What else could you possibly want?
My last cruise of the season was October 31st, 2026. As I write this, it’s Tuesday, November 3rd. Tomorrow is the day for my long anticipated (left) hip replacement surgery. Today is election day. These dates and details are signifiers of time passing in what seems to be a linear fashion. Before I sat down to write this, I was upstairs making a peanut butter and jam sandwich, watching a drama unfold on the bird feeder our housemate set up in the back yard next to the porch.
It’s a simple feeder: a flat platform for bird seed and one for a shallow water bowl that hangs on a shepherd’s crook hook. It’s near that large holly tree that is too large and needs to be trimmed significantly down. One of the local squirrels has taken to basically treating the bird seat like an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet, and a blue jay that takes up winter residence somewhere in the large holly tree that’s too large and needs to be cut down or on the back porch were having a loud discussion about which of them had rights to the bird seed. The blue jay, in the manner of nearly all blue jays, was vociferous in the assertion of its rights. The squirrel, confident in the manner of all critters sitting on top riches rightly acquired or not, appropriately shared or not, continued to eat his fill, occasionally looking at the blue jay and its aggressive squawkings as if slightly amused by the distraction.
Are you not entertained? Are you not already sustained? Is it not enough that you can watch me feasting? What else could you possibly want? This is me imagining what the squirrel might be saying between cheekfuls to the blue jay. There was a time when the Gyspi, the old merled dog, could keep the commuting squirrels at bay; when she was a puppy her vertical leap was five feet and, being a herding and hunting dog, would pull down low flying birds and squirrels leaping from off ramp to on ramp along the interyard network of tree limbs. Sometimes in the middle and late summer they would stop through and treat our garden like a fill up station, and Gypsi would, for the sport and sheer joy of it, which also benefitted us and our garden haul, to take down at least one squirrel a year. This was enough to remind them the rest stop on our property was closed.
In this precise moment of this precise season, it’s difficult for me to walk without my stick, even in the house
We got slack with the garden and Gypsi is nearly 14 years old; still spry for an old dog, but not as inclined to jump five feet for sport and for joy. Me working on the boat and Amanda out trying to help homeless folks get and keep housing in an increasingly calloused world, in a city bent on gentrification and short money solutions made keeping up the garden a challenge, and for a while we had access to locally farmed vegetables, which was alright. That’s the old American dream, that echo of what used to be the middle class, that notion that if you’re too busy or purple-thumbed to grow a proper garden then you can at least, help financially support small family farms. Damned right. Because that’s what you do when you work odd hours and have a little more money than time.
But the currents change and this season, as my Amanda calls it, is one in which there is slightly more time than there is money. And our housemate, who is retired, is a solid gardener and so that’s what he does when he feels like it. After my surgery and recovery, I’ll be able to get out there and help with the garden more of the house repairs that need to be done. In this precise moment of this precise season, it’s difficult for me to walk without my stick, even in the house. The surgeon has ordered me off the NSAID painkillers that work prior to the surgery. I also had to go get my piercings removed yesterday.
Calm down! I only have some very vanilla earrings. Five of them. One of them is from the day my second divorce was final. The others are memory markers of years on the river, particularly taking the Mayor Andrew Broaddus Up the river north to South Point for shipyard and my first winter watch and my first trip upriver on the Steamer Belle of Louisville to Gallipolis for shipyard. Tonight we’ll make some last minute preparations. I’m already preparing by getting some Literally indie Literary podcast episodes loaded and ready to drop while I’m recovering and reaching out to folks I want to talk to on the podcast after the first of the year. I’ve got a few books to read once the initial post-surgical pain meds haze is past, and a manuscript of river stories I plan on editing and expanding. We’ll see how much of that actually gets done, but I do like to plan activities. I figure that tackling Finnegan’s Wake in the wake of a post-surgical haze might be a good mindset for a book that is unreliably narrated, arguably without plot, arguably without actual characters, and what some consider one of the greatest books of literature in the western canon. It could also be utter gutter snipe. It could also be both. One must be open to such things, since the same has been said of Melville’s Moby Dick.
And when it comes to absolute gutter snipe, I can think of no place better to end than with an admonition to vote. Not because your views are expressly represented, but because somewhere there’s a fat squirrel of a human gobbling up all the bird seed and looking at you, wondering why you’re not happy for them. Are you not?
The fireman reads