Wild Ducks Flying Backward

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It’s six o’clock in the afternoon, approximately, give or take a tick or two, and the sun’s attention span is rapidly shrinking. The sun, we might say, should we choose to venture further down the path of anthropomorphic hyperbole, has seen quite enough of you for one day and is entertaining other options. Weary of the old ice-cream castle Judy Collins routine, clouds, too, are shifting priorities, gathering forces, adopting attitudes. By nightfall, you could be in for some rain. Perhaps freezing rain. Even snow. Obviously, we’re privy neither to your whereabouts nor your season. You’re in freaking North Dakota for all we know. November.

What we do know is that you have availed yourself of the most recent book by novelist Tom Robbins, and what we can assume, though it may be only a conceit, is that you have every intention of beginning it this evening (you couldn’t very well have begun it at work today), so if external weather conditions prove foul, so much the better. Should it pelt, should it blow, the cozy factor (almost always a boon to literary experience) will increase severalfold, thereby fertilizing the narcotic poppy of reading pleasure.

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