Relatively smooth morning.  Now Coltrane wakes me with some track I’ve never heard.  Computer moving slow, and probably from so much being on it, the laptop I thought was dead.  Well, I’m typing on it.  Why I don’t know.  What I type, no idea.  The moving slow is starting to disrupt my attention and curve my mood.  Don’t let it, I tell myself like a teacher at the elementary level who can’t stand what one student is doing.  I feel less a writer this morning.  Then don’t think of yourself that way.  A writer.  Just write.  Now I sound too much like a teacher.

Wishing self to a vineyard, then to the lab, blending a circus of barrel samples and hoping this one will score well.  But I’m just imagining.  I’m tired of imagining.  I want to live.  Live it..  So what’s it.  The it where you’re there.  You don’t have to wish anymore and you have the framing you’ve for so long seen and dreamt.  I put myself there.  Using the sights and sensory ticks of the crush pad, that one year with my friend Blair, doing punchdowns in a tank room even after hours of working a tasting room floor, having to talk to people and answer all their inane questions and outer space inquiries about the tastes in wine.  Blair and I wold punch down five barrels of Malbec, then do a mini-swarm of Merlot, or Syrah I think it may have been.  Then there was that one Zinfandel barrel.  The touching of the grape skins, the “cap” as they call it, and pushing it into the below purpling puddle showed me that time isn’t stopping.  It’s accruing momentum.  It’s not halting.  For anything, or anyone, certainly not me.  This early evening with Blair after I hopped off the clock to help him in the minuscule way I could was, I’m put to say, four years ago.  No, that’s ’15.  So then ’14, harvest of 20-14.  No…. I remember now.  It was ’13.  Six years ago, nearly.

The morning’s melodic modus perpetuates with me summoning of these oeno-scenes, and the laptop cooperates finally and wants me to tell more of the story.  What story.  The wine story.  MY, wine story.  Not much to narrate or orate or paginate other than the tasting room tumultuousness at time and the predictable toil of those weekend days, barrel tasting.  I’m just a writer writing this morning but now I see something—  Wine and the notes associated, like this in-the-moment Coltrante track, seeing my co-workers go from person to person, pouring, me getting tot he winery early on a Saturday morning to write in that reserve room with the long polished oak table.  And that was only last year I was in the practice of doing that, and a bit before when they stationed me at the Roth property.

Approaching the age I’m approaching, so what do I do now.  Why didn’t I follow my sister-in-law’s advice and just write about WINE.  What I taste, what I was sipping one night to next, and what we did in the tasting room.  Friend of mine who worked with me at the tech company for a few months decided to go back to the wine industry, back to the tasting room and the theatre that is wine and talking wine, not just pouring it but that being your day to day language.  Coltrane has me dizzied in scenes, visuals, the sounds of removed corks just after 9am and tasting through the characters before they’re offered to the world, whomever they are walking through the doors.  I retune to my friend, what she’s about to start today, her first day at the new property.

“This Chardonnay someone said tasted ‘banana-y but slimy’.” Vanessa said, one day that was pretty slow so what else to do but taste the wines, together, for however long it took till we saw, well, whatever.

I sipped, slow, and hesitantly since I don’t like Chardonnays of that act, certainly not from bottles that have been sitting out for over 12 hour, opened day prior.  “I don’t know, I don’t see anything in this, at all.”

“What is it with you and Chardonnay?” Vanessa said,

“There is nothing with me and Chardonnay, that’s just it.”

“Oh.” She swirled a bit more before dumping it into the fruit fly-overseen sink.

I want more of that. More of those conversations, I tell myself.  Not even the wine, but the words that precipitate from.  The windows of winery rooms and how the bottles are arranged, the vineyard walks I used to do, taking more pictures than I need to and just letting my head do what it would, let whatever creative orchestra in my parcel mold what it wishes. 

I used to walk St.  Francis’ Syrah block, the Syrah Noir, and write little poems, quick verses to hold and detain where I was, what I was thinking, my life right then so I could beat time somehow. But a wish, only. This moment submitted, just after my son arrived to the story, over 7 years.  Now, time and I grapple, battle, both worlds in loud rattle.  The morning, this morning, all thoughts decided and sown into my notes, notated and studies.  Wine, poetry, jazz…. Seeing where to go.  As Vanessa starts her new job, today, think I do to. I hire myself to pursue something new.  What.

Who knows.

Time does, maybe, or not. I’m not concerned with a map.

“What?” She said, watching me let the red blend’s rhythms make themselves known, nose near puddle, in bowl.

“This one… see?  This is what I’m talking about. This one teaches me.”

“What do you mean teachers you?”

“It’s like a jazz session, just a jam session.  Not a track, not a titled song, just a meeting of instruments and intentions, worlds and….” I sip, left he amalgamated tide ride over collective receptor.

Vanessa tires it.  After sipping, she smiled.  Nodded.  “Oh my god, yeah…. When was this open?” She turned the bottle around, saw yesterday’s date written over the description on back label.  “It was opened yesterday.  Much more of a fighter than the Chardonnay.”

“More of a teacher.” I said.  

Sip.