By a Thread

“The tread that you take only serves insomuch as to awaken you from the stuff of dreams,” said the cohort on her left.

And he did seem to be dreaming, she noticed, with his closed eyes moving rapidly like the stinging flies that darted along the flowing river of song.

Nip, nip, nip, they bit as they impelled the rhythms of the beat that tried to repeat the melody and inspire the choral chords of the chorus longing in her ears.

Oh, how she longed to finish her sweet song. The one that told of the blue highways the width of two horse’s asses winding for miles and miles along the changing countryside and the muddy white vehicle the brothers drove to reach their unknown destination.

One brother sat in the driver’s seat clutching the steering wheel in one hand, right foot ready to brake from cruise control as he drove, using his free hand to crack open roasted, unsalted peanuts and toss the tasty legumes into his mouth, brewed yellow tea in the spill proof cup between his legs.

Although he did his best to dispose of his nut-munching detritus in a hard plastic container in the cup holder on the side, bits of broken shells and flakes of red nut skin surrounded him and settled into the car like Pig-Pen in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles Schulz.

The other brother did his best to laugh at the mess his elder sibling made and carefully sliced horseradish cheese onto a paper towel and prepped a bag of tart cherries for consumption by them both as Bob Dylan played on the stereo.

If she could only get the beat and the lyrics right, she knew her song would be a hit. The tale was such a classic, of two now retired brothers traveling cross-country to visit the remainder of their family back East where they had both been born, along thousands of miles of lanes and roads almost exactly the same width the ancient Romans had built over two millennia before.

How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?

How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?

Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly before they’re forever banned?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

The thread by which she and her cohorts in the international songwriting seminar hung was a slender one involving both curiosity and creativity, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

She began humming the melody that had just come to her. Yes, that just might work.