Breakfast with Marcello

A slow smile spreads with the coffee.  He recalls the salon scene from Fellini's La Dolce Vita.  Steiner talks about the weight of silence.  "Peace frightens me," he says. "Sometimes it seems that peace is only an outer shell; that all Hell hides behind it."  Steiner later kills himself and his two young children.  Old Gumbo Jones sees in an instant that his adolescent fantasies were framed by Frederico Fellini and Truman Capote.  For fifty years he has been in love with Holly Golightly.  He has sought the edgy dissapation of Marcello Mastrianni as a detached observer of this busy monstor that shits out souls on one end and devours them on the other.

The pre-dawn hours have been preempted by stern task masters - farmers, meditators, and busy career girls who start their days lifting weights, running, and swimming in cold water.  Old Gumbo Jones sits with a cup of coffee and his mandolin, picking out intervals that ring on the still air.  He does not know if these beautiful sounds make the milk sweeter, or if they conribute to the harmony of the spheres. He does not care if they spur a work-out girl to imagine her rendezvous with fate.  Old Gumbo Jones is out of bed early because he ate pizza last night and cannot sleep.

House wrens begin their morning sound.  Gray light creeps through bare pecan trees. Traffic hisses along MoPac and dogs begin to bark.  Day has begun, and all that made sense in the darkness fades away.