Growing Up

After I was about 15 I never asked anyone for help, except for the occasional librarian and the guy at the local hardware store. My Dad was a Navy Medic, gone a lot of the time, and my Mom could always put a meal on the table. A perfect combination, as it happens, because you need to eat, and the physical self is always getting damaged. More than that, the emotional self is always getting damaged.Breeding shows. You learn to stay afloat, grab hold of anything and keep from drowning. Thinking about them today, while plugging away at the things to do that the board president passed down through Pegi to me. It finally happened that the speed and efficiency with which we install a show backfired. We've opened most of the recent shows a day or three early, to meet the demands of some other event. Pegi asked yesterday, if we would be able to open a show next year, that's been scheduled for over a year, several days early, and we just can't do it; it can't be done, one of those things you don't want anything to do with trying. She'll have to reschedule whatever it is, because our dates are locked in. I'll do what I can, I used to be able to do more than that, but now it's all that I can do. On the roof this morning, collecting debris, I have no idea for a source, from which we get debris on the roof. I can imagine a few methods but they're all so far-fetched I won't regale you with them. There is enough humus, in the southwest corner, beneath a four-foot parapet (it never gets light) and there are lichens and a couple of small shade-loving plants. The hidden garden at the museum. The roof is EPDM membrane, which is what you'd use on a house that was covered with sod and had sheep grazing. It's a bomb-proof barrier and actually benefits from not being exposed to light, so covering it with sod is a good thing. Exposed to UV it has like a 40 year warranty. Often used for Koi ponds. I only ever kept a few things that I wasn't eventually going to eat, never a fish. I enjoy aquariums when I run onto them. There's one in the Cleaning Supply place I use. Turtles. Very cool. I like to go there with D, so he can conduct business and I can watch the turtles. I lied, I think, I did keep fish; owned a small lake in Missip, stocked it, fed them the collected bugs from the rest of the farm. You can't imagine how easy it was to catch fish in this small lake, an acre, maybe; you just put a hook in a piece of dinner. I used barb-less hooks, so I could release anything I didn't want to eat, but getting a meal was easy. Marilyn had a way of smearing a filet of any white fish with a smear of mayonnaise and a couple of capers, a slice of lime. I like it, you know; in a removed kind of way. Better your recipe than any other, who you think you are, I get that, who I think I am.