Your Shelf - Shelfari

Your Shelf - Shelfari

Winter thoughts

Walking home late last night in the snow, I realized there were two things that I felt really strong about. 1) I think all proper dogs should be allowed in bars. They would defintely improve the atmosphere. Proper, of course, means a dog over twenty inches at the shoulder and well mannered. 2) All midgets should be required to carry large cigars.

Dogs of Yore

Amazing! I got my wish, we are having a thunderstorm. Thunder, lightening, no forest fires, I hope and petrichor. That is my favorite word. It describes the smell that arises when rain first strikes the earth or pavement. It is delightful and evocative. I am transported to a front porch in Indiana, a five year old boy with his arm around a Gordon Setter, watching a thunderstorm. The dog is long gone, a victim of distemper, but the scene is still vivid. All in all, five is a pretty good age. It's a funny thing, I started this blog as busy work to keep from obsessing about my current situation, but I find myself doing something just like that. At least revisiting points in my life, perhaps it will be instructive. I don't think Ill ever be too old to learn. Too addled, maybe, which of course is often a product of age. Time will tell.

The rain sounds like marbles falling into a metal basin. I have vague memories of a white porcelin clad shallow bowl with a red strip around its rim. It's a sound that has often lulled me to sleep. A lovely idea, therefore as Boswwell wrote, "and so, to bed."

Grey Thunder

As a boy, I lived in the midwest. It was hot and humid in August, the time of the year I plagued my mother for solutions to my late summer boredom. Summer friendships were waning, the resumption of school a faint glimmer on a nine year old's horizon. What made it all bearable were the evenings. The setting sun lowered the temperature and brought out the lightening bugs. It often also brought out the lightening, along with thunder and terrific rain. What a show, different than the Fourth of July and often better, since the rain cooled things off. If we were going on vacation, a trip to Crooked Lake in Northern Indiana, our soaked backyard became a wiggling mass of nightcrawlers available for capture.
Some fifty years later, I live in the much cooler Pacific Northwest, lightening starts forest fires, summer rains are rare, and I don't think I've ever seen a genuine wild nightcrawler. Last night it was hot, but the only thunder was from the old car cruise. Car enthusiasts, mostlly men, mostly my age, drive a circular route through my little town showing off their restored and often revamped hot rods. '57 Chevies, old Ford roadsters, chopped and lowered, chromed and colored with candy-flake paint they creep down the street and whenever possible they gun their engines. The local police don't like this, but even old boys will be boys, so sporadic loud "va-rooms" are the order of the night. It's a show and it's loud but it doesn't bring out the worms.