Stowaways Alleyways And Castaways

A green locust has been hitching a ride on our Subaru these past few days. We first noticed him as we were getting ready to drive to Ballard. He was crawling around on the windshield. He crawled to the bottom and disappeared in the narrow space between the metal of the hood and the glass of the windshield. He reappeared when we returned. Crawled out of his hiding place and went for another promenade on the windshield. I noticed him today as I was backing into our parking space in back of our building. The sunlight revealed the glistening strands of an orb web over the rearview mirror and when I glanced to the right I saw the locust on the surface of the other rear view mirror. I wonder why he – or she – is so attached to our car. It’s not unusual to find spiders living in the hollow cup-shaped mounts of the rearview mirrors, especially this time of year, late September, early October. The air has been spectacular, clear and fresh with a very slight chill imbuing an otherwise unseasonably warm temperature.  A neighbor tells me more smoke is on its way from California, the wildfires now raging in the Napa Valley. I hope not. The last smoke lasted a full week and appears to have decimated the population of songbirds. I haven’t seen any chickadees, sparrows, robins, starlings, pine siskins, goldfinches, flickers or red-breasted sapsuckers since the smoke cleared. Just the usual scrub jays and crows. Corvids are hearty birds. I remember the family of crows on Bigelow that flew down late in the afternoon on one of the worst smoke days – the sun a vague yellowish blob in a sky of sooty grey – gliding down to the grass after I tossed some peanuts on a neighbor’s lawn. It’s a nice spot under a giant chestnut that’s probably over a hundred years old and is slated to come down soon. It’s been struggling with some sort of disease the last several years, some of the branches are already dead. It’ll be sad to see it gone. We got a pizza after picking up prescription at Safeway and ate it while watching The Mystery Of Henri Pick with Fabrice Luchini and Camille Cottin about a library on the coast of Brittany consisting entirely of rejected manuscripts – The Library of Refused Books – inspired by a Richard Brautigan story. A young female publishing executive discovers the manuscript of a book called The Last Hours Of A Love Story ostensibly written by the owner of a pizza parlor in the same small town; the novel is published and becomes a huge hit. The plot thickens when the host of a TV book show – Fabrice Luchini – refuses to believe the book was written by the owner of the pizza parlor and becomes so obsessed with finding the truth he loses his wife and his job and goes to Brittany to vindicate himself. It was a lighthearted movie with a lot of commentary on the publishing industry and book culture in France. It was inspiring to see houses and apartments chock-a-block with books. It was like watching an alternative reality, a place where serendipitous treasures reside in the quiet splendor of the outcast and castaway.