Some Are a Melody, Some Are the Beat

People always expect me to be out doing something.

Like the friend who e-mailed me one evening not long after 10 p.m. When I responded immediately, he expressed surprise that I was home.

I can't be out dancing on bars or dating lawyers every night of the week, I reminded him.

No, some nights I'm at a friend's house watching "Napoleon Dynamite" for the first time, laughing and relating to being a nerd in high school.

I've never been to Idaho, but I do know plenty about growing up in a mid-century rancher and wishing I were more popular.

I hear several good songs I already know that were used in the film, like When in Rome's "The Promise" and Alphaville's "Forever Young."

So many adventures couldn't happen today
So many songs we forgot to play
So many dreams are swinging out of the blue
We let them come true

Between the actors' deadpan delivery, the quirky subplots and the bad costumes, I begin to see why this became a cult classic. Favorite line: I caught you a delicious sea bass.

Or I'm opening a bar of Choco-Love with sea salt and almonds, only to have the poet sitting beside me notice that a Roethke poem is included with the chocolate, something I'd never noticed despite weekly purchases of this particular chocolate.

Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
She slowed to sigh, in that long interval...
I tossed a stone and listened to its plunge.
She knew the grammar of least motion, she
Lent me one virtue, and I live thereby.

I should not have to have poetry pointed out to me. I am thrilled that it was.

Sometimes I'm invited to an afternoon fire where people sit around outside under a brilliant blue sky drinking Georges duBoeuf Beaujolais Nouveau while we still can and listen to music, talking about early New Order versus late New Order and how Helena Christianson once dated Michael Hutchence but is now married to Paul Banks.

Oh, what a tangled, incestuous musical web they weave.

Meanwhile, the fire burns on through the afternoon as the blue skies become cloudy ones and the fire's warmth becomes more useful than decorative.

Other times, I'm traveling to the hinterlands for an unlikely meal.

It's an Italian restaurant called Palermo and although we're the first people at the bar, before long there are three regulars surrounding us.

One, a deep-voiced man who retired from Reynolds and is now consulting for them, tells me that he built his house in Salisbury in 1989 after designing it himself.

I continue to be impressed with people who design their own houses and have no training to do so.

Coppola "Director's Cut" Zinfandel gets us started, but we soon pounce on $4 happy hour specials of crispy Buffalo wings and shrimp cocktail (a steal of a price for five good-sized shrimp).

Our bartender is young and gregarious and tells us he is a substitute P.E. teacher who has mistakenly kept the equipment room key in his pocket after a day subbing.

Also, he mentions that chivalry is not dead.

I hadn't thought it was.

Dinner is gnocchi verdi - spinach pasta with procuitto and more of it than I can possibly finish after all those wings.

Then there's the time I'm riding down a country road in Fluvanna county listening to Jimmy Martin on the radio singing "Drink Up and Go Home" as the sun sets.

Don't tell me your troubles, got enough of my own
Be thankful you're living, drink up and go home.

Oh, so thankful I'm living. Even when I'm not doing much of anything.