The Path of July

I have a category on this blog with which I flag certain posts, a category called “I Never Thought I’d Be In This Situation.” The holiday of Independence Day is suddenly upon us, and my feelings about July 4th definitely fall into this category. Watching this country walk the path she’s on is a difficult thing for a man who grew up in the time of my youth; it’s a completely different place. This year, I will forgo watching any of the fireworks & music festivals that have been a custom for many years, like A Capitol Fourth and the Boston Pops annual concert. I won’t subject my eyes or my soul to the bastardized and polluted trash they will certainly offer.

It occurred to me this morning that listening to public figures talk about “independence” and “freedom” while wearing their cute little masks and nodding approvingly at the vermin who have burned down the cities and torn down the statues and mocked the truths and closed the churches is akin to listening to some lowlife who never even met my mother talk about what a great lady she was. It’s obscene, and it moves my heart to violence.

So for me and my house, we will enjoy the time together, and the warm, sunny weather, and the dogs and burgers on the grill. And that’s about it.

***

I re-watched the old musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg again recently. First time I saw this movie, my wife and I were watching television when it came on. I picked up the remote and was juuuuuuust about to change it, not being a fan of musicals, but something in the look and the pacing of the opening scene held me. Next thing I knew, I had put down the remote and my wife and I were absorbed. We found the film very moving and the music pulled at my heart and my unquiet mind.

Quite by random, I ran across this quote today by the writer Kurt Vonnegut, excerpted from a letter he wrote to his wife in 1965:

In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me. I’m just as glad they haven’t consulted me about the tiresome details. What they have worked out is this: I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, do errands, go to the nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half an hour, return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do schoolwork, either teach or prepare. When I get home from school at about 5:30, I numb my twanging intellect with several belts of Scotch and water ($5.00/fifth at the State Liquor store, the only liquor store in town. There are loads of bars, though.), cook supper, read and listen to jazz (lots of good music on the radio here), slip off to sleep at ten. I do pushups and sit-ups all the time, and feel as though I am getting lean and sinewy, but maybe not. Last night, time and my body decided to take me to the movies. I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I took very hard. To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.

I agree with my whole, broken heart. The movie was heart-breaking. That’s why I loved it. I told my sister about it not long ago, and she watched it and liked it, too.

***

Recently, some of our neighbor’s cows got out. Again. Jinx is a pretty fair natural cow dog, and he choused them out of our yard and down the road, for which he got a pretty generous treat. Later in the day, however, one of the cows and her calf returned and were moving ominously near my wife’s flowers. Jinx and I went outside to roust them again. This time things didn’t work out so well. Jinx managed to turn the cow away, but ended up driving the calf deeper into our yard, where he leapt into the two foot-wide space between my fence and the neighbor’s fence (long story, that). The poor thing couldn’t get out, and I couldn’t get her out, and she ended up spending the night trapped between the two fences. The young puke who owns her naturally never came calling for her, and I didn’t call him. He and I have had run-ins before, and I figure if I ever get into another fistfight in my life, it will be with this guy. The less contact I have with him, the better. Mostly because I don’t want my last fight to be a losing one with someone a third of my age.

The next morning, Jinx and I sallied forth and stood for a while, watching the poor dehydrated and lonely and hungry calf. Then, inspiration. I clambered over the fence, way down the line, and started walking back towards her while Jinx mirrored me on the other side. She saw us coming and lo, she rose up and lo, she crawfished in midair and it came to pass that she was aimed in the direction of the opening of the fence, and she squirmed her way right back down the way she’d came and out into freedom. She ran right down the fence-line on my side, hit the road, turned right, and headed to her home pastures. Later that day, we saw that she and her mama had been reunited. In the early evening, her sorry-ass owner was riding the fence-line in a four-wheeler, looking for escape routes, I suppose.

But just after we got her out of our fence, Jinx and I retrieved a section of fencing from our barn and cut it with the angle grinder and nailed it with snug snugness across the breach in our defenses, and I’m hoping that’s that and that’ll be that and that’s the end of that.

Last night, I stepped out onto the back porch where Jinx has a bed for sometimes snoozing. He was not asleep, but watching the squirrels as they contemplated raiding the bird feeders. Then I noticed that Jinx wasn’t alone. The frog who lives beneath our porch was sitting on the dog bed next to Jinx, mellow and calm. The frog, whom Mrs. Orr long ago named Jed, kept company with a dog, and all was well on our small acres.

If you look closely at the upper right corner of the photo below, you’ll see Jed. He croaketh well who watcheth well, both dog, and frog, and beast.

My wife and I sometimes watch old episodes of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show because we both grew up with the sound of the show as we were falling asleep and our parents were watching it in the living room. It’s a dose of comfort in a foreign, scary world of nowadays.

Last night, we watched Carson interview the writer Ray Bradbury, one of my favorite authors. We were fascinated by how adult and mature and serious the banter was between Carson and Bradbury. This was even more remarkable given that Don Rickles himself was sitting next to Bradbury on the couch. Rickles made a few little jokey asides, but Carson mostly ignored them and redirected the conversation to things scientific and speculative. Rickles even asked Bradbury a couple of questions about science and science fiction, and was genuinely respectful. We were struck by how the men didn’t use each others’ every statement as a jumping-off point for a vulgar joke or insult or double entendre.

As I mentioned, Bradbury has long been one of my favorites. I deeply enjoy his work, especially his insightful book, Zen In The Art of Writing (available for free here), a work vastly superior to the later, similar memoir/instruction manual On Writing by the unhinged hack Stephen King. But I also admire the innate sweetness of Mr. Bradbury. In every interview I ever saw or heard, he came across as a wonder-filled, childlike soul. He was also a very good extemporaneous speaker, eschewing the filler words and noises so common to speech today. But then again, almost all adults were good speakers a couple of generations ago. They hadn’t yet discovered the soul-and-tongue-killing joys of the cellphone and the internet.

Here’s a nice interview demonstrating what I’ve described.

Be sure to keep your pets, especially your dogs, close to you if you’re unfortunate enough to have neighbors who shoot off fireworks on July 4th. This is the day of the year when more dogs and cats go missing than any other. People underestimate how terrifying the martial sounds are to the small creatures, and the small creatures WILL run away and seek quiet, safe shelter. Some of them never find their way back home. Keep them close.

And enjoy what freedom you have. It’s not a gift of the government. It’s a gift from God. And like all His gifts, we squander and misunderstand it terribly.

~ S.K. Orr