You Cannot Be Sirius…

When I was a boy, the space program was in full vigor, and I was wild about NASA and the astronauts and the magnificent crafts in which they flew through the black heavens. I was particularly intrigued by how the astronauts were strapped into their capsules. For takeoff, they were on their backs, looking directly up to the sky above, so that after liftoff, they would be facing the mysterious and star-clogged skies into which they were rocketing. This morning it all came back to me.

It’s not uncommon for Mrs. Orr and/or me to fall asleep in our recliners, and when this happens, we stay put until morning. Last night, I slept in my recliner and had a pretty decent night’s sleep. Around zero five hundred, JInx decided it was time to get up and at ’em. He did his loud yawning routine, which failed to rouse me. He padded around my chair a few times, and I ignored him and feigned sleep. Then he began nosing around my face, snorting and sniffing, causing me to fight hard not to laugh and give away my awakened state. Pretty soon, he decided that subtle was not going to work, so he put the full weight of his upper body on the headrest of my recliner. Since I was already supine, the canine weight helped tip the balance. I felt myself going, but there was nothing I could do. Up, up, over, and thump. I found myself situated exactly like an Apollo astronaut, on my back in my chair, staring up towards the ceiling.

“Well, you finally did it,” I said.

Mrs. Orr came to see what was going on, and I had to ask her to avert her eyes so as not to witness my graceful disentanglement. Jinx thought the whole thing was just the jolliest start to a day he could recall, and tormented me until I was able to get to the door and let him out.

There’s a useful Southern word for what Jinx did to me. The word is “tumped.” As in “That confounded dog tumped me over.” When I was a boy, we never upended anything, never turned anything over, never tipped anything. We tumped. And today, my disloyal and conniving dog tumped me over.

***

I took off work a bit early today so that I could get my vehicle’s annual state inspection. The day was cool and gusty and sunny and lovely, and I enjoyed the drive to the mechanic’s garage. This would be the same mechanic who recently repaired my misfiring cylinder situation. He and I had a lively discussion about the state of this country, and he was incredulous when I told him that I hadn’t listened to, watched, or read the news since the fake inauguration in January. He then told me about a friend of his who had a run-in with local police the other day. Apparently, his friend had been ticketed for having a tinted license plate bulb, and was treated like a drug dealer. When his friend protested at how he was being spoken to and especially the $150.00 fine, the police officer threatened to arrest the man for causing a disturbance and resisting the lawful orders of a law enforcement officer (have you noticed how they no longer call themselves “police officers,” but insist on this LEO thing?) My mechanic was very agitated over her perception that the police these days are an arrogant, bullying lot. I agreed with him wholeheartedly based on my own experience and observations. We talked a bit more about this sort of thing, and then the other mechanic was finished with the inspection. After receiving my sticker, I said my farewells, drove home and decided to do a few chores since the day was so pleasant.

I put a new coat of paint on our Adirondack chairs, pulled some weeds in the cleared space in front of our bird tree refuge, and then decided to take a load of trash to the county dump. The bed of my old pickup truck has been serving as an ad hoc dumpster for some time, and it was time to get rid of all that stuff.

The bulk of what I gathered up was Jinx detritus. I’ve written before about his penchant for finding and bringing home all manner of bones. I loaded 29 bones, some as large as my own thigh, into a box. I also loaded up quite a number of shoes, boots, shirts, caps, and jackets, almost all children’s sized. I don’t know which local farm has children and keeps such items openly available to a wandering rogue like Jinx, but he pretty regularly shows up with some article of child’s clothing he’s purloined somewhere, and many’s the time I’ve expected some irate parent to arrive at our farm, demanding the return of something they witnessed a certain spotted dog spiriting away. The only thing that’s caused me more stress is Jinx’s habit of bringing me artificial flower arrangements from the local country cemetery. Mistakes have been made.

Anyway, I loaded up all the stuff I wanted to take to the dump and tried to coax the spotted menace into coming with me, but he was too busy watching the cows across the pasture, so I set out alone. The dump I went to is a bit north of us, in an area first explored by Daniel Boone. Coming up over the ridge just before the descent into the valley was a real visual treat, the landscape and the sky joining together to make a gorgeous scene.

I was tooling along, making pretty good time, when I noticed that a state trooper was behind me. Was I speeding? I looked at my dash…nope. I was exactly fittyfie and in between the lines. And then it hit me.

See, I have the ability to construct entire conversations and debates within my mind in the space of two seconds, exchanges that sometimes are so elaborate, they require two or three sessions of two-second reverie to complete. In that flickering moment between glancing at my speedometer and rechecking the rear-view mirror, I saw my fate entire.

I saw the state trooper holding my drivers license, looking from it to my face, and then flicking his eyes into the tailgate. Where there were piled several items of children’s clothing, all those little boots and tennis shoes and caps and Carharts, and a sizeable number of bleached bones — human bones, sir? — and then the trooper’s mirror-shaded eyes coming back to rest on my face, the weasely, untrustworthy, serial killer face if ever there was one…and then me in a jail’s common area, holding up my now-beltless jeans while trying to shout above the din into the pay phone to my wife and explaining where I was and how the habeus grabbus got applied to me by Super Dooper Trooper Sans Humor , and the tv interviews with my coworkers, who described me as a quiet man who kept mostly to himself, but who wouldn’t take the Covid vaccine and who was too fond of his mutt, and…..

Back home, I lectured Jinx again about his scavenging proclivities, and I emphasized that his thievery just might get his bacon-bringer-homer tumped into the Crossbar Hilton.

Jinx yawned. Twice. And looked up, untroubled and unrepentant, into the sky, where the stars live,  where the astronauts used to soar.

~ S.K. Orr