Grub Street GrackleThe Grub Street Grackle
A Magazine for Thinkers, Poets, and Other Bad Birds
The originary incongruity of that peculiar morning was that, though it was still cold and dark, I awoke without the sluggishness that had become habitual in the past few weeks--my first thought was to be out of my blanketed languor and rushing into the cool light of things. In seconds, I was dressed for a run and on my way out of the house.
I opened the door to find that one surprise can yield another: it was snowing in Texas. The soft flakes of cold, melting white only sharpened my hunger for the world, and I jogged into their descent with a fresh and precipitous enthusiasm. I was in a mood for miracles.
Crossing the Kroger parking lot a few minutes later, I did not, as I would have another day at that stage, feel my heart sink at the dullness of my modern environs; rather, it leaped up at the sight of the cold blue open field. For some reason, I rushed at one of the small silhouetted trees set in the middle of the lot, as though I could by seizing it catch unawares the sleeping treasures of the world.
The tree exploded, or the sky exploded, like an M. C. Escher tesselation shattering and flying apart into a perfect confusion of negative and positive space. The grackles scattering by scores out of the little tree were holes in the broken white sky.
If I can ever make these black characters in which I deal do to the page what those Kroger grackles did to the snow-filled air, I may say that I am living in my destiny.
