“Overhead he heard the cry of what might have been a melodious owl, but it wasn’t a melodious owl. It was a flying saucer from Tralfamadore, navigating in both space and time, therefore seeming to Billy Pilgrim to have come from nowhere all at once…”
Pg. 75, Kurt Vonnegut / Slaughter’ House-Five
As Billy Pilgrim I feel “unstuck in time.” Isolation is snuggling at home with my memories. It is the special moments of time when I do go out that I go back in time for memories. Such as the Napoleon pastry.
On Dumetz Road and Topanga Canyon Blvd. in the San Fernando Valley once was a small-town market.
Now a Mermaid fucking coffee hole. Gary’s market had about all the produce a small community needed. When I was a kid, we walked there to fill our pillowcases up with penny candies.
That was for sleep overs with my girlfriends on Friday nights before Saturday morning scary movie marathons.
At the age of 15, I remember seeing my reflection in the bakery deli window. My eyes were red, and the echo of laughter filled the market with the echo of youths, like when we used to fly kites.
We were not flying kites anymore. Then we sat outside the storefront on the sidewalk eating our Napoleon. Manna per chance?
What I love about the book The Children’s Crusade or Slaughterhouse-Five is something amazingly simple. Yes, fast flying UFOs. I have had my experiences with them and this novel by Kurt Vonnegut helped me to place my memories in a creative place.
The book describes many wonderful elements of so many mysteries of life, death, and war.
Light beaming down from the sky and strange, maybe, Tralfamadorian symbols being downloaded into my brain. I wondered if this was an embellished fictional novel or what?
Seems like every block in West Hills, Woodland Hills, Calabasas, and the Santa Monica Mountains holds a memory waiting to unfold.
“It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string. And that once a moment is gone is it gone forever.”
Pg. 27 Kurt Vonnegut / Slaughter’ House-Five
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