My Plate

If someone had warned me, I might have taken the day off. Just not what I was expecting. Of course I would be here, I have to crate the last three glass pieces. Electric and phone out at the house. Dead trees from the fire took out the phone line, and the nice lady at the electric cooperative said, "Well, Mr. Bridwell, you are the end of the line". I knew that. Storm debris everywhere. High winds and several rounds of hail, which actually sounded terrific on the metal roof. You can't really do anything else at that point, but listen. I've been writing some poems, on the side, but I don't keep copies. They strike me as very flat. I'm playing with that flat surface. When I finally hear myself in them, I'll start including them. They pursue a line I've been interested in for years. The window crew arrived just after me, a small grant is paying to change-out and old single-pane, for something low-e, double paned, and argon filled. Good crew, they know what they're doing, I monitor them. I crate and clean. I need to take out the trash, but Sharee arrives with the student show two days early. I can deal with that, I just have to make some adjustments in my schedule, which, after all, was just an outline. Of course I cut myself, on the raw edge of some OSB Brent had used to make the shipping crates. A little blood on the packing materials. I think it's a nice touch. A little blood never hurt anyone. I take a walk in the woods and come back bleeding like a stuck pig. Too close to things, I think. A certain remove allows a disconnect, the very escape you had imagined. I don't have to do that, because Tom will. He probably will. I know him well. My only advice is to guard him closely on the perimeter. When he drives inside, he misses everything. An outside shooter. I get the high school show spread around the gallery so D can arrange things when he's here Friday. A decent show. I'm struck with how derivative art is, as it should be, at this level. Copy what you like, until you can outright steal without anyone knowing. Perplexing drainage problem. We capped off an interior roof drain, and old 4 inch cast iron pipe that was rusted away to nothing. It used to go into a storm drain in the alley, but that drain doesn't exist any more. We lowered a scupper in the roof parapet to deal with the water. Clean water still gets into the basement, so I put a five gallon bucket under the clean-out for the old pipe, Today it was full of water. Hurts my brain. I go to the library and look at Matisse paintings. Summer of 1905 and the birth of Fauvism. Last two nights, getting a beer at the pub, I've been given dinner. Waitstaff dinner that someone didn't want. Warm outside, makes a person want to go fishing. An urge I haven't had in years. Catching native Cutthroat trout, above the beaver dams, where the stocked rainbow can't reach. The Little Cimarron headwaters. One of the most beautiful places I've ever been. Had to leave once because of a snow storm in July. Where I liked to fish was 17 miles in, off the paved road. A little baby fly rod, six feet, with two pound test leaders. The river, there, was only 15 feet across and eight inches deep. The water was so cold you couldn't stay in it. The flesh of those fish was the firmest I've ever experienced. Cooked in a cast iron skillet, with a little bacon fat, then a squeeze of lemon, right on the creek bank. There were some cut-banks, with deeper holes and bigger fish, but I was always happy to catch a mess of 10 inch Cutthroats. Nothing has seemed the same since, fishing wise. Now I read art history on my days off. Think about a film about docenting. The Docent, as a working title. There's this guy, he's a janitor, he lives alone and works at a museum. What you might call an eclectic autodidact. He docents everything. It's his nature to find out about anything that interests him. He knows a lot about the breeding habits of frogs. With his cap turned backwards, kneeling on a piece of foam, peering at frog eggs in a petri dish with a magnifying glass, he talks about the anti-freeze properties of the sugars in the individual eggs, pointing with a conductor's baton. He always dresses the same way. He has theories. There are very funny stories about Janitor College. He docents Art History classes through the museum with a mop in his hand. One minute he's demonstrating The Modified Chevron mopping stroke, the next he's talking about Jackson Pollack's lifetime love for Thomas Hart Benton's wife, the lovely Rita. Maybe some of his habits are odd. He tends to skip meals, if he's involved in something, but otherwise eats everything, including acorns and roadkill. It's rumored he's asexual, but several animals have filed lawsuits against him, their owners, but nothing has ever come to trial. Drunk, one night at the pub, someone remembered him saying he was "saving up for a Panda". I got off track there, but docenting is an interesting text that could carry a great deal of sub-text. Sara called, after hours, and I was here, so we chatted, and I brought her up to speed, from my perspective. The ridge tomorrow, maybe morels.