Respectable Garb

Even when I clean up I look like a tramp. My clothes, though washed, are stained, and I appear to be someone who feeds hogs, or maybe a mechanic, fresh in from the garage. Or worse, like a helper down at the morgue. The last night Glenn was here, down at B's, listening to live music, Ronnie was still wearing the long-sleeved white shirt he'd worn picking blackberries earlier in the day and he looked like a war victim. Bleached out spots, I was going to say, are the bane of my existence, but they are, in fact, a sign of passage. The shoes I prefer to wear, the most comfortable pair, are completely shot, the seams are ripped and the soles are suspect, but they contain my various broken toes in a way I find almost comfortable. In the summer I often wear light cotton pants, Dockers, or some such, and I had a specific belt, a narrower one, that I wore with them, and then the belt wore out, dead, it broke apart. Clearly this was a product of the belt getting sweaty wet and drying with all that body salt. For several months I hid the fact that I was holding my trousers up with a piece of rope by wearing garish shirts that featured parrots and pineapples. I think a piece of half-inch synthetic rope (the warp), tied in a neat square-knot, looks as nice as anything else. I was reading an interesting article, Pollen Analysis Of Prehistoric Human Feces From Mammoth Cave and that led to a book on the natural history of sunflowers. Indigenous, probably, to the flood plain of the Missouri River. One objective of the German invasion of Russia, WWII, was to secure the sunflower crop for cooking oil, and, in fact, the largest tank battle in history, The Battle Of Kursk, was fought in a sunflower field. The largest seed bank, for breeding research, was in Leningrad, which was under siege for 900 days, and several top geneticists died of hunger protecting the seeds. Which is amazing, because you can make a very good and nutritious bread from sunflower seeds. Peter The Great lured a bunch of Mennonites into farming along the Volga, a lot of whom moved to Manitoba, then further south, and that brought the sunflower full-circle. Read all day, a very nice lunch of chopped steak with blue cheese, vine-ripened tomato and a creamy dressing. Did clean the sink and drain-board and they look much better but it's a losing battle, they're old, the enamel layer is porous and dull, they stain easily. I was thinking about food-stuffs that required a lot of preparation, olives, cassava, pickling generally, curing meat, and the storage of food, grain bins, cellars, the carcass of an elk hauled up in a tree. Mostly what we do is try and get enough to eat. All the rest is merely show.