Sixteenth Day in America....

We reached Lubbock, to a singer-songwriter competition in ramshackle bar on Buddy Holly Avenue where one of the judges was a photographer who had been photographing the fires for the ranchers. And he talked of the speed that the fires had moved, jumped, while out on the dance-floor young Texans danced the Texas Two-Step and a slim girl flew from the floor up into the smokey (smoking in bars, and other places, is still okay in Texas) dimness above and then re-appeared, sliding down her dance partner's back as gracefully as the greatest ballet dancer you ever saw and danced on as if always earthbound while her partner kept his eyes scanning the edge of the dance floor like he was a solitary stranger in hostile territory watching the woods, cooly indifferent to the wondrousness of everything that was happening above and around him on that dance floor.

And his girl was dressed, boots, jeans and shirt, all in matt black except for a four inch wide oval of turquoise and silver belt-buckle which shone in the dance-floor lights like the distillation of a million years of young men's dreams of the yet-to-happen, and old men's regrets that they hadn't delayed being born by forty years and so would've been still young when they got here to this bar in Lubbock, Texas.