The William Blake Pickup

I was driving in Portland. Rain fell. Gray and black reigned over the landscape. A new year held out potential for a better year, but not a return to normalcy. If I hear the word “normalcy” again I might kill myself. It ranks as one of the worst words ever concocted in American English. Thank you Warren Harding or more likely his campaign manager.

A vehicle appeared ahead of me. It was a mid-size pickup from the 90s puttering along five miles under the speed limit. I drew closer and beheld a Chevrolet painted very much in the ecstatic style of William Blake’s art. Indeed, Blake’s quote “Exuberance is Beauty” was lettered on the tail gate.

I had read this immortal line from Blake, a mad poet who often sat naked with his naked wife in his backyard, drinking porter and reading Shakespeare to her, but never really understood it until I saw it painted on a tail gate while rain fell in Oregon on a morning the antithesis of color of everything Blake painted.