this image (above) of gas pumps in the lit-up dead of night is breathtaking…. thank you, you two, for bringing us that. By way of answer to the prompt here on this page: I’m a cracker-trucker kind of character from way back. I’d show up, if the pit stops had bathtubs. (Ha. A shower is as much of a wet dream as you get, at truck stops. Unless you count the diners– you don’t know America until you’ve had a trucker’s breakfast at one of those. Your cardiologist will thank you.)

Every late November I do an art-and-humor pilgrimage to Victoria BC (an otherwise hyper-genteel island town with horse-drawn carriages and castles and summer street lamps voluptuous with flower-baskets) to see the annual early winter Lighted Truck Parade — a bunch of celebratory semis and serious work trucks gussied up for Xmas– among which the most amazing are often the concrete-mixing trucks– whose tanks revolve their strings of lights and never (like some vacuum cleaners or writers’ colons) get tied up in knots… the sheer glee and gusto lavished on (and emanating from) a decorated workaday dump-truck, I kid you not, would crack a heart (or at least a smile)– Some vehicles are plastered with prefab Xmas trappings and slogans (put the X back in Xmas, et al), but others are monochrome breath-takers or polyconceptual wonders — and they run a course along the sea (in sight of the Olympic Peninsula 20 miles across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, on the US side) — starting from the cruise ship landing then along the urban parkland to the Parliament Buildings and Empress Hotel downtown.

The whole shebang puts the cracker back in the fire-works, the love-song back in the jukebox… and reminds us what a winter light is for — not just the tourists’ soigné sort of holiday.