My father arrives next week? I’ll remove the question mark when I actually see his bearded face.

 

My desire to write is as strong as ever, but not so much my desire to communicate. Why is that?

 

The picture above is another of J.K. Potter's, by the way. The figure seems to be of two minds on a particular matter. Perhaps he is being rabbinical - "on the one hand... on the other..."

 

My caterer friend, whose life sometimes resembles a reality TV show, has parted company with that hotel. She and the hotel manager had a disagreement. The hotel manager later called to apologize, but the damage was done already. I guess some things were said. My caterer friend decided the woman was too crazy with job stress, personal life daffiness, and all – too unstable a personality. Apparently the hotel had burned through all the other caterers in the area, and they didn’t want to work for them either.

 

So much for the red headed girl, (whom I mentioned a few posts down.) Our paths are not now likely to cross.

 

Otherwise, life is free of drama. I’ve been helping a nice couple move from their apartment to the new home they built. There is a shortage of hours in the day. Who took those missing hours? The nerve…

 

The requirements of Elizabeth’s family life are sometimes interfering with the smooth running of my business – but no, the real problem is that my summer helper isn’t here yet, and the work load is more than Elizabeth and I can handle on our own. Of course, it would be convenient if the girl were single and without social obligations, but my experience has been that such folks haven’t yet acquired much of a work ethic – if they ever will. I suppose what I require is a robot.

 

Why isn’t the summer helper here yet? Why because the Northeast is still too cold for her. She has decided to stay in Florida until our New York temperatures rise a wee bit. Truth is I can’t blame her. Only once before, since I moved to this frontier in ’94, have I seen a heating season stretch on for so long. The unseasonable coolness is extremely dispiriting – that is to say the unseasonable coolness is very uncool.

 

Keeping mine, though. Hell, the Squabbler is the definition of cool. Cool is not giving a damn what people think about you. Well – more precisely, cool is doing the right thing, not the wrong thing, or doing what you think is right, without being influenced by what you think others may think of you. You’re usually wrong anyway. I have to laugh – well, it’s really more of a bitter laugh – when I hear people say Americans are disliked by this ass-backward European socialist country or that one, and it matters for whatever ridiculous reason. Who cares?

 

(It’s the same laugh I use for folks who worry about endangered species. Who cares? Actually, if you want to preserve an animal that may be close to extinction, figure out a way to eat it. If the animal’s meat tastes good and becomes popular we’ll shortly be overrun by the damn things.)

 

Remember Fonzie? (Does he have an “e”?) He was the definition of uncool. Why? Because everything he did was calculated to impress people.

 

I suppose caring what others think is optional, but it’s none of my business really, since I can’t control it, so I try to take the not-caring option whenever possible. The Squabbler is much better at it than I am, but I learn from his example the best I can.

 

Oh – I had a nightmare I was becoming the Squabbler. There was a hole in my throat suddenly, as if I had developed a cancer there, and I was seeing through glass. My face was gone, a gas mask having replaced it. It would be terrible not to be able to smell flowers and incense, pretty girls, and summer breezes. It would be terrible to be trapped in my head.

 

But here’s the thing: it’s important to do good. It’s important to be upright. It’s important to have morals – if you’re going to be in a position where it’s unimportant what other people think of you. Who’s heard that old saying – “When you commit a murder suddenly the world is made of glass?” That can also apply to other wrongs not as extreme as murder. When you lie suddenly the world is made of glass. When you commit adultery suddenly the world is made of glass. When you cheat, steal, and so on, suddenly the world is made of glass because suddenly there is no place to hide and everything is breakable. You have to go carefully, looking over your shoulder all the time, being ever mindful of what people may think of you.

 

I may become a micro-fueler dealer, by the way. I’ve been looking at various ethanol making machines. It’s early yet. I still need to be assured that automobile engine life isn’t reduced by converting them to 100% ethanol, and that there’s sufficient octane. It’s interesting to me that the hybrid cars are doing so well. People are sheep, yes? Around here the hybrid feature is useless because of our hills, so what you basically have is a high gas mileage vehicle. That’s cool. But you’re always running on gas around here – up and down, up and down. I think the smarter set-up is to manufacture your own fuel. You can heat with it too, right?

 

The best case scenario is that we regain our collective sanity and start drilling for some oil, but even in the unlikely event that such a thing happens gas will remain rather expensive for a while. Perhaps if the nation is to become energy independent it will happen because individual people have become energy independent first. After all, it is individual initiative – not collective or bovine movements of mass hysteria – that really gets things done. Having a machine in your garage that can turn garbage into fuel for your car would be a good thing either way.

 

Oh yes – and wind power, though we are finding it has very poor cost benefits on a scale of mass production – is ideal for individual homes. There are a few decent investment opportunities in small-scale wind powered home generators. I’m looking into that too.

 

So – boring, right? I have only practical, every-day matters to write about lately. I don’t like writing about the sort of thing anybody can write about. Well, it’s just where my head’s at right now.

       

 

Fibber McGee and Molly take the little girl from across the street to the amusement park in this 1941 program. The FM&M movie, "Look Who's Laughing" with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy gets a plug here. Soon the program will break for summer vacation.  

Happy Memorial Day. Please attend your community’s parade. None of us have anything more important to do today. At many cemeteries a committee has supplied miniature flags, sometimes even flowers. It seems to be only the old folks who go out to the cemetery now. We have a few High School young Republicans too, but from the middle - people our age - there is a terrible lack of interest.  

Afterwards, I am working. If the weather stays clear I intend to take my new body down to the lake and jump in once I’m done with my work. One year – a few years ago – I took a dip every single day between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Once, during thunder, when the lifeguards at our village beaches are required to ensure no one swims, they made an exception of me so that I wouldn’t miss a day. Well, I’d have gone in up at the golf course or down at the river source, but I’d have had no witnesses then.

 

I’m a strong swimmer. Or, at least I used to be. I’ve done the lake across – about a mile – but I’ve never done it lengthwise. That’s about eight miles. Some athletically-inclined High School student does it every year, gets her picture in the paper. Yes, “her” – it’s almost always girls. I wonder why that is? Our boys tend to go for more distant challenges, and then write books about their experiences which end up for sale in the local coffee shop.

 

I’m rambling.

 

Last year I did not swim once. Why? Too fat. I am extremely vain. No, really – it’s not one of my more endearing attributes. My Mom used to tell me to take my shirt off and get some sun on my back. When I was a teenager I had terrible acne. She thought the sun would help. But I wouldn’t reveal more of my body than was absolutely necessary. Between Freshman and Sophomore years in college I lost over one hundred pounds. Suddenly, I couldn’t be bothered to keep my shirt on.

 

Now again I’m close to perfect. It took a while. My body seems to enjoy storing fat more than it used to. They tell me that’s middle age.

 

How boring! This post could be written by any number of people. But I’m not ready to start anything ambitious. I thought I might write some more poetry in the coming months. We’ll see…

 

 

My last words were “Holy Water,” then the phone died.

 

Catching up with an old friend – The Lady. It’s been… months. Since some time shortly after Christmas.

 

The picture above is by photographer J.K. Potter, by the way, as is the picture which begins the previous post. If you look closely you will observe a crucified Christ figure in the midst of this picturesque decay.

 

So, getting a new telephone must be added to the weekend agenda. I had hoped to take a drive in the mountains tomorrow, now that all the dogs are gone, but something tells me I am already committed elsewhere, details to be determined. My camera is ever-ready, but I’ve not had the inclination to use it. In the mountains I will use it.

 

Bloody cold this past week, in defiance of the calendar. I think of primitive man: the sun will not rise tomorrow unless we arrange these sticks and stones in some particular alignment. I think of an old Twilight Zone: the earth is drifting closer to the sun, and we are doomed to burn. But this turns out to be a dream, and in reality, the earth is drifting away from the sun and we are freezing.

 

We are all going to die! Every last one of us, every Man Jack. We must do something.

 

Who was that British MP who dropped out of public life because he learned an asteroid was going to collide with earth at any moment? He had a promising career. It was very likely that, had he continued, he would have become Prime Minister. But instead, he chose to go fishing. Sure enough – he died. The asteroid arrived, striking only him. It was a smaller Apocalypse than the one he had been expecting, but the result was just the same: he died.

 

Oh and Elizabeth is working with me full time now – at last. Business is growing, booming, and so on – exploding. My summer helper will shortly be returning as well. There will be three of us, sometimes four with the addition of Elizabeth’s sister when necessary.

 

A car the same make, model, and color as my own just pulled into the driveway. There is a long, black canoe tied to the top of it. The canoe is decorated with advertisements for local merchants. It occurs to me that this is Memorial Day Weekend. It is time for the annual canoe race down the river. The river flows behind the house, in the valley where the deer bed down. It is very small here, so close to its source, like a mere creek, but many miles to the south it becomes wide enough for gigantic oil tankers and the like to navigate.

 

The Lady tells me she has joined some women’s group or other – a lugubrious notion to begin with – but, to make matters even worse, a group devoted to the study of various “spiritualities,” featuring speakers or presenters from divers daffy disciplines. One week it’s Tarot cards, the next week it’s past lives regression, and the week following who knows what it shall be? Aligning sticks and stones to ensure the sun will rise tomorrow, perhaps. I’m not sure I can endure hearing her reports of these women’s group meetings.

 

She is living on her own now in a small city about 90 miles east of here, in a small apartment, for half the week. The other half she spends at home with her family. Over the telephone I could hear her walking from her store, which she was just in the process of locking up for the evening when I called, to her home-away-from-home. She stopped to pick up milk for her morning tea at the grocers. She exchanged greetings with other people on the street. I heard all this – the wonder of cell phones – as if I were there with her. She takes it for granted. I think it’s amazing.

 

She wants to return to the Church. When we met she was Baptist, or pretending to be. I went to one of her services with her. She couldn’t understand why I also had to go to mass. She said, “Doesn’t coming to my church fulfill your obligation? I mean, it’s the same Jesus, isn’t it?”

 

I tried to explain it: In her church a group of people get together to think about Jesus. In mine we are together with Him.

 

So now – it is seven years later – she tells me she wants to return to the Church. The preaching isn’t as good. The people seem to be mumbling. There is just too much sitting and standing, and kneeling, and standing again. She doesn’t understand it. But… (and there is always a “but”)… something calls her back to it, something real.

 

“What is that?” she asked, “It’s like a power.”

 

“It’s called Grace,” I said. She asked a few questions. We chatted back and forth until the phone went dead.

 

I used to cover the canoe race for the local newspaper. I think I’ll give it a miss this year. I’ve seen it. One year, maybe it was five years ago, or six, I “pitted” for a friend who participated in it – followed him by car from place to place to feed him and water him as he paddled the 70 miles to the finish line. I waded out into the river up to my armpits, and handed him Vienna sausages and Gatorade, or whatever – fuel for his body. I asked, “What do you do when you have to pee?” He pointed to the bottom of his canoe where some water was always pooling. When one is in a canoe race there is no time to stop.

 

At the finish line he, and hundreds of others, listened for their names to be called out over the loudspeakers to be certain that the judges had seen them and recorded their times, and then they overturned themselves in the water. I wonder if all that urine affects the fish at that point?

A catering job ended with a number of us sitting down to a meal together. This occurred yesterday afternoon. I sent Elizabeth off to handle the usual Tuesday jobs while I donned the livery and accomplished feats of delivery – “slinging grub,” I call it. Afterwards, the owner of the hotel, his manager, my caterer friend, and a few others fixed plates for ourselves and appropriated a half-cleared table in the hotel’s large banquet hall. Among the others was a cute redheaded girl I kind of fancy. Earlier we had passed one another in a hallway, and to get her attention I put up my hand and she took it in hers and held it for the duration of our short exchange. Oh my – what an interesting tingly feeling! It’s been a coupla ten years since my hand has come into such contact. I detected a slight intake of breath on her part. Well, that worked up an appetite of a certain sort, but alas, under the circumstances food had to suffice.

 

The conversation turned to television, and television News. I could not resist saying my piece. Oh, my caterer friend’s heart literally stopped when she realized I was expressing an opinion of mine in the presence of our employers. And you know me, dear White Lodge readers – I have no difficulty declaring another’s argument as “Rubbish!” and then deconstructing it. It is my caterer friend who once told me “I have seen smiles turn into looks of horror when you start talking.”

 

But it all worked out for the best. I’m not as misanthropic as all that. The hotel owner was so intrigued by what I had to say that our impromptu luncheon became prolonged. The cute redheaded girl was developing a wart on her fanny. She is in the permanent employ of the hotel and I gather unaccustomed to hob-nobbing with the management. Perhaps she was anxious to get on with her long list of duties, and if that is the case I regret being the source of her discomfiture, particularly as I wouldn’t mind linking fingers with her again in a less stress-filled setting.

 

Later in the day my caterer friend dropped by for a brief de-briefing, and she told me S. – the hotel owner – declared that I was an extraordinary and impressive person. I said to her, “Well, I coulda told you that.”

 

 

It was last week a customer of mine said to me, “There are just too many people on the planet!”

 

“Rubbish!” I declared, “Whom would you wish to eliminate? Should we start with the French?”

 

Of course, the truth is that there are just as many people – no more and no less – than God wills there should be, for each and every human soul is an individual creation into whom God inspires the breath of life, of consciousness.

 

She said, “I don’t have your faith. Don’t you ever doubt it’s true?”

 

“Of course I do, but I know it to be true despite my doubt. If I knew otherwise, or if I thought as you do, I would immediately take my own life in the most efficient and least painful way possible and put an end to my meaningless existence as an aberrant occurrence of random nature assembled in a cipher which is calculated by No One and destined to end in Nothing.”

 

Yes, she is still my customer, though I suppose I must think I can afford to lose a few. But anyway, she is the owner of the dogs whose picture I posted a few days ago. Or – that is to say not the owner, since her belief system informs her that dogs are the equal of Man, (and further informs her that she must use the word Humanity in order to avoid being gender-specific), but something in relation to the dogs she must be. Perhaps we can put our heads together and come up with a new word?

 

Elizabeth doesn’t like the kennel idea, by the way. (See my earlier post, “Suspenseful Adaptations” below.) She doesn’t like the idea of dog kennels at all. But really – though this may seem a specious argument – if there is a continuing demand for dog kennels, that is, if people will insist upon putting their dogs in kennels despite the abuse they may suffer in such places, doesn’t it make sense to practice reform by operating the same sort of facility the “right” way? Of course, that assumes there is a right way. I would think that being humane and attentive is the chief requirement – and one must be, if he loves dogs.

 

Well, my work day awaits me. While I am working I will no doubt be contemplating the many other possible uses for that property I am trying to buy. Perhaps I will also envision in my mind’s eye the image of that cute redheaded girl sitting on my sofa in the living room of that house. I understand that’s called “creative visualization” – some poppycock term for “fantasy.” I think in my case I’ll stick with the old word, just in case creatively visualizing something requires certification of some sort.

 

But I do promise to bear in mind what Sister Mary Tabernacle Door taught me quite a few years ago: “It is one thing to entertain a thought, another thing altogether to allow a thought to entertain you.” So, the redhead on my sofa will remain fully clothed – for now.

 

Good day to you.