It's Personal: Alice

It was a beautiful day in Seattle. Saturday, that is. This past Saturday. When it was sunny. And warm. A beautiful day. But I see I've already said as much.

The day ended uneventfully. At the end of the day. It was dark out, I remember. But there wasn't much else. A bit of work on the plan for softball practice. Apart from that, however, there was the digestion of the dinner I didn't have that evening.

Sometime during the day we went to a place called Roxy's up north. Not so far north that you start going south, mind you, but far enough north that it wasn't south of where we started. There's a deli-like atmosphere at Roxy's. Small tables and small chairs for big people who don't fit at and in them. A bar of mirror and multivariate bottles with the devil's drink. I had eggs with sausage and pancakes at noon. With iced tea, always unsweetened.

We departed the theater sometime later after the moving picture ceased to show us pictures of interest. Just flashing names of grips and tographers of cinema. The sticky ground with clumps of popped corn. Who thought to pop the first corn, I wonder. Or put fizz in water with sugar and syrup of the might fructose corn stalk. It was dark then. With people walking to and fro. In out doors. Out in doors. It was a chaos of sorts, tempered by screaming children.

We tried the theater at the mall in all its sunny gloom. The giant Eastwood aiming his dirty harry gun at Elizabeth Taylor and her violet eyes. There were broken lines of old people interspersed with new people hopping up and down in impatient glee. With people neither old nor new attempting to smile at both the old and new people but not much succeeding. We looked at one another without three dimensional glasses and determined we would make a four dimensional escape across time.

There was a lull during the warm day when we sat at home and stared at what might have been a fire in the fireplace if we had firewood. Or fire. Or kindling. Or if it wasn't so warm out. There was no tension to break. No movement. Almost no silence except that there was. Between the clicks of the dogs' nails.

We decided on a non-three dimensional showing at another theater at a place called the landing in Renton near Boeing. Which I don't think was named because it was a place that was once a landing. For planes or boats. Or trains or automobiles, for that matter. Just a landing. Or the landing to be more correct from an articled perspective.

The movie began and ended with moving pictures in between fraught with computer-generated imagery and talented actors. Row, row, row your boat. A hatter, mad as can be on stage and off, danced impossibly and fought the same. Gently down the stream. A big-headed queen with her knave provided some what might be considered humor in an anti-non-Vaudevillian sort of way. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. And from the moving pictures, there came to me a lesson I have not yet unlearned. Life is but a dream.