The Fun Part of Manic is the Manic Part

It's interesting hitching your wagon to a place like Deadwood, and this morning as I walked across the park behind Sophie's scootering back I felt stabs of civic pride. It was as though the city was greeting me with a series of Trials, or a series of Representations, like I was walking through the DWC (the abbreviation for Dead Wood City) Stations o' the Cross. This Is Your Life in DWC. First, across the busy street all awhoosh with large working trucks (plumbers, contractors, all on their first coffee break already, as this city gets up early and works hard until midafternoon) and then across the first parking lot to the Rec Center, where the blonde woman who picks up trash and cleans bathrooms greeted me with a peppy ""mornin!"

Passing along the path by the baseball fields, where I saw the other mom who bikes her son to Sophie's school ("'mornin!") and then the pair of older women all behatted and wearing windbreakers, laughing with each other, ("mornin!" "mornin!") and the trash men were gungling along with their large containers and smiling hugely ("mornin!")

You get my drift. Everyone was unaccountably cheerful despite the new gang graffiti along the wall, which will no doubt be erased by the minions of the park sometime today (DWC X4th is our Gang Local Union) and if they had united in some kind of song and dance routine it would not have been at all surprising. In fact by the time we were walking up the final sidewalk Sophie and I were swinging our arms and singing rather loudly together:

FROM THE ASHES OF DISASTER GROW THE ROSES OF SUCCESS!

Which she punctuated with the backing singers saying "Those ROSY ROSES!" at the appropriate moments.

Comments

[Ms. Jane]

Little birds alighting on your fingers and whistling harmonies?

[Jo]

*gasp* you were THERE?!