One for the Ladies, Two for the Critters

I received for Christmas one of my Dad's slightly used digital SLR Nikon's, though in some senses it was not in fact a Christmas present, but rather, an invitation to spend a portion of my free time sharing something they have a passion for: photography.  Typical of the thinking of a person my age and generation, I more or less told my father I didn't have the time for photography.  Well, at some point I somehow figured out that: A. Photography can be learned over the course of years.  and B.  This camera and all the endeavors it would seem to represent, is not merely about photography.  Big surprise.  Especially given that old chestnut, "it's the thought that counts."  And, as usual, their thinking, about me, is somewhat better than my own about the same.

Apparently the only way to avoid a parents wisdom is to avoid the parent.

The other reason it seemed prudent to celebrate rather than think about photography in a time management (and obligatory) frame of reference is that my parents live in New Mexico, where they have, in Albuquerque, a relatively easy jaunt just a few hours away from one of the most spectacular winged migrations on planet earth, at the Bosque del Apache.  It's within one of the Rocky Mountain flyways of the Sandhill Crane (among many, many other birds.)  Apparently the Western Hemisphere's greatest collection of cranes, period.  Possibly the worlds.  For some reason I sort of doubt the latter.

Of course, I live in a flyway of the Sandhill Crane, as well.  Here in Indiana, we are on a backwater flyway of cranes, sort of backwash from the great Mississippi flyway... the miracle mile of birds that follow a river, that perhaps due to its muddy nature, has never managed to overwhelm the negative reputation of the American State named after it.  Oh, well, everyone gets a little jolt of Huck Finn fun, just thinking about, much less, seeing, the Big Muddy.

The birds agree.  Perhaps less due to Mark Twain, then the thirty-thousand years of sixty mile wide floods that were business as usual until Americans placed even such a leviathon as our greatest river, into our manifest as destined to be tamed.  And tame her we did, with concrete, and dam, and dredge, and worst of all: the intimation of utility and value in her service to us.

The birds wouldn't have guessed Eli Whitney's smoky brethren puffing the paddles of  boats would have much to do with their future fishing on the floodplains and watershed of the Mississippi.  Just as the Wright Brothers weren't exactly singing "Fly Me To The Moon" at Kitty Hawk.  It's one thing at a time... of course.

Eventually,  the paddle boats and pumps, and other instruments in the civil liberties of beasts of burden out flooded Mother Nature, and everyone was driving their Chevy's to the levy.  The path that drained most of the Louisiana Purchase had been channeled, tamed, and taken to pasture and stable alike.  So now, on a great swath of America, when it rained, it would rarely flood anymore.

Turns out that birds like water for a number of reasons.  The most obvious being that water is where the life is, and a bird, being larger by far than the vast majority of lifeforms (even a Robin, or relatively small songbird.... most lifeforms, by absurd and nearly unthinkable magnitudes, are tiny, and vastly populous) needs a great deal of life during one stage or another of its existence, to support its bones, and flesh.  Water carries a great deal, and attracts even more life.  So, water necessarily plays a huge role in birds lives, from a basic needs standpoint.

Furthermore..... I learned from my parents, who have had to study a bit of bird psychology, so as to capture them on film in as revealing and yet, discreet a manner as possible.... birds prefer to roost in safety, away from predators.  Water birds (when, I am assuming, not sitting on a brood) "roost" in, where else? Water!  Apparently, unlike big cats, and crazy humans----coyotes, and other predators, don't find water to their advantage.  But birds do.  Hence the enduring appeal to millions of birds, of the Mississippi flyway.

An Ornithologist, just having received his Doctorate, told me a few years back, to my disbelief, that the woods surrounding Bloomington (a huge swath of green on the map... mostly state forest and parkland.... as well the the Deam wilderness... the only "wilderness," whatever that is, really, in the Hoosier state.) is home to the largest songbird population in the country.  But why?

I'm guessing that Indiana's Hickory, Oak, Beech temperate forests, are far enough North, and far enough South, to enjoy the benefits of both climates, and therefore enjoy a greater diversity, and perfusion of ecological niches.  I'm also guessing that when the Holy perfection of the sacred forest feels a little bare, the birds may endeavor to break the surly bonds of our cartographers, and munch on corn for a few afternoons.   You won't find this on a magazine cover any time soon, but it would be a surprise  to me in the extreme if Indiana's big, monocultural, much despised (though highly relied upon) farmland under production, didn't account for a great deal of poultry in the sky.  Besides, from what I have read it is legal for farmers to occasionally kill flocks of predatory "nuisance" song birds.  You've heard the recent alarmist headlines:  Even though blackbirds carpet Jack and Jill's walk to pre-school:  don't worry Mom! It's natural.  Fish gotta swim and birds gotta die.

So, songbirds, as I write this, are gorging on wild cherries fermenting since Autumn, due to the slow embrace of winter.  They've no need to fight with the Flamingo's (or whatever is down south.)  They like the quiet stillness that so bores the barflys of Bloomington, when some well meaning friend takes them on a "hike."  Most of the time, there are only a few earnest hikers.... the occasional hunter looking for male ungulates, and the great hilly forest for, as we Hoosiers would put it, "the critters, and the critters alone."  I tried once to remove a twig from McCormick's Creek; the first state forest created in Indiana.  It's about a twenty minute car ride from my door; and maybe a 1.5 hour bike ride.  The Forest Ranger, a wrinkled and smiling man, listened to me as I made my case for a twig IPO.

"This twig," I told the Ranger, holding it up to his inspection, beneath a tree containing perhaps a hundred thousand identical specimens, "says something special to me.  Beneath its skin of bark, and leafless lack of modesty, I can see a pride I could learn something from; whaddaya say?"

As Kris Kristofferson might have said:  "That kindly ranger looked at me/ All eaten up in sympathy/ Then poured himself another beer/ And came and whispered in my ear/ If [twigs] were just a dime a bundle/ Boy you couldn't buy one for yerself."  (a botched rewording of his not terribly popular song "Best of All Possible Worlds."  Name dropping Voltaire's "Candide" in country music is not a good idea... even for a Rhoades Scholar.)

The kindly Ranger looked at me, and said, instead, "Son, them's fer the critters."

Being a nice boy from the suburbs, I bent down to place the critters quarry upon the ground.  No toss about wastrel, me!  Well, mostly.

(McCorkmick's Creek is in Spencer.... which, as I said, is less than 30 minutes from my door.  People in Spencer have a way of talking that sends shivers down my spine.  I do believe, despite the old axiom, they've plum stopped progress.  As if the sheer beauty of their speaking voices weren't enough to send me into spasms of pointless blogging, there is also the matter of Townes Van Zandt's song, Tecumseh Valley, which, should I ever learn the truth, and the truth be something I wish it were not... would be very bad.  Some people don't operate like this.  But, you see, I've had a number of girlfriends give me shame for being too rational.  I tried to tell them that people who've known me a long time should get the last word on the subject... but being a man, I queried no one but the girls, and the girls by some force unspeakably wicked, powerful, and sublime, convinced me to sometimes quit thinking, when wistful, wishfulness + apocrypha could stand in, like Uncanny Valley Girl Mannequins. 
So, I choose to believe that Townes lovely song about a very unlucky whore from Spencer, is name checking the town I live near.... And don't forget that the fantastically interesting Tecumseh:  Native American mystic and strategist par excellence: is from Indiana!  So that's two strikes against getting too rational and actually researching the question; ha!  I guess I'm doing this one for the ladies.)

Some of you are thinking this time he's done it.  Despite the intensity of my boredom, I'll read this thing in its entirety, just to have at hand proof! That Andy has become completely entangled in the marginal, marginal, marginal, margarine margins of his mind!  As Billy Joel would say, You may be right.

I don't want you to quit reading, so I'll give this classical narrative piece a very steady hand on the joystick.... and a slow hand to my climax: which you and only you can decide if it's on topic, as opposed to a bad substitute for butta'.

Standing on a clients roof a few months ago, just as November was beginning to kick my ass, I felt the cold moving in on my bones weaken, and the sun came out from behind a cloud and just decided to stick around a bit longer, after all the ruccus of the summer and all.  I stood there, shivering and unaccustomed to what from January's perspective was very mild cold indeed.  It's fifteen degrees out, American style, and that's nippy for a Hoosier, amongst the entrails of his state.  Whilst, attempting to not have George Harrison singing in my head, but betraying just that wish by sighing like a baby girl, instead of working, I happened to space out for a minute or so, in pleasure.  Then, I heard a strangely familiar sound.  It's impossible to describe, but  I knew, for example, that it wasn't a cricket, and it didn't quack like a duck.  The strangest sensation came over me, and I began to realize that the sound I was hearing was a Sandhill Crane.  I scanned the sky behind me, thanked my lucky stars I wasn't being paid by the hour, and sure enough on the horizon a hundred or more cranes were flying my way.  They shifted around restlessly making cuneiform, calligraphy, hieroglyphics, or perhaps just a mockery of Thomas Pynchon.  I couldn't say, and they were defiantly democratic: just kept on deciding all the way across the sky.  I hungered, let me tell you, to be up there amongst that two or three tons of poultry.  They are freakishly beautiful creatures:  perhaps unique among the embodied beings on earth, in their liquid embrace of space, and shimmering, morphing, collapse and expanse.  Humans will never ply the entirety of their precious wells... long after we have destroyed every last hope we have, there will live the beauty of our terrible hubris.  Upon the scar of the earth, and the boiling remnants of our post coital solar systemic collapse, God will pad about this woodshed and having lost His religion for once, sigh, "here lived humans..." Mercy to the Angel who inquires toward that muttering.

But a crane...!  A crane will rarely hide behind figleafs from the erogenous abiding earth... a crane does not whisper like a race of Wicked Playbills.  It croaks as honestly as a pile of shit stinks.  And with as much embarrassment.  It knows the entirety of the universe (cleverly composed, unlike yours--- you poor, poor creature--- of its concerns: alone) is bidding its attention.  Across the sun, and through the moon, brushing featherprints into a rainbow, the crane alights... as unsteady as a drunk in his favorite bar.  You look upon its feathers and see planes of a thousand equations... rippling, engorged, bodily and masterful: a strange world of interface between the air, and a dinosaurs tattered genome.  Lordy, the six foot wings polish the air like the thick substance it would seem but for its ubiquity... and hands you a piece of the wind: billowing beneath it like a ghostly twin:  or a human's song to themself.  You watch this clockwork space filling, flesh puzzle sublimity... and recognize, briefly, the lie....  the Wild Duck lie, that undergirds the span of your life.  Identity, and ideas, and knowledge and understanding, step back, for a bow.  They step back, as pleasure enters the room, unencumbered by the modest stoop, she normally cultivates, so as not to bruise the peaches of your tender character.  The cultivated traits of culture and society step back for a bow.  For this born witness, hurtling with the wind, and turning upon the alignments of the planet and stars, the dignity conferred by our cultural expectations is no match for our noblest of states: belonging.  And only here, in the Basque Del Apache, with my parents and myself, clicking photo's of these embodiments of incensed sacrament, do I see the worry behind my ascension into all the corridors of human entitlement.

With these cranes I stand with my family to look upon the grace of our abiding, unknowable world.

Tecumseh Valley By Townes Van Zandt

The name she gave was Caroline
The daughter of a miner
And her ways were free and it seemed to me
The sunshine walked beside her
She come from Spencer 'coss the hill
She said her Pa had sent her
'Cause the coal was low and soon the snow
Would tuwn the skies to winter

Well she said she'd come to look for work
She was not seeking favors
For a dime a day and a place to stay
She'd turn those hands to labor

The times were hard Lord the jobs were few
All through Tecumseh Valley
But she asked around and a job she found
Tending bar for Gypsy Sally

She saved enough to get back home
When spring replaced the winter
But her dreams were denied her Pa had died
The word came down from Spencer

She turned to whorin' out on the streets
With all the lust inside her
It was many a man returned again
To lay himself beside her

Well they found her down beneath the stairs
That led to Gypsy Sally's
In her hand when she died
Was a note that cried
Fare thee well Tecumseh Valley

Redolent Woods (Continued)

(I've been tossing and turning over a professional quandry for days.... and just now, at 4:41 AM, after falling asleep at my writing desk, and rousing myself to brush my teeth, and place my head upon a pillow... I have discovered the niggling solution.  A few hours ago I could feel the pressure of the need for an answer putting grotesque strain on my mind.  The last few mornings I've awakened, and as I slide off my clothes to enter the shower looked into the mirror at someone who looked like he had been tortured all night.  It's not all that bad... just riddles that present themselves to someone who NEVER knows nearly enough answers, and refuses the sensible retreat of his fellow creatures.  In any case... for the next seven or eight hours I can put into play the puzzle that has assembled itself... but for now, before I grab breakfast, I might as well write a bit.  Sleep.... beautiful sleep, has been replaced by a slightly less accusing mien, as I bend to my washbasin, an inch or two from the mirror... it's nice to have that slightly wrinkled codger back...)

The bath of my vineyard client is a tiny affair, with an old tub of cast iron, beneath a surround of thin plastic.  When I peel the plastic from the wall, an old window reveals itself and its frame, beneath.  The frame sticks out a few sixteenths beyond the wall, promising trouble for the concrete board that needs to, none-the-less,  tuck neatly behind the tubs coping, and accept the mastic, tile and grout, for water-tightness and appearance.  The window, which must have provided a yielding and mixing atmospherics, and more even than that... useful light, in a neighborhood that predates electricity, lost it's purpose beneath the expedience of a toggle switch and the moist, musty, confines, of this old bathroom, somewhere in the Eisenhower era, I'm guessing, wildly.  How many old bathrooms have a window frame rotting away in the near reach of a shower?  It seems crazy until you consider how thoughtless our energetic largess... our switch flipping entitlements have truly made us.  The dim, yellowed plastic and asthmatic intermittent hum, of an elderly, fake vent/ light, in many bathrooms, stand in for the sun.  And when, pray tell, was the audition for that?

Then again... perhaps I should not give much thought to auditions!  Who, after all, is the impostor, really, on this quiet, July evening.  A piece of trashy electric junk... or me?  As I try to imagine explaining my complex thoughts about the shooting claims of Honeysuckle, into the abiding arms of the sun gentled fluids of these Cicada buzzed hours... I realize what an odd choice of work I've made for myself.  Construction workers don't, as a rule, regard biophysics as deserving of their attention as Payton Manning.  Perhaps.  One of these things... is not like the other.  But is one of them me?

It actually makes me smile.  I'm just feeling defensive for the poor trashy bathroom fan.  Once upon a time it was a mat of lovely Pleisteine ground cover... which turned, by a number of miracles into petroleum (which should give pause to any interest in "organics" whatsoever) and somehow then, instead of being a sacrament to our ecstatic societies thermodynamic signature, it was polymerized and injected into the tomb like sarcaphagous of a Do It Best, injection molding Asian contract factory.  Was it molded into the happy utility of a Schedule 40 pipe, to carry, plumbed and pressured, the fabled needs of a City On The Hill?  Not exactly... the regular perforations of its unmolded rectangular form, were meant to brook no barrier to the unspeakable humours our children are taught that we stopped believing in, when Pastuer provided us with a different kind of religion.  But the perforations within this Chinese made, plastic cage, are a lie... not the fault of the ancient groundcover... or it's long arduous journey to China, through time outta mind... or the poor saps who flip a switch to listen to a bicycle wheel buzzing fan flap sound, that perfectly mimics all the symphonic potential of the concept of broken: no the fault is in our desire to not be human.  To not stink.  To need privation more than a window.  To build a wall that makes claims before the elements, and forgets that the rain will quench the thirst of the dying, just as surely as it will fall, like a tear, upon your broken pane.

What was it Fitzgerald said about "two opposing ideas in your head, at the same time, and still retain the ability to function?"  I just looked it up, and found a blog by a Gulf war veteran applying the maxim to his "fighting and flying" instincts.  His daughter is on the autism spectrum, and he fairly beautifully allowed his white hot feelings on that subject to elucidate how Fitzgerald's quote might limn something as staid within him, in our sad little world, as that old chestnut called a principle.  As talkative and self expressive as I usually am (my business partner, looking at my paperwork on my computer tonight, around midnight, said, "Jesus man, I guess you really like to type."  In a move that reminded me somewhat of Brian Dehenny pulling his orbitals skin to the side and bathing a voyeur in the movie Cocoon, I just tapped on my Blog Dashboard and admitted, that next to a spreadsheet, the canvass of digital parchment, lets my fingers do the walking.) the reserve that some people have, where their suffering is a given, can fill me with wonder.

Fitzgeralds's quote is often considered one of the ways in which intelligence should be viewed.  This cracks me up, since what most of us regard as community and loyalty, are therefore pools, relatively free of the pollutant of intelligence.  How many to stand at the dinner table and speak, with feeling, and enthusiasm, against the general drift of conversation?  How many in a court of law?  How many as the last words to their loved one?  How many before their congregation say, "this is my blood? Does anyone else think that is a little macabre?"  These acts are considered intelligent?  I suppose Fitzgerald could be counted on to reply, given that he was certainly a functioning alcoholic, "well, Andy, you wouldn't in those circumstances retain the ability to function.... and that wouldn't be intelligent, now would it.  One need never act upon the sea creatures of their uncharted mind.  It is enough to know they are there, yes?"

Frankly, I'd rather act astonished at a fake bathroom vent, or, to wit, an instance of possibly fraudulent transubstantiation.  Rebel, rebel.

(perhaps I should throw in the towel now, and not claim a continuation.....)

Redolent Woods, Alien Flowers (and the grape's and bath's amore)

It's late July, 2009.  Warm thick air carry dozens of insects across the impossible stars up and down this street.  The sodium lights, are so bright, however, that the insects shadows are impossible to see.  I drive down the street, slowly, and crawl nearly to a stop where a honeysuckle vine climbs the remains of a long dead tree stump.  The stump is thin for these parts.  Where many are five and six feet across, this one is only a few feet wide, and carries instead of the girth of its previous self, a riot of stem, flower, and burning placental photosynthetic hunger.  I slow the vehicle, for I have been thinking, and feeling, with a mystical intensity all my own, hidden placental dreams, stretching from my most active growing place, my human mind and heart.  Plants, and fungus, and the history of us... we lifeforms have been on my mind, heart and soul.  From the songs at the school that come from my lungs, to the sodium lit theater that slides past my car window (unless I command it to stop) I am seeing and feeling things I had not known before. 

This past few weeks I have been watching this galloping honeysuckle fill space and time, according to its own set of claims.

Years earlier I had seen this sort of plant growing in December, before the frost would kill it.  So, being the fragrant, Asian import that I knew it to be, I watched it in wonder, flowering constantly from spring to this dark honeyed evening, when not even the moon would touch its flowers... but its yearning could be seen, for something vertical, to hold, and to hold to.

I've watched this plant, while coming and going from ten or twelve houses in this near southern neighborhood in my town.  This street is one I have walked, bicycled, and driven on all eleven years of my time here.  When I stand still, and look to the faces in the cars that pass by, I see familiar ones, most of them concentrating on the narrow street, and the dangers such an thin artery portends.  Flashing by, their faces I see... sometimes wishing I might say hello; sometimes glad for their passing.  This is their road too, and they and I are why there is a town.  So hard to remember.  Yet, how could it be otherwise?

I had passed, four days prior, a woman who met me this spring in my garden.  Out walking her dog, as she had been when she passed me the first time, she had inquired if I might do some work on her home.  My sisters wedding was a few weeks away, but I desired to pack as much work in as possible, so I told her, provided I could get the job done, without much waiting, I'd be glad to bid the job the following day.  My bid was accepted, and the week prior to my sister, Mary's, wedding was spent juggling the complexities of three job sites... all of them with that magnificent honeysuckle,  in somewhat cancerous embrace of the light and air, between them.  How filled the mind becomes with the fears, desires and claims of ones' clients, and yet how much more room there always can be, for the ghostly miracles of our fellow life forms.  I passed that Honeysuckle that night, after finishing up the dog lady's bathroom remodel, and was on my way, after buying a sandwich to try to put a bathroom tile job away.  I had something like seven hours to get it done.  The honeysuckle murmured in its shape and intention to me, something like, "good luck, you earnest lost boy."  Some people who get migraines, get them from honeysuckle.  You don't want to live in southern Indiana, if you can get a headache from a flowery smell.  At night especially the white flowers reek of perfume, and some of it is meant for the sort of things more appropriate to Halloween, then a childs dreaded return to the classroom.  Oh well... sorry kid, maybe one day you can work all day, then learn that you have to tear apart two days of preparation to prepare a bathroom wall for the latest greatest fickle pleasure of a customer.  All the bells of a lazy, fall school day would have rung, by the time I get the concrete board cut and back up after tearing it down for the new plumbing, chosen at the last minute.... that is, the minute when the owner realized how much better a bathroom with nothing in it looks, then the one that most of us spend our lives using.  Actually, I still feel sorry for you, kid.  I'd rather work sixteen hours then spend one day in school.  (I promise I'll never tell my children that.  Though I have a feeling I'm going to have to lie.)

I pull into an alley, at right angles to the Honeysuckle's street, and drive toward the back of my clients lot.  Behind the old, low, one story framed home, is a large fenced in back yard (chain link) with a spacious cinderbloc two car garage behind that.  Thick along the entirety of the fence, I see with a smile on my lips, the vines of grapes, running perhaps two hundred feet around the yards periphery.  When I exit the car, in the twilight I can see, the small bundles of ripe fruit and I caress their bloomed surfaces with my hand, wondering when I will first be able to leave the bathroom tile in its mastic and come out to pick the tender fruit, it's wet musky juice and bitter crunching seeds crushed between my lips and teeth, and the odd wealth of the summer heavy on the arch of my aching workday shoulders.  Not nearly soon enough, I could tell anyone who'd listen. 


No one is listening, however, and the house is silent as I turn the key in its arthritic lock.  Opening the door I smell the work of many decades of mold... a sweet tang, like composted citrus... mild and virtually below the radar of what my friends tell me is normal.  I get the feeling that most people think this smell is wood.  What it really is, is the slowly aerosolized resins of the woods, by the action of fungus.  The fungus lives everywhere as a spore, and one day, resting on the surface of of wooden board, warmed by central heating, moisture leaks through a foundation mortarblock, and gives the fungal spore life... which it spends growing for as long as the woods remains wet... which in Indiana is damned near forever.  As the fungus works its way through the wood, the laboratory of its inner mechanisms parse, digest, and release all manner of energy, and usefulness from the building blocks of the wood.  Heavy metals, and certain toxic substances, as well as other chemicals, it discards, out of preference for the cellulose, and other complexed sugars and alcohols of the wood.  The esters and rosins that make up the protective chemicals in the wood, meant to ward off insects, the fungus releases as "gases" and sprays of aromatic compounds.  This is what you smell when you open the tupperware and see that dark blue, sporulating pennicillin growing on your organic bread, one week after you stopped eating it.  Sometimes... as with bread, it's a musty set of aromatic compounds... cardboardy, and wet paperish.  It's more or less a bad smell.  And very consistent with our disgust and recognition of mold.  In fact, it's a slight component of the mushroomy connotation, when one imagines the smell of a portobella.  Yet... within the house, as I ascend the stairwell, to the main floor from the basement, where I have a key to enter, there is this liberated wood ester smell:  where the tree obtained the fatty acids to produce them ninety years ago, I'm going to have to remember to discover one day... but for now, they are pleasantly vying with the mildewed basement boxes and rugs for a place of preferred prominence, prior to my opening of the tile mastic, where industrial solvents... most, but not all, derived from fossil fuels, not fungus, will rise to my olfaction, leaving the fungus to itself, in any case, within the confines of my somatic sanctuary.

(to be continued...)

Blind Witness to Some Wishes Unearned

She had long taken heed of the shallower implications of her aging.   So much so, that these new circumstances... her widowhood, her isolation, her dependence on the few she wished, frankly, she didn't have to talk to at all... struck her, mostly, in their scale, more so than their substance.  "Here I am, " she thought, as she always knew she would.  The ugly formica paneling of a waiting room.  The caustic uncertainty with no one to soothe its burning.  The plain, unforgivable fact that she not only could have predicted this all, but long ago looked upon these prosaic objects that were in fact all that remained, and said to herself, "this is what it will look like."  She had never looked away.  And now things looked just as she had thought.

"Mrs. Auburn, your sisters nearly done," said the very nice nurse.  And it was certainly good to be forewarned.  She used to flush with anger at the unexpected phone call, back when weeks would pass without incident.  Back when life, her life, was what anyone would recognize as normal.  Today though, Dilly was never surprising in any way at all.  Never surprisingly thoughtful. Never surprisingly lucid.  Never surprisingly resilient.  Well... she had never been resilient at all.  So, no surprise.

Dilly did come through the door, looking pretty and composed.  She was telling the nurse something about somewhere she'd never been.  It all sounded perfectly plausible.  The nurse clearly recognized which was the life of the party.  Anne hated partys.  The nurse wouldn't hate parties she realized.  And surely, like so many people, the nurse could not imagine hating Dilly.

As Dilly looked into her eyes, with the subtle triumph in her eyes that reflected her pretensions had fooled them all again, Anne knew she would say nothing to contradict her sister.  "Are you hungry?" were the only words she could even think of.  And, of course, they had the benefit of having something to do with her own circumstance.

"I don't know," said Dilly.  "We should go to a movie... what do you think?"

As always, "I think I'm hungry," said Anne, while they moved into the bright and ceaseless sunlight of the parking lot, to the car.

"We could eat popcorn, you know," said Dilly.  "You love popcorn."

Anne loved popcorn, yes.  But hadn't been able to stomach it in some years.  And, yes, she knew that old hunger for a movie and popcorn.  For a good time, just the two of them.

"We should go to the pharmacist.  And I have things I need to get done.  Though one of them is off the list," Anne said.

"You need a worry board," said Dilly. "You should ask Bill to make you one.  He'd love to give you a gift."  Dilly smiled at this in the old way.  And, as always, Anne nearly blushed.

Closing the vehicles door she couldn't deny her sister, "I could probably use something to calm me, true.  And yes, he has never hidden his feelings.  I'm the one with that problem."

"If wishes were horses, you still couldn't accept him, Anne.  And he won't go begging forever.  Just say yes!  Isn't that the  magic of a man?"  Dilly looked over the Hospital building, as if canvassing a crowd of breach bronzed body builders, nearly shivering at the thought.

"The fact that you are right, does not change my feelings, Dill," she said to her sister, pulling out into the street, toward no theatre, no popcorn, and remaining, therefore, upon the the path she had seen already, long ago.  At the signal she stopped, it's color being red.  And she noticed, with the peculiar senses she had always been burdened by, that her sister had nothing else to say, and it satisfied her, this confluence of conversation and the obedient traffic.


Things certainly had grown complicated since Dilly's husband, Joseph, had died.  Joseph had never been someone Anne looked forward to seeing or spending time with when they were young.  His tastes extended to all manner of exotica, and Dilly was only one of the pleasures he'd taken as his birthright, being a man, and being indifferent to refinement of any sort.  It might have bothered Dilly to some extent, Anne surmised, very early on, with Dad and Mom and the Hoidays, in all the expected ways.  But Anne knew that once Dilly had recognized her fears of retribution from the family were never going to be realized, now that she was married, she completely quit thinking about it at all.  It was a friend that suggested to her that Dilly's lack of concern might actually be the rational response to her marriages tension with her family.  Like a half resolved, cloud covered spot of light on the horizon, Anne could imagine there being something virtuous, and heartfelt about that perspective, but there was never going to be a question as to whether their had been a betrayal or not.  Dilly walked away, from the family, and whatever her rationale, could not subsist simultaneously as a completely accepted member of their tribe, and a wife to Joseph.  They drank excessively. They cared nothing for principles, either generally recognized, or potentially held by strangers.  They offended, loudly.  They brought children into not only a dangerous world, but the heavily consequential orbit of their own worldview.  Were they train wrecks, these resulting memories, Anne would ask herself?  No, a train wreck would not be seen, predicted, and so much the fruit of causality.  A train wreck was a tragedy.  Jo and Dill's family were precisely what you'd expect them to be.  The phone calls were distressing, but there were never any questions to ask.  Only, "What can I do?"  Dill had certainly been interested.  Dill could not have comprehended that it wasn't a question, either.

As the years had passed, though, the callouses did thicken.  And there were times, Anne had marveled, where Jo seemed like nothing so much as a brother in law, and a predictable one in the end.  His pleasures, even he'd confide, had their costs.  Their marriage, they seemed to enjoy, like a foam mat upon deep, dark waters.  One side, in the sun.  The other, what? Out of mind?   After decades, and funerals, and troubles faded by time, the whole imposition of thier union in the face of that old fiction of a once so hopeful youth, had replaced the implacable old boundaries.  It was surprising certainly, to witness.  Though so oddly comforting.

There was Josephs treatment of Dad, for example.  Dad who sought to offend no one; Dad who had accepted this son in law, somehow.  Joseph delighted in the composure of her father, realized Anne.  Joseph certainly knew he had no desire to compromise his freedoms with his family, for the father of his wife.  But Dad had, in the ripeness of time seen something in his son in law.  Perhaps it was simply that way with men.  A lacking maliciousness proving some irrational bonhomie?  She'd been grateful in the end to Jo.  He shrugged off Dad's illness the way he shrugged off all mysteries, apparently.  He had strange riches of time to spend with Dad.  It seemed, often, they talked more to one another, near the end of Dad's life, than anyone else.  It helped Dad.

Ashes to Ashes

"Maybe when a kids screaming, they're just the only one allowed to speak their mind."

Born of a mind
To take down the world
As long as my dogs in the fight
I wiped every tear
And  patched every hole in sight

I didn't need........ a flag or a name
Pieces of  pleasure
Or beautiful things
All those shadows
Just abstracts and
Art in my eyes

The long nights of living
In places where knowledge
Could kill time
Put me straight in the arms of
Souls just as hungry for dreams

And wouldn't you know
That the love and the wine
Brought fertile flowers
That  knew how to climb
To, honey
this future of
Your mama and me

Baby you're born
And daddy's too late
To dwell on things that might never change
So what
Maybe that worlds out of sight

I'm just a fool
Born in a small town
Shakin' off dust
For the future I'm bound
I 'spose
Rubbin my neck and my eyes

Still up in the sky
The future glows
From the pastures
Of of plenty
That everyone knows
Yeah, we're dust
But don't we look pretty tonight?

Strange World

So... I've been playing around with this blog more.  Under "Stats" on my blog I can look up all kinds of info about where my readership is coming from.  Right now most of the people who normally read my blog have joined collective blogs and websites to which I sometimes contribute, but I continue with this blog since I find it the best way to express and access my thoughts and feelings, through a distance of time and geography.  Carrying a journal can't really compare.  And try sharing it!

Google traces people reading my blog from 43 countries.  The vast majority of the people who have visited did so accidentally.  How do I know?  Because, creepy as it sounds, Google can show me their words in the search bar of the page in which they searched.  For example:  someone in the last week, I don't know who, searched on Google for the words "how to make snow come."  The second hit, on the list of results Google gave her, was exactly wrong.  It was my song, three or four posts back from here, "When the Snow Comes and Falls in the South."  Kinda hilarious.  My song has nothing to do with making snow come.  Moreover, who searches with such a fascinating patois as "make snow come."  That word "come" fascinates me.  Was it demanded by the obvious trouble that simply asking how to make snow my generate?  Some people might be inclined to instruct one in snow making by shaving ice.  Others would demand that reverse sublimation, as in Nature, be reflected.  The nerdiest would be frustrated when the resulting snow didn't limit itself to six sided crystals.  "That snow is crappy... it's just unreal!"

Dare I search "how to make authentic snow?"  What song might that generate?  Probably a Head and Shoulders jingle.

Another person searched "  "aunt.peg" + (swallowing or swallows or swallow)"   "

Well, I don't know whether it makes me more uncomfortable that I have an Aunt Peg, or that someone found me while looking for whatever that is!

Lets see where I come in when I search for that:  (I search, and read a few pages of hits....) Hmmm... someone must of had a long night.  Apparently "Aunt Peg" doesn't refer to the Aunt Peg I mention in my blog, my Mom's Aunt.  But rather, a very busy pornstar who is either frequently "swallowing" or sometimes "swallows" or has been known on occasion to "swallow."  Kudos to the searcher for leaving no stone unturned.  And.... I didn't have the patience to wade through all the hits until I found a small mention of my Aunt Peg, by myself, in my blog, from a post I wrote a year ago.  I hope Aunt Peg never searches for herself, on Google.  Bottoms up!

Someone searched for "andy coffey blog."  Now we're talking.  The only problem is the number of Andy Coffey's out there.  Boy oh boy.... there's a ton.  Most of them in and around Louisville and the Midwest.  Journalists and TV personalities, and lots and lots of dead people.  I can assume the dead people didn't blog.... to an extent.  There must be an Andy Coffey somewhere about to die... I hope it isn't me.  My mourners would be searching for my blog.... gee wiz, let's just hope someone was looking for me, this blog, and found it.  Good for you.

Somebody in Britain looks me up frequently.  Someone in New York City.  Obviously people in Sweden and Denmark.  There's a couple of instances an Ipad was used in New Mexico..... hmm..  Now what would someone out in the blasted Desert be doing with one of those things?  Who knows?

You wouldn't believe what Google will tell you if you simply ask.

Encounter Down From Morton And Lime

I leave my door every single day
With my small cloth satchel underarm
Sometimes to the Church, to confess or pray
Sometimes to the dance hall to be charmed

Wither my memory of sadness and pain
Banish my concern for my own harm.
Passing by the church, I beg today
Can you see me to a young man's arms?

As the light in the sky, still so early fades
You'd not be too surprised if you could see
The figure of a woman, walking just your way
In the dim light passing by it would be me

"In the Sweet By and By" above me play the bells
My mind is nearly taken by the tune
Though just before they're done the music swells
Through yellow light that I am walking through

 But not in celebration of enduring pain
It comes from where I walk across the street
For the fiddle and guitars make a different claim
And I'm smiling for the friends I'm there to greet

Wither my memory of sadness and pain
Banish my concern for my own harm.
Passing by the church, I beg today
Can you see me to a young man's arms?

The crowd grows restless that they've yet to dance
In pairs they walk to the center of the room
When twinning fiddles have their way with darkness chance
What hearts of those assembled will refuse?

I took the hand of one named Johnny Bland
A sheepish sort of look on my face lies
As a witness from the window can see us dance
Out of four there is no blinking of our eyes

Wither my memory of sadness and pain
Banish my concern for my own harm.
Passing by the church, I beg today
Can you see me to a young man's arms?

Some of the songs call to twist and spin
I hold and trust from him I'll never fly
Some of the songs switch me to other men
And they're clearly not unhappy in my eyes

Then the waltz comes at last and some people sit
While I look for someone that I've never seen
And who should approach but the perfect fit
For a girl who doesn't mind the touch of dreams

He'd seen me coming with his kind and gentle look
Sadness drained from his dark and tender eyes
He offered his hand which I gladly took
And I shivered at the other on my side

Wither my memory of sadness and pain
Banish my concern for my own harm.
Passing by the church, I beg today
Can you see me to a young man's arms?

From a people that had searched over seas and hope
The fiddles found my footsteps in their sighs
I simply fell where led by the dark eyed bloke
With the light of every pilgrim in my eyes

It is difficult I knew, even then, to awaken
And meet, alone, the troubles of my day
The journey in the arms with him I'd taken
I feared would end when the fiddles ceased to play

Wither my memory of sadness and pain
Banish my concern for my own harm.
Passing by the church, I beg today
Can you see me to a young man's arms?

The fears of every mortal being far from wrong
The dancing ended as the sun will take a dream
The players of the instruments meant me no harm
When tradition broke the heart of Harmonie

I pulled my new beau to the side of the floor
A place I'd never had a reason yet to be
And as entwined the hands of other boys and girls
I asked the dark eyed stranger who was he?

He said, "Since there we danced, I can hardly dismiss
The sad and watchful man I came here as.
My name is Billy Faren, and it's a pleasure, Miss,
To meet and dance, but might we make it more than that?"

"Harmonie Jennings," is my name dear man,
The answers, yes I'll walk with you tonight"
So we passed through the sound of the fiddles and the band
To a starlit street before the town folks eyes

Wither my memory of sadness and pain
Banish my concern for my own harm.
Passing by the church, I beg today
Can you see me to a young man's arms?

We walked for a time that neither could discern
Amidst the woodsmoke, and other scents of life
So many dreams and yet what could we hope to learn
Whilst holding, there, each other in the night

We stopped beneath the lamp at Benders lane
And from his pocket he took his other hand
"Need I even tell you for what I pray?"
When with a touch and kiss he hoped I'd understand

"This is the house within which I was born"
Said Billy, sadly, to the shadows in the night,
"There's something I have yet to inform...."
But I kissed him then again beneath the light.

Wither my memory of sadness and pain
Banish my concern for my own harm.
Passing by the church, I beg today
Can you see me to a young man's arms?

Billy walked me gently in the darkness of the night
 Past an ending dance, where a last waltz sadly played
Past the steeple where the bells hid out of sight
Arm and arm to where it was my fate to stay

To part would be as silent as it was hard
So I simply turned from Billy to my home
There would be tears eventually even were we not to part
For till the morning... I  must now be alone

Wither my memory of sadness and pain
Banish my concern for my own harm
Passing by the church, I beg today
Can you see me to a young man's arms?