He's Back!

If anyone cares, I am maybe 2/3 of the way through weed whacking down the field.

Yesterday I had three break-downs. One took me to the shop for a lesson in winding the string properly.

The second to my leaned friend, Conrad, who fiddled with my dormant machine until it finally started, bellowing blue smoke. I guess I must have flooded it when I tried to start it.

The third was likely a result of spilling fuel during a refuel, so it ran dry far earlier than I expected.

This morning - I began at 7:30 after seeing that our neighbor's car was gone, so they must be away - I did two and a half tanks of work. The half tank was because I again ran out of gas way before I thought I ought to.

And, Voila!, I looked the thing over and discovered the line to the primer had worked its way loose. I put it back where it belonged and got in another hour of whacking.

This obsession was initially meant to present Lacey with a perfectly mowed field when she returns this afternoon from a work of work in California. I hope it's going to be enough for her to think I'm wonderful.

Because that field is sure as hell the best of me she's going to get for a while as I recover from backbreaking days of hard labor.

My eyes have often been bigger than my stomach, tough in recent years my old depression mentality seems to have given way to not wanting a plate piled high with more food than I can eat.

But now that metaphor has shifted to physical tasks.

I have trouble admitting to myself that my aging body is no longer what it once was.

Whether on the tennis court or our doing chores, I feel as if I ought still to be able to do what I did decades ago. And the tricky thing is that, as I begin, I often feel much like my old self. Though undeniably more rickety, not fluid and smooth in moving as I like to think I once was, it feels so good to be out and moving, that I think this time I will have regained my former strength and endurance.

So it is that, after the many who has brought his tractor and sickle bar over to cut our field the past many years, has now gone blind, I thought to get out my weed whacker and have a go myself.

Not only am I a klutz with the weed whacker - I have never learned to string it properly, so it doesn't feed string as it is supposed to and about every 20 minutes the string disappears back through the hole and I have to take another 20 minutes to figure out how to take off the head and get the string back.

But the big issue is my aging body. I go until I have run the thing our of fuel - about an hour - and then I either quit for the day, or take a rest, refuel and head out for another tankful.

The cutting is now about 2/3 done. And I am about 90% done.

Lacey had watched me stagger back into the house after a day of this, and called a guy to ask if he would cut it with his sickle bar. He said he would, though he couldn't get to us for another month or so, and because of the staggering increase in he cost of fuel, he would have to charge us $85 an hour, four times what we have paid in the past.

So, when Lacey left for a week of work in California, I called him off. I told him I was doing it with my weed whacker, and if I died out there, Lacey would likely call again and ask him to finish the job.

I've done two tanks of fuel today, and taken one trip to the guys who sell these things to get help in restringing.

There's a thunderstorm watch on; I better get back out there.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw
themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't
make it of wood, you must make it of words. -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.,
poet, novelist, essayist, and physician (1809-1894)

******

Before retiring Sunday night I stepped onto the screen porch to breathe in the air of a near perfect summer night. Something much larger than I must have just fallen into the pond, below where I was standing. It was thrashing around wildly. Too dark for me to make it out, by the time I found a flashlight it must have extricated itself and the drama had ended.

Deer? Bear? Drunk neighbor?

Unlike Tracey, our dairy farmer neighbor who came here the day he graduated from college and bought 25 cows, I backed into this untamed life late, quite without a sense of what might happen. When living in a Boston suburb we came for respite and one day saw this quaint old farmhouse selling for what my most prosperous parishioners paid for their cars.

Lacey had grown up in an old house in Connecticut. She knew about wells and septic systems and eating from your vegetable garden. I was a Rube. Turned out we had no septic, just a straight pipe into the pond. And during a thunder storm lightning hit our well, frying the pump.

Fixing those was expensive but less unsettling than the first bat that flew through our living room and up the stairs one sultry night. Or the skunk that took up residence under our front stoop for most of a summer. I asked Tracey what to do. Wait, he counseled. It’ll move eventually. Or you will.

The woodchuck, fattened on Lacey’s vegetables, waddled across the road in broad daylight one afternoon and our terrier broke her vigil at the stoop to charge and roll the thing. Once recovered from the initial attack, the woodchuck realized it was bigger than she was and stood its ground. Lacey managed to separate them with her tennis racket.

Cosmos is our first male terrier and we can’t let him run without supervision. Yesterday I turned to latch the screen door as we headed out for morning business, and by the time I turned around he had disappeared. For ten frantic minutes I called and scolded and shouted promised biscuits, my panic a toss-up between telling Lacey – who is in California on business – and losing my furry buddy.

Of course when it pleased him he reappeared, happy and soaking wet from hunting in the tall grass. When Lacey is away Jasmine, the Siamese, divides the night between perching on the bathroom sink calling for me to get out of bed and open the faucet for her to drink, and sneaking up while I’m asleep until, sensing her, I open my eyes and we’re eyeball to eyeball as she checks out my mustache for remnants of my supper.

I haven’t yet seen the bear Jay met coming up the road to his house the other day. Said he looked sleek and healthy, maybe the biggest bear he’d seen.

It’s going to cost me more to heat the place this winter than I pay in property taxes. I read that highway deaths have dropped markedly since gas passed $4. Some of our neighbors are cutting their trees for firewood. I don’t think there’s any way we can go back to how we all lived before seemingly cheap oil made life for most of us so sumptuous.

But it is arresting to have a glimpse of it.

I have been a New Yorker reader since before I could read.

My mother, who was from New York, loved getting it when we lived in the hinterlands of North Carolina and then, for goodness sake, in Manila, The Philippines. She sometimes read articles to me, and I always loved the cartoons.

I look forward to receiving the magazine each week, and give subscriptions to a couple of our kids.

So, I feel as if I am a part of the magazine's ethos.

Which is why I think I understand and cringe at the terrible judgment the editors used in running this week's cover showing Senator Obama as an Islamic terrorist and his wife as his gun moll.

The times I have made a mistake in judgment like that I wished I could drop into a hole in the ground. I bet - hope- the New Yorker editors do, too today.

It is a matter of being just a little to clever, too sophisticated, cynical, laughing at people who don't "get it."

I assume what they meant t do was to make fun of the ridiculous ideas floating around on the internet and in the political ether about Obama's background, identity and patriotism. The cartoon is meant to show how ridiculous the charges are.

Unfortunately, in addition to enraging people who already feel tender about the young senator's quote - misunderstood and taken out of context - during the Pennsylvania Primary, about angry people in dead-end lives turning to religion and guns as a substitute for success, it will be picked up by the nastiest right wing enforcers who will reproduce the image as if it were meant to be taken seriously.

The New Yorker has subscribers from al over the country, from all sorts and conditions of Americans - which, its being a magazine that still focuses on sophisticates from that sophisticated city - surprises me. Maybe it is because it features good writing and handsome ads and copy.

This week it overreached. I presume Senator Obama's candidacy will survive it. I wonder if the New Yorker editors will have the grace and sophistication to admit an error in judgment and issue a mea culpa?

If you read these things you know I am an Obama supporter.

You may also know that, like a lot of old 60s liberals, I have been uneasy about what began to seem to me like a shifting of his views to accommodate the center of political opinion as he faces the general electorate.

I think I worried more about his getting co-opted by his handlers than I did about the particular positions.

But then, as Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson - two of my heroes - expressed their unhappiness with him it began to occur to me that maybe the problem lies with those of us who assumed the young senator was either the reincarnation of John Kennedy, or at least the embodiment of the agenda we have been lamenting ever since the election of Ronald Reagan.

Obama says we haven't been listening to him and I think he is right. We have been listening to our own longings which he seemed to fit better than an presidential candidate in a generation.

I still believe he is the finest candidate in that span, but not because he will fulfill all that I have hoped since November 22, 1963. (In fact I am sure President Kennedy, had he lived and won a second term, would have ended up angering those os us who were credentialed liberals.)

I think he is a good candidate because he listens, he seems to consider, and then he makes up his mind.

One result is that he sometimes comes down on a different side from my side. I cringed when he told AIPAC that he supported an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel (He altered that later). And I wished he had stayed with his original stance against the bill to indemnify telephone companies against suits for allowing illegal surveillance of their customers simply because the government asked them to. I thought it was unnecessary for him to say he disagreed with the Supreme Court's decision saying a person could not be executed for rape of a child.

But so far I believe he has made those decisions based on his thoughtful convictions.

I think he is a member of my children's generation, a citizen of the world, with views formed by a different time.