RUDIMENTS

RUDIMENTS, pt. 606 (cutting no corners) Storms came and storms went. Nothing much ever bothered me up there, weather-wise. The Winters were long and strong and brutal, but it was all cool. When you live way out in a rural place like that, you do realize you're on your own, and since there's not much else around you except natural things, there's not much that gets disrupted. Things like fire and medical emergencies, a heart attack, etc, you were sunk - probably 35 minutes at least before some sort of organized help would arrive. That's way too long for fire or death to be forestalled. So a form of fatalism was always in the cards being played. When the big snows came, and they invariably always did, the key was dealing with isolation and managing to squeak by. Trudging for long times, if need be, to get to others - places or supplies. I've already made mention of the snowmobile mercy missions, but tha...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 605 (never, ever got airborne) Well, summation time seems immanent but I'm not paying it any mind at all. The thing is, I never thought I'd see 70; it still astounds me. And all of this now is my way of a sort of recollecting what's transpired in the lunar (or was it solar?) haze of what went by me. I mostly can still remember teething and what that was like - then losing those teeth and getting new ones again. The second time mostly one at a time. Even back then I marked that as one of life's odd sequencings, and marked it accordingly as needing more study. I remember, out by Columbia Crossroads, some amazing trailer guy there, named Claude. No teeth had he, and a large family, and a wife. In a run down trailer a ways out in the woods. No one approached him much, ever - bad name, bad reputation, just somehow a bad taste in everyone's mouth about him. I never did find out what he did to...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 604 (good bones and built on rock) One thing I noticed right off the bat, out in the country like that, was (and it hit me as an epiphany, which is a cool way of saying I was 'thunderstruck,' which is another way of saying I was struck by lightning, in a metaphorical sense) - the people there were totally set and fixed and rational, and I was completely abstract. My thinking bore little reference to theirs. I just saw things in other ways, like from a complete other place. That was OK, and I realized it all, but it made for a challenge, in that it was my responsibility to make it kind of merge together. So as not to cause conflict or a meltdown all around me, of the entire situation. I'd snuck through, somewhere, and made it stick. The absolute last thing I could do was to begin mouthing about any real opinions or feelings. Now, psychologically, and even socially, that's a problem, when you hav...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 603 ('duck, squawk, shout, shoot) One time I spent, I swear, five hours in some dumb old guy's row boat - with him - on a pond he had on his property. It was a large enough pond, yes but not really big - nothing like you'd see in a park or anything. Anyway (always willing to say 'yes' has screwed me up a few times more than I mention), this guy saw that my pond had geese and ducks. He and his wife were getting old, like 70, then, and felt it was time to unload their 10 or 12 ducks. So they came up the road one day and asked  if I'd be willing to take the pond animals from them. I said yes. Problems abounded - and I should have realized, and so should he have. Our two little pond set-ups that we had on our property were doing fine and were just enough room and free-space, apparently, for the 6 or so ducks and geese we had. Once we put his new stock in, it was (suddenly) a crowd. To start t...