Morning Taxi Ride

I am in a taxi, bouncing over dirt roads, on my second journey to Jalalabad. Winter’s morning sun burns slow through a veil of vapor hovering just above the fields. Corn stock shadows hang in the air, cast in cold fog, black bones in a spider’s web. I am alone in this moment, suspended, rapt by the creature of memory.

“Larry…Larry…”

I turn from the sun and shadows to face my friend, a young man named Erkin (whose name, he tells me, means “Freedom”), “Yes Erkin…what is it?”

“Brother,” he paused, rolling the word around in his mouth, “you looked so serious, what do you think about just now?”

“I…I was thinking about the light…the sunlight on those fields,” I turned, gazing back out the window, to the landscape passing by like frames of a motion picture, “If you could be anywhere right now Erkin, where would you be?”

“I would be in America…California maybe. It is warm there, yes?”

“Yes,” I smiled, “It’s warm there.”