Evie's Birthday Poem

Evie will be doing the day by day, as I have other blogs to tend.  I just weigh in occasionally - PJR

Last night we hit the French Quarter in New Orleans.  The young woman at the visitor center advised us to stick with Royal Street, so of course, I wanted to get to Bourbon Street. So we went one way on Royal and cut over a block to go down Bourbon.  Bourbon Street is noted, among other things, for celebrating public drunkenness.

I bought us a beer so we could fit in as we walked down the street.  Evie has the photographic evidence, which she may share.  The most interesting thing I witnessed was a car slowly moving through the sea of people.  It was an older couple, maybe even older than us.

A few young people started blocking the car.  One particularly loutish lad jumped on the hood.  The driver started to open the door as if he were going to get out.

I have an irresistible impulse to make up back stories for people.  I decided that Driver was a Marine, who had gone to Vietnam twice and Young Lout was going to regret what he had done.  Mrs. Driver talked him down perhaps threatening to not bail him out of jail this time.

It only took a few blocks for Evie to be totally done with Bourbon Street.

The French Quater has a little bit of Greenwich Village and a little bit of Northhampton and a lot of some place I have never been and don't want to go to.

On a more staid street, we encountered a young woman sitting at a manual typewriter.  It was Kaile H Glick of The Spontaneous Prose Store.

I hadn't done anything for Evie's birthday, so I decided to commission a poem.  I told Kaile what we were up to and she went to work typing away on a small piece of paper.  You could probably not read it from a picture as Kaile needs to change her ribbon or maybe that is meant to be part of the charm.

She has been at this a long time, so she probably knows how to use the shift key, unless it is broken, so I assume that the lower case is part of the art. Here is Evie's birthday poem.

----------------------------------------------

          going till may/happy birthday

when you have put in the hours that
        add up to decades and its
safe to say its to hit the
        road, to celebrate the ups and
downs, to watch the road roll out
     like the bow on the gift that
         you give yourselves and eachother
the moments of beauty while the
     music flows from unknown doorways
     and into the beautiful future

                 -khg

      the spontaneous prose store.
 ------------------------------------------
 I tried to get the spacing correct, but literary scholars will want to look at the original so we will preserve it in our archives.

I asked Evie what she thought of it and she said "It's literature".  Actually, that is not a compliment coming from her, but so it goes.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter J Reilly writes on taxes for Forbes.com.