Rain Day

Severe storms, tornado warning in Kentucky, ground is saturated, again, and the leaves are inside out. Want to just write all day but too much lightning, so I read and make some notes. More "Seven Pillars...", then the Best Short Stories 1993, then some essays in the New York Review of Books. Maybe the last morel omelet for late breakfast, way too much coffee, early dinner of Pulled Chicken Thigh Green Chili. Storm warnings lift at 5:12, though still raining. It was on a September day much like this, the Fall I was a Junior at Janitor College, at 5:12 PM, we got word that a classmate had died, Olaf Kellervo, killed by a sugar beet. Another huge fucker, but the sweetest guy you'd ever know, he had gone over to the UP to get a load of mushrooms, some magic mushrooms, but mostly a large haul of Agaricus Augustus, 'The Prince', the most prized of the whole agaricus family, and around the old white pine stumps in the UP, because of late summer rains, there were hundreds of pounds of mushrooms. The Upper Peninsula is stingy in most things, since she was raped, but she does produce some fine mushrooms (deep-fried battered dill pickles, smoked white fish, bad coffee) and Olaf, we called him Rosco, because there was a beautiful toilet, in the museum, a wooden, lined, water tank that mounted to the wall, with a pull chain, and a lovely seat with surround, and Olaf could just reach up and take the tank off the wall for cleaning, so he became Rosco because the toilet was a Rosco. You never know how these things are going to happen. I was mostly known as Birdbrain. So Rosco was on a mushroom run, we could piece together the trip from certain stops he always made, he adored roadside food, a trip with him was the seventh circle of hell, he stopped at any place that sold food of any sort, so mostly he did these trips alone; he liked to drive fast, he drove a '56 Ford convertible and the sun had come out, after many days of rain, and he had lowered the top. He was following a farm truck loaded with sugar beets heading to the factory, a serious business there, then, running 24/7 during harvest, probably still, I don't know, can't keep up with everything, and a really large beet bounced off the truck, a pot-hole on Rt. 2, I can still see it today, what I imagine must have happened, he wanted to pass and had gotten too close. The witnesses, two families in motor homes, traveling next behind, east and west, were close, and in agreement that a big sugar beet bounced off the truck and struck the driver in the head. He was dead before he hit the abutment. Cleaning Operating Rooms is a good test. What do you do with that? Pieces of skull, hank of hair, what I thought you meant. I'm not looking for compromise, I'm more than willing to be sacrificed, but Rosco was down. I collected his body bag, dug his hole, sand-blasted his tombstone in granite, hauled from Vermont, and that was the end of that, until tonight, until I remembered.