Errands

One of the last three trips in and out on the goat trail before the driveway is rebuilt. I brought in quite a load of supplies, drinking water, booze, sausage, eggs, potatoes, juice. I'm set (the longest definition in the OED). Did my laundry, and while it was washing, went to Big Lots, right around the corner, and bought candles (it's the cheapest place to buy candles) as I use a few dozen every winter. Stopped at the pub, for a draft and a bowl of chili, then went to the museum, where I was not on duty, and researched Carter for a couple of hours. Mackletree is going to be closed for at least a month while the road department rebuilds a couple of bridges, so starting Tuesday I'll be driving one of the two long ways around. A change in scenery. Great conversation at lunch with a minister and his wife. They had overheard a student from the university asking me about reading for the Chinese students, and asking what I was going to be reading at Chautauqua, and when he left (their table was right behind where I sit at the bar) and I had turned around, to say good-bye, so I was facing the couple. The minister asked me what were the circumstances of me reading at Chautauqua and I explained to them. They both said they'd like to read some of my writing, I told them just to google me, and that I wasn't that drummer in Texas. We talked about access for a few minutes. How easy it was to find out about a person or a thing or a word. When I was leaving, the minister stopped me with a raised hand, and said that I had made their day, that I was the most casually erudite person he'd ever run into. It was a nice compliment. During the afternoon, reading Mary's letters, I'd occasionally fade into the middle distance, and remember the chance encounter. That 'casually' that he mentioned is something that I've consciously worked toward. It's very difficult, which is strange, to get the written word to read as the spoken voice. The train of thought. Doing my walk-around, looking out the various windows, they all frame a slightly different picture of the world, but I'm partial to the view out the nine lights in the top half of the back door. The top middle panel frames the woodshed, which is about forty feet away (I know that because I use a fifty foot extension cord to run the electric chainsaw when I'm working on small stuff there) and I see something moving. There's a bear in my woodshed. A small bear, but a bear nonetheless. It's maybe 4 feet tall, and I don't do well estimating weight, but maybe between 150 and 200 pounds. I don't know the specific gravity of black bears, but they're remarkably tubular from their shoulders right down through their torso. A bear's claws are not retractable. This is almost certainly a young male. Young males, at two years old, have to find their own territory or Daddy will kill them. I watch him for fifteen minutes, the window AC is on, and it acts as white noise to mask my shuffling around. We both hear a pack of dogs, they're running something and headed this way, so he ambles off down the ill-defined path toward the graveyard. The dogs get here, a few minutes later, and immediately go to the woodshed and start sniffing around; then, whimpering the while, they tucked their tails between their legs and headed back the way the way they had come.