October 27, 2010. Wednesday.
Situation: Work tonight. Squeak has been going outside, but not venturing too far. Moi says she’s getting along better with Woody; I saw them pawfighting, which is a good sign. Moi says Squeak doesn’t like sharing the litter box with Woody, one reason she’s been going outside more often. Moi surmises that early Monday morning the McNeighbors let Sebastian out, who spooked Squeak, and she ran for a tree and didn’t realize how high it could be before she was so high in it she was afraid to come back down. It’s 12:20, and I feel like taking Mway for a walk now. Yesterday I saw Moi pulling a tick off herself. So far this year I haven’t found one tick on me. Maybe that’s because I cover myself up better than Moi, or maybe because I don’t sleep with an animal that brings a colony of ticks to bed.
State of the Path: I look for the long crooked stick but don’t find it; I find something similar: its end is bent, but that’s because it’s broken. I decide to bring it along. A lot of red-leafed sumac saplings: now that they’re red, it’s easy to see how much over the years the sumac has spread, right up to the walled garden. At the pig pen, the big poke weed still lies bent over, still holding its purple berries. Spot two female cardinals: one in the old orchard, another down by the creek. With the leaves off the black walnuts, the McNeighbor mansions, lined up adjacent to the old orchard, unfortunately come more clearly into sight. Just before the maples, I scare up a bird that’s lying in the middle of the path; it flies off toward Hutchinson’s field, brown with orange underfeathers. I’d like to know what it is, but I didn’t see it long enough to bother looking in Audubon. I reflect on how I don’t get many burrs and boogie lice on me on these walks; that must be because I chopped so much burdock down in the spring (however, if I walk around the house, I get the stuff on me right away). I walk the plank: water in both channels, more goldrenrod has turned all brown. I’m glad I have my new boots: the path is soggy along the ridge. At the strawberry patch, where there are a number of cedars (they could be something else, but I call any wild evergreen a cedar), I spot a couple cedar saplings I never noticed before. I take the path up to the summer house (again, simply because I can), walk back down. Coming up toward the clearing, I don’t see poison ivy anymore below the stalks of goldenrod as I did all summer.
State of the Creek: It rained a little last night, so the water’s up and moving all along the stream. Leaves have been shoved downstream, some are starting to sink. At the log jam, I spot movement in the grass along the bank; probably the same thing Mway saw yesterday. Was it a turtle or a vole? All I can say is “spot movement.” Further down, about six frogs plop into the water. I think about how warm fall has been. At the car tire, the stream is riffling, moss on rocks, water laced by brown pin oak leaves.
The Fetch: Because its end is broken, I can’t twirl the stick I brought along: am disappointed. I toss what I have, pretty much in same places as yesterday. As soon as Mway stops dropping it when she brings it back I say “good enough.”
Addendum: Midway into writing this, the phone rings for Moi. I go outside to get her. Coming off the ladder, she spots Mway with a freshly killed ground hog beside her. Moi praises her, snaps several iPhone photos. (Reason for the praise: for as long as Blue was alive, he killed the ground hogs that otherwise ate leaves off the vegetables in the garden, never let Mway share in the spoils, except for organs he eschewed. Until today, Mway has been too timid to kill a ground hog. Moi interrupts me, again with praises for Mway.)
2 comments:
Sorry not to get back to you yesterday, but I spent most of the day furiously inscribing my “B” chapter. You can put the “B” volume back on the shelf now and set out the “C” volume (don’t forget that that consists of two books). Thanks for the listening session the other night, and thanks also for gently reprimanding me about scattering my pages all over the place (there are also some more I left down in the music room). I’ve started gathering them together and putting them in order because I do fully intend to put my novel up on your blog. (I’ve thought about asking you to do the typing in, but I think it’s best I do that myself, lest you make a mistake). My plans are, once I’ve written out the whole novel in longhand (as you would call it), to post a chapter a day – 26 chapters will result in as many postings. I thought about it for a long time – rather than having my novel exist as a separate entity, either as a book or a blog, I think it would have its greatest impact as part of your work. It would do double duty then. It would stand on its own as a literary work, but it would also impart your work with that meaning that I think has been eluding you all this time – you will finally have found what it is you’re truly in search of: a portrait of your dog as a young artist. Your plodding journal, your “bloggersroman,” as you once called it, is clearly turning out to be a Kunstlerroman – I think there’s no mistaking that. A hapless blue heeler pup, bred for the cattle stations of Australia, finds herself instead raised by a bumbling old musician and his wife in central Pennsylvania. Because they own no cattle, they can only provide her with the work of fetching a stick. However, because of her underemployment, she manages to learn to read and write (and even writes a couple parodies, a treatise on canine literacy, and a literary analysis of “Ulysses,” her favorite book). But because she can read, she discovers what kind of work she was truly bred for. This discovery results in an existential crises for the dog until she realizes that fetching a stick has adventitiously prepared her for writing with a pencil, with which she can so felicitously write her first novel, devoted, with the proper respect, to the four men her male master most admires but has never been able to live up to. What do you think? I’ve considered that maybe you should change your blog title to “A Portrait of the Dog as a Young Artist,” but I think permutations of the title of Joyce’s first novel are all too common, and “Walks with Mway” probably should stand. MM.
By the way, keep the “A” volume of the encyclopedia out. I’ll be needing to refer to the “Australia” article the whole time I’m writing. MM.
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