When I went out the front door this morning, just about to head off on my walk, I found the air filled with the smell of sizzling bacon, and instantly fell captive to the aroma, as to an angelic song, reaching to the recesses of memory and experience. I close my eyes and breathe and stand suddenly before my mother as she kneels above the glowering coals of the campfire, turning the strips of bacon and four small, crisp brook trout. It is July and I am at the Metolius River and the day is already hot and I can hear the buzzing of wings in the air, of birds and of flying bugs, and the insouciant harp-sound of the breeze in the grass and the chortling, chuckling river close by, and the accidental tune my father plays as he juggles tablespoons and metal pans upon the Coleman stovetop, preparing a pot of coffee while he puffs on his pipe. There will be bacon and eggs and fish and hash browns and coffee and Prince Albert rising like a genii. Later, when my father swirls down the stream a-fishing, we will go up the hill, my brother and I, between the uncombed cowlicks of sagebrush and the salt-dry soil and the porous red lava rocks, to where the Ponderosa Pine trees grow taller and taller and smell of sweet vanilla, and I will be Green Lantern and my brother will be Iron Man, dying day by day as his miraculous iron heart fails, burns low, brings him to his knees. Such goes our story, tragic but for the fortuitous intervention of Green Lantern and the incomprehensible powers of his ring. God, I miss you, Gary. My God, I miss those days.
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