thank you notes (pierce)

I’m thankful for the neat arrangement of bookworm holes in the running head of my book, so even and geometric that they look like Fortran code in a punchcard. I’m thankful for the way they mass and scatter as I turn the pages, a dead insect’s animation for a flip book. I’m thankful for beaten-up old novels, yellowed and sellotaped but never dog-eared, which somehow seem to have as much preserved themselves as been preserved. Whose continued existence feels both assured and miraculous, each one sitting on a shelf in stasis, decades passing, both treasured and ignored, waiting for another brief moment splayed in the sun. I’m thankful that I can receive such uncomplicated happiness from a physical object, and also that the essential clichés of appreciation expressed here become more comfortable as the years pass. Less self-conscious. I’m thankful that there is still Camus I haven’t read, even if I can’t respond to it as I did in my twenties. I’m thankful the window seat was free, and that a man is spray painting something elaborate on the derelict building across the road, and that the coffee man helloed but didn’t threaten real conversation. I’m thankful for coffee, the strange lather of milk on dark water which still holds, in its intricate head of bubble and froth, the mystery and fun of a teacher’s demonstration of a chemical reaction. I’m thankful my body accepts milk without protest. I’m thankful that the brown halo of dried coffee is still there on the floor beside my foot, which means nobody noticed or had to clean up the bit I spilled here yesterday. I’m thankful for the light in Dublin today, for the way the sun hits the slant of roofs, drying them in sparing patches. For crumbling red brickwork in which implausible greenery roots. I’m thankful for wood of many characters: the grained floor, the knobbly stools and knotted tabletop, the ludicrous filigreed complexity in all the antique shopfronts, the weathered criss-cross timbers supporting the derelict windows of the street’s sagging facades. I’m thankful for Saturday. I’m thankful that in every humour, in every state of fear and anxiety and animal flinching in which I find myself, that my mind defaults to noting these little graces, these small pleasures that amass as the great contentment of my days. I’m thankful that I can see this behaviour in my father, from whom I probably groked it. This labrador enthusiasm, experienced almost daily, for the best window, the best book, the best coffee, the best sunlight I have ever had in my life.

- Pierce (1/22/16).  I have a blog at http://distorte.tumblr.com/ but all I really want you to look at is Hilltops (http://hilltops.ie/)