Grandfathers and Golf Carts
A pair of cardinals lives near this house. Sometimes they drop onto the feeder. Sometimes they clutch the telephone wires. Their red feathers are such a bright spot in all the brown and green of the Possum Creek environs.
A place named Soddy-Daisy should be from a Faulkner novel, maybe. But I’ve had a pedicure here, and every day I go swimming in the lake. Sometimes, a lightning bug flashes past my window at night, and I make a wish. Other times, our mostly blind neighbor waters his grass just before nightfall and all the lightning bugs go into a tizzy, flashing and flashing like a Pretty Lights concert.
If I had grown up here, I think I would have believed in fairies.
There is a red spider on my screen. The other day, my aunt and I saw a baby beaver trying to cross the highway. The value of a truck on a country road is that it is bigger than the car with which it will inevitably collide, head-on.
The loneliness of old age is primarily self-imposed. Or maybe it isn’t loneliness at all. Maybe we just get tired of making conversation because, after many years, we realize that no matter how great our passions have been, the world really doesn’t change. Or no matter how much the world changes, there is still only one way to go about being, so what’s the use in chatter.
Our needs are finite. Meeting them is inherently dissatisfying. To be human is to suffer, and wouldn’t we just be so bored if it were any other way?
Run with the dogs awhile.
