Petty Squabbles

Bear baiting, it could be claimed, but it's actually just a matter of composting organics, which I've done since the beginning of time. My compost heap is a major source of entertainment. Mostly eggshells and coffee grounds, the occasional bone, vegetable trimmings, but there's always a battle when I clean out the fridge and throw away the last of a soup, or a three-bean salad. I don't waste very much, but I do have waste; and in their rovings, various critters find me supplemental to their intake of protein. I went out to pee, 2:30 in the morning, and there was a pack of dogs digging through my last contribution: rancid coleslaw, some rice, a rotten potato,and they were fairly flinging it at each other. It's not my intent, when I clean out the fridge, to start a feeding frenzy. I'm just cleaning out the fridge. I know when to let things go, a painful learning process where ego is the enemy, and you only learn by burning yourself. Nothing prepares you. I have to pull the plug. At a certain point nothing makes any sense. October temps in August, low in the upper forties, while I'm up I close the windows and get a blanket. Such nice sleeping weather I almost over slept. C is off first thing to retrieve two Carter paintings from the Ohio Supreme Court building. I painted the Richards gallery and started the maintenance book, found the time to start rereading Mary Carter's letters from 1944, which I now see as a pivotal year for the Carter family. Clarence had several shows and sold a lot of paintings, and he had landed a role as the designer for the advertising division of Alcoa, then just a shipping company. He did a painting a month for them for several years, to use in their publicity, and he was paid a thousand dollars apiece for them. Despite Mary's poor-mouthing to her mother, I think they were doing quite well by then. Summers, usually, as a resident artist at Chautauqua or someplace, and painting the rest of the year; there must be a thousand paintings, watercolors and oils, maybe two thousand, and we have maybe 70 paintings and 20 drawings, we know of several hundred others, Sara and I, the Carter brain trust. There are a great many paintings that I've read about but have never seen. It's strange, in a way, we have all this original material, and I'm fast becoming the expert in Carter studies, even though it's not my major field of interest. I spend most of my time thinking about memory, and how it can be crammed into a block of text. It's an imperfect science, even considering what we think about. I take the fifth, on anything concerning meaning. I just do this because I can.