Author: wetleatherdog@gmail.com

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I Take Full Responsibility, And I’d Do It Again

Flip-flops Bow Tie o’ the Day has convinced me to come clean about something I have done for decades. I admit it. I did it. A lot. I confess: I have hit my mother almost every summer, more times than I can count. I have hit her with The Chronicle, The Salt Lake Tribune, and my notebook. I have hit her with a flip-flop, a dish towel, and a fly swatter. In fact, I have hit her mainly with fly swatters. To be fair, I have only hit her at her own request—whenever she’s said something along these lines: “Sis, there’s a fly on me and I can’t reach it. Hit it! Hurry!”Mom cannot abide a fly anywhere, especially on her.

At first, I couldn’t swat the fly on Mom hard enough to kill it because I worried I’d hurt her. It is antithetical to everything I am to raise a hand—or fly swatter—to Mom for any reason whatsoever, but when the gentleness of my swatting merely urged the fly to go somewhere else, Mom fussed at me bigly for being tentative and not annihilating the offending fly dead, dead, dead when I had the chance. She gave an order: “If there’s a fly on me, hit me as hard as you need to, but kill that fly!”

I must tell you I have never seen anyone enjoy seeing a dead fly as much as Mom. She relishes it. Seeing a squashed fly with its guts dangling from the head of the fly swatter has always reduced Mom to a primal glee I can barely describe, no matter who killed it. More than once, I have observed Mom so elated about killing an annoying stalker fly in the house that I thought she was going to drive up to Curley’s and dance on the bar in celebration. If I could have, I would have had the head of every fly she ever so happily obliterated mounted and hung on the wall in the family room right by where Dad’s moose, elk, antelope, and deer heads hung in all their taxidermy glory.

And so, over the years of purposely hitting my mother with any available swatting devices, I became a pro at swatting any fly who dared light on Mom—all the way to their flattened deaths, while doing as little damage to Mom as possible. It’s all in the wrist, as they say. I hit Mom for so many summers that I believe it qualifies as a full-fledged family tradition. I hate flies landing on me, too, so I plan to hand down this semi-violent-but-necessary summer tradition. Thus, I will pass down my cherished quiver o’ fly swatters to the next generation—along with the order to kill dead, dead, dead any fly dumb enough to land on me. Mom will be so proud to know the family tradition will live on past us both.

FYI You can never have enough fly swatters. When you see one, buy one. They are like reading glasses. You use both of these items for a few minutes at a time, then you lay them down when you’re done, and then you forget where you last had them. I say, cut to the chase: make sure you have a fly swatter and a pair of reading glasses in every room of the house. It’ll be incredibly useful for weeks or months. Eventually, you won’t be able to find any of the reading glasses or fly swatters in any room, yet again. You’ll lose them all. When it gets to that point, it is a sign it’s time once again for you to clean and organize your house. Some people do “spring cleaning.” I do “reading glasses and fly swatter” cleaning.

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TIE O’ THE DAY Wishes Y’all A Merry Labor Day

When I was a wee sprite, Mom rarely commandeered the living room television. Before cable, satellite, streaming, and even VCR’s, we had a grand total of 5 channels in Utah from which to chose what to watch: ABC, NBC, CBS, KBYU, and KUER. That was it. Televisions were pricey back then, so most families I knew only owned one, and we were no different. Eventually, Mom and Dad got a color TV (with remote!) in their bedroom, and I got a clunky and tiny black-and-white TV set (remote-less) in my bedroom.

In the evenings of my single-TV childhood, Dad was kind of the unofficial boss of what the family watched, although he generally let whoever had a strong preference for a certain show watch whatever they wanted. I guess you could say Dad let anybody who was at home figure out what we were going to watch between ourselves, and he went along with it. He did exercise ultimate veto power whenever he felt it necessary to our benefit or for his own viewing sanity. When it was down to just me, Mom, and Dad left in the house, I fully admit I pretty much chose our nightly living room TV schedule. Dad and Mom both seemed fine with my choices, mostly. However, I give Dad props for enduring hours of TV shows he would rather have missed. When faced with a program like The Smothers’ Brothers Comedy Hour, Laugh-in, Chico And The Man, or The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, Dad sat in his chair, silently gritting his dentures, and reading The Salt Lake Tribune, his hunting magazines, the encyclopedia, and volumes of Popular Science. He read harder when I chose to watch shows like Mod Squad, One Day At A Time, All In the Family, Charlie’s Angels, Hill Street Blues, Police Woman, Facts of Life, and Columbo. He read extra hard when I wanted to watch artistic PBS offerings on KBYU or KUER—like Masterpiece Theater, classical music concerts from Carnegie Hall, and ballet and plays from Lincoln Center. Eventually, I took pity on Dad and decided arts programming was too problematic for him to watch, so I regularly retreated to the tiny, remote-less, black-and-white TV in my bedroom for the majority of my bigly art-viewing choices.

It was universally understood in our house—like the Law of Gravity—that the unalterable living room television default for Sunday day viewing was NFL football or NBA basketball, depending on the season. LDS General Conference weekends were the exception to the NFL/NBA rule. Likewise, the living room TV was always tuned to the national news (usually Walter Cronkite) at 5 PM, and the local news at 6 and 10 PM, every day. No exceptions. Other than that, what we watched was a mostly civil whoever-calls-it-first matter.

Mom liked to watch Hawaii Five-O, Barnaby Jones, and a show called Petrocelli, which was a remarkable TV show on NBC that didn’t make it past its first season. Mom rarely had a programming preference—except when it came to a handful of occasionally shown movies. When any one of these movies was going to be broadcast (usually on KUER), Mom was adamant about watching it on the bigly living room TV, no matter what else anybody might have wanted to watch. The list is small, but clearly I remember it well: A Summer Place, An Affair to Remember, any Doris Day/Rock Hudson film, The Days of Wine and Roses, I Want to Live, The Student Prince, and Picnic. I loved watching Mom sit down to completely immerse herself in watching these movies. I loved seeing how much she loved letting the cooking go, letting the dishes go, letting preparing her Sunday School lesson for the Sunbeams go. For these films, Mom stopped flitting around the house from one duty needing to be done to another duty needing to be done, if only for a brief while. For my part, I would secretly take the phone off the hook, so there could be no outside interruption to Mom’s state of movie grace. Throughout my life, I rarely saw Mom light somewhere and let it all go for a couple of hours. But for the duration of these only-occasionally-shown movies, Mom was enthralled and perfectly still.

It’s Picnic that prompted me to write this post. The events in Picnic take place on a Labor Day weekend. I have long had the Picnic DVD, and I have watched the movie on almost every Labor Day since I managed to find it. Suzanne is not impressed with the film, so she’s watched it with me only once. So I am usually an audience of one when I throw it into the DVD player—unless you count whatever dog(s) we have at the time. I like the movie, separate from how I associate the movie with indelible memories of watching it with Mom. Yes, William Holden is too old to be the character he’s playing, And the scene with the-train-racing-through-the-tunnel symbolism is a bad cliche. But the writing is otherwise generally strong. William Holden and Kim Novak give fine performances. I would dance to the song “Moonglow” at a Labor Day picnic with either one of them. The air sizzles when they dance to it. Above all else with this film, what will stand the test of time is Rosalind Russell’s performance as an aging-and-looking-for-love school teacher. Her acting is beyond fantastic. I mean—Russell’s acting in this flick approaches Meryl Streep realms at times. She makes her character a dynamic blend of spot-on smarts, biting humor, and devastatingly desperate and perpetual disappointment. The movie is hilarious and sad and and hopeful. With a small side order of cheesy.

Oh, I know none of y’all are ever going to sit down and stream Picnic, and most of you have likely never even heard of it before. But I watched my mom watch it a couple of times when I was in my kidhood, and that alone has sealed it as one of my all-time fave films. If you had ever watched Picnic with Mom, I have no doubt you’d feel exactly the same way I do about putting it on a movie pedestal. Every Labor Day when I watch it again, I feel like Mom is sitting right here beside me—content and still and entirely unconcerned with any world beyond the movie. She is purposely—but temporarily—not doing something for somebody else. She is relaxed in her soul, and the wrinkles fall away from her face. The wrinkles fall from both our faces, really. Mom and I are exactly how I always see us.

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A Dip In The Deep End

Bow Tie o’ the Day and I are on our way over to take a dip in the swimming pool. I would snap photos of our swimming exploits, but I know better than to take my phone anywhere near a swimming pool. My age-related, intermittent hand shakiness would likely send the phone right into the pool if I attempted to shoot an aquatic selfie. You’ll have to make do with a photo of me in my old timey swimsuit, before I get to the pool. The swimming pool belongs to the HOA, but this week every year, it’s almost exclusively mine. The neighborhood kids are back in school, and their parents are so relieved the kids are out from underfoot that I think they are staying home to recuperate from their child-filled, hectic summer. I’m glad the kids are back in school, and I’m equally glad the parents seem to have no desire to visit the pool right now—because the pool is once again almost mine-all-mine. It closes for the season after Labor Day. But during this week—and before the Labor Day weekend—it is usually deserted during the day except for me and Bow Tie. The pool might as well be in our back yard, which I guess it already sort of is because there’s only one house between us and it. The only thing I’m sad about when I’m alone in the pool is that there is no one to witness my spot-on, dead Rasputin pose, which I feel compelled to re-create every single time I am playing in water. (I am convinced I was Rasputin in a former life.)

You have no idea how acutely I am tempted to let Skitter play in the pool with me. I fight the temptation every year, and so far, I’ve been able to resist its lure. But I know who I am, and if I were you, I would bet bigly money on it that one of these coming summers I will sneak Skitter into the swimming pool—infuriating the HOA and incurring a hefty fine for me to pay. It will be so worth it to me to do it. It will be a phenomenal tale to tell y’all when it finally happens. I’m just not up to the hassle it could stir up this year. There’s currently too much contention in the American air already. I don’t want to add to its pollution. Maybe next summer I’ll be bad. 🏊‍♀️ 🐶

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Stop That Rude ‘Tude, Dude

The next time I spout off about how we need to remember that the bigly commandment which encompasses the essence of all the others is to love our neighbor, poke me in the eye. Twice. Remind me of the poet, Robert Frost’s line about how “Good fences make good neighbors.” Tell me about how boundaries can be a blessing. Oh, who am I kidding? I understand Frost’s point about boundaries, but—schmuck that I am—I will always err on the side of looking out for my neighbors, especially if they are my literal neighbors. You see, I was raised in the vein of John Donne’s “No man is in island,/ Entire of itself,/ Every man is a piece of the continent,/ A part of the main.” See how I blather on about our connectedness and responsibility to each other? So—like I said initially in this post—when I get honking on about looking out for literal neighbors, poke me in the eye. Twice.

Tuesday is our weekly garbage day. Every Monday night before I go up to bed, I drag our garbage can out to the curb. Every other week, I put out our recycling can with it. The cans are usually emptied by 8 A.M. Tuesday morning. Yesterday, however, no bigly trucks came to empty either can. We live on a sort of obscure Centerville street, and about once a year, the garbage and recycling company misses our row of town homes. At noon, I called the company to let them know our street had been missed for collection. They were able to send out a garbage truck to do the missed garbage pick-up immediately, but the recycling would have to wait to be collected until the next day, which is today. I wanted to alert my neighbors to leave their recycling cans at the curb for one more night—despite what the HOA rules say—so they won’t have to hold onto their recycling until the next scheduled recycling day, which is in another two weeks. I didn’t want to interfere with my neighbors’ days by knocking on each of their doors to explain the situation, so I opted for the ever-useful Post-It Notes route. I wrote a note (as seen here) on a Post-It, which I stuck on the lid of each recycling can on the street—where they would see the note before rolling their still-full recycling can back into their garages. (Please note that I chose to use the newer “Extreme” Post-It Notes which stick through all manner of wind, rain, snow, temperature, and Mormon crickets, so there would be no possibility of unstuck and lost messages.)

So there I was—ambling down the street, placing a handwritten Post-It message on each neighbor’s recycling can. I stuck the last note on the last garbage can. No sooner had I placed it when some guy I vaguely recognize as one of my neighbors yells out the window of his approaching car, “Why are you touching my recycling? You have no right to touch my recycling.” So much for doing a silent good deed with the intention of not wanting to disturb my neighbors. I don’t know anything about this guy who’s yelling at me, and this guy clearly doesn’t know me—which is very odd since I am the only one in my neighborhood who wears a Bow Tie o’ the Day over to the Great Wall o’ the Housing Development Mailboxes 6 days per week. I tried to explain my mission to the man, but he wasn’t giving me an opening to say anything. His diatribe went on, and I finally turned around and walked back home, wondering when it started to be common for people to begin by assuming the worst of their neighbors. When did it become the fashion to begin every kind of human interaction by metaphorically balling up one’s fists and taking a fighting stance? Apparently, in this neck of the woods, it began sometime before yesterday afternoon.

But guess what. This morning, I noticed that the bantam doofus must have read my note, because he left his recycling at the curb overnight. I do not expect he will mosey over to my place to apologize to me or thank me for my Post-It Note efforts at following what I consider to be the bigliest of commandments. Nor do I need him to do so. 🥊 🤺 🤼‍♂️

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Socks, And Books, And Subterfuge

Socks Bow Ties o’ the Day and I were trying very hard to think of a way to wrap up my posts about my preoccupation with books. But we quickly realized I can never completely wrap up said book-y posts. I will never run out of book stories or my praise for books and reading, so think of this as the end of official book-related posts, but for only a limited time. Let’s consider this an intermission of sorts. Book posts and references will no doubt show up in posts from time to time—until I eventually declare it to be time for another series o’ posts about my printed and paged friends.

When I was in the 1st and 2nd grades at Delta Elementary School, there was a silly rule that girls had to wear dresses. This was a stoopid rule, and I don’t even think it was officially written down anywhere. It was just the way it was. I cannot begin to tell you how much the “rule” curtailed the girls’ playground actvities. Even if you wore shorts under your dress, hanging upside down on the monkey bars was only for the bravest of girls who were willing to risk getting in trouble for what gravity does to a dress when you hang upside down from the monkey bars. Heck, even hanging right-side-up on the monkey bars created a problem—especially if you were up high. Boys seemed to like looking up at what could be seen of girls simply playing on the monkey bars, but that was just a creepy things girls had to endure if they wanted to climb the monkey bars. The slide, the merry-go-round, and the swings had different, but very much the same, dress perils.

When wearing dresses during those early elementary years, I always wore white knee socks. Occasionally, I got a beige pair of knee-highs. What excitement! The best thing about wearing knee socks was—and still is—the stealth they can provide for carrying contraband. In my case, the contraband was usually a small book and mini notebook and pencil. And Chapstick! I always had Chapstick. Still do. I walked around with bulging socks most of the time when I wore dresses, because girl dresses tended to come with no pockets—yet another stoopid “rule” the clothing manufacturers followed as if it were a law. Who ever came up with the not-brilliant idea that girls didn’t carry stuff and didn’t need pockets? Had these clothing people never seen a real girl in the world, in her natural environment? I’ll make this simple for clothing manufacturers who still make pocketless clothes meant for girls: every being on the planet needs pockets—especially children. There is no exception to this.

My knee-high socks also bulged with raw sliced turnips whenever they were part of the school lunch in elementary school. I was one of the few kids who liked turnips. Sometimes, the lunch lady would get in a huff and wouldn’t excuse a table if every kid hadn’t taken at least one bite out of each food item on their plate. When turnip slices were on the menu, I let everyone at my table know that I would be more than happy to take their turnip slices off their hands ASAP so we could get excused for lunch recess. Kids at nearby lunch tables got in on my scheme too. I’d accept the turnips until my socks were packed. With socks chock-full, I had the lower legs of The Elephant Man. The lunch lady would excuse our table, with nary a turnip to be seen on a kid’s tray, but I had to time my getaway with utmost care—for when she was looking in an entirely different direction. If she had laid eyes on my temporarily deformed legs, she would have made the coming years of my elementary lunchroom life more Hell than it already was. I never got caught.

Of course, even though I didn’t get caught with the turnips, it doesn’t mean I didn’t do that thing every kid has to try: I stole something. I stole a book from the Rexall, a Delta drugstore which used to be on the corner where Curley’s is now located. The movie, The Godfather had just come out in movie theaters, and I wanted to read the book. I was a sad case that day because the city library didn’t have it, nor did the elementary library (duh!). It was checked out of the Bookmobile, and there was a waiting list. The high school secretary told me I couldn’t use DHS’ library due to my excessive youth, so I don’t even know if DHS had it. And then, on my way home from my ever-disappointing search for the un-findable book—The Godfather, somewhere, anywhere in the environs of my hometown—I saw the book, my day’s Holy Grail, on the rotating kiosk of paperbacks at the Rexall: The Godfather, by Mario Puzo. My family didn’t have a charge account the Rexall at the time, and I did not have the 4 bucks to purchase the book. I had to have this book. Must. Have. Book! I casually stuffed it in my sock when no one was looking my way. It wasn’t easy to get it in the sock because The Godfather was one of those bigly thick books I don’t cotton to. I sort of slid-walked sideways to the door closest to me. I made it out of the Rexall with my horrible crime undetected. I amscrayed. I skedaddled. I booked it (pun intended). I fled like the scared petty criminal I knew I was. Who knew I could run home so fast in a dress and with a fat book deep in one of my knee-high socks?!

At first, I didn’t feel guilty at all about being a book thief. It was right after I finished reading The Godfather that I began to feel contrite. I had been wrong to steal it, and I felt the abject guilt in every cell of my body. I worried myself sleepless. I couldn’t secretly return the book because it was evident someone had read it. I knew I should tell my parents and the Rexall owner what I had done. But I took the chicken-y way out to try to absolve me of my guilt: when I had saved up the $4, I surreptitiously left it on one of the two Rexall counters by the cash register. No note of apology, no nothing—just the $4. I didn’t feel like I was ever quite even with the Rexall, but I did feel considerably better. And, most importantly, I knew I did not want to feel the way stealing made me feel, ever again.

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Not A Bark Was Heard

I had a chatty day in Utah County yesterday. Skitter and I drove my jalopy truck down to visit my college pal, Jane. It was a roaring talkfest for hours, as per usual. When we get together, our opinions on the state of the world flow endlessly. For some reason, Skitter didn’t utter a word during our visit. She preferred napping at my side. The rigors of intense conversation sometimes overwhelm Skitter, so she retreats into whatever doggie dreamland her walnut brain takes her. She probably has more sense than any human I know. 🤠

Check out this past post from August 2018:

HAVING A THOUGHT, I AM NOT

Bow Tie o’ the Day and I can’t think of anything to write about this morning. We haven’t done anything yet, and we have no plans to do anything later. Our schedule is wide open. There are no errands needing to be done. The house is clean. Laundry’s done. (That laundry thing was a lie, but we don’t want to do it.) And for some reason, we aren’t even having opinions about anything. And there are no stories in our heads. What do we say here? How do we write this post, with nary a topic to write about?

I have no doubt you’re thinking we should just skip a post or two and give y’all a break. Nope. It ain’t our style. You know the “not post” thing is not gonna happen. Right now, in fact, as I’m typing away, I’m thinking maybe I should just see how long a “there’s-nothing-here” post I can write. I’m a writer, so I should be able to b.s. about nothing whatsoever for a while. I can treat it like a writing exercise—you know. Just treat it like a challenge for my abilities: jabber about nothing. And that would be all well and good, except that no matter how much “nothing” anyone writes about, the sentences are always about something. I mean—sentences have nouns and verbs and all types of other words, and you can’t have a noun without the rest of the sentence saying something about it. It’s the same with a sentence’s verbs and its other words. Every word is about something. So nobody can ever write about nothing, really. In fact, you’ve just read a string of words that are pretty much about nothing—except they are also about me trying to write b.s. There. You’ve now read over 300 words. About nothing and something at the same time. 🙃

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ALERT

The William Gaddis book I wrote about in the previous post is titled THE RECOGNITIONS, not, as the spell-check decided to re-name it, The Reconciliations. My apologies.

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About My Relationship With Books: Part 4

For a while, one of the cups I kept in the cupboard at the Pub for my Diet Coke had these words emblazoned on it: “I LIKE BIG BOOKS AND I CANNOT LIE”—a reference to the 1992 Sir Mix-a-Lot song, “Baby Got Back.” The point of the cup was to proclaim my undying adoration for books galore. Technically, however, I don’t like big books, and the words on my cup which said I do, are evidence I lied about it. It doesn’t matter how interesting the book is, if it’s much over 300 pages, it feels like work to me to finish it. I especially despise a long book that requires me to devote more than a week to it. After a week of reading, if I still haven’t finished it, I feel trapped. I feel as if I’m weeping and wailing and gnashing my teeth all the way to the book’s bloody last page. I’m at war with the damn tome. You can’t just jump ship and abandon a book when you’ve already spent a week on it. You have to finish reading every last word of it. It’s a point of honor—even if the book itself turns out to be worthy of only a “meh” rating.

Just last week I decided to read a somewhat obscure book I’d always heard about but hadn’t yet read: The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, originally published in 1955. I ordered it online, and less than twelve hours later, Alexa informed me prime had delivered it to my doorstep. I was excited to begin reading—until I opened the front door and saw the thick package. I lifted up the package and my spirits sunk further because it wasn’t just a thick book, it was an unusually heavy, thick book. I tore open the package, hoping maybe other books I had ordered had been shipped with it—thus, accounting for the thickness and the weight of the package. But no, it was just the one book. The Recognitions has 933 pages. I was bereft.

It’s a psychological cootie I get: I look at a book with more than 300 or so pages and think, “I will be dead before I can finish reading that bigly book. I don’t have enough time to read a book that long.” But really, I’m going to read books anyway. Between all the books I’m reading simultaneously, I’m going to read that many pages and more in a week’s time. Logically, I know it should make no difference how many pages a book has, but it really does make a difference to me. Lots of pages means lots of distress for me. I would have no anxiety about reading every page of a 1000-page book if it was presented as 3 or 4 separate and less husky books. My Bigly Book Anxiety is simply one more peculiarity in a catalog of my many reading peculiarities.

I have a theory or two about why I am anti-bigly books. The first theory is simple: most lengthy books I’ve read seem to be trying to be long, at the expense of trying to be great. I have rarely read a bigly book that couldn’t have used a good editor to do a more thorough weeding of the manuscript before publication. Too many good writers have a tendency to want to put every jot and tittle into their story. They like to hear their own writing voice. They won’t cut out a fine piece of writing that might be lovely, but is totally unnecessary to the story. I think they are secretly afraid they’ll never get published again, so their book has got to be “the” book to end all books. Sometimes these writers think they have a lot to say so they write a 1,500 page book, when the story could be beautifully told in 200 pages—with much more impact and clarity, without all the blah, blah, blah to cloud it. So, yes, I am saying that most stories don’t need to be like the Primary song in which the pioneer children sang as they walked, and walked, and walked, and walked, and walked, and walked. And walked. A story needs to end at some point, preferably while you’re still alive to read it.

My second theory—the one I think most explains my disliking bigly books—has to do with my assertion that reading is an activity. It is doing something, in the same way shooting hoops is doing something. Many of you probably heard something like this from a teacher or parent more than once when you were a kid, holed up in a chair reading a book: “It’s such a nice day outside, you need to get out of this house and ride your bike.” Like reading is the same as the Deadly Sin of sloth, or loitering. Reading is not wasting time. To read is to engage with other people in other places, dealing with other situations. Reading takes you far outside yourself, even as it simultaneously plunges you deeper inside yourself. Reading requires your attention. It requires skills. It changes you. When you finish reading a book, you are not the same person you were when you began it. I’m not overstating this point: When you give yourself up to it, the act of reading—with your full and open attention—enlarges and transforms you, one book at a time, in a multitude of ways, some of which you might not even discover until years later.

So how does this relate to my dislike of long books? For me, I like to experience these transformations regularly and often—every 300 pages or so. It’s a kind of high, and I’m proud to be addicted. To read a lengthy book is to defer the transformation for so long that some of it gets lost along the way. At the end of a bigly book, I often feel more exhausted than changed. I feel like I’ve been through an active experience, but my brain is too wrung out for me to fully care about understanding the implications. This aversion to bigly books is an eccentricity that is likely due to some sort of failing in my personal reading habits. I will own my failure. But, to be honest, I’m not all that interested in trying to alter my reading routines and proclivities at this point in the game. I am what I am, and I read how I read. I like regular-sized books, and I cannot lie.

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About My Relationship With Books: Part 3

Cursive is not my strong suit. My printing suffers from sever bouts of illegibility as well.
This is the “lost” book today, as homely as when I originally “lost” it.

I once, accidentally-on-purpose, “lost” a book I had checked out from the Delta City Library because I wanted it for myself—and I wanted it right that minute. I checked it out knowing I had no intention of bringing it back. I know kids do things like that sometimes, but I must confess I was 36 at the time. It was in the year 2000, and I had just moved back to Delta from Maryland. I hadn’t bought my Hombre truck yet, so I couldn’t drive out of Delta to find a bookstore where I could try to get my own copy of the book. I couldn’t order it online because I needed it NOW. And I probably wouldn’t have been able to find a copy anyway since the book was not in print at the time. Two weeks later, I out-and-out lied when I confessed to the librarian I had “lost” the book. I paid the fine for losing it, which meant I paid the cost of the book—something like $26. Thus, I can truthfully say I bought the book, even though we all know I “lost” it with purpose and with glee.

And just what was this extraordinary book which so caused me to confiscate it for my eyes only? What book did I decide Delta library patrons could be deprived of, for my selfish benefit? It was a book about taxidermy—a field I couldn’t care less about. Its title was HOME BOOK OF TAXIDERMY AND TANNING, written by Gerald J. Grantz, published in 1969. I have no idea what specifically caused me to even pick it up and start thumbing through it s pages when I first encountered it on its library shelf. I could see from its check-out card that the book hadn’t been checked out for almost a decade before I borrowed it, so I didn’t feel too guilty for wanting to “lose” it. All I know is that when I opened up the pages of the smelly, misshapen, ugly book about taxidermy, I was inspired by sentences like these: “Spread the scalp out, flesh side up.” and, “Fold the skin once, flesh-to-flesh, roll it up and place it on a sloping surface to drain.” and, “Now fill the shell with chopped excelsior, tamping with a dowel.” I was intrigued by its jargon, and I simply had to have that book right then and there. Its pages immediately sparked in me this brilliant idea to write a book-length series of poems using taxidermy processes and terminology as metaphors for life and love.

Yes, folks, it is creativity like that which keeps me raiding my piggy bank as I approach my 60’s. I am rolling in the coinage. I have distinguished myself as a writer who has ideas about writing the absolutely least marketable books I possibly can. I live for the thrill of finding the perfect words to write the things most people don’t want to read. I’ve got a knack for it, coupled with all the wasted skills. Bearing this in mind, please be assured I’m perfectly content to know that an old book about taxidermy made me a minor thief of public resources, sort of. I got a groovy idea for writing a book of poems out of it—a book which nobody will ever publish or read. And that’s good enough for me. 😆 📄 📝 🖋 📖 🤓

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About My Relationship With Books: Part 2

In college and graduate school, whenever I was down to my last few bucks before payday, I often chose to buy a book instead of buying more practical things like socks and bacon. I’m not talking about buying textbooks that were required for my classes. This went beyond necessary books. I’m talking about buying books that could live on my own bookshelves for all time, but were irrelevant to my immediate academic or practical pursuits. It was common knowledge among my peers at that time that I would choose a book over food in almost every instance. For me, it was a no-brainer to buy a book. It wasn’t difficult to skip a meal or two, every once in a while. Yes, I had access to plenty of libraries, but one of my book-reading eccentricities involves my propensity for making notes in the book margins and underlining or bracketing a magnificent word, or a smart point, or a lovely sentence as I read. Libraries tend to frown on the type of collateral graffiti I perpetrate on books as I read, so I learned young that it was better for me—and everyone else involved—if I have my own copy of a book to read.

So how did I acquire food to keep me alive and passing my college courses when I was broke because I bought books instead of groceries? Trust me when I tell you this: Saturdays are a veritable feast of free food at the grocery store. Saturday is the day I could count on there being free samples of food products being offered to—even thrust upon—customers as they made their way up and down the grocery aisles. Of course, technically, I wasn’t shopping. But I assured myself it was okay for me to sample because I was there browsing for items I would be buying when my paycheck hit the bank and I could return to the store with check that wouldn’t bounce. The key to making this food sampling strategy work was to alternate the stores where I grazed. I didn’t want to become “that suspicious customer” who eats all the samples at the same store every Saturday, and who then ends up being trespassed from the premises forever, with the aid of a kindly police officer. On any given Saturday, I’d browse and sample at 1 or 2 grocery stores—whatever it took to get a not-so-balanced meal. The other days o’ the week were trickier. I discovered that pastry shops and delis always had free samples, so they were good targets, though their offerings were meager and not very filling. At least once a week, somebody in my circle invited me to a bbq or party of some kind, and it was okay to just show up empty-handed and leave with some leftovers. It was okay that I couldn’t contribute to the party-at-hand because when I was flush with cash I could be counted on to repay the meal by hosting the bbq or party myself. We were starving students together, but mostly—thankfully—not all at the same time.

The best how-to-get-food-because-I’m-hungry-and-I-bought-a-book-with-my-last-10-dollars-instead-of-food scheme was the funnest for me to carry out. I only had to use it when I was in college. I’d invoke the pretense of a game of scavenger hunt, for which I was the only participant. I’d write out a list of food items to be scavenged. I stuck with the basics, so as to not make it hard for the strangers I would encounter: a piece of bread, an egg, a slice of cheese, an apple, and so forth. I conspicuously carried my list with me to a stranger’s front door, so I looked legit. I’d knock or ring and the innocent soul would open the door. At which time, I’d inform the stranger that as part of a party game, I’d been sent on a scavenger hunt, and I wondered if they might have—and could give me—one or more of the items on my list. I have to say this about the Weber State University-area communities where I lived while getting my degree: nobody ever sent me away empty-handed. And then I’d take my scavenged treasures home to whatever sketchy house or apartment I was living in at the time, and I would build myself a meal—which I would eat while reading a book.

See what I did right there in that last sentence? I organically ended up right back at books, which is exactly where my higher education food trouble originated. (That’s a writer’s trick.)

BTW Keyboard keys Tie o’ the Day reminds us that books have to be written before they can be read.