Reading Matter

Some of us were drinking at Bell’s on Sunday, and GinaB was lamenting that people didn’t read enough nowadays. So I asked her what she was reading, and she said she was halfway through Victory by Joseph Conrad. (Her favorite Conrad book is Mirror of the Sea, she said.) Christopher volunteered that he was reading two books, The Print by Ansel Adams and some old British detective fiction, Unholy Dying, by R.T. Campbell; Unholy Dying was coming as something of a relief after reading The Gormenghast Novels, which Christopher dutifully finished. Matt Schwartz said he was reading an autobiography of Gene Autrey, and of course he was always reading the Bible, he said, a little bit every morning at least. Mike Campbell said he’s reading January 2008 issue of Linux Pro Magazine, figuring out how to install and use the Linux operating system on his computer. (The books Mike just checked out of the library are Artists' Materials by Lorraine Harrison, and The Artist's Handbook by Ralph Mayer.) Myself, I’m reading vintage Joyce Carol Oates, The Seduction and Other Stories, and I just took a break to read a revision of Andy Mozina’s story “Dogs I Have Known,” which will no doubt soon be appearing in one of those fabulous literary magazines that nobody reads. Andy Mozina happens to be the author of the critical work Joseph Conrad and the Art of Sacrifice.

The Little Cottage Floods

The recent snow melt and heavy rains in Michigan and Indiana brought up the water levels in the Kalamazoo and St. Joseph Rivers. The St. Joe was more than fourteen feet above its normal level at Niles, Michigan, the fourth highest level in recorded history. The water did not reach as high as the floorboards of the Little Cottage in Benton Harbor so there will be no damage to the building or contents, but we couldn't get to it from the road without a boat. Christopher took this photo from Linden Drive. Mother Nature does put on an impressive show. I was worrying about what happens to the critters living underground in such a flood. The next door neighbor Harvey, who was tending his sump pumps, said that after the last time it flooded this bad, he didn't have a mole problem for years.

Kitchen Tale #11

I just mouse-proofed one of the kitchen cupboards. It was very satisfying. There were many cracks and spaces where mice were entering and shitting. I used hardware cloth (wire mesh), a staple gun, and steel wool to close off every possible entrance. When my brother Mikey came over today I made him lie on the dirty kitchen floor and look at my handiwork with a flashlight. He is probably the only one who will ever see it or who would appreciate it, since he did the same thing for my grandpa Frank Herlihy's mouse-infested cottage cupboards. I don't really like to obsess about cleanliness, but something had to be done. The cupboard contained enough mouse turds to fertilize my garden. Shoot. I should have thought of that. To think, I just threw those tiny turds away!

The Tow Truck Driver

There’s a man in my neighborhood who drives a tow truck and runs a little junkyard shop that sells tires and radiators for American cars. Some years ago, this man got beat up by some youths who cracked his skull with by hitting him repeatedly with a length of wood, took his wallet, which contained $15,000. While he bled on the floor, they searched his house but didn’t find the rest of his money. Somebody found him about twenty hours later and finally got him to a hospital, and as I heard it, the fact that his skull was cracked open helped him survive because the pressure from the swelling from the head wounds would have killed him. And the artery supplying blood to the left side of his brain was severed, and normally that would have killed him, but somehow the blood clotted and stopped flowing. After three weeks they sent him home, and after six weeks, he was able to speak pretty well and he went back to work driving the tow truck. The doctor told him he wouldn’t want to take another blow to the head, though. Recently, four youths came into the place and found him alone, punched him in the head and knocked him out, and took his wallet, which had a bunch of money in it. The tow truck driver is a slight man, maybe 150 lbs, fine boned, and he is chatty and friendly, and it just seems as though he will be assaulted again. He says some people tried to lure him out behind a house recently, and when he caught on that something was funny and drove off instead, a car followed him for a long while. He isn’t inclined to get any sort of security or even a safe, though his shop assistant carries a gun under his shirt. The police don’t seem terribly interested in the recent robbery, though the victim has offered a $1000 reward. This tow truck driver doesn’t want to do anything differently than he’s always done, doesn’t want to change procedures. It’s hard seeing a nice guy, my own neighbor, living so precariously, just driving around alone in his tow truck, going wherever anybody calls him. He’s probably no angel, but he’s nice, and he’ll tow me when I need it, and when he’s picking up a car to take to the junkyard, he always insists on paying a decent amount for it, even if the owner was offering to just give him the car in order to get rid of it.

Ray Adams & Christmas Bird Count

We saw Ray Adams the other day. He’s a guy we see just once a year, when he comes through our neighborhood while doing the Christmas bird count. He drove down our dirt road to search for species and almost left without seeing us. He’d pulled in our driveway and played his owl calls the way he always did (owl calls serve not only to attract owls but also other birdwatchers), but I was sitting at my computer with my headphones on the way I do when I write, and Christopher was playing a video game in the TV room. Finally the thirteenth owl call got through my headphones, just as I noticed an old maroon colored car pulling out of our driveway, so I flew out and stopped him. Chris followed. We didn’t have all that much to say to Ray Adams, except about the thirteen red polls we’d seen---he said the redpolls come south when the food up north is scarce---and he told Chris if he wanted to see snow buntings he should try the farmers’ fields south of Schoolcraft. Like always I invited him in for coffee before remembering he couldn’t drink coffee or eat chocolate, and anyway he was busy doing the bird count, said he needed to get going out to a place where the crows have been gathering, out by Lawson Ice Arena by the campus. He said there were thousands of them just screaming their heads off every night. (A real murder of crows, I guess.) Ray Adams is very active in the Kalamazoo Nature Center and the Kalamazoo Audubon Society. He doesn’t carry a bird book with him, says he just doesn’t need to, can recognize most any bird by sight or sound, though his hearing is not quite as good as it used to be. I said maybe Chris and I ought to do more for the birds, he said, oh, you should just be sure enjoy your birds, and it was sure nice to see Ray Adams again this year.