After four years, Gunter accepts me as a friend at last. And finally I learn the great pleasure there is in that. His pacing the courtyard in clockwise circles all day saddens me. He searches and searches for an opening, constantly hoping for escape. This morning I spent time with him. Sat and then lay in the hammock. He was with me immediately, circling the hammock, and then walking under the lowest part to make it swing, and then pausing for some minutes calmly in the shade of my body to press heavily against my side. He permits me to stroke his head and neck far back under his shell where the scales soften into a pliant, cold skin, and along his forelegs and back in. He no longer hisses and retreats, but gazes long into my eyes and stays near. It's not escape then so much as company he wants. Folks have reptiles all wrong. These are deep, complicated creatures. It just takes them a very long time to come to trust.
10:48:46 AM    comment []  

9 a.m. It's a beautiful day. Clear. Bright. Dry and 75F degrees with a breeze. I wish I knew which bird it is that calls out this time every morning. Something similar used to make that cracked bleat from a vacant lot near the concrete river when I was in elementary school. There were still undeveloped places in L.A. in the '50s and '60s, places overgrown with mustard and wild fennel, anise- and eucalyptus-scented places where birds cried.

We sail ever-rougher financial seas this week. Humiliated and angry, I lit into the electric company workers who arrived here at noon yesterday to shut us off. Then I wasted fuel driving too fast into town, where I emptied my checking account from the ATM and then stormed into the power company payments office with my envelope of cash. And so now the car insurance payment will bounce. The Great Cascade continues.

I put 100 more books up for sale at Amazon and have generated $89 in three days. If I push the "deposit now" button today the money will arrive in my account in five days. Both phone lines are in jeopardy; one must go, I know, but I'm just marshaling (and re-marshaling) my resources for another great lunge in a new direction to try to create something other people might pay to receive, and a phone line--my Internet connection--would be a great loss.

Gunter tortoise and Ranger dog are with us again for four days. And they'll return again at the end of September for another 21-26 days when their people make their annual pilgrimage to the Midwest. I was going to give up on the pet-sitting, but then I remembered I could trade it for firewood. So now the issue of winter heat has been resolved, and that's a relief.

After I mail today's sold books I must make phone calls to a variety of governmental offices to try and resolve tax anomalies before their people, too, coming pounding at the door. Somehow the storm-cycle of crises is coming back around (generating my POW-themed dreams). The respite, which I believed was an ending to turmoil, turns out to have been the calm center of it. We'll ride it out one more time. Batten the hatches. We won't give up the ship. Not yet. And when we finally make it to land, we'll stay put.
10:12:54 AM    comment []