Your Language

As in watch your language. That Brit has a dirty mouth but he speaks so well you hardly notice, in fact, it's charming. Read about a boat, D wants to build one, I have built one, but just one, the infamous pirogue that was a legend around the backwaters of Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard, she drafted just 2 inches and I could take her anywhere, raiding oyster beds of the rich and famous. Massachusetts law dictated ownership of certain waters, they went with the land, you had your house, and you had your oyster bed. Many changes of hands later, rich people end up with oyster beds they know nothing about, don't care about. I think it's true that I've never bought an oyster, can't remember ever, but I have eaten my weight many times over. The Vineyard, we were so poor there, our combined income wasn't enough to pay any taxes, but we lived like royalty. We were brewing beer and making wine, bartering the excess (most) for anything we needed, grew all our own food, bought wheat berries, green coffee beans, and sugar once a year, along with a 55 gallon drum of lamp oil, made the cash we needed for those items by selling oysters to restaurants. In three years there we published 18 books, hand-set letterpress mostly, but a couple of linotyped (and go back over to the mainland and linotype a couple of books in a day or two and bring them back), longer books, and the 'Leash Of Gaelic Tales" which was monotyped and the dude that did it for us brought the galleys over, we just had to put him up for a couple of nights and feed him, I've told the story, but I was remembering so clearly. Somebody would show up, and if you live on Martha's Vineyard people are always showing up, and we didn't have a phone, or electricity, for that matter, people just materialized out of the fog. In the extended summer is when this would happen, droves of people, night after night for weeks on end. We couldn't afford to feed them, not to buy stuff, so in the summer we'd feed them clam chowder, we'd gather the clams on the mandatory beach walk, I'd make the chowder, Marilyn would do something magic with vegetables, and always, strawberry shortcake for dessert, because we had a great strawberry patch and she could make such a nice shortcake. Later in the year, it was always oysters, lots of oysters, fixed a lot of different ways but usually roasted on a grill just until the shells opened. And for those other dishes, requiring raw oysters, I still bear scars. Now we were really popular, the food was amazing, we either had to open a restaurant or leave. We left, moved to Missip to cut down on the guests. And it worked. We were more than self-sufficient, we produced a surplus in everything we did for ourselves, make three pounds of butter, sell two, bottle three cases of beer and trade two, kill a grass-fed steer, sell half, make sausage to order. We were a well-oiled machine. Oh, the boat, right, it was a Guide Boat, which is a white-water boat you stand up in to row, fishing for trout, and there were pictures, it was lovely, and the article said that it was "only incidentally beautiful": what the builder was going for, directed toward, was beauty and function, it was hardly incidental. Watch your language. The Brit, I've noticed, asks a lot of questions for which he always has the answers; often, too, he'll roll off the end of a sentence with a kind of half-question, half-statement. I like listening to him. It's confusing. The emphasis. Also with Mary, who hasn't finished High School, is 19, dropped out of school to live with an abusive goth, the State should pay me for listening. I could dress it up and get a grant. Listen, you want to know the truth? Dreyfuss was correct. I went into the basement bathroom with some trepidation, you don't want to know. A pink elephant, my living room, I don't want to know. I'm still wondering what you said behind my back. No one treats me the same anymore, I'm like a janitor with contacts. The docent of choice. The go-to person for definition. It's tough to create the right image, I don't want to wear a cape, but I need to convince D he needs to come in and do a few things, while he's on vacation. I think I might be able to do this, I'll have to call in some markers, it's an iffy thing. I hate politics.