Isaac the Eater and Wesley the Playful

It's a tale like many others, it but has lessons for us nonetheless:

There was a town whose people feared a dragon that lived in the woods on the north side of town.

There were frequent skirmishes with much sword swinging and rock flinging and harsh harsh words during which the dragon would disappear into the dense foliage of the many trees and the townspeople would trudge wearily home, angry and sad that the threat of the dragon persisted, disappointed that they had failed in their mission to be rid of the dragon.

One day after a halfhearted effort to lure the dragon out of the woods into the open meadow with taunts and threats, the people gave up and gathered at the town's picnic grounds to share a meal together and tell stories and make plans. 

The head cook brought out roasted meat sandwiches and young Isaac, age 2,  and his brother Wesley, age 7 and graduate of Kindergarten, each took a sandwich, as did all the adults. The head cook soon brought out another platter, and everyone except Wesley took a second. Younger Isaac however, was not finished and did take a second meat sandwich. Later, the cook brought yet another platter and again little Isaac took a sandwich and bit off a bite. Ooh he can't eat three the people said, as they each took another to prove they could keep up with the little lad. But he did, and more. Plate after plate, the cook brought sandwiches and the wee Isaac took one and the adults took one until all the adults were so full they could not move. Soon they drifted off to an overfull dreamy slumber, leaning this way and that upon each other.

Surprised to find himself unsupervised by adults, Isaac finished off his last sandwich, picked up his small stuffed toy dinosaur in one hand and took his brother's hand in the other, and they wandered off. North, as it would happen. When they got to the shady woods, they saw many ferns. They started to make up a little song about living under the arching fronds with toads and chipmunks. 

Soon the curious dragon heard their voices and came to see. The children saw the dragon peeking out from behind the trees and waved. Little Isaac just happened to wave with the hand that was holding the dinosaur toy and the dragon asked if the toy was a dragon like her. The children move closer to show the toy to the dragon and explain what they knew about dinosaurs, which was a great deal. Isaac told the dragon that the toy dinosaur was named Cow. The children and the dragon played some games and sang some songs and made up stories together.

Eventually some adults woke up and saw the boys were missing and roused the others and they set off to try to find them. After some misguided wandering south, and then east, someone got the idea to try to see if the Archie the hunting dog could give them a clue.  They let the dog sniff the children's naptime blankets and pretty soon Archie headed off north. The adults followed. When they near the edge of the woods, there they saw the children playing with the feared and hated dragon and they hollered at Wesley and Isaac to come here, come here.

The children obeyed of course but before they went to the adults, they each took a hand of their new friend the dragon and brought him toward the gaggle of adults. At first the townspeople were horrified, but then the boys and the dragon started to skip and sing a song they'd made up.  That's when everyone realized the error in their ways about the dragon and started asking the dragon questions and getting their pictures taken with the dragon. There were high fives and cheers and the dragon allowed herself to be petted and even gave a few of the smaller people short rides.

Isaac the Eater and Wesley the Playful are all grown up now but the people still enjoy a lovely relationship with the dragon. The dragon comes to tell them when the various woodland fruits and berries and nuts are ripe and the townspeople bring the dragon sweet treats now and then.  The people have picnics at the edge of the woods and invite the dragon to picnics in their town square and the dragon participates in their parades and celebrations. Sometimes they have an outdoor play or concert so that she can enjoy some entertainment with them.

-

There are some morals of the story there for you if you bother to look.

Roof Architecture and God

Where did Anson Johnson and Jay le Rondein and such modern architects get their inspiration for the low flat topped horizontally oriented style that they are so well known for? In 1947, a group of American architectural students took a southern European field trip that included Andelania, an island off the coast of Spain. This large island of volcanic mountains had only flat roofs on their homes and offices and buildings. The building codes of the independent island state cited concerns about rain and snow runoff harming people outside the building and undermining the foundations of the buildings by dumping too much precipitation too close to the building itself, so the flat topped roofs were slightly concave to collect the rain water and snow melt water and channel it through plumbing to be deposited far from the building. In fact, the towns' first sewer systems were to carry this roof rain water away from the buildings and were only later copied to carry waste water away from homes via underground plumbing systems. In early times, the rain water went through underground piping while household sewage was carried out of town in barrels and dumped. Later, a piggyback system was build in a layer on top of the rain drainage system to carry the household waste. The architecture students of the '40s liked the aesthetics of the horizontal flatness of the buildings an the layers of the multistory buildings. They found it to be an interesting contrast to the sloping and vertical nature of the surrounding cliffs and mountains of the island, and carried the images back home to their American architectural studios where it played in a rebellious and innovative way against the overdone steeply pitched roofs of the Victorian and Gothic and Colonial Revival houses popular at the time. The completely flat roof did present problems of excessive snow accumulation, so the style quickly evolved into the low pitched roof of the suburban ranch style, with just enough pitch to shed snow but not so much as to echo the steepness of the traditional residential steeply peaked houses so popular then.

Only when architectural historians visited the island in later years was the true origin of the flat roof uncovered. In much earlier historic times, the population of the island worshipped Vol, a god that was thought to reside inside the volcanoes. When Vol was angry, legend said, the earth would shake and tremble. If Vol got angrier still, a dome of one of the island mountains would begin to swell and bulge. If Vol became even angrier, ash and fire and lava would spew from the dome and cover fields and roads and houses and towns and kill wildlife and livestock and people. At the first sign of displeasure, the people would hold meetings and attempt to figure out who among them was displeasing the volcano god. If someone had plowed a field the wrong direction, and had pointed the rows directly toward the volcano god, it was decided that Vol was angry that the person did it to mock him, and that person could be declared the source of the trouble and killed at the base of the rumbling dome. These 'trials' escalated as the volcanic activity escalated, with sometimes whole villages sacrificed to appease the god. In early times, shelters consisted mainly of a ramada type architecture of post supporting beams that supported thatching of reeds and rushes and grasses to shed rain. One village higher on the slopes, where snowfall was prevalent, had adapted a peaked shape to their roofs to more effectively shed the snow. This shape for houses was becoming popular when the volcano of that peak began to show activity. The usual violators were sought out and sacrificed but the volcano erupted one day in late summer anyway. The first thing to light on fire from the burning cinders blasted from the volcano were the peaked thatched roofs. Coincidentally, as the lava flowed down from the dome above, this city was engulfed and a nearby village that had not adopted the peaked roofs was spared. A swelling in the land above the village diverted lava flow to either direction around it, but it did appear from the village as though some guardian hand might have caused the flow to go to either side. This was the origin of the prohibition against peaked roofs. They were for many centuries seen to offend the volcano god because they were thought to be an image of his shape and therefore a mockery of the god himself. Eventually, when Christian missionaries in the 1890s converted the Vol worshippers to Catholicism, the beliefs in Vol and the sacrifices to him were ceased. But still, when the village wrote up its 'modern' building code ordinances, scientific reasons were offered up for various dangers and disadvantages of sloped roofs, and flat roofs were mandated by law. To this date, the cities and the state still mandate flat roofs, and manage to find various engineering data sets which they cite in order to support this preference.
It is a certainly good thing that religion and ancient myth are never allowed to enter into the laws of the obviously much more advanced and civilized country that is the United States of America.

Red Beads

Something landed on the branch of the star magnolia just outside my window, on a brisk March day when the fat and furry bud cases were barely cracked open to reveal white petals within. The movement of settling wings in the periphery of my vision is what caught my attention. I turned my chair to see it was him, there on my branch, keeping his balance by the shifting of his tail feathers. In his beak, he held a strand of red beads, transparent glass, and they seemed to glow from within in the low light of the afternoon sun. He looked at me directly, first with one eye, then the other. I left my desk, grabbed my jacket off the hook by the door, and went outside. He hopped down branch to branch until he was at my shoulder, where he looked at me again, with one eye at a time, twisting his neck from side to side, a habit he knew annoyed me.
"I thought you weren't coming back," I said. He pushed his beak, still holding the beads, toward me. I cupped my hands under them as he let them drop. He shook his head and said, "I lied. You know I always do that." "I forget," I answered and walked toward the back yard. "AWWWW," he called, "Don't go away!" I kept walking. He tried to take flight from the tree but its branches got in the way of his wing feathers. He was forced to drop to the ground, waddle out from under it along the path to more open ground, where he could take flight. He flew out to beyond where I was headed, then circled. "You're mad I came back?" he asked in a pass near my head that made me instinctively duck and swerve a little, which only served to aggravate me further.
"I'm mad you left. What do you think?" I answered, turning away. "You know I can't live in a house and you won't live in a tree. Do we have to go over all that again?" he snapped. "Where did you steal the beads?" I asked, hoping to offend him. "Bought them. Mexico." he answered. "So you shifted to buy me beads?" I couldn't decide if I was touched or angered. "Fly with me," he demanded.
"No." I draped the beads over the branch of a witch hazel tree, longing to pause to smell the curled yellow blossoms. Instead, I turned and walked toward the house, feeling him fly past my head once and again as he made passes through the yard. I went inside and closed the door, leaning back against it for a second. I heard a loud long "Cah-aaaaawwwww" from high in the sky, then the branch by the window scraped the siding when he landed. I did not look out the window. I opened the basement door, pulled the chain to turn on the light, and stepped down into the musky space where I could not look out windows to let him catch my eye. I folded laundry, sheets first, drawing my arms wide to pull the wrinkles out, smoothing the fabric with each fold, then the towels, snapping each one crisply and creasing it slowly and firmly, perfect quarters, perfect thirds, a perfect stack. I looked around for more to do, but things were in order. I climbed the steps, my feet heavy. Silence. I paused and took a deep breath before I opened the back door. Only the beads were there, draped over the outside knob, swinging against the white paint as my hand shook on the inner knob.
I scanned the sky, the bare high branches of the trees along the property line. I pulled the shining beads from the doorknob. There were many shapes and graduated sizes, a carved glass flower in the center, leaf shaped beads to each side. It was beautiful, perfect. The glass beads felt cool in my hands. I held them to my heart. I could feel it pounding: Was he gone for good this time?

Words and Photographs in Books - Fiction

We drove north out of town, following the directions they gave us, and stopped at the side of the road where they said it happened. But we could find no signs. Nothing at all. There were no scraps of paper, no tire marks, no beaten down grass, no broken glass, no burn marks or ashes, no signs of any disturbance or anything unusual at all really. We picked up a few beer cans and some fast food litter to try to redeem the trip from total pointlessness. We debated a while if we should go back and ask for directions again or if perhaps we'd gotten the crossroads wrong, turned too soon or gone too far. In the end, we decided we didn't have time to try again so we drove away, leaving the tall cottonwoods rustling their leaves along on the far side of the ditch. We wondered aloud and privately if it really ever happened and then forced ourselves to change the subject and stop talking about it as we drove on the our next appointment.

Years later, I was driving that road on the way to visit a friend, when the fenceline cottonwoods rose into my view ahead. The early morning light sent shadows of them crossing the roadway and without meaning to, I slowed down as I neared the spot. And there in the tall ditch grasses, exactly where they'd said it would be, was everything we'd expected to find. The books were there, tumbled in the ditch, some lying open, their pages fluttering in the breeze. Black skid marks on the asphalt lead to tire tracks that flattened the grasses. Broken glass, the smell of gasoline and oil, a burned patch in the grass along the shoulder. Envelopes of guitar strings, business cards, matchbooks, a makeup case, CDs, your sunglasses, and folded roadmaps.

I looked up and down the road, but there were no cars, no other people. I started to gather up the books into a pile when a crow landed on the hood of my truck and two more landed on the center line of the pavement. They cawed and flicked and shook their wings and cocked their heads to stare at me. I looked down and the book in my hand was open to the photo of you, victorious and smiling, a strand of hair blown across your face, standing on the steps of the courthouse. I dropped to my knees and cried as I held the book to my heart. The crows cawed, flapped wings, rose and settled again together in a broken branch of the cottonwood trees.

In the end, I left everything there. I knew if I took more time to gather things up, if I picked up the books and straightened their pages and closed them and stacked them in my truck, that I would be late to see my friend. And what would I do with them, how would I explain them being there? What good could those things do me anyway; what use were they to me now? I drove away, leaving it all there, fluttering in the wind, catching and reflecting the sunlight.

I drove away and as I did, the crows dropped out of the tree and flew along and behind me for a ways before veering off into a valley to dive and tumble with each other until I had to leave sight of them to turn my eyes back to the road.

My friend was waiting on the porch, smiling, with a pitcher of lemonade for us to share and a vase of sparkling yellow roses, fresh with dew and glistening in light reflecting from the white of house walls. We talked a while, laughed, shared stories, joked. We talked about our plans, our hopes. Then I saw it there on the chair between us, your book, open, face down. She saw me looking at it and picked it up, closed it, and slid it onto her lap. She broke the silence that had settled upon us by offering me more lemonade, and we talked a while more, remembered, planned, laughed. Once, we sat silent for a while to watch a coal black cat walk the distance of her driveway, then double back and stalk a grasshopper that was sitting in the gravel. The grasshopper popped high over the cat's head at the last minute and the cat walked on as though nothing had happened. When I got up to leave, she stood to hug me goodbye and I saw that her lap was empty, the book not there. She smiled and walked me to the truck and hugged me once more before I drove away.


I miss you but I am not sure you are really gone.

Secret Club

Every day that I was there, these strange flat small yellow people guarded this door. It must be some kind of secret club's meeting room or clubhouse or maybe they just keep their secret club regalia there or maybe it is something darker, but it is difficult to think of small yellow people as capable of dark thoughts and acts. I imagine happy things behind that door, though I know not why they would hesitate to share them with the rest of us. I asked them questions and they refused to answer. If I talked to them too long, the human people in the area gave me looks that indicated to me that they are protective of their flat yellow friends and that they wanted me to respect their privacy. I asked it they minded if I took their picture, and they did not say no, so I took the liberty. But they never did talk to me, so their mission and the nature of what is behind the door they guard remains a mystery.

Tour Bus - Fiction

When we were younger and less known, we toured in a bus with our name on every surface along with lots of flash and dancing eye candy, hoping we would be as famous as we thought our bus's paint job made us seem to be. Then, when we were actually famous and well-known and sought after and tired of the attention when we were tired of being 'on' after a show, we started to tour in 2 plain white unadorned buses with heavily tinted windows. These sleek white beasts glide barely noticed through town after town and earn us the quiet our old bodies and brains need to sleep off the adrenaline and then pump it up again for another show in another town. But back when we partied all night on the road in our flashy bus, we were burning ourselves out and not all of us made it out alive. Somewhere on the road between Chicago and Milwaukee on one such trip, one of our bass players took on a bit too much of something or a bit too many of some things together and his heart stopped beating in the second seat of the 5th row. After that, nobody would sit in that seat, or even in that row, really, and there was frequently a disturbance when someone would forget, one of us or some lowly lighting guy or one of the costume girls would plunk down with a beer and the bus would gradually go dead silent as we gaped at him or her. They would remember and leap up or maybe have to be told and pulled into the aisle. One night, we were waiting in a parking lot in one of those big L towns in Kentucky, waiting to find out if the last minute add in some nearby college field house was a go or if we were going to hit the interstate for Georgia instead. We sat around in our funk of uncertainty and someone and someone else got into an argument that lead to people taking sides that lead to someone mentioning the dead bass player's name and that shut us all down. We sat in the gloom staring at the empty seat and each other when finally one of the drummers said "I'm gonna torch that seat," and started pushing and pulling on it. A couple others joined in and only managed to get the arm wrenched akimbo. Jimmie finally got up and skulked through the aisle glaring, which made most of us shut up and sit down. He went to the driver and asked for the toolbox. They went outside and underbins were opened and closed and Jimmie came back with a yellow plastic box. He yanked up the carpet and poked his head around under the seat and one of the sound guys joined him. Pretty soon they had the seat unbolted and 3 or 4 of them were carrying it over the other seats to the door. They set it down a few parking places away. We all sat there stunned for a few seconds before we poured out of the bus and gathered in a circle around the seat. There were a few whispers about how we might be arrested but a couple others were rolling up paper towels from the lavatory and wedging them between the seat and the back and pretty soon, the paper was lit and the flames started to creep. Well, it wasn't as dramatic as we'd hoped, for instead of bursting into wild and brilliant towering roaring flame, it mostly just sizzled as the flames crept around and over and under, melting then actually burning the polycarbons of which it was made. It took a long time and there were little plumes of black smoke now and then, yet no fire trucks roared up, no police cars with flashing lights zoomed in. Soon it was a twisted framework of angled metal and sinewave curving springs and then it was over. We left the metal remains there on the pavement and trickled back onto the bus as the driver radioed to dispatch for our directions. The spot in the row of seats stayed empty for years, until we got the new white buses, and became the place where the ice chest full of bottled water and yogurt that reflected our cleaner habits was kept. We fondly remember the removal of the seat as more violent, we remember the flames as higher and hotter, we remember cheering and yelling instead of the somber quiet observance that actually took place, and at least some remember the driver cleverly talking our way out of trouble with police or fire officials, but in the end, "the day we burned Eddie's seat" was a turning point for us. We lived cleaner and worked harder and played better music and earned more money. Remember the day we "torched the bus seat"?

What A Welcome To Milwaukee

I was quite impressed to find, on arrival, that the City of Milwaukee had erected a sculpture of a K to welcome me to town. It is huge! What an honor! Thanks, City! Isn't it a cool nifty K sculpture?

Getting The Boot

We planned it for months. It started with me complaining about poor service that caused us to almost miss a plane one vacation. Everyone had a story about bad service, delays, employees who just don't care how much this is wrecking your life. It made us want to pull a caper, get them back somehow. One of us had a friend of a friend who worked there. We found out where the cash is stashed and spent some time faking that we were waiting for planes doing recon on the patterns of who came and went and when things were watched and left unwatched. We organized ourselves, assigned roles, took our time, made a plan involving distractions, handoffs, disguises changed for other disguises. We rode in together with plenty of time to have a coffee and get into position. The plan went flawlessly, leaving no need to employ contingency plans or back up options. We had the cash. There was much more there than we had even optimistically anticipated. Our fresh disguises meant we all looked much different on the way out than we had going in and even during the elegantly executed theft. We were going to get away with it. We were cautiously elated on the way down the elevator to the parking garage. Then everything changed for one little detail. We were . . . stunned. The car was booted. Big yellow metal scruffy thing bolted right to the wheel of the car. Stopping us in our tracks. How could this happen? The driver had a few parking tickets from last summer, he sheepishly admitted. We sent one of our party to two terminals over to ditch the cash and change to yet another disguise just in case. While we called the police to pay the tickets and the debooting fee with our own credit cards. We left the garage, having pulled off a successful revenge caper but . . . instead of richer in the wallet, a little poorer than the day before, all because of the boot.

The Door Between You and Me

I wait. I pace the hall, up and down, outside the door. The door is steel, very wide, grey, a cool grey, closer the color of blue than tan. I sit down against the wall, beside the door, slumping my bag next to me. I wait. The wall has a slight texture if I push my back against it, rounded bumps, not rough, but with a smooth surface that slides against my jacket. The baseboard is thin against the wall, rubber. Where it meets the deeper metal door frame, a curved triangle of grunge remains, where careless mops never quite reach. I close my eyes to shut out that sight and press my head against the wall. I listen for some sign from behind the door. Nothing. The door is thick, heavy, soundproof. Is it one of those fireproof doors? I wait. I wake with a start: I must have drifted off. For how long? Nothing is changed. There is still no sound, no one here, no change in the light. I get up, pushing off the wall. I go to the end of the hallway. There is a window, a drive below, curbed on either side between sidewalk and grass. There is a bench of metal slats, a trashcan. A few scattered trees with a few scattered leaves remaining. I can see the parking lot and my car. I look back to the door. Are you still there? You did not speak to me or even meet my eyes, but I am sure you know I am out here. I am sure I saw you go in. I saw you pull the door tight shut and I heard you click the latch tight closed. What is happening? How long will it be? I go back and sit again, with my back against the door this time. It seems colder than the plaster wall. Smoother, but there are chips in the grey paint of the frame and the door. The linoleum tiled floor changes to a darker color at the doorframe. I take the book from my bag and try to read. I can understand the words but they do not hold meaning to me beyond the moment I read them. I put the book back in the bag. I wait. How much longer? There! I hear a clicking at the knob, as though a hand turns it from within, from the other side. I lean forward, waiting for the door to open. But no more sounds follow. Did I shift my weight against the door, thus causing the mechanism in the latch to shift? Or was there a hand there, on the other side? I get up and pace some more. I stand leaning against the wall opposite the door. There is a window high on the door. I go closer, up on my toes. But it is reinforced with wire mesh, translucent. I can see nothing through it except a uniform glow of the diffused light beyond. Or is it merely reflected light from the hallway. I lean back against the opposite wall, slide down to sit there again. Are you still in there? What am I waiting for? How long have I been waiting? How long should I wait? Am I waiting for you to come out? Or for you to let me in? Should I pound on the door, jiggle the handle, yell, demand your attention? Would you even hear? Should I wait longer? Or should I just stand up and walk away.

The First Time I Flew

I was enjoying one last glass of wine on the steps of the porch, listening to the light wind move the leaves in the trees down by the road. He walked up the drive in his long black coat, making me aware the evening was cooling off. I pulled my black lace shawl close around my shoulders. "Can I share your wine?" he asked. I handed the glass to him. We talked a while about little things, nothing really. He handed my wine glass back to me. I finished the bit of wine remaining and set the glass on the step. "Fly with me." he said. As I was thinking what he meant by that, wondering if he had a pilot's license or if he meant taking a trip somewhere, he flicked open his hand. Long black feathers streamed from his fingers and along his forearm. I looked to his face, where his nose was a long black beak and his eyes were shiny black, glistening. He shrugged his shoulders and lifted his elbows, and his arms were wings. He folded them behind his back, and said to me again, "Fly with me." As I was thinking that I would love to if only my shawl were magic, I looked down to pull it closer around me and opened my hand to see that it too streamed with feathers. A little stunned, I spread open my shawl that was now long black flight feathers covering my arms and hands, and the unexpected force of feather against air rocked me gently. He opened his black wings and lifted off, raised them high, and pushed down. Flapping, he rose, flew over me, circling back around. I spread my wings too, and pressed them against the air, and rose with him. We flew in the moonlight over the rustling trees, gliding along the creek, past the big oak, down to the lake, swooping low, then climbing high, soaring, sailing, and returning along curving lines of the creek to land, back in the yard. "Thanks for the wine" he said, as he pulled his coat around himself and began to button it. I watched him leave down the drive, then turned myself, gathering my shawl to me as I went inside with the empty glass.

Kitten Fighting in Chicago

My son and his friends needed a ride to the kitten fights in downtown Chicago, so I agreed to drive. You could tell we were in the right place, due to all the people with their shoe boxes with the airholes. We got there early, so the kids left me with their kittens while they found a bite to eat. The line was long for check in, but that was an excellent chance to meet people and there were carts to hold your kitten carriers if you needed them. After check in and number and match rotation assignments, rules were explained at the fighting cages in the auditorium. Modern technology allows odds to be quickly calculated on each kitten as various data points are entered into computers. You can enter your smaller bets into automated machines that pay out in coins when you read your card in after a fight round. For fun, I put $2 on my son's kitten and won $8.75. Most people treat their breeding cats and kittens well, but there is some cruelty, just like in other fighting and racing sports. Sometimes, the losing kittens get abandoned like these on cafeteria table or this poor one left in the garbage. It was an exciting evening in the Windy City!

Ludden Jail Break Out

He didn't do any of the things they charged him with. But he had no alibi. It isn't his fault he likes to sleep under the stars in his pickup truck box in whatever back road shelter belt or corn field he happens to be near. And yeah, the guns all have reasons for being in there. You'd find hunting licenses in his wallet that explain every kind of weapon he had and anyway, there's nothing wrong with having a few extra as a hobby. And he hadn't been drinking either, no matter how many cans and bottles were on the floor of his pickup. He does feel a moral obligation to pick those things up off the roadside, and no matter how many times we tell him to put them in a garbage bag in the back, he still just tosses them on the passenger seat floor. And no, he was not speaking incoherently. When he left us, he was talking about some new article on some physics project in Australia about bubbles and how they expand and how that relates possibly to the expansion of the universe and that may have seemed incoherent to the sheriff's deputy, but it was not. Just because the local law enforcement does not follow physics is no reason to charge our friend with all the open cases in the county. Well, we realized there was no way he was going to beat all those charges they had stacked up against him and and he couldn't afford the kind of lawyer it would take to even try and anyway, he was ready to move on to a different state, so we had to bust him out. It is surprising how secure those little town jails can be. We left a couple hundred dollars on the desk under a rock to cover any damages to the door frames and locks, and I hope it was enough. We gave him the rest of our cash for gas money and some of the holiday goodies we had in bags and boxes and tins and let him take any warm clothes we had in our cars and sent him on his way. One of us gets a postcard from him now and then. I think he was in Utah, last anyone heard.

Turkey Suicide

Was it a tom-tom-hen turkey love triangle? Was it a turkey-crow star-crossed lovers thing? Did this one finally figure out that his missing friends from previous Octobers and Novembers were not living happily on a farm in Iowa? What drove this poor turkey to take his own life in the highest limbs of a tall tree? It breaks the heart to drive this patch of 33 between Reedsburg and LaValle and see this sad carnage. Won't somebody cut him down and give him a proper resting place? A small stone slab carved simply "Tom - Called Home."

The Point of The House

I installed them today!
Everyone knows the real point of building or remodeling any house is to have cool kitchen cabinet knobs. In fact, that is the real reason we are building the lake house. A couple years ago, my spouse said "Let's build a lake house." and I said "Can it have those cool leaf shape cabinet knobs?" and he said "Sure, as long as they are not too expensive." which I took to mean less than a hundred dollars each, so I said "Okay, let's look for a lot to build on." and it all followed from there. They were long and narrow, with an undulating edge and a distinct center vein and they came in this amazing bronze color so dark it was almost black. Each has two points where it is attached, so techincally, it is a door 'pull', not a 'knob'.
I visited the manufacturer's website every few weeks to take a look at them and fantasize about how they would look on various style cabinets and in various types of homes, and in fact, the entire design was shaped in a major way around how it would provide a framework for the leaf cabinet pulls and show them off to their best advantage.
The house was given a timber frame, wood and bamboo floors as a background to show them off, oil rubbed bronze door hardware to match them, black granite counter tops to coordinate with them, a brown stone sink with leaves carved on the front, an area on the second floor open to the ground floor so that you could see down to them, an open floor plan so that you could see the kitchen from other rooms, a cabinet that pierced the kitchen wall with glass doors on both sides so that there could be doors with knobs in the hallway, visible from the living and dining rooms, and a deck outside series of patios doors so that you could see in to them. Every so often, I would fill up a shopping cart at the website just to carry the fantasy a bit farther toward reality, even though it was far too early to order them. Finally, when things were well on their way, I suggested to my spouse that it might be time to order them. He said it was still a bit early, but what could it hurt?
So I went gleefully to the website with my credit card propped by the screen and . . . they . . . were . . . discontinued! Oh, the horror! I lost all interest in the lake house for several weeks and sat at my chair in the kitchen and stared at the opposite wall. My family would show me the plans and the books and magaines with their pretty pictures and ask me questions to try to stimulate renewed interest and I would say "Whatever" or "I don't care" or "Anything you want will be fine." Finally, my husband convinced me I was ruining it for the rest of them and that he knew the joy was gone for me but that I should fake it for their sake and find some merely adequate leaf knobs instead of the perfect ones that the house had been designed around, and so I agreed to get back involved in the process. I even ordered some knobs that had two smaller leaves at the ends and a twisty part to hold onto to open the door or drawer. But still, I mourned the elongated undulating leaf shape pulls. I mourned them deeply.
Finally, on a visit to one of those overstock discount stores, as I was ambling pointlessly around the kitchen wares section, there, at the end of an aisle, in dusty plastic bags, were my leaf pulls! Could it be? Were they the real thing or cheap knock offs? Yes, they were the real true oxidized undulating leaf pulls. But there were only about a third enough of them. I bought them anyway, full of hope that other stores in the chain would have more. I rushed home and called. Several stores, miles away and from each other, had quantities that would total what I needed and a couple of spares. I cancelled appointments and plans and refused meals to dash to the stores to bag them before someone else discovered my treasure.
They have been in a box in the garage, awaiting the moment that they could be installed, for weeks and weeks. The cabinets were delivered in their cardboard boxes on a Friday, but the carpenters could not come from their other construction job until the next Thursday. I suggested to my spouse that I could open the boxes and find the fronts of the cabinet doors and drawers and install them. He rolled his eyes and said it was too early. When the cabinets were installed, I suggested it was time and he pointed out they would be damaged during the installation of the heavy granite counter tops. When the counter tops were installed, I suggested it was time. He said they might be in the way during appliance delivery and installation. When the appliances were in, I brought them in from the garage and removed them from the dusty bags and caressed them. He said they might be damaged when the plumbers came to hook up the sink. Or when the carpenters worked on trimming the cabinets and the windows and doors.
But that was all done last week, so today, after I did some scary painting over the part upstairs that is open to the ground floor where the guard railing is not installed yet, I rewarded myself by installing the elongated undulating oxidized leaf pulls. They are wonderful! It is everything I knew it could be!

Cat and Crow

He had a pet crow with feathers black as coal that shimmered blue sheen in the sunlight. He had a pet cat, with fur dark as deepest night and soft as velvet. The crow rode about the farm on his shoulder, struggling to hold on as he did chores, flying up to perch above on the beams of the barn when he moved too much or when he brushed her off. The cat kept near his feet, just far enough to keep out of the way of boots and tools and trouble, but near enough to catch the milk he squirted in her direction at milking time.
One spring morning he missed the crow landing on his shoulder as he left the house for the bus stop, but some days she was busy hunting or riding the breezes and was there to greet him after school, so he did not worry just then. He missed her again as the bus pulled up to his home stop when she was not on the jagged branch of the oak tree on the corner. He missed the cat too at milking time. He called for them and poked around the farm, in out buildings and along fencerows, half certain they would both turn up soon from their oddly coincidentally-timed disappearances. As the number of days grew greater, he missed them a little less each day and soon summer swimming and fishing and biking into town with friends kept him distracted. It was a mystery he would occasionally ponder, and missing them would make him sad, so he would allow himself to move on to other thoughts.
Late in summer, he and his friend were tossing a ball back and forth in the farthest reach of the farmyard, where evergreens formed a border between the lawn and the cornfield beyond. He jumped for the high ball, missed, and turned to run for it. His friend came to help look, and lifted spruce branches so that he could look on the ground under for the ball. That is how he found them. Perfect skeletons of a cat and a crow, meshed together.
How did it happen? Did the natural enemies that normally coexisted peacefully for the sake of the boy give in to instinct and battle with each other? Were they after the same mouse or grasshopper and crashed by accident? Who died first? Did the crow attack first and dive at the cat and dig its claws deep into the cat’s loose coat? Did the cat turn and claw or bite some critical artery and kill the crow, whose claws remained firmly locked onto its spine? Did the cat crawl off with its horrible burden finding rest under the tree for shelter, to bleed to its own death or to slowly starve over days?
The friend held the boy’s shoulders as he threw up his lunch, then stood silently by as the boy panted to catch his breath. They found shovels in the barn. They dug a trench along side the skeletons and scraped them in. The boy and his friend buried their bones, cat and crow together, tentative friends, ultimate enemies, partners in their tragic death. They covered the white bones with black black earth.

Three Crows Go Driving

From an entry in the back packing journal dated 6-24-08







Three Crows Go Driving

Three crows go for ice cream
In their Maserati GT S stick shift,
Black of course.
They order a black cow,
A root beer float, and
A hot fudge sundae.

Three crows go to the cemetery
To pay their respects
To the Civil War veterans.
One wonders how much longer before
The country is ‘color blind’.
Another says “I’m optimistic.”
The last says “We’re optimistic
About everything.”

Three crows go to the nature preserve
To photograph wildflowers
They find black snakeroot
In the woods
Skunk cabbage by the stream,
And Crow’s foot violet
At the edge of the prairie.

Three crows speed home
One says “Busy day.”
Another says “Important day.”
Third says “Cop.”
They pull over as lights flash.
Crow at the wheel
Hands over a license.
Officer returns to his car.
And looks ahead.
The Maserati is gone.

Papers drift and tumble
Where the car was.
Officer steps back out,
Bends to pick up the pieces
Three coupons
For the ice cream store,
A map of the cemetery,
A tracing of a crow’s foot violet leaf.

“Yeeeaaaah” comes a caw from overhead
Three crows fly away,
Turn and keel in the warm breeze
then fly steady westward.

Construction Site Cleaning

It never fails to amaze and crush me that I can spend hours sweeping and scooping and dumping and vacuuming up bits of wood scraps and wood chips and wood shards and sawdust and bent nails and popped screw heads and snipped bits of wire and bits of stripped wire coating and grindings from cut plumbing and jagged bits of heating duct metal and bits of foam insulation and tufts of fiberglass insulation and sanding dust and drywall mud globs and drywall mud dust and paper snarls from drywall cut edges and boxes and bags and wrappings and labels and directions (never read by anyone at the construction site) and spare parts (which I am sure were truly spare and not necessary at all) and assorted other unidentifiable debris and then come back the next morning or maybe even in a hour or two and find more of it right where I cleaned. I have thought at great length about it since the project began on April 16 and I as the homeowner realised I was not going to be held in high esteem as Her Highness The Homeowner Who Gets All She Demands Because She Is In Charge Because It Is Her Home That Is Being Built but rather The Clean Up Gal. Here is what I have concluded: There is so very much debris that it would defy the laws of physics for it all to coexist in the space of this dimension, complicated by the fact that debris from various subcontractors can coexist as peacefully as the subs themselves get along. So some of the debris squeezes into alternate dimensions. When I clean, I clear out the debris taking up the space in this dimension, allowing the debris suspended in alternate dimensions to pop back into this, its original dimension, and re-inhabit the space. I wonder how many layers of it are there in how many alternate dimensions and how long it will keep popping back to be swept and scooped and vacuumed?

How To Rustle Cattle

First, take calves, not grown cattle. They are easier to handle and cuter. They still smell though, so wear old cloths. Timing is everything. They should be weaned and eating grass. You don't want to bottle feed a bunch of calves. Trust me. Find a pasture with a side road so you are out of sight more than on the main gravel road. Never rustle cattle from a highway. The fence should be strands of barbed wire, not that grid stuff. You need an accomplice. Your accomplice stays outside the fence, you go in. The wire is slackest nearest the center of a section between two fence posts. Find a spot where there are not cowpies inside the fence. Lay down along the outside of the fence, right next to the wire, facing up. Lift the wire as high as you can above you and scootch sideways under it. You are in. Leave the calves with unique markings in favor of the bland average ones. Get between a calf and its mother to separate it. Wave your arms to scare the mother away. Grab the calf around its legs and take it to the fence where your accomplice waits. Hold it over the fence and have your accomplice put their arms under its belly so you can roll its legs up and over the fence int the arms of the other person. Your accomplice can carry it to the trailer and roll it down in. You can go back for more. Don't be greedy. A half dozen is a good start your first time. They will be more work to raise than you think. Don't become attached to them and don't name them.

A Job Site Hazard

It can be shocking the first time you see it. It is one of the dreaded and known risks of allowing too many subcontractors onto a job site simultaneoulsy. It is probably more common than we would like to think. It starts out innocently enough. The carpenters show up and run a couple cords to power their saws and drills and electric screwdrivers to patch the hole in the particle board subfloor. Then the drywallers arrive for the day and run a few more cords for their lights and drywall saws and Roto-zip trimmers and power screwdrivers. The plumber steps in to try to get those shower supply lines in while the wall is still open on both sides and runs a couple more cords to power his soldering iron and saw. The electrician makes his appearance to install that one missed light fixture with his own cords for his tools. Pretty soon, the mass of cords on the floor is exuding powerfully attractive pheromones and all the cords stored in all those subcontractor trucks get a whiff and are irresistibly attracted into the building, and the mass grows and grows and grows. It can take days for the mating ball of the Elasoidea electricalii orangeri to accomplish its natural mission and for the individuals to quiet down enough that the subcontractors can return to the site and begin to sort out their own individual cords to return them to their own individual trucks. This is just one of the many ways that delays are introduced into the construction process.

You Chose Crow (Fiction)

The thing I hate most about you now is your ugly beak. I hate that it is shiny and hard and as long as the whole entire rest of your head. I hate its pointy end and your sharp black tongue inside. I hate your wrinkled black nostrils. Sure, I am glad your guardian creature was there or we’d be very very dead right now, but why couldn't you think of anything else? That crow came diving into the gully just ahead of our plummeting car and you couldn't focus on the decision at hand? The creature demanded “Choose!”. You chose “Crow.” You never think, do you?
I don’t mind your black beady eyes. They are not that different from when you used to squint across the kitchen table at me, drunk and stoned and angry. I don’t mind your hunched posture. It is not that different from when you came home from work, hot and filthy, and skulked around the edges of the kitchen, looking for beer and Jack Daniels. It is not even your hideous shriveled claws I hate most, for they are much like your metal-cut and dried-blistered and callused hands were. It is that beak. That awful black and shiny pointed beak.
No, wait. That must be second what I hate the most. What I well and truly hate the most is that when I look at you, it is like looking in the mirror, for to the untrained observer, now, you and I look exactly alike. Exactly. Alike. That is what I hate the most.
Artwork by Sheri Lee Butler, Warrenvlle, IL