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Into The Void Before Sundown
The first time I met Len, he had just arrived at our elementary school, a transplant from California, which made him interesting and exotic to someone from Pig’s Knuckle Junction like myself. He was taller than me, Nordic blonde, and bore a resemblance to Glen Campbell. Len had a great line of patter and that flat, explosively-bitten-off accent that Californians flaunt. We became fast buddies and palled around together from the get-go. We both loved tetherball, which was the rage in the elementary schoolyards during that age. We would race to the poles when the recess bell rang and play furiously until time to return to class. Len had been…
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Home In High Summer
We went down into town this morning for an outing, but we almost didn’t go. Mrs. Orr has been battling a sinus thing that has migrated down into her chest and she’s been very weak from all the coughing. But she wanted to get out of the house and so we did. We ended up forgetting to buy the one thing we really went for, but that was all right. There’s an oriental market (yes, I’m aware that I’m supposed to say “Asian,” but that’s just too bad, innit?) where we sometimes shop for staples like Japanese matcha green tea, soba noodles, miso paste, and the odd vegetable like immaculate…
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A Day No Chests Would Swell
When I arose this morning, I tiptoed out onto the back porch and sat for a long time, listening to the mountains come awake, watching the woods and fields shake off the night’s humid blanket. I checked the dogs’ water dish and saw that some insects had perished there during the night. There were two daddy long legs, which have the habit of trying to drink from the dish at night and falling in and drowning, I lifted the little bodies with their curled-under legs and placed them in one of the flower boxes, where I knew the ants would soon find them and do their recycling job. Then I…
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Brevities
This morning my wife headed down into town. She had only been gone about fifteen minutes, and I had just poured myself another cup of coffee and wedged myself between the spotted twins on the couch when my phone rang. It was Mrs. Orr, and I immediately knew something was wrong. I heard her address me by the term of affection the grandchildren use, PeePaw, and I heard something in her voice and said, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?” And I listened as she told me that she had just gotten down to the bottom of the mountain and was near our little post office when two deer streaked out…
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Nearing The End of April
The days are longer, walking in with soft daybreaks and shuffling out with glowing coral sunsets, and the early, surprising heat has modulated itself back to where it should be, and it would be easy to unwind at least eighteen of the hours of the day outside under the dome of pollen and barnswallows and floating spider webs. I’ll get this out of the way first — I haven’t even tried to work on my memoirs for a while. There are some things, some images and events that are too evocative of too much rawness, and my instincts tell me to sidestep them for a little while until it’s time…
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The Ides of Memoir
As I grow older, I live more and more in the past. And so I have decided to try and return to setting down my memoir, though in a different fashion than in the past. Previously, I started and stopped a memoir focusing mainly on my mother and my relationship with her (see here, here, here, and here). For reasons I won’t delve into here, I have decided that this focus was not conducive to regular effort, and so I have decided to start again. I feel the need to record my memories of certain things, places, people, and events that have remained clanging around in my mind, and I…
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Endings And Beginnings
At 458 pm on Tuesday, I walked into the office manager’s lair and said, “Think fast!” She looked up and I tossed my keys at her, underhanded. She moved pretty adroitly for an obese diabolical narcissist, and she caught the keys. “Thank you, sir,” she said. “Good luck.” I didn’t say a word to her. Walked out and was met by one of my coworkers, who embraced me and told me she was going to miss me. Then I walked out to the lobby where two more coworkers were busy and said, “Girls? Adios.” They both turned to me, and one of them said, “Good luck.” The other walked towards…
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In Dour Country
Well, I got it, too. On Friday, I developed chills and that head-swaying dizziness that I’ve experienced several times in the past with the flu. Cycles of fever started right after these symptoms. I took a home test Saturday morning and got the captain’s bars of a positive result. As people used to say a few years back, meh. Mrs. Orr is feeling better, fever-free and cough almost completely gone. Her remaining complaint is the soreness of her eyeballs, which she often gets after running a fever. That and fatigue. We’re continuing our Ivermectin/antibiotic/vitamin supplementation and I do believe this regimen has been responsible for minimizing the effects of the…
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Honing The Edge of Loss
These are days of depletion, of withered hopes, of long hours, of loss. That feeling that the little ship inside me has run onto a jagged shoal and now there is a little slick of acid growing in the waters around it. I have been interviewing for a new job, and have been quite hopeful that I was going to get it. But because of some remarkable bureaucracy jiggles and inflexibility, the moment has passed and I did not get the job. I made the mistake of allowing myself to believe that I was going to be awarded the position, and that belief lightened my mood at work and made…
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Winter Begins
And now we sit in the deepest pocket of the year’s darkness, with the night air so still that even the nocturnal predators do not dare to disturb the hush with their cries. We have reached the farthest point on our yearly circle around the great light in the sky, and are now beginning to swing back to complete the ring, spinning always, the great seas and the vast acres containing numberless bones slipping in and out of light and dark, and so it has ever been since ages ago, back when certain words were spoken. It’s difficult when I stand in the yard to remember that this bleak patch…