WEBVTT

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This is called "The Painter,"
and it has a little plot to it,

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and it's not very long
but it has a little plot.

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But it takes place, part
of it, in northern Arizona.

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Maybe you've seen this meadow
full of Mexican poppies

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that we once saw some years ago.

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"The Painter."

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"The clouds, and between them,
sunlight scattering shadows

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on the road.

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Then, when the road
curved sharply,

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flowers, wildflowers,
yellow poppies

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startling and spotting
an upland meadow,

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surprising me out
of my thoughts.

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We'd been traveling.

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I had a little job to do.

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Gail had made a reservation,
and the motel lady

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said it was for one night only.

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They were booked.

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But the next morning,
there was a vacancy,

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and the lady said,
shaking her finger

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like a stern schoolteacher,
don't forget to move your car

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when you switch rooms.

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We have only so
many parking spaces.

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We changed rooms, moving
our small belongings,

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setting up house.

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And there we were on a day trip
to a ghost town on the mountain

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road, and there was the
meadow, and I pointed.

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Gail, will you look
at those flowers?

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She had that look
that said she was

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visiting another place inside
her head, a better place.

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A counter universe
where a painter

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could arrange and rearrange
flowers into birds that flew,

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the mountains into buildings
on the streets of Paris,

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where the light had been
so beautiful, so baffling,

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fixing its shadows to the
stones, losing the stones,

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and gaining more life that
it drove her even further in.

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I'm a tourist of the
interior, she told me then.

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Paris she had walked
relentlessly and daily

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for months, stopping,
gazing, dreaming,

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lost beside the Seine, beside
the sleeping clochards,

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making sketches, rushing
back to our apartment

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to paint, to arrange and
rearrange, because, she said,

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the world is just
too much for me.

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I can't deal with it.

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And she would come out only
for a moment because I asked,

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and I asked because
I didn't want

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to be the only sane person
left walking on the Place De La

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Republique.

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Now she looked out at the
yellow poppies and said,

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what are they doing here?

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Then she said, uh oh, we
forgot to move our car.

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And I said, Gail,
we're in the car.

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And she started crying."

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[LAUGHTER]

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