I am

A so-called '"cold front" moved in' and the hot, sunny, mid-90s afternoon of late summer brought dusk and a chrysalis of weather, wind blowing big limbs, leaves chattering like paper chimes, high lightning above the shroud of cumulonimbus, striking the night like flint and steel on a cold, dark pile of sticks. Thunder rumbling like my stomach growling just an hour before, pasta-starved, satiated with bread and beef. Content. Occasional mist dampening the right-hand page of my book, and the frayed pant leg of my jeans and scratched, weathered, stitched leather of square-toed boots. A grey cat scurried down the sidewalk, disappearing behind a small tree, fleeing from the torrents of rain which now came in sheets- rugs shaken out the front door, of dust and dirt, which prevailed on the wind and into my awareness through my nose. The sound of glass breaking. It's like a dramatic scene from a movie and I'm in it, the storm, the cat, the glass, and now I wait for a woman to scream but it never comes. And so I went back to my book, briefly, until the drama taking place outside my wine glass eclipses my interest in either the Russian River Valley or England's petty criminals being shipped across the world to Botany Bay. It was one of those moments where I was present and I felt like I had been traveling or planning and I was out in distant galaxies on strange planets meeting stranger aliens and Scotty had suddenly beamed me up to the starship Enterprise. The starship ME. The astral projection was over and I was back at home inside my body, inside my head. And I realized that for, what seems like, my entire life I've been preparing. For something. For life, itself. Preparing myself for what lay ahead, for finding the type of woman I wanted to live my life with, by educating myself in the arts and sciences and mathematics that allowed me to run my business and be innovative and feel cultured, and by learning history so I could know what lay behind and how we got here and where we might be going, and for races, which got longer and longer and became a means for the expeditions in my mind that may lie ahead in emergencies and effigies, should anyone care to carve the marble from around the protuberance in my torn hamstring. It is all over. Mark Brown says when you stop preparing, it means you have arrived. So here I am. And everything I do becomes who I am. Every day when I tie the Sioux bison bone choker around my neck, it becomes who I am, and these frayed jeans and boots, and going to the gym and riding my bike and the things I read and listen to and not having a tv or watching movies: it's who I am. Maybe it's always been like this. But suddenly I realize THIS is who I am, not who I'm becoming or striving to be or do.