I sit in porch smoking cigar. Cold’s not bad in light of the sun. I feel like I’ve done a lot, though I couldn’t give a definition of just what that “a lot” has been—one of those feelings of slow and steady working that’ll maybe suddenly materialize in outcome after slogging with little to show.
I burned boxes. I’m not sure how much of my “productive” life is simply decluttering amassment of what I never sought or asked for: junk mail, boxes from shipments, I’m not even sure what else.
I drew a blueprint—a backstop and strike zone for pitching, large enough to catch (most) wild pitches and a strike zone with bright rope threaded vertical and horizontal to break the strike zone into ninths. Horizontal zones over the plate will be fixed, and the vertical zone will be adjustable to refine zone size and height for the differences of a high school and fourth grade zone.
Brain work—that has to be something.
I picked up the wood to build it.
It is thawing in the garage. Treated lumber to stay outdoors, I’m going to let the snow and ice melt and dry before cutting and piecing to the plan.
I salted squirrel and rabbit skins. I will use them for tying flies, but they needed aired outdoors and better dried before they are permitted (if not open-welcomed) to lay in the open of our home while making flies.
I’m not sure what else I’ve accomplished. I think I need some fresher greens to get my natural energy back. Winter’s hollow and emptiness is draining on me, I can feel.
…It’s a short cigar, Arturo Fuente Hemingway “Short Story,” and it’s more than all I need—an excuse to sit alone outside and slow and rest and be in the sun.
An acquaintance I met once in life died the other day. I think about him now. He was a waiter at a restaurant in the city, and I don’t know how but we got talking of writing. He was a writer too—or desired to be (as perhaps, too, am only I). I’d just published a book, my only one, and he told how he was trying to write one too. His friend would buy him a bottle of whiskey for a certain number of pages completed. I don’t know how far he ever went toward completion of the dream. Wondering, I’m made conscious of my own efforts and headway toward the same.
He wrote darker than I do (Hemingway, self-dwelling, and whiskey) a way I used to before I bottomed out and let God and Light back in and began to see beauty and romance again in the world, even if started of ideal and written dreams. Faith and belief colored in my rest.
He was forty-two, year older than me. I don’t know what happened and never will. His memorial didn’t say.
Still, I think of him—someone I met once and still remember. How many do we encounter and remember so in our own life-live?
The short story’s almost smoked, and my thought is almost written.
Tomorrow’s a new month. Tonight is a full moon. I’m ready and feeling for a change.