People are very polite here, even the ones under seventy who aren’t just visiting. I’m not sure they speak in complete sentences, though, “Have a good one” is close enough for Jazz or guv’mint work. The who is indicated by eye contact, the one your connected eye is going to have is left wide open, just a wish that it be good. Like, say, if the one you’re fixing to have is a bank robbery, you should either have a lucrative one or rob a bank with positive moral standards (good luck with that buddy).
This lady talked to me at length today, though I think she started a week or two back, and though she had the stuff to make complete sentences she didn’t pause for punctuation though was nice enough to explain her hand gestures, well, I helped. The conversation began something like this … Boy it sure is hot out there you shouldn’t leave humans or animals in a car it’s too hot it’ll kill them I’m a human oops sorry I called you monsieur (a moment to reflect, she did no such thing and she might have been the least franco-human I’ve ever met) I have three cats and three dogs and boy are they hot (I interjected, this is not verbatim, but it’s damn close. I have a memory for crazy) oh no, willy, que ball and bigs, bigs is dead they are cats or were, bigs is (she started flapping her arm and wrist away from her, I said ‘A long time ago?’ and she nodded and affirmed he was dead long time) but he had to live in the basement cause he scratched my eyes out because he was dying and who knew if he’d get along with the dogs … my name is Jennifer … I shook her hand, told her my name and bade her have a good one. I think she’s still talking. She had a lot to say about dead cats and, I have this feeling, that if you mistake a dead one for a living one you get the entire biography of cats. All cats.
She made a very good point. Once. I assume.
My dog friend thinks basements are where cats come from. He leads a predestrian life. Herschel, my dead dog, with a lot of wrist flapping to denote distance and time, had the kitty woodpile. That damn woodpile was the only reason most people ever read Ramblings From Oregon, my Open diary journal. My brother called open diary O-pend-ee-airy.
The short of it is the anal retentive neighbor had a nursery cut down a perfectly good tree, the cool squatter neighbor on the other side asked the guys putting limbs into the chipper if they wouldn’t mind leaving him some wood as he liked camping and building fires. He didn’t ask the anal retentive guy because he would have said no. The guys left him cookies from the trunk, great, fat, round pieces of what had been a living tree earlier in the day (squatter was at work. Oh, his name was woody. Heh.) They left them in his driveway.
Now in felony flats where I did dwell what made a thing a drieway was that it was driveway shaped had less grass than other parts of the lawn and was on one side of the house of the other. Um, except for the anal guy. His driveway was paved and had a gate. I mean driveways weren’t for parking at mine or woodys house unless one had guests, except woody always had to unload his truck.
“Fuck,” woody said a whole buttload of wrist flapping ago. “Fuck,” he said again. Over the course of weeks woody would chop at the cookies to make reasonable logs to chop later, like in a year when the wood quit oozing sap like it was still a tree. He stacked them along his fence opposite of what some might call a driveway. The neighborhood cats thought it was a cat recreation center. One day shortly after it was completed, I was taking Herschel for a walk. He really needed to sniff that because it smelled like some dog had peed on it when it was vertical and now it was horizontal. He put his wide friendly nose into an opening and out popped a cat. He was taken aback. He tried again and out popped two cats.
For the rest of his life Herschel was ever hopeful for something amusing to pop out of the kitty woodpile, the font whence all kitties are hewn. Later the bunnies took over. They just wriggled their noses at Herschel. Someone had insisted that woody take two bunnies. He set them free. They didn’t want to go free so they stayed in his front yard and multiplied. Even after woody moved on the bunnies nested under the house when with child(s) or in the kitty woodpile.
The beauty of dogs over children is that they stay at a mental age where you are the coolest thing ever and the world is full of wonder. You really have to abuse a dog to make one cynical or jaded. Every thursday every dog I ever had would bark at ten o’clock when the big truck came to take away the garbage. Most of them would have preferred the garbage went to the dog(s), or, perhaps, was thrown on the kitty woodpile to ensure growth.
Wow. I’m on vacation and that’s what comes out. To be fair the purpose of this vacation was to clear my mind for important stuff. Looks like it worked.
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