To Shouting Out

Shout out to Whit, who I am pretty sure never reads these letters but one day will. Maybe when he’s 31 and bored and he searches his dad’s name and some old high school friends and then his roommate from college and then finally, what the hell, he types in my name. Not much comes up, but then his finds this. And now he’s reading it; hey, bud.

Shout out to my nieces. As I write this, one is a principal engineer in a biotech company and she has the soul of an artist. One is studying abroad in Spain, though clearly she has not limited herself to Spain. She has always refused limits. Another is an English major at UT Austin and I would give anything to know what she knows the ways she knows it. She connects dots in ways I never imagine. And the youngest finished up a soccer game today. She’s a scientist-artist-thinker-doer, like the rest of them.

Shout out to my dog, Otty, who right this very second is standing beside me, crying because Keith is grilling steaks in the backyard and nothing is more important than the moment he flips the steak over and a tiny bit sticks to the grill. That tiny bit is Otty’s and he should be out there. He misunderstands all his needs.

Shout out to all the hippies who bloomed today, mid-April. The first day when the sun was out but the wind was not and the daffodils bloomed. This is their favorite day, and even though you don’t know when it’s coming exactly, they don’t care because they are always ready to celebrate this day, push everything else aside. Break out the long flowing skirts and the patchwork shirts. Someone wears a top hat and blue jeans. They are the surest sign that spring is truly here.

Shout out to the worms waking up. The rain will come and wash you to the surface and soon, on our walk, you will be unavoidable. We try not to step on you, but it’s just a matter of which one gets it.

Shout out to the ice cream vendor who right now is cleaning her truck, checking to make sure the music is loud enough. Trust me, it is. In the 10 years we’ve lived here I think I’ve seen it stopped with her selling ice cream about 5 times.  Optimism meets fatalism in her tiny refrigerated truck, the music interrupted by a cheery voice, shouting out, “Hello! Hello!” 

By Ezra Wolfe from Philadelphia, US [CC BY-SA 2.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons