Gleaning

My friend Kim, in Tallahassee, collects bricks and copper and anything else of use from construction site dumpsters. He works a main-frame job but hates waste, uses the significant profits from his dumpster diving to finance his cast iron habit. At the University Foundry they recycle old sinks and tubs, but you need to add in some clean pure stuff, so he has to buy some ingots on occasion, pays for them with copper. Metal for metal. Cool exchange. D loaned me a quarter today (exact change for coffee is important at the pub if Hollie is on duty, because we're in a hurry) which will blossom into a dollar by Thursday: the bastard, he cheats me out of petty change, gleaning me blind. "To gather what is left by reapers" is the final definition of GLEAN in the 1st Random House Unabridged, god do I need a new dictionary, maybe the income tax refund. On the drive into work I stopped in the middle of Mackletree to try and figure out what the fuck a particular squirrel was doing. I'm sure it's the road salt, I tasted some. How did they learn that? At Janitor School there was a guy from Latvia, Janis Rainis, named for a writer I never got around to, so many of them, and I read fast; he never bought a drink and was drinking all the time. How good is that? (He could tell a story, lied like a sailor.) Glean is also what you take from a particular place, the gleaning, what you do with it. I do very little, examine words, my usefulness, what I might be worth. Power out, got to go. Up early this morning, out with a mug of coffee, find enough morels for a breakfast omelet and to saute with a steak for dinner. Good way to start the day, nail down the menu. Town with a list, laundromat, library, Kroger, lunch with D at the pub, oil-change, stop at the tire place and line up two new tires for tomorrow morning, then below the floodwall and down on the first terrace scouting posts for the installation. Nearly take a fall in the slick overbank deposit of silt, lubricated mud, slimy with hydrocarbons. Need a golf club, as summer walking stick, finding so many golf balls, a chipping wedge would be nice. Never played golf except for one round in Utah, at the height of my post-divorce what most people would call depression that I remember as being just dumb, sad, remorseful times. But I did inherit those genes that make you want to hit small balls with sticks. Janis, before I forget, was a big guy, and his left eye was glass, a penalty he swore was from looking through a knot-hole at his older brother having his way with a milk-maid; Janis ejaculated, let out a squeak and the milk-maid stabbed him in the eye with a hat pin. He told the story well. I remember nuanced variations in his tellings. We all do this, but with him, it was an art, granted him free booze in a competitive environment. That glass eye, every major function, ended up in someone's soup; still, they couldn't get rid of him, at 23 or 24 he had published the definitive text on Cobweb Removal in all the major mags, a giant by any standards, could weave string theory into cleaning corners. Brilliant in the field but had no sense of propriety, sacked from several jobs for touching. Just because you're Latvian doesn't mean you can, it only means they like your accent. Could be true of me, I suppose, but I offer in my defense a humble tale Janis often told: there was this farmer, he had several different daughters from several different mothers, all left with him, which is a testament to something, and he was looking for suitors, beating the bushes, hoping for something to happen. A pale-skinned guy from the East arrives, looking clean and well-shaved, might as well trust him, whatever he stamps in the snow, goodwill. Turns out he was the devil and there was hell to pay. You probably had to be there, it was a very funny story. Thunder storms, I'd better go. With morels, it's mostly a texture thing, like squid, an earthy background taste (or salty) and then it's gone. Ethereal. Ephemeral. Mushroom breath in the morning. Brush and floss. Took two days to get there, but it sounds right, correct, really, it's all I have to go by, what I do. Love your Iris.