For You I Pine and Balsam

Jonathon Pyne

I'd promised some folks that in lieu of a phone call, I'd keep in touch via this format.  Push came to shove(and a loss of some feeling in my fingertips) I've gotten pretty rusty in wordsmithing.  Oh yeah, every once an awhile I even astound myself with a three syllable word rolling out of cheek and jowl which sounds darn impressive, but, but...That same medication which causes a permanent loss of feeling can also cause hearing loss.  What's left?  Loss of vocabulary? Stunted phrases.  Adjectives like good and nice? Writing for Reader's Digest: Ten tips for better sex in your garden?

I thought I'd get away with throwing in a picture of a beer on Superbowl Sunday. We're out in the country, yet I couldn't help the nagging feeling that ten of millions of people watching live in the city. What if they all flush at once? Was anybody watching the borders when the the Great Dane buried the cat collar and bribed his owner with Doritos? 

The tree picture will hold Gary's interest for a while. With raised eyebrows he asks, "People really spend hours on the net reading each other's blogs?" In a late afternoon visit to the library, I find that the 80+ year old library angel has been out for a week with a bad back. Sleeping becomes a chore. Bad sign. One obvious tip of her absence is the immaculate front counter.  Mandy my blue heeler goes directly to the carpeted reading area for a vicious bout of back itching complete with grunts, groans and animated ruffs. Ruff.

There's no spozed to be here in Kickapoo Center right now, but I'm thinking I might get away from having to toss firewood slabs down into the basement, if I find enough fodder here for procrastination.  Jorge, shit that he is, decides to lay low.  That means he calls 1/2 hour before I'm spozed to leave for a 3rd day of hydration and blood tests in LAX asking if I got coffee. I give three short "no" answers to his questions. I can hear him slinking away on the phone.  When I call today I get his answer machine.  Jorge and Houdini have things in common in that they both disappear quickly.  Only Jorge will reappear across the state.  I figure it's too much work to actually find out if he's a friend or just an acquaintance.


Just about used up my allowance of surplus-energy starting a fire in the wood furnace this morning in preparation for an intended line-dry wash never accomplished.  The open dryer door was too much of an invitation.After the three no answers to Jorge's half-assed attempts to be personable the previous day, which I know from experience is a 70+ year old lonesome retired bachelor's attempt to order an otherwise lack luster day in which TV, nap, lunch and letting the dog's out are primary activities along with secondary affirmations of hoping for free coffee, a visit from one of the B's* in Richland Center which may also include some vicarious sex or maybe a short run to town for bananas at the Kwik Trip, I repeat Jorge's follies save for the TV and sex which lately drives me totally bonkers( TV that is). 

I try to avoid dissing the medical establishment despite a wealth of topics. All that negative clank ends up littering my dreams, despoiling my mental landscape with empty pop cans of medicalese jargon, "I'm sorry I can't tell you that because if I'm wrong you might sue me"  and a discarded candy wrapped cauchemar about a derelict woman pushing a baby carriage with a disguised doll whose head unscrews so she can pour another shot of whiskey.  

A bright spot is the spunky, staff nutritionist who spends hours listening to me vent of ex-wives and rubber band-like excursions in my life, surgically inserting suggestions here n' there to keep myself hydrated and properly fed without thumbing a nose at Mayo Clinic's low residue diet which is so wrong yet technically correct because it absolves them of any litigious ambiguity. Our discussion asides  take us to a deep space nine in the stratosphere where I'm pontificating about male machismo attitudes of objecting women at the same time I'm enjoying the company of an attractive middle aged woman.  I tell her I wonder if she's just used to hearing males ramble on about themselves.  "I wouldn't be here if I didn't care."  Truly an angel

In the dark voided absence of any personal visit to my Amish friends, Wilma writes me an eight page letter of inspiring thoughts and life on the farm.  If I could, I'd kiss her. Instead I give her an angel pin one of the nurses in LAX gifted me.  I hope she's not taken aback by something strange to her culture. In the letter she describes making cheese(nothing to write home about), hoping for colder weather to make ice for the ice-house in summer, a snowball fight at the schoolhouse and a coyote hunt.  In the background members of the family are enjoying a card game called rage.