City Rhythm

Sometimes I think it would be nice to move out to a farm.  To have some space for animals: goats, chickens, and bees.  I'd like to own a big barn and run a dog kennel for city people to bring their dogs to when they go on vacation.  The stalls could be divided up for the dogs.  Each stall could have a little cot.  Each dog would be taken for a walk twice a day on the country lanes.
But then, I inevitably take a drive into the "countryside" around here and lose my dream.  I am too much a city person.  I move too fast.  I like restaurants and the ease of quick trips to Indian and Chinese markets for emergency ghee and fresh ginger and lemon grass.  I like going to movies on a whim--the retro ones that show for one night only on the big screen like Five Easy Pieces or foreign films like 400 Blows.  I like driving from one place to another and happening up on an art opening and stopping in for free wine in plastic stemware and cubes of cheese and looking at things like a series of framed collections of tissues with narratives about where the "artist" was when she used that tissue.
Mostly, I like the rhythm of the city.  Different cities have different rhythms.  Some even seem to have a pulse.
Every Saturday night from nine until two a.m. there is a radio station that plays jazz classics: Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk. There is nothing quite like moving through the city at night with the host's easy tones accompanying you and the music and the lights.  Sometimes it's simply magical when the car moves right alongside the subway for awhile, and then the train lifts up and runs above you like an instrument itself--the train, the city, all part of the groove, in sync with the piano and the drum and the saxophone.