17 OCT 25

Morning begins... Patience experimenting with shadow puppets on the wall... Yali hustling through the living room in his suit-coat over another fake-blood-stained shirt... I guess “cowboys” is on pause this weekend...

It's the eleven o'clock hour and the whole family is field-tripping to Cahokia... sounds of the boys slinging things around in the pilot seats laughing at each other... “HAHA!”...

Above the world for a little while... a city a thousand years old... autumn sunshine lightly soaking through a gray sky... patches of forest a little crunchy from the summer drought... shades in avocado and sand... blasting pop of deep orange only a little this year..

And it's a sack of sausage pretzels rolls from Gus' as we drive back to pick up Patience's dance bag following Puck's spontaneous request for another visit to the Zoo squeezed in before Patience's lesson at the studio... Maori rap pumping through the minivan speakers as we coast east...

“Guess I'd better leave my pocketknife behind...” Puck muses... “rather not be perceived as a bomb threat at the Zoo...” // Yali grins wickedly at him... “You are a bomb!... An abomination!”...

Puck is still flagged at the metal detector anyway... removes a load of Inspector Gadget gadgets from his cargo pockets for the security officer before he's all-cleared and starts walking us towards swampland at his very particular Puck-pace of something slightly less than "furious"...

Dole Whip break... only orange and lime left on a crowded afternoon in some kind of perfect feel of autumn weather that brings out the thousands...

Everyone home some hours later in a late dripping honey light and colors layering against black silhouette of drowsy trees...