Today we made 400 miles or so and did a lot of good.

Tonight we are bedded down in Durango.

So many interesting and wondrous things happened. I can’t tell you about most of them, because they were not exclusively my story, and I’m still trying to work out where my story ends and the stories of those I love begin, and the morality of that shit.

I can tell you this one. It was for sure exclusively mine.

I was in Pagosa. Inside the Natural Grocers. Alone.

I had just taken a picture of the things that were in my shopping basket. I was on the last aisle, just before heading up to the checkout.

Down the aisle came a woman.

This woman thought that her husband was walking right behind her, and she growled something low that she thought were for his ears alone.

He didn’t hear her.

But I did.

She said:

I am in control of this radio.

You will submit to me!

What could it mean? I didn’t know and still don’t. Some private joke I guess.

For once in my goddamn life, I was quick enough to say the perfect thing on the spur of the moment.

I looked up and I said to her, Well now, Ma’am.

That is quite an offer.

And then her husband caught up from behind her, and he said:

What’s so funny honey?

I smiled and stepped away before she could compose a coherent answer. Stepped away quick, but not too quick. Just ambling. Grinning.

I wish I could be that appropriately inappropriate every moment of my life until I die.

That will never happen.

But a boy can dream.

And right now I think I will.

For real and literal.