Days and Days

The year has rolled back to the time when spider webs are more prominent in the mornings, especially with the dew hanging on the sturdy strands. This morning I saw one suspended beneath the maple in the back yard, the sun just starting to glance off the night’s architectural marvel. So much work. To be undone in so short a time. Such is the way of this world full of beautiful tragedy and melancholy art and small, fragile creatures with their arduous work and deceptive power.

Speaking of the small creatures of the earth, Mrs. Orr told me something delightful last night.

“Do you know what a group of ladybugs is called?” she asked. “A loveliness. A loveliness of ladybugs. Isn’t that, well, lovely?”

I agreed that it was lovely. Sometimes the people in charge of these things do something well.

We did something this past weekend completely uncharacteristic for us. We watched a sporting event. The Wimbledon tournament was on, the ladies’ on Saturday and the gentlemen’s on Sunday. I have fond memories of how the entire base would shut down when Wimbledon was on during my Marine Corps years. Watching a tight match in a room with several dozen leathernecks is a pretty intense thing, and I always enjoyed it. So my wife and I watched both finals and had a good time.

I was struck by the behavior of the crowd, though. I haven’t watched a tennis match on television since the Nineties and back then, the crowd was quiet and restrained, under the excellent influence of the English sky and soil, I think. They were very noisy in this current year, which struck me as unseemly. I imagine tennis has been corrupted, for lack of a better word, by the rise of certain players who lack the couth of yore, the sort who pump their fists and scream when they make a good shot. The kind who throw temper tantrums and can’t even spell the word “sportsmanlike.” I know that golf has been corrupted in this way. I used to watch it all the time back in the Eighties. The last Master’s Tournament I watched was in 1985, when the great German golfer Bernhard Langer won the green blazer. It wasn’t too long until his quiet, gentlemanly demeanor was replaced by, well, the sort of thing I’ve already mentioned.

One tennis player I always enjoyed was the Swiss champion Martina Hingis. I enjoyed her as much for her effect on other players as for her considerable skills — and with her crafty, aggressive play, she was indeed talented. Miss Hingis was born with a facial expression of aristocratic hauteur, something that bothers me not in the least. But it sure did bother the shit out of the odious Williams sisters. They clearly despised the icy composure the little Swiss girl displayed, especially when she was beating one of them. I’m sure things weren’t helped along when Hingis told the press that the Williams sisters’ skin color was actually an advantage to them. Or the time that one of them lost some of her beads from her hair on the court and Hingis walked into a press conference and tossed one of the beads at the reporters, like a Comanche lobbing a scalp at a foe. The Williams girls and their supporters didn’t like Martina Hingis because she refused to be cowed by their glares. For this, she will always have a soft corner in my heart. To this day, when I see a girl with that regal mask, I smile and think of Martina.

Last evening, I saw a beautiful gray cow in one of the nearby pastures. She was alone, and when I started to take her photo, she lifted her hind foot and scratched, just like a dog. Jinx was nearby, but paid no attention to her.

But oh, my pardner isn’t well. Sometime in the night, Jinx got sick, in a very quiet, self-possessed way. When we awoke this morning, my wife and I were stunned to see a half-dozen piles of drying vomit in various places around the house. Neither of us ever heard a sound, even though one of the incidents occurred just a few feet from our sleeping heads. Jinx hadn’t exhibited any symptoms of feeling anything other than perkiness before we retired. This morning, he was clearly embarrassed by what had occurred. He didn’t come to me when I arose as is his custom. He was curled in the office, and I went to him and stroked him and spoke to him. He put his face in my hand and whimpered. Mrs. Orr and I took pains to be extra loving with him. He stayed close by, watching me closely. He watched me while I sprayed spot remover on the rugs. Perhaps he was worried that I was going to spray him with the stuff and remove some of his spots, of which he is so regally proud. No worries there, my pardner. Mrs. Orr got some special food for him, which we will feed him tonight, after a day- long, let- his- tummy- settle period of fasting. Poor little feller.

On the drive to and from work, I’ve been listening to some stories by a writer I’d never heard of, Algernon Blackwood. He was apparently a ghost-story writer of great acclaim, and I have enjoyed listening to two of them, The Listener and The Willows. He had a wonderful name. And look at that magnificent, beautiful face. Such character. So very Basil Rathbonian. This was a man who carried mystery the whisper of spectres and mist and the creaking staircase in his very genes.

Please continue to pray for my newly discovered online friend over at Head Rambles. He and his daughter and their family are in a season of grief many of us cannot yet fathom. But he is strong. And I was wrong. He is not irascible; he is utterly normal and reasonable.

Jinx and I walked this morning, he with his empty and treacherous belly, me with my sleep-fogged head. He still watched me closely and seemed uninterested in the things I stopped to examine, including a honeybee on a clump of Queen Anne’s Lace. I reminded him that he’s now known even in a mountain village in faraway Ireland, and I do believe his soft eyes glistened just a bit at the idea of international infamy. But food was paramount on his mind at that time. He was not thinking, as his master was, of how the honeybee will soon outlive his purpose and grow feeble and sleep on the sun-warmed blossoms and finally drop off onto the earth, his duties completed, nameless and forgotten like all those of his kind. Like most of mine.

And so came the time to leave for work, and I left my tender feelings at the door and imitated Mr. Wemmick, feeling my face and my spirit harden as I left my small acreage  and drove down off the mountain and into the place where people teem and gossip and inflict harm for sport.

When I arrived and parked, I heard a call and looked up and saw my friend the crow, whom I have fed and who has visited me daily for so many years. He called again, then looked west at the mountain with its cellphone towers and technological incursions. He was looking west, and the magnetic pull of his gaze came to me in song lyrics, as things sometimes do in my mind, and I heard them again, trite and worn as they might be:

There’s a feeling I get
When I look to the west
And my spirit is crying for leaving…

Yes, that’s just about right, isn’t it?

~ S.K. Orr