If I am repaired, can we meet again for the first time, in all of the places I have feared to go, and then, again, in all of the places I will have forgotten, if I am repaired?




SC




_____________________________



Here is the desk drawer in which all of my odds and ends are kept, tidbits that would otherwise never see the light of day.











Thursday, November 17, 2016

Pete's Little Saga, Part III


There’s a trailer between James’s place and mine, a 70's model Fleetwood, single-wide, rental, proof positive there's no Government enforced regulations in these parts as to what is and what is not inhabitable. 
          
    The Trailer's current and primary tenant is a tattooed and heavily pierced young man, named James as well. He's come over a couple of times, talks incessantly, and always as if he were about to cry. Up-the-road James, says he isn't quite right, but has only offered as proof, Trailer James's lack of Drivers Licence and middle school education. With Trailer Jamesfrom what I’ve gatheredlive a young woman, an undetermined amount of children (hers, I assume), a mother (also hers), who is missing a leg, and two dogs, Amy and Harley.

     Amy is a vicious little sausage of a dog. Not a wiener kind of sausage. Amy’s more along the lines of a Little Smoky, something you’d find stuffed and rigid in the pillowed recesses of some antique store—the classic lap dog.  

    Harley is a sausage as well, though much larger than Amy, a sort of black and tan Basset with stubby legs, mainsails for ears and a belly that is in constant need of rubbing.

      Trailer James and I seem to be caught in a similar Middle-School limbo. We never entirely grew up. He, I assume, for lack of education, and me, for lack of want. I've always been sort of a seventh-grader, doing things the way I thought grown-ups might do them—pretending. Trailer James might not be pretending so much.
     
     Never is my immaturity more evident than when it comes to dogs. Bring a dog into the room and you can pretty much count me out of the adult conversation. I love them with the complete abandon of a boy. I've never actually seen Trailer James get down in the grass and roll with Amy and Harley, like I do with my boy, Bo, but I wouldn't put it past him. Trailer James loves dogs, plain and simple.             


     Perhaps Pete sensed this love in passing. Perhaps his previous home had a similar abandoned quality to the Trailer. Perhaps the children, buzzing around the threadbare yard, were equally familiar. Perhaps Harley had invited him to come and sit on the porch. God knows it wasn’t Amy, viscous as she is. Whatever the case, the Trailer was where Pete arrived next on his journey.




      

Sunday, November 13, 2016

Pete's Little Saga II


Pete showed up at James’s first.
          
     James lives about a quarter mile up the road. The way he tells it, he was letting Pete camp out on his front porch until he found who Pete belonged to, but then Pete got a hold of one of his favorite camouflage clogs, and that brought an end to the charity. 

     Rather than call the Pound, James ran Pete off.  In the direction of my house. 




     
   



Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Pete's Little Saga, Part I


When they finished their business, Harley and Bobo trotted out across the cropped and amber hayfield, due west, the sun rising behind them.
       
     Pete and I watched. It was cold and wet. Even still, Pete whimpered and tugged at his lead, desperate to follow the big dogs.
       
     ‘Not a chance, buddy,’ I told him. ‘You’re a house dog now.’
       
     Pete’s a pup. A stray pup. A stray pup with an eleven-inch pin and four loops of wire holding his left femur together. Spiral fracture. Hit by a car. We assume.
       
     I paid for the fix. All in all about twelve hundred dollars. Twelve hundred dollars I don’t have.
       
     Why?

     Pete asked me to.