"Never cut a line you can untie," he tells me, stabbing his watery drink with a straw. That's the piece of longshoreman's wisdom he has for me. We have washed up in a dingy bar on the concrete shores of I-80. I talk too much, that's not unusual.

I stopped at a filling station to get gas before work. The pump top TV is blaring some kind of commercial, but the screen is blank, a reflective black eye. I can see myself in it--Hollywood-sized sunglasses, designer jeans, cashmere sweater, leaning against the silver foreign car. I don't want to believe what I look like.

After three weeks of rain it finally seems like spring. That's a season that passes here in a hot minute. If you aren't nimble about taking the chill wet and clench out of your shoulders it will have peeled out of the parking lot and headed for Oregon, leaving you with ten more months to contemplate brown flanked hills.

Edith Wharton's "Ethan Frome" and Kobo Abe's "The Woman in the Dunes" used to be important to me, and I am reminded that it could be time to circle back again.