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It may be a cliche, but even cliches can be true.

Each of my days is like a new page in the book I’m simultaneously reading and writing. I get to the bottom of one, my stub dull and whittled down, almost too short for my fingers to grip it, and then I blink my eyes, and in the quick space of that blink, a Hand has reached down and covered that page with a fresh one, and in the groove between the previous page and the new one sits a new, sharpened pencil. With the aroma of good coffee hanging in the air of the house where I think all these thoughts, I reach for the pencil, and I start scratching my spirit’s words across the page…and where did the hours go?

I’ve been missing Bonnie so much today, and why today in particular, I do not know. Just an absence, an echoing void in my life. Her grave is almost camouflaged now, blending into the leafy mast of the floor of the woods, covered with the cairn of large rocks I placed there, bordered by the 2″ X 3″s I pushed down into the soft earth. Most days I go up there and say a few words to her, and ask her to pray for my wife’s comfort, and I always touch my index finger to the brim of my hat and remind her to watch for me when I cross over. I think often of the reunion between red dog and blue-eyed man.

***

I saw a blue-eyed man the other day in the grocery store. I was next in line, the young cashier already starting to reach into my cart and stroke my purchases across the seeing eye of the scanner. And then he walked up and interrupted her.

He was perhaps eighty, stoop-shouldered and lean as a walking-stick beneath his flannel shirt, his feed store cap cocked slightly on his bald head. He squinted up at the girl through smudged lenses and evaluated her, then reached into his shirt pocket and took out a folded page of a newspaper advertisement from the store. A finger as crooked as a tree branch poked at the page, and the old man spoke to the cashier, his voice a reedy song, piped in the key of Appalachia minor, his eyes on hers as he assessed her attention to his needs.

“I wont three of them Tombstone pizza pies. The pep-er-OH-nee kind. They’s the only kind my wife can eat. And I wont a bag, a big bagga them Bugles, the ones what’s on sale.” The way he moved his finger across the page and watched the cashier’s eyes reminded me of something. I had seen this before. Ah, there it was…it was the same intensity displayed when a captain is showing a young lieutenant an objective on a topographical map. Do you see? Do you understand? She reached for the phone next to the register. Then she looked at me, apologizing with her eyes. The old man looked at me, too, clocking me to see if I was going to inconvenience him. I smiled at him and winked at the cashier. Both of them relaxed.

In a minute, a manager arrived, sleeves rolled up in cuffs on his biceps, glasses up on the stubble of his shaved head. The girl bent her head to him, explaining in terse whispers that the old gent needed someone to fetch his goods and bring them to the register. I expected the manager, who was in his thirties, to instruct either the cashier or the customer in proper grocery protocol. But he nodded at the old man and said, “I’ll get ’em for you, sir. Hang on a sec.” He turned and hurried down an aisle, and in less than one minute he was back with three pizzas and a bag of extruded corn snacks. The cashier rang them up, the old man paid with a twenty and received his change, and the deal was done. I watched him walk, crookedy-backed and splay-footed, out of the store with a sack in each hand, a relic from the age when a man could stroll into a dry-goods store, present the grocer with a list, and then stand by and watch his things gathered and presented for his approval.

I am forever impatient with people in public places, but I would have embraced the cashier and the manager in that moment, that moment of watching the old man head back to his house with the things he and his wife will enjoy on a winter night in the mountains, two unimportant old creatures who aren’t smart enough or educated enough to care about impeachments or elections or climate change or the tawdry goings-on of that prominent family over in Anglund.

***

It was unusually warm last week, and the false spring fooled the birds and the insects and the plants. The daffodils are half a foot high, and the robins have been gathering beneath the feeders outside, and my wife almost put her hand on a red wasp who was crawling with sluggish strokes across the handle of the back door. But it snowed yesterday and today, and the sky has that singular look, the only occurrence in all of nature when the color pink can look cold and cruel. The natural world doesn’t need me to fret over it, but fret I do. I worry that plants and animals will be tricked into comfortable dealings with the day, and that they will be ambushed by the vagaries of it, by the sudden changes that contain no mercy.

No mercy. A man in a nearby town was arrested for stabbing a German Shepherd to death the other day. The act was allegedly the result of some sort of dispute between the man and his neighbor, who owned the dog. While he sits in a cold box wearing his orange coveralls, does the man regret killing the beautiful dog? Did he ever really feel that the act was necessary? Does he hope for mercy from the bored, overworked judge who will stare at him during his arraignment? Did he have a dog when he was a boy? Does he enjoy looking at himself in a polished steel mirror and eating with plastic utensils, the sort of cutlery that even a jailhouse killer cannot wield to lethal effect?

***

A week ago today, I completed the final draft of a manuscript of a children’s book. I’ve sent it off to several publishers, and….we’ll see. If no one bites, I’ll publish it myself. The publishing world has changed sufficiently that the once-omnipotent gatekeepers have been shoved aside, and this is a good, good thing. I have several things I will publish, one way or t’other. If nothing else, my grandchildren will be able to say, “Remember when he used to whisper those stories?” Last year, I improvised a ghost story to our granddaughter Reese while she and I sat together on the front porch, and it scared the living you-know-what out of her. My wife read one of my long poems out loud one day not long ago and wept aloud. That’s all the critical acclaim I will ever need. The ability to put the words on the pages is all the reward I need, as long as I can move emotions around in the human breast.

~ S.K. Orr