This is one of my occasional participations in David Abram’s Sunday Sentence project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
“Of course all altruism was in some way selfish.”
Source: The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
This is one of my occasional participations in David Abrams’ Sunday Sentence project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
“All my life, I have taken satisfaction in finishing things in order that I may experience a sense of achievement, regardless of whether the thing was really worth achieving.”
Source: Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney
Most of our trips to Roundrock are for fun and games and foolishness, but sometimes we have grimmer tasks.
On Monday my wife and I buried her dog, Queequeg, under the pines in our forest. Queequeg was nearly 15 years old, which put him in his golden years but wasn’t exceedingly old for a small dog. Queequeg was a Pomeranian. He’d been getting slower and would breathe heavily after he climbed the stairs and such, but he didn’t show any overt signs of infirmity. On the night he died, he had been chasing his ball and accepting treats and wagging his tail only an hour before. And then he laid down and went to sleep and didn’t wake. It seemed to be a painless death.
I’ve buried two other dogs (and a rabbit) out in my forest. The dirt under the pines is good, with no rocks, so that’s where we put Queequeg. I stopped at the hardware store in town and got a Beware of Dog sign that I placed over his head after I put him in the hole I dug. I can’t throw dirt on my dogs’ faces. We also put his two favorite toys and a dog biscuit with him. After that I partially filled the hole and then placed a large stone in it. My hope is that this will thwart any scavengers. Then I finished filling the hole and placed a flat sandstone rock atop it. I intend to return to etch his initial in the stone. My wife dug up some daffodils from our dog Max’s grave and planted them beside the new one.
Queequeg was named not for the tattooed harpooner in Moby-Dick but another Pomeranian that appeared in an episode of The X Files years ago. Although Flike is four times his size, Queequeg was always the alpha between them.
In the early mornings we had a routine. I would go downstairs to fetch my tea, and Queequeg would greet me. I would let him outside, and when he came in, he got a treat. He tried to modify this by skipping the going outside part, and sometimes he got his way. It’s odd going downstairs now in the early morning and not seeing him asleep by the door.
The view above is just below the cabin at Roundrock. You can see a bit of the lake at the left. When we were there on Monday, it was up a few inches because of the recent rains. (I had hoped for more.) The beavers are clearing us a new view of the lake, though looking the direction this deforestation gives, we see mostly the dam and not the lake.
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My St. Louis daughter-in-law, Celestine, took the oath of citizenship this week and is now a permanent U.S. citizen. She’s even registered to vote. When she came here, back in the fall of 2016, I apologized to her for the state of politics in the country. (You may remember that mayhem.) She told me that whatever we had was nothing compared to politics as usual in Kenya. I may have mentioned that my son and his wife are expecting their second child — another boy to be a brother to Small Paul — and I wonder if the swearing in ceremony included him or not.
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The front of my house is suburbia has three porch lights on it. Two flank the front door and one is beside the garage door. In my tenure here, I have replaced those lights three times. The most recent, failed set were deluxe lamps with built-in LED lights and photocells so they’d turn on/off on their own. That set failed the most quickly of all we had. I researched repairing them but it was either this fix or that fix, and you couldn’t know which until you tried it to see if it worked. And then I found that there was a class-action lawsuit against the manufacturer for another model of their lights, so I threw my hands in the air. The set I put on this week are now the fourth that have graced the front of my house. I shopped around for something reasonable (that I could replace the bulbs in rather than the whole fixture) and bought the cheapest models I could find. Then I had to wait for decent weather (and decent weather this time of year means a trip to the cabin, not house maintenance). But it all came together on Tuesday, and after only three trips to the hardware store, I got them installed. I screwed in LED bulbs with photocells and waited for nightfall. When that happened, my hard work paid off. I don’t intend to do this again.
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Books read in February:
Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush – I had read his novel Mating many years ago and remember liking it. So when I came upon this title at the library, I grabbed it. Maybe I’m not the same person I was many years ago, but I didn’t really like this. A sort of family story about a bunch of college friends who come together twenty years after graduation at the death of their group leader type. At turns comical and grim, I just didn’t connect with this one.
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hirobi Kawakami – A forty-something woman crosses paths with one of her beloved teachers from high school, and they begin to do things together (mostly drinking sake but also going on trips to sample magic mushrooms). The woman recognizes her loneliness only because she is in the presence of someone who relieves it. Again, I didn’t connect with these characters.
All Adults Here by Emma Straub – Three adult siblings and their spouses (and children) gather at their mother’s house to assess their lives and secrets. It’s well written and easy to read, and the characters are well drawn, but it took me forever to finish this. (Also, when I was in New York a year ago, I visited Emma Straub’s bookstore Books Are Magic. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was sick with Covid and carried it around Brooklyn.)
Bear Necessity by James Gould-Bourn – A fun book about a widowed father and his 11-year-old son who has stopped speaking after the death of his mother. Except he does speak to the dancing panda in the park (who turns out to be his father, doing what he can to make the rent). This book flirts with violence — the landlord threatens to break the father’s legs if he doesn’t come up with the rent — but it is all over the top and not intended to be taken seriously. The happy ending is just as over the top, but it’s satisfying.
This is one of my occasional participations in David Abrams’ Sunday Sentence project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
“When he was seventeen, he learned the hard way that all it took to become a father was a three-liter bottle of cheap cider, a girlfriend to share it with, an awkward fumble on the Hackney Downs, and a general disregard for the basic laws of nature; and when he was twenty-eight, he learned in the hardest way imaginable that all it took to dim the stars, stop the clocks, and bring the earth to a shuddering halt was one small, invisible sliver of ice on a country road.”
Source: Bear Necessity by James Gould-Bourn
My conversation with Ben Tanzer at This Podcast Will Change Your Life is now online. Note that we recorded it in December of 2022, when the weather outside was frightful.
I think I ramble more than a little, but there may be one or two coherent thoughts in all of it.
This quote is from the “Runaway’ chapter of One-Match Fire. In this moment, the father character, David, sparks a lifelong love of running in his son, Curt. The chapter takes place (with some flashbacks) during the Trolley Run, which is an actual event in Kansas City. I’ve run it four times.
“Open Country” is one of my stories that I can directly attribute to having a little bit of forest on the edge of the Missouri Ozarks. It appeared in Volume II, Issue I of About Place Journal, in May of 2013. This was their “Trees” themed issue. It was my 17th published short story, and I felt I was really on my way.
Clearing cedars is something I do a lot of at my little cabin. The problem with them is that with their oily needles, they can burn hot and transfer a ground fire into the tree tops, which is something I don’t want around my cabin. So whenever I take myself into the forest, I also take a pair of loppers to liberate any small cedars I find from their earthly toil. It’s an endless task, and if I clear one area this year, it will have new cedars growing in it next year. But everyone needs a hobby, right?
I call it an allegory, and I don’t think it’s too hard to see what the cedars in the story can represent to an insightful reader. In just three years, current events showed that the main character’s aversions were commonplace and running rampant throughout the population.
About Place Journal is a publication of The Black Earth Institute, which is an effort by artists and scholars to create a more ethical world.
There is an area of Kansas City generally known as Red Bridge. It’s named after an old red bridge that crossed the Blue River back in settlement days. Subsequent replacement bridges were all painted red to honor that bit of history. The newest bridge (concrete and steel) is fitted with red granite to maintain the tradition.
What you see above is the prior red bridge. I believe I drove across the bridge at least once in my adult tenure here (and it’s not impossible that I had when I was a toddler before we moved to St. Louis, though it is unlikely that I would have been doing the driving). This bridge not only no longer takes traffic but it no longer leads anywhere either. (The area behind me when I took this photo is full of trees and rock piles and is impassible.)
But a new use has been found for the old bridge. It’s become the host of love locks. Couples affix a padlock to the bridge (or gates or fences and even monuments) as a sign of their love. Names, initials, and dates are generally inscribed on the locks, and tradition requires that the key to the lock be thrown away (generally into the river the bridge crosses) as a sign of the unbreakable love of the couple.
This is a global phenomenon, and while it is sweet and is even used in some places as a tourist attraction, it has become a problem. The weight of the combined locks has threatened the integrity of some bridges, for example, and the tossing of the key into the river can actually affect water quality and wildlife. At the bridge above there is a box in place where couples can deposit their key, which will eventually be recycled. (Often I’ve seen this box broken into, presumably for the metal.)
This bridge is about a mile from the end of the Blue River Trail, and I would pass it when I did my 26-mile rides back in the day.
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I can sit at my desk during the day and hear the puttering mail truck pull up to the boxes across the street. (One of those boxes is for my address.) Then I know that I can venture out the front door with the dogs to “get the mail.” They sniff around the front yard while I cross the street and get the (mostly junk) mail from my box. This has been our routine for years. But I think it’s changing. The other day I happened to be looking out the window at the time the mail truck was filling the boxes. I hadn’t heard it drive up, and when it left, I didn’t hear it drive away. I suspect the route I am on is now going to be serviced by an electric mail truck. Thus, if I don’t happen to see it, my treks across the street will be almost random, having no auditory hint that the delivery is made. Such are my troubles in life.
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I always wear red when I go to my cabin. I have a red Osceola Cheese tee shirt and a red plaid flannel shirt I generally wear. (The point is to be not mistaken for a deer by a hunter.) Yesterday, when I had gone to the cabin to sling some of the 15 tons of gravel I’d had delivered, I was dressed in red. When I came home mid-afternoon, I stopped in a convenience store and saw that everyone else was wearing red too. Apparently it was tied to some sporting event yesterday.
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Here is something astonishing. For the first time in my life, I made a wager on a sporting event (last night’s big game). And here’s another astonishing thing. I won! I got involved because it was a fundraiser for a neighbor boy so he could go to a high adventure Scout camp this summer. I didn’t even understand the terms for winning, but his mother texted me saying I’d won $150.
Those of you who know me won’t be astonished to learn that I gave the winnings to the neighbor boy to use on his trip. Maybe he’ll send me a post card.
The weather was mild on Sunday for early February in my part of the world, so my wife and I made a trip to our Ozark forest. Because we were at my son’s house the day before, we suggested that grand Emmett join us, which meant spending Saturday night at our house before we embarked for the woods on Sunday morning.
I had notions of using my chainsaw to cut back some of the encroaching trees along our road in — this is the best time of the year for that since there are no leaves to add weight and there are no insects to burrow into my skin and leave me itching for a week. However, having young Emmett along changed those plans.
So did the appearance of my latest pile of gravel. Through the decade-plus that my cabin has stood in the forest, I have worked with a number of local contractors, trying to get things done. This has not always worked out. Some would appear and do a little work then never appear again. Others would promise to do some work and not show. Other would simply ignore my voice mails and texts. Getting my spillway repaired was a multi-year project with several contractors, each of whom said the guy before “did it all wrong.” I suspect that the jobs I had for these men were simply too small for them.
It happened that the man who built my cabin had become a friend on social media. He had taken a job as an over-the-road trucker but then announced that he was doing excavation and hauling work locally (due to his wish to be closer to his family). When I saw his new career, and remembering the excellent work he did on my cabin, I contacted him about getting some gravel delivered. And since he seemed eager for the work, I showed him a muddy area along my road as well as what may have been the true cause of my spillway washing out: all of the water racing down the quarter mile of road leading to the cabin. He laid a pipe under the road in the muddy area and then spread gravel over it. And he dug three trenches into the woods to bleed water from the roadside ditch that was sending torrents to wash out my spillway. Plus he delivered a three-ton pile of gravel.
In the months that followed, I spread those three tons around the cabin (to maintain a firebreak and to keep the scrub from growing there). I used a shovel and wheelbarrow (also a reluctant back). And so I asked him for a new load of gravel. Then the weather turned bitterly cold and the holidays came and whatever else, and the gravel pile didn’t appear.
Last week, though, an invoice came for the gravel. It was twice the price I had paid for the last load, but since I was dependent on his machines, and since the local quarry closed so getting rock meant going farther, and since fuel prices have been fluctuating, I resigned myself to the seemingly higher cost.
But when we got to the cabin on Sunday, you see the pile of gravel that was waiting for us. (Boy for scale). That was much bigger than any pile I’ve had delivered in the past. (My reluctant back is already mumbling complaints.) Emmett had a wonderful day climbing up the mountain and then sliding down it. Playing with his cars, burying them and unearthing them. He was covered with a gray dust by the end of the day. I thought about shifting some of that gravel into the area where I want to expand the firebreak, but somehow sitting in a comfy chair in the sunlight won the day.
The warm day in the woods came to an end, and the only work done on the gravel pile was what Emmett and his cars did. I wrote to the man who delivered it, asking him how much he brought in. It turns out he’d dropped 15 tons of gravel this time. If my math is correct, the price doubled but the volume went up by a factor of five.
Now I need to begin spreading the gravel. I want to expand the firebreak around the back of the cabin (the direction where a potential ground fire would likely come). The area that I could cover is about equal to the area already covered on the other side of the cabin (and the first layer of that was spread by heavy machines). I’m going to focus my initial effort on the gravel that has engulfed the tree. I don’t know if that is bad for the tree, but if you look at it closely you can see what looks like space between the gravel and the trunk. (Click to embiggen.) That is because we wrapped the tree in chickenwire, so the gravel is “held back” from the trunk. Libby says that this has made it easier for the beavers to chew on the tree above the chickenwire, so it’s my priority to shift that part of the pile.
Lots of work, but that’s why I go to the woods.
Lucky Rabbit's Foot 