The potato patch

I see where Crash has won the Academy Award for best picture. That is the only movie of the bunch I saw this past year, and that only because the DVD was given to me as a Christmas present. I liked it. Stories with all kinds of people bumping into each other capture my imagination.

And Brokeback Mountain? I read Close Range while on a business trip to Idaho one winter. Reading was always good on those long and lonely business trips to the semi-arid earth of the high plateaus that are home to the potato patches of the Northwest. I needed to believe there was something beyond--something different from--business, especially then, when the whole ordeal began to bore me.

Today, I have my wish. I don't regret it.