Bare Bones

It's rare that I make my commute with nothing on the radio, no book on CD playing. For the first half of my commute this morning, I listened to Louise Erdrich read Lorrie Moore's story, Dance In America via the New Yorker fiction podcast and afterwards my mind was too blown to take in anything else. I flipped off the car stereo and drove the rest of the way in silence. I paid attention to the fire truck racing along the frontage road, an ambulance solemnly following. I thought about the difference between He leaves the room and He walks out of the room. I thought about secrets, and the way a story can be told by isolating pieces of information, leaving things out, like in a photograph where what makes it beautiful is the lack of extraneous details.