The Albatross Man At Christmas

Author's Disclaimer: This is an excerpt from "Dog Stories" by Roger Gavrllo copyrighted 1996.
The photo is not an Albatross.  The bird in question is a seagull. The above is a fanciful chicken with extremely long legs. The store in question is two miles from the shore of a Great Lake.  White men used the term "Great Lake". The Native Americans, called it Kitchi-gummi, sometimes Michi-gama and one source said "stinking water" was a third translation. An Anishnabe man (the real name for the Ojibwa)  from the St.Mary's band "up Nort"   told me it was called Bad Spirit because of the number of people the lake swallowed up each year.  I used Albatross because the word had a ring to it and evokes many  images from history and legend.

The crash at the front door fifteen minutes before opening time at first startled me.  After I dusted myself off and stood up, my ire was peaking.  "Gol durn these idiots. Don't they know we open at 10 AM."  I went to the front window to identify the source of the noise. I could see the top of someones camouflage hat and what looked like feathers on either side of the brim.  He was sitting on the front stoop.  I hoped that in a few minutes he'd continue his itinerant , homeless ways and move on.  I wouldn't be forced to yell at him for blocking the door or call the police.  

At opening time I unlocked the door. To my dismay, he's still there.  "Morning," he says.  I tried not to pay attention. There are a half dozen things to do at opening time, like locking cases, drawing back the steel security gates in the display windows and turning on overhead lights.  When I returned to the entrance-way, the Albatross Man is turning off his head phone set.  It saved me an additional irritation of informing him of a ban on loud radios in the store. The music is so loud I can clearly hear the tune playing before he turned it off. Perhaps he read my mind, saw my defensive body posture or  has drawn the same reaction from a dozen other downtown store keep.  "Turn that darn music off."  

I grimace when he undid his inner coat and zipped up his pants.  Although not a large man, he sported an ample gut that hung out under his red T-shirt and poked through his partially open trousers.  In my mind I rehearse the description for the beat cop after I call 911.  "Small man, not more than 5'8" , partially bald, peanut head, large gut, camo clothing and a hat with feathers on it."  

That's when I noticed a seagull under his belt.  At first it appeared to be the comical rubber chicken from the Milton Berle show in my youth.  The bird-actually a juvenile seagull because of the speckled body- was tucked, bright pink feet-first under his belt.  The lifeless head knocked against his thigh when he moved.  My non-reaction to the entire spectacle unfolding before me was the most intelligent thing any enlightened person like me could say.  " Is that a dead bird you're wearing ?" 

"Why yes," was his reply.  

"Take that thing outahere," I say with a raised voice.

"Can I put it down on the steps here?" he asks.

"No you can't. Besides it's illegal to kill these birds," I tell him. I am beginning to get angry.


"I didn't kill it," he says.


"Well, it's still against the law to possess this bird," I said next. " Take it outside."


Which is what he promptly and politely did without further argument.


to be continued

 

The Christmas Report

Droll.  "Make fun of," says the dictionary.  Winston Churchill said, A joke is a serious thing.  It's the kind of  day when the sum total of waggishness in Kickapoo Center is taking a stool sample to the vet. Not mine, the dog's.  This snit-itus musta been the result of a night tossing and turning on the couch.  No, Dawn didn't kick me outa bed. This throat condition is getting out of hand, hah! Out of hand, get it? Can't sleep, can't eat. What else is there? 

My son, the perennial do-gooder sent his Christmas cards out early.  He didn't grow up on 77th street like I did. One holiday I looked up the chimney flue above the cement logs that never burned down and noticed that the opening was nicely cemented shut.  A recent news report tells of a Texas man who locked himself out and tried to get back in via the chimney.  Musta been in East Texas where folks don't know that chimney's have dampers.

I'm taking a serious look at sending out Christmas cards.  Most of the cards we get in the mail are from people we haven't seen in ten years.  They're not people I regularly communicate with. But they send us pretty cards and letters with news about the kids. The really appreciated cards are from people like neighbors, Gordie and Carol, who wish us well and thank us for the sweet corn last summer. I have to decide between fun and serious. 

In this card I combined fun and serious.  Dawn made the Santa  from a mutated birdhouse gourd. The kid riding a snowball and two skiing snowmen are ornaments handed down from my Grandmother. circa 1910.

One "year in review" we receive in the mail is still printed on an Underwood typewriter with O's and E's so dirty they get filled in with purple ink when the author finds an old mimeograph machine in the back room of PS #421.  She sneaks in a coatroom to run off duplicates after a busy school day.  She's a single woman, substitute teacher and dispatcher for a security service.  She travels in summer visiting lighthouses around the world.  The last time I heard from her, she was stuck in Wales. There is a Wales, Wisconsin,  but this was across the big pond.  Her visa, credit cards and purse were stolen.  In the e-mail to myself and other correspondents, she asked that we send her money.  Just to check if the e-mail was for real, I asked a security question, only she would know.  I never got an answer. When she got back to the states, she reported that her computer also got hacked.

"Barney got promoted off the loading dock. Tricia and Sammy just completed residency at  Lost Souls Hospital in Mittsburgh .  Bubba had surgery on a webbed finger. The dog ate a whole bulb of garlic."

...And we made it through another sub-arctic winter, a raccoon took up residency in Mandy's doghouse, the unvarnished railing to the upstairs is finally completed and I can still make a killer omelet.

 

Looks like a cheese, mushroom, spinach omelet with a side of brown rice for the furry, black and white kid, only nine minutes till tender and nutty.

 I gave the doghouse to Jorge. If he curls up, there's just enough room for him and his mutts.

Seeds For Change

Sunday, December 11,2011

The seed catalog came in the mail.  To a dirt wrangler like me this is similar to getting a combination Rolling Stone , Interview Magazine, The Week, The Bible and a long term subscription to Playboy in my mailbox.  You, too, can get one by going to Fedco Seeds.

A guy named C.R.Lawn founded the co-operative.  Google his name and you'll find that he's been a keynote speaker and highly regarded for his down to earth wisdom on topics near and dear to me.  The black and white seed catalog is filled with curious drawings, information about seeds the company offers and a range of topics of note to people who work the land.

One such topic is global warming.In a half page section of the catalog is a no nonsense report of the climate changes in the northeast .

Lawn gives an update of Fedco's decision to join 82 plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Monsanto to halt "uncontrolled spread of transgenic seeds".

As I typed the last sentence, the power went out, our wireless doorbell went off and I assume this is a signal from God not to write anymore about this David versus Goliath issue. Read the catalog description. First hand is always best.

The last item of note in the catalog is a two page spread on FDR's Fireside Chats and their application to the present economic times.  It'll drop your jaw. 

Shelling beans in the living room, I slip in a DVD of the All In The Family series. Each episode begins with a song I  thought was the Republican National Anthem.  After I few episodes I skipped over Archie and Edith at the piano singing, "Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again,"  or "Didn't need no welfare state, everybody pulled his weight," but the last line tipped me off that the song is a parody.

"Gee our old LaSalle ran great." Do you remember ever seeing a picture of a LaSalle?  The writers of the song are saying in a tribute to the old days that the "old days" were indeed a bummer.  Hoovervilles ( shantytowns) were prevalent.  Car companies went under before ever becoming a brand name.  And Hoover?  His name will be remembered as it is now for someone who did nothing in a time when a real statesman is needed, like Sir Winston Churchill in WWW-2.  The other Hoover? I see him portrayed more and more  in current cinema as a control freak who liked to cross dress.  What a legacy! 

Order the catalog. If you can, join the co-op.  They have a low income factor.  Even if you don't garden, you'll help the rest of the people who provide your food.

Snits and Scoffing

I am amazed. No, not because the sun is shining after 372 days of sullen, dirty-sheet gray weather, but because snit is not in either of my dictionaries.  Snigger, sneer, snipe, snot and snob all figure prominently.  I am not getting up from this chair to go to the bookshelf. 

Snit-it's probably why Jorge hasn't called.

"Hey, ya got coffee?" 

I'm in a short snit because I'm not feeling well.  I'm used to playing while injured.  I did a whole season of championship organic gardening with a hernia.  In between, I suffered through bouts of gut wrenching arthritis with the pleasant name gout attached to it.  Every time I hear that word, the image of a fat demented king gnawing on a turkey leg, dirty bandage wrapped around his toe, comes to mind.  My former physician's solution for hypertension was a generic drug which elevates uric acid levels.  Hence the swelling of joints and accompanying pain.  Then, he prescribed a medication for arthritis which elevates my BP. 

I have a new health provider, the same woman Dawn, my wife uses.  I love her so much I brought her potatoes after a visit to the clinic recently.  If I give you potatoes watch out.  It means commitment. 

Ailments which cause an undue amount of focus on a natural function like walking, breathing and eating disturb me. The stricture of my Schatzki ring makes eating an hour long event with copious amounts of water to help wash down food.  This morning's first entree was oatmeal, brown sugar and organic apple sauce.

So that explains a bad attitude. Not because of the oatmeal. I know it's good for me, but I'd like to make some crepes, especially the ones Jeff Smith makes with beer.

Scoffing is something I do.  It's accompanied by eating crow frequently. Crows are a protected species, by the way, under the Migratory Species Protection Act, so don't call up the DNR.  It is a metaphorical statement. 

My high school when it was brand new. Note the cars.  It was the former German-English Academy.

From grade four through the end of high school, I was imprisoned in this building. At the extreme left, jutting out from the structure is the auditorium.  It's where we had school wide assemblies, Thanksgiving and Christmas pageants. The main entrance is the center edifice with two sets of steps.  Twenty minutes a day we were required to perform tasks for the school. It was called "work service."  If I was lucky I got assigned office monitor because the principal and vice principal had a office on either side of the entrance.  The administrative offices were located there. If I was real lucky, my second wife was assigned duty with me.  She was a Norwegian blond, soon to be cheerleader.  She'd do things like ask me a saucy question,

"Do you ever wonder what it's like?" 

It being having sex-we were only eighth graders.

Then she'd get up. kiss me softly me on the cheek with a shy wink, and walk away as the bell rang.  Whoa. Think about what the little snot did to me on purpose, an eighth grader with soaring hormones.  It will figure prominently in my future life with her. 

The far right attached building is the gymnasium.The first floor was reserved for elementary grades and the upper floors were secondary school.  There was a third floor with the biology and chemistry labs.  Two staircases led from the third to the second floor.  One was reserved for seniors, only.  You could get the crap beat out of you for unauthorized use of the senior stairs.

There were 54 people in my graduating class. The school was the only co-ed  private school in the city, so my senior class was equally divided between girls and boys.  27 women were people I saw every day of my life from fourth grade on. Made it hard to find a date for the Prom. Especially if you weren't a jock, a lawyer, doctor or banker's son. Maybe that's why I hung out with the outcasts like the local Mafia boss's son and a crazy kid who lived across the street.  Going outside the building was verboten during school time.  I got solitary confinement and three days suspension for having lunch with Joe across the street.

I was pretty impressed with the new Pontiac my ma purchased when I turned 14  The bubble burst when everybody turned sixteen. Some classmates got their own Porsche's and TR-3's.  My mother, bless her heart, was a high school teacher all her life.She had two degrees from UW-Madison.  As an only child she knew the value of giving me a good education. I scoffed most of my life at the education I received.  Mom. rest assured, you were right.  I did get a good education. 

I learned to despise the wealthy and privileged. I didn't learn some lessons very well when I married one wealthy snot-the cheerleader- but I scored high that year on envious, go-figure  looks. Besides, I was a farmer, lived across the road from a commune, wore bib overalls. and wasn't bald or  fat and bored with my life. I showed them.  She left after three years to have an affair with a wealthy, fat advertising exec from Chicago. Like my son, it takes a couple of hits with the cosmic slap before sanity is restored.

Enter Dawn, my wife, not the time of day.  She started this sweater before Christmas and finished it in July. I scoffed one hot July; squirming when she asked me to try it on. She grinned with that special feeling one gets after months of hard work.    The humidity makes you break out in a sweat if you even think about work. A sweatband was required apparel.

This morning Mother Nature throws another cold one at us.  I'm chilled.  I don't have the energy to start a fire in the wood stove. With the sun out, it'd be 75 in the house by noon with even a small fire.  I think about a rationalization Dawn and I made when we decided to move back to the frozen tundra.

You can always dress up for cold weather, but in hot  weather there's a limit to how many clothes one can shed.  There's a reason why the Arabs wear those flowing robe besides hiding an assault rifle. I cropped my head so not to show the feathers hanging out the sides of my mouth. Yeah Dawn.  It's a great sweater.        

Outlaws

One of those annoying news snippets on the front page when I go online with this dinosaur  computer which talks back and refuses to load my e-mail, stopping my muse in the middle of the river gets my boots wet and my bacon soggy was-wait for it,

"Men spend ten more minutes a day grooming than women." 

"Oh so what who gives a shit,?"

I'll have to ask Jorge if that's true for African-Americans. 

When we moved to the country, we inherited two sheds of junk.  I have a ton of my own junk and don't need no more.  Moving across the country, we loaded up everything we thought we'd need in sunny Arizona into two moving vans. Little did we know that one of the trucks was leaking transmission fluid.  It refused to go forward in Grants, NM.  I give Penske credit for customer service.  They towed that broken down van all the rest of the way to Sedona.  When we moved back, we needed two of the same size trucks.  We'd accumulated more stuff in the five years in AZ, so we had to make a second trip with my pick-up hauling a trailer.

Coyote here is getting a Doo from the hairdryer I found  in the barn.  It also can be used for frontal lobotomy. The gen-u-wine chrome and Naugahyde chair  adds a measure of comfort.  Farmers don't throw anything away.  Just look at their front yards.  If you drive north on our state highway, the serene natural beauty of the countryside will suddenly shock your sensibilities when you come to a salvage yard right on the highway.  Dawn says,

"I thought they had to put up fences around those eyesores," 

when we first passed by mountains of rusting junk.  The worst thing about the junk yard is that it's adjacent to a wild-life waterway formed by lowlands adjacent to the river.

Two old stoves, dead birds who crawled inside the stoves to get warm, a rusty trailer, chicken wire, 4X8 sheets of rubber backed plywood,  broken concrete, pine logs , 4,000 sheet metal screws in an old broiler pan,  a usable straw broom are only the top of the heap.  When we remodeled the upstairs bath, we had a local hauler deliver a huge, black dumpster  to get rid of all the detritus.  Since then, the town  has a spring and fall clean-up where we donate scrap previous residents left behind.  Thanks to Joe Childs we can tell a wonderful story of the Ford's brakes giving way on Freymiller's Hill as we began to carry a 500 gallon oil tank to the dump. I had intended to create a metal giraffe sculpture until I realized I didn't have a welding machine.

The sun's shining and Mandy hasn't been fed.  The cat is inside for a warm-up.  I've got big decisions on what to do today.  Inside or out?  The choices for inside are exciting.  Take all those dry pieces of bread, toss 'em in the blender and make bread crumbs.  Finish the drywall around the inside window in Dawn's studio or  paint behind the wood sconce installed over the kitchen sink when the kitchen was remodeled two years ago.
Outside, I have to figure out how to bury the compost after a particularly chilling overnight. The white crust on the gardens is a telling sight of frozen soil, but-hey.  Mark 12/5/2011 as a special day.  I had oregano alive and well in the garden.  I took it from under the cold frame and moved it to the summer kitchen.  At night there's a purple glow from the garage window from the grow light I hung over the herb.  A long term goal is to replant it in the greenhouse, once that's up.  That's another story for a different day.

Oh, the title? A case in point for dementia.  I originally intended to write about my formative years and the two schools I attended from kindergarten through high school.  The main thought would have been; My teacher's could have ridden with Jesse James for all the time they stole from me. I didn't write that, the late poet Brautigan did.  But it's true. 

The View Near The Bridge

Off to the right my dog stands expectantly with the yellow lid of  of a kitty litter pail clamped between her jaws. It's the rural version of a Frisbee. "Stay," I command.  On a rainy, foggy, misty day like today, it would be doubly stupid for both of us to be run over by a pick-up with a deer rack on the tail end. 

Yeah, this is OK I ponder, but a middle of the road shot would be better.

Now that Herman Cain is out of the race, perhaps I could run for office on a middle of the road platform. I wouldn't be any worse than one of the Republican hopefuls who doesn't know that the U.S. doesn't have an embassy in Iran.  I don't jog with a pistol.  I don't jog period.  I haven't been a ruthless businessman, don't have a drug problem or have skeletons in this office closet, save for a thwarted project back when Nixon was running for re-election. The idea was to take a picture of a penis and attach the slogan " Lick Dick in '72."  I won't divulge details, just make up your own story. It would be ten times better than something a bunch of drunken hippies came up with after too many cold ones.

Ah so young and so clueless.

The Middle of the Road

This is what happens when it rains all day, the animal children have been following you around like lost souls, yet when you show them the door they stand there gazing at the weather, looking back to you with, "I'm not going out in that," eyes.

DDOD

I am tempted to nominate Mandy, my dog, as dumbest dog of the day. DDOD.  That is until I called Jorge to complain about today's weather-combination of rain, fog, sleet, snow and  ice-through Sunday afternoon.  It is after eleven in the morning and he's asleep on the couch. I can hear the TV news announcer in the background. I'd woken him up.

"Why are you asleep?" I ask.  "Didn't you go to bed last night?"

"Naw, didn't get much sleep.  Chase was barking at something outside most of last night," he tells me.

"So Mandy is the second dumbest dog of the day, "  I tell him with the following explanation.

It's a dark and dreary rainy 7 am Saturday. Mandy climbs on the bed.  Pooch the cat is comfortable at my feet, stretched out in a thin line.  Mandy licks my hand, then decides there's more nutritional value in my whiskery face. Plus, she can clean her tongue of morning catarrh on two days growth of beard. I decide that since I am an old fart, I should look like one, but only a debonair old fart. I'll grow a goatee.

"Oh Daddy, I luff you so much," she tells me with wet kisses.   Geez.

I ignore the dog, hoping that she'll fall asleep. No such luck. Lick, slurp, lick. Slurp some more. Then she turn her attention to the cat. Snip, snurfle, nip.

I get up and walk downstairs.  Pooch the cat follows like the good dog he is.  I let him out.  Mandy doesn't follow. No click-click of toe-nails on the stairs. I open the door to the storage space under the stairs where we hang all keys: the house ( five doors-five keys), the garage, outbuildings, three cars and twenty-nine master locks.  This is usually a signal, "He's going outside".

No Mandy.  Next, I jingle her collar. The tinkle of rabies vac tags says, "We're going for a ride."  Nothing, absolutely nothing, is more important than, "going for a ride."  When I was a kid I remember pleading with my Dad to take me for a ride, anywhere.  I taught her well.

No Mandy.

Finally, I walk up the stairs. push her off the bed and cajole her to go outside in my most pleading, pretty- please voice.  I can see the cartoon balloon above her head, "Oh well I'll humor the dufus." She stands in the breezeway looking at the falling rain.  I slip on my overcoat and don my muck boots.  She follows while I put the log propping the door to my Chevy closed to one side.  Once it's safe inside the garage, I can find out why the door handle sticks and so the car can drip water all over my workshop floor. I walk to the dog pen to check on the tire of the truck.  I'd overloaded the truck with slab wood from the Amish and a back tire went flat.

"Crap."  I forgot to close the driver's side window.  The bench seat is soaked.  The tire is OK, therefore I drive the truck to the front apron of the garage in case I have to get out the compressor to fill the tire. My sweatpants feel like I peed in them from the soaked seat. The truck bed fills a depression in front of the garage with rain water collected overnight.  One more, "crap."

Ahah! I remember, Mercury went retrograde according to Dawn, the astrologer.  Mechanical things will go awry.  Communication will be difficult, legal issues and signing contracts are to be avoided.

Dawn and I spend a good deal of the morning trying to figure out how to get out of Dodge City with our hides intact and a reasonable amount of cash in our pocket.  We want the positive things we moved to this area for like clean water and a pristine natural environment without a depressed economy ( we reached a low point when one of Dawn's framed paintings sells for $7 at the Amish auction and a wooden barrel with a quick sketch of a chicken is quickly snatched up for $20) , lack of amenities( forty-four miles for decent Chinese food) intellectual poverty of the residents ( Scooter, the local cop is still on suspension without pay-the town has no police force) and a climate without the bipolar lows of -22 degrees in January and near 100 degrees in the height of summer with cloying humidity.

Jorge Googles St.George, Utah. Oh boy. Road trip!