8/3/17

i'm thankful that i forgot to tell you something the other day, which is when d and i were walking to dinner with our friends, ahead of us on the trail i saw a woman who had stopped her bike (which seemed, from the distance, like quite a big and bulky bike) and was drinking from a plastic bottle and i thought she was taking a break from her bike ride. i'm thankful that as we got closer, i saw that she was kind of dancing/swaying while drinking from the bottle, which made me think that this was some kind of sunset cocktail ritual, drinking booze out of a portable bottle while celebrating the sunset. i'm thankful that as i got closer, i saw, in the scrub off to the side of the trail, a white duck, and i thought that perhaps she had stopped her bike because she had seen the duck and was appreciating it. i'm thankful that as i got closer, i realized that the reason her bike seemed so big and bulky is that there was a big box mounted on the back of it. i'm thankful that as i got closer and peered into the box, as i will always do if there is an open box, i saw that the box was lined with a blanket and then what looked like some loose handfuls of hay. i'm thankful to have suddenly understood that the duck was the woman's duck that she had brought from home, like the way you would take your dog to the park. i'm thankful, as we passed her, to have made eye contact with the women, whose eye contact back with me seemed to indicate that she understood that people would find it strange for her to be out at sunset on the trail dancing with her duck, but that she didn't care and that was what she was going to do. i'm thankful for the woman and her duck, who are a model for us all.