there is a bright moon out there tonight, not full but bright enough to light up the gravel driveway, where i expect my son to come driving up in about an hour. he's driving from chicago. and he may or may not have a squeaky clean, covid-free experience to share when he gets here, but either way we are a little suspicious, wary, hoping that he's clean just as we hope our own kids come home from the village clean.

one cannot blame the village for being a little wary of outsiders. my advice to him will be to park and simply not move for a couple of weeks. let the world go on around us and don't tell everyone that someone from illinois has just driven up our road. it's not the kind of thing you want to advertise. he's on quarantine, and should not be going to the store anyway. he will just hide out with us out in this country house out in the boondocks.

he called me just now from carrizozo. that's a small crossroads town way out in the middle of new mexico, not far from oscuro and the road to the trinity bomb site. he will drive right past oscuro, and on to tularosa and alamogordo before cutting back west, up into the mountains, and out to our house. he will be driving those desert roads under this same moon, with the mountains always looking down at him from the west. he'll do this because he's gone just a little past the mountains, to come down and hook around from beneath them, before climbing back into them right at alamogordo.

most of new mexico is towns that are in the desert right at the foot of mountains, like alamogordo, las cruces, even carrizozo. nearly every town is dramatic in some way because of intense views of mountains and the knowledge that you can climb right up into them if you so desire. alamo is like that; i consider it a perfectly normal 20,000-person town, with not much going on, but these dramatic mountains tower over it and make it sparkle at night and look like a beautiful place. nah, it's just as intense as any place. but it has these dramatic views.

it irritates me that he drives without a spare. that means he's kind of out there, like i used to be, at the mercy of fates and the good will of strangers. during a coronavirus, i'm not sure that people will stop. though they will probably at least call me for him, so that i could go get him. now that he's less than an hour and a half away, that's a more realistic possibility.