rest stop

to see copies of the subway tiles, check out this site. search for tile. their website is pretty cumbersome and doesn't have direct links to specific things. go ahead. they're pretty. transitmuseumstore.com

i generally spend one meal a week on the new york state thruway and although there are fancier rest stops ("service plazas") out there, ones shaped like items of local importance or ones overlooking grand parts of america, i find the stops in new york more curious than most and the stop at milepost 33 northbound on the thruway uniquely strange. to begin with, there is a farm market on the sidewalk near the multilevel parking structure. in the middle of nowhere. really and truly nowhere. not a huge market, but a serious one. a real one with options ranging from seasonal fruit and vegetables to pies and other sassy pastries. there are jars of jam. i have never seen anyone buy a thing. there is also a hexagonal history kiosk chock full of lore of the hudson valley. in an attempt to include as much as possible, the building's interior columns are made to look like those in larger subway stations, white tile, ornamented with replicas of actual fancy tile images from real live subways.

just as there are two stories to the ridiculous parking garage, there are two stories to the building housing the food and other goodies. the second floor, accessible by elevator or escalator, is some sort of internal balcony hung from the edges of the building, leaving the center open. most people standing under it are getting napkins and straws from a little food accessory station, two bustling floors below. which is why it was not until this last trip while i was waiting for the sweetie that i stared off into what i expected to be empty, anonymous space and noticed a rather impressive octagonal atrium in the center of the second floor ceiling, sectioned off with large wood beams like a pie cut for eating. each slice is painted the blue of the american flag and each slice is sprinkled with stars. or laid out, maybe. they're in neat rows, staggered just like they are on the flag, twenty five to a section. i have not yet found anything like an explanation.

but back to this second floor. you can look down from the railing onto the glory that is the food court- starbucks, quizznos, sbarro, burger king. or you can turn around and revel in the fact that this floor is home to what might be nine hundred vending machines, including one that sells only pringles and two with a variety of kosher snacks, two penny smashing machines (we have a smashed penny for each of the options except the serenity prayer, which makes me want to punch people when i see/hear its folksy self) and restrooms. now these restrooms are cavernous, at least the one for women is, which generally allows me to sample the joys of six or seven stalls before i find one equipped with both a pee-free toilet area and an actual roll of real live toilet paper.

that is just fine, though. because the quest for a cleanish toilet led me to the final stall in the second alcove of the restroom and when i closed the door, "I BELIVE IN A WORLD OF ENDLESS POSSIBILITY" stared at me from the door in black sharpie. pretty big. pretty emphatic. endless is a strong statement. i don't know about endless. but next to the assertion in equally strident scribbling was "TOO BAD YOU CAN'T SPELL" which made me think of the middle sister and her passion for yelling out car windows at farm stands, businesses and teen carwashes when their signs aren't up to her grammatical code. she despises overuse of apostrophes, and rightly so. it always seemed to me if you have a message you want to put out there and it's important and fairly small, you can check to make sure you've got it right. quite a bit of the rest of the world appears to be more forgiving because further over, a third party, clearly trying to vindicate the "beliver", scrawled "TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BELIEVE" but this was not the end. and although there were a few of those someone was here or someone loves some other person type writings, a good part of the rest of the bathroom door was taken up with discussion about whether it was more valuble to have faith or knowledge.

cornered

as you know, max and guthrie are the dogs we share our lives with. we do pretty much what they want, which is mostly not much, and we're all fairly content with that as long as there's an occasional hike in there for the non-max members of the family. this is how things have been for a long while. but lately max is getting a new personality and although the sweetie and i find it a little bit mystifying and mostly charming, guthrie has had it with max. i'm not kidding. the fact that max has no body fat to speak of means he's cold, even in warm weather. even indoors. now, pudgy little guthrie is a furnace on four legs and max seems to be able to feel the wake of heat when guthrie walks by. especially in the car, max will do anything to get himself up next to guthrie. and guthrie, a cuddler by nature, has taken to scooting as far to the opposite side of the car as he can. the way children do. he's touching me. HE'S TOUCHING ME!!! max will twist himself and his harness all sorts of ways and will sleep like his neck is broken if it will give him even a tiny bit of warmth off guthrie.

max's new personality involves a lot of wandering around, getting lost in corners, then crying. loudly. very loudly. and although i'm not sure, i suspect that when this happens and we're not home, guthrie completely loses it. several times we've come home to a frantic guthrie at the door and a horrible ghostly wail from beyond, from somewhere in the house. because max will nose toward a corner from across the room, wedge himself directly into it, then stand there, always helpless and sometimes scared. he will bellow like a cow until someone finds him (this is not always as easy as you think), lifts him out, redirects him and watches that he doesn't go and redeposit himself right back where he got himself trapped (by the way, that's dog nose juice, not blood, all along the wall there by max's nose. and that's time number three visiting that particular stuck place in the space of ten minutes).

you're thinking we ought to maxproof the house and we have, to some degree, but that dog is like a cockroach or a rat, able to flatten himself and squeeze into tiny places you'd never find a normal dog. his bones are all he has left these days and they fold and slide over each other. and i know i've dragged him out of one small spot and set him down in another room altogether, only to turn around and find him wedging himself right back where he was, fixing himself up to cry again (that's what's going on in the pair of photos behind the mellophone). like the strange repetitive circling and the wounds that won't heal, this particular behavior seems to be a hallmark of whatever is tearing down max's brain. the fact that max's body is dying doesn't seem to interest him much. it is just a new way of doing things. but in addition to this dying his body seems to insist on, he's managed this new way of living that's really sort of lovely. he gets lost in the house maybe twenty times a day. it's not because he doesn't know where things are or because he is blind. he goes to water and food without any confusion. he knows where the back and front doors are at the apartment here in brooklyn and in the house upstate. he can look up the stairs and track my movement from a floor away. and the fact that he finds himself under the same chair in the kitchen five or six times a day suggests he's intent on going there, not really lost the way we might get lost. that chair is not something he'd find unless he went out of his way.

and i suppose there are folks out there who might say it's cruel that i've run to get the camera more than once when i hear the crying, because i know he'll be stuck, looking ridiculous, a good photo. and certainly some might not think i should laugh when i see this poor old dog stuck against walls and doors and sometimes, well, more often than he'd probably admit, stuck against shadows or changes in patterns on the floor. but you can only be sad about something so many times before it gets ugly and you get too tired. and the truth is that it is funny to see this spidery dog walk directly across a room, navigating furniture perfectly, only to be sucked into a corner as if by giant dog magnets. and every time we take him outside and watch him walk only downhill, it's funny. and sad and scary.

and each time he cries out and one of us goes to find him, he looks up with eyes i'm not sure he really uses all that much because he seems to be past all that, looks up at us like he's finally safe. every single time. and when we pick him up he is so grateful to be found, so grateful to be in someone's arms. he knows right where he is.

wabash cannonball

out from the wide pacific ocean to the broad atlantic shore
she climbs flowery mountain, o'er hills and by the shore
although she's tall and handsome, and she's known quite well by all
she's a regular combination, the wabash cannonball.

Carter Family version of Wabash Cannonball, ca. 1930

you probably already know we live right up close to where the delaware and ulster railroad used to haul tourists, coal and milk from the hudson valley to the susquehanna and back again. in fact, the depot is just a few houses over and across the highway, which is really a two lane street. we know what time it is through much of midday because of the whistles of leaving and returning trains taking passengers as far as roxbury. in the last year and a half, we've watched the trains go by, listened to the whistles, but we've never managed to muster up enough courage to hop on board.

so when some friends planning a visit said their two year old boy had a passion for trains, i mentioned that we have a rideable train right here in town. the friends said it was a good idea, that their child would love it. not knowing so much about two year olds, i suggested maybe a visit to see the train might be more appropriate than an actual ride. but the child was sick in love and would not be deterred.

because the sweetie couldn't go with us, he and the child spent some time before our stroll over to the depot watching video of trains and also watching johnny cash and the muppets sing a medley that included wabash canonball. then the four of us- the parents, the child, me- walked down to the depot. when the conductor yelled, "all aboard!" most folks flocked to the outside cars but it was cool and we went on past to one of the covered cars with seats that flip from back to front. we had the whole car to ourselves.

the child was pretty excited. you now how little kids get when they see something large and real and up close that they've only seen small on tv or from not at all touching distance. their muscles get funny. they dance around a bit. their eyes start to breathe. their hair breathes. they don't know what to do. you want to help them so you say things like, "do you like it?" or "what do you think?" or "isn't this fun?" and maybe they nod, but they can't really use what you're offering at that point.

we hopped off the train in roxbury and got ourselves cheetos and cookies and something to drink. we looked at photos and relics of the railroad's heyday. we sat on a bench and watched the engine take itself from one end of the train to the other, readying itself and us for the trip back. now the small child had warmed up to the train by this time, was still in love but not in that far off way. so on the way back he sped through the empty cars, laughing, putting as much of himself into the train as he could, sucking up as much of its wonderfulness as he had room for in his small self. because he is a small child he does not have room for the fear that makes adults hesitate at the moving slabs of metal between cars.

so the day went. cool, bright weather. the rocking of the train. a small, happy child. it is a good thing to be in the company of those you love and it is an even better thing to witness the strangeness of a small child in a new place he already knows well. but to have all this while watching the leafy, rivery world pass by on your own real and actual version of the cannonball- now that is quite an afternoon.

geese of confusion

this morning we had to go to the hardware store. now, i don't always feel comfortable at this particular hardware store. it's one that caters primarily to large construction projects and the tone of folks in the store can seem, well, sometimes snooty. but because they cater to professional hardware types, they always have what we need. and they have several large, friendly dogs who can pretty much offset any amount of snootiness you might feel if you can find one or two of them. so we hopped in the car and headed out behind one of those huge orange and white trucks like our tree-guy neighbor drives.

some bit down the highway (yes, it's still just a two lane road) the giant orange truck braked for what seemed to be no reason at all. and then, the truck and the person in it just sat there in the middle of the highway all giant and orange and ridiculously stopped. but off to the left there's a pretty big pond and four very self-important geese were strolling in a string-straight line out onto the road and toward the truck. they walked right in front of the truck. right in front. they stood there in front of the truck a minute or two conducting some sort of business meeting, huddled up together, one of them eying the driver every once in a while, i imagine. and then they turned themselves around. by this time, traffic the other direction had stopped as well and the four geese, doing little to nothing to acknowledge the strangeness of their trip out onto the highway, strutted right back the way they came.

rowboat

the sweetie wants a boat. i've spent the last ten years or so trying to navigate a rather insistent form of vertigo while standing on solid ground, so when the sweetie began his mutterings about a boat to take out on the reservoir, a boat for fishing, boat that floats on water, i didn't say much. i figured a boat we could afford wouldn't be a boat that would float. i nodded some, we sure do need a boat. yessiree. but i didn't take it very seriously.

the sweetie, on the other hand, takes things like this very seriously. he spent countless hours poring over images of motorless boats, figuring out distance, size, weight and all that might snag him up in his quest to float quietly on a lake surrounded by mountains in his own little boat, fishing and fishing and fishing. finally, he found it. there were phone calls. there were emails. there were visits with a truck rental place. there were consultations with googlemaps. there was a great setting of alarms for an early, early hour. we left the house at 5am in a rented van for a 7:30 meeting in a farm field scattered with boats. the boat man led us over to "ours" and my heart sank. i understood godawful and i understood grotesque.

but the sweetie did not understand any of these words. he was already in love. the boat man said things like, "it used to be a sailboat so it has a retractable keel," and "when i came out the other day there was a little water in it so i imagine there's a pinhole leak somewhere." and those should have been red flags. not for the sweetie. he cannot be blamed for any of this because he was already so smitten and already rowing that boat across the lake in his mind. but i should have known. the boat was painted amateur camo. so it is my fault it came off that rickety trailer and the sweetie and the boat man huffed and groaned as they shoved it in the back of the rented van. this, too, should have been a clue. it is a 200 pound boat, a boat heavy for my sweetie and another grown man. a boat that will require horribleness each time we wrangle it into the water.

we drove straight to the d.e.c. office near the reservoir where the folks there will steam clean the boat for you, to keep you from bringing invasive creatures into the water supply. the men standing around laughed about the weight of the boat, which allowed little bits of dawning, of realization. they know i can't lift the boat. so i did. with the sweetie on one end, i grabbed my end and we hauled the boat over to the rented van, where rational thought and the voices of all my tiny muscles screaming in unison brought me to the conclusion the men had. and they came over and helped the sweetie lift the thing up and on into the van. cleaned, stenciled and paperworked, we headed right on over to a spot on the reservoir where we could unload the boat and keep it. the shore is littered with adorable little rowboats, bottom up, chained to trees or chunks of cement. they recoiled in horror as we unloaded our frankenboat.

our trip from the van down a short gravel incline to the water was full of bad words and dropped boat ends. you will remember here the 200 pounds of awkward metal. i hated the boat. the whole idea was ridiculous. we are not boat owners. we are not rowers of oars. i sat in the middle plank seat of this fourteen foot camo behemoth and fitted the aqua blue oars into the little holes for them. i do not know about rowing. i have canoed and i'll tell you right now the two are not much alike. the sweetie hopped in, threw in fishing pole, tackle box and anchor. the sweetie has such great faith that all will work out the way he hopes. i am not at all like the sweetie. i sat in my blue life vest and grabbed the oars. i paddled like i was in a canoe and we went backward. it took me a few minutes to figure it out, but we started moving forward, in a pretty straight line, with something like decent speed.

there was wind and the water was choppier than you think it will be on a sunny day. we spun around a bit and found out that a 100 foot anchor doesn't do much in a large part of the reservoir. the sweetie did some fishing. water sloshed around his feet. after about fifteen minutes, we headed for shore, drained the boat and went back out. fifteen minutes was about the limit for staying out and afloat. this is when we found out that it's true. any boat we can afford can't stay afloat long. when the sweetie offered to row, i snarled, "stick with fishing!" now, you already know i am not good at rowing. i have no special skill and someone someday will tell me all the things that are wrong with my technique. but i like it. i like it the way i like knitting. it hits the same place in my brain, pushes the button that says calm down. everything is just as it should be. and i sat in the boat thinking i wouldn't mind rowing around all day.

it will always be an ugly boat. it will always weigh 200 pounds. but the nineteen tiny holes in it are patched up and the wheels the sweetie fastened onto the back make land travel a bit easier. and after three days, my back still doesn't hurt from rowing and my arms and shoulders feel fine, too. all those parts of me feel better, maybe. but what i'm still trying to work into reality, the part that isn't fitting anywhere at all, is that, during these three days, i noticed my brain doesn't track motion funny on the boat. no vertigo. no dizziness, no sweeping movements of land and sea and sky away from me as i fall endlessly toward them. the one place where my brain doesn't lie to me about where we are is when we're on the boat.

triple play

just a hint: those mill photos blow up. click a few of 'em.

we started out the day with rain, which is how we've started out most of the days since the first of june, but we hopped in the car anyway. big wednesday road trip.

stop one- brooks bbq. there is not much to say about brooks except that if you are in town and you choose to eat at the pizza hut down the street, you are a fool. there's chicken wallpaper on the walls. there's a lunch counter with five curves to it. they give you a plastic bucket for bones and every table is well supplied with wetnaps. the sweetie had ribs and i devoured nearly half a chicken, all at the senior citizen lunch hour of 11:30. hospitals don't boast as many walkers and canes as brooks during a weekday early lunch. this is not a complaint. i figure people who have been eating for seventy or eighty years ought to have a pretty good idea where to go for lunch.

fortified, we motored on up to ommegang. the best way to explain it is if ben and jerry had chosen beer to make instead of ice cream. it's a small operation and it sits right in the middle of an ancient hops field, surrounded with views people don't even deserve. and these good folks let strangers just walk in, follow them around and then drink their beer. and they're friendly about it. these are folks who think beer should have only a few ingredients. they think you should know you're drinking something when you drink their beer. they put their beer into cheese, chocolate, raspberry jam, mustard. they want you to be happy. i don't know how you could help but oblige. there are picnic tables everywhere on the grounds and the folks encourage picnicing. we walked toward a table just to sit and something odd caught our eyes. some sort of cross between barbie's dream house and mad max. out on a post, about chest high or maybe a little more than that, sat some sort of metal dollhouse made from discarded parts of the brewery, i suppose. two story, with doors that opened and furniture of sorts. no sign. no explanation.

we'd been considering the baseball hall of fame and although everyone in there played forever ago, baseball and i are not right now on the best of terms so we threw it over for hanford mills. if you've never been there, get in the car right now. there are plenty of things to recommend the place. first, like every other attraction in upstate new york, the grounds are like candy. you look around and worry you might be trapped in a postcard. but no, things up here are just like that. look, the view from our town's dump is better than any manhattan penthouse view and the smell of pine trees and clover as i drop off my recyclable plastics is intoxicating. but you don't get used to it, so with every new place it's a surprise. the plain and simple prettiness of everything. so there's that. then there's the fact that this is a working mill. they make things there, using water and the craziest wheel collection you've ever seen. there's the big wheel, which you can see here sitting still and waterless, then rolling like hell with water crashing over it. when you're standing right there on a wooden platform in front of it, surrounded by the other wheels it turns, your whole world shakes.

there were quite a few wheels belted up to this giant one, each smaller one belted up to a tool on the floor above. all the while, there's water running underneath, so there's no poverty of sound or motion. in a room around from all this wildness were the wheels. now, i know that you don't necessarily find the same charm in things that make my eyes go all dreamy, but these wheels, like hatboxes or cheeses, were too much. more planning, care and craftsmanship went into the making of each of these than into some of the buildings brooklyn has been allowing the past few years. it seemed like they had enough they ought to be giving them away to anyone who needed one or two. turns out they intend to keep them all because they're a chronology of the craft of wheelmaking in this country.

now, i get my heart broken regularly seeing crazy old machines, long dead before i was born, left to rust and wither. i want them to be mine. i'd have no notion how to fix them or what to do if i ever managed to, but still, i want to see them alive. and that's what's so kind about this particular place, hanford mills. they get these old beasts up on their feet and give them a little something to live for. this shingle saw, for instance, has that block in its jaws because it's getting ready to slice off a slab of shingle. nobody told the thing cedar shingles from out west came along and beat poor old pine shingles into the dirt. the folks at hanford keep this saw's teeth plenty sharp and tell it pine shingles are all the rage. and it makes beautiful ones.

this molding saw here is something else altogether. our guide explained that the person who ran it would need about six hours to set up all the gears and levers and bits for a single design. that means every time you want to shift designs, you'd need to be really sure about the switch, because your whole day would be all about rearranging. but all the joints and levers and switches on this thing hum when the water hits the wheel and the axles start to turn. they have things to do.

some things were just nice to look at. the detail on a label for a separator or the color of the worn wood the label lives on. dials, levers, pipes, wheels. the place was full of them. not shiny and polished, because living things get dirty, especially if they work. but the working things looked somehow more real.

at one point in the tour, our guide got very animated. she told us about a steam engine, not the one that lived here when this mill started, but another one from the same time, and how the mill folks found it on ebay, how it was sitting in a quarry, rusting, dying, broken. the mill folks snapped it up quick as anything and hunted up someone who knew how to fix everything that was broken on this engine. so now it works. and they use it. hard to imagine, seeing the photos that looked pretty much like chunks of rust. and the photo here is blurry. it should't be because this engine is something you can't stop looking at once your eyes fall on it. but i put the photo in anyway because i figure anyone with a little sense would rather see it blurry than miss a chance to see it at all.

there's more, of course. the farm house, barn, ice house, chicken coop. the various shapes water takes, still, bright pond, shivering waterfall, fat, lazy stream, skipping race. the whole town cuddled around this land and its pile of buildings, even now, even in this century. but the first and last thing we saw was this guy. peanut. we will have to go back again. for the chicken. for the beer. for the steam engine and the dog it belongs to.

atlas of

there is a new book here at home. hammond's nature atlas of america. a biggish old book, flat black, mostly, with a mossy green fabric spine trimmed in gold. it smells of basement and army surplus stores. there's no publication date but it looks to be an early fifties book, swell graphics, swinging descriptions of of all things nature. and it covers everything. everything. the book tells you right up front it's not a scholarly work. it's for folks to get up close and chummy with nature. a bit of a nature fireside chat. but when i read bits of it i imagine everything as very clever conversation at a stylish cocktail party in 1953. gents in suits sipping martinis and ladies in those dresses that drape just at the shoulders, all collarbones and lipstick and stunning high heels. the author, e.l. jordan, ph.d, holds his drink carelessly and tosses out these witty bits of information on animals, plants, stones, mountains. the women nearby laugh the way i think dorothy parker did, leaning forward, head thrown back, mouth a loud oval- deep laughter. the men chuckle, faster and softer than the women, finishing off a drink and wandering away for another, wishing, a little bitterly, they could be so unbearably clever.

the book is crammed with lovely paintings and there are maps of all sorts scattered throughout. maps with shading and dotted lines and bold lines. i could stare at maps all day. when i was eight or nine, my grandpa gave me a massive book of maps of north america similar to this one. flora, fauna, geology, tectonic plates, volcanoes, evolution, fossils. it broke open something inside my head and now every map has directions for treasure.

each specific entry has one of these paintings, the name of the animal, plant, rock, etc., a caption and a descriptive paragraph. and here's where things get strange. the painting of the balsam fir shows a stand of fir trees with a forest fire raging in the lower left, behind them. what? a forest fire? then there's the opening of the little brown bat paragraph. "close the eyes of a bat with any kind of glue and it will fly with greater assurance than than with its eyes open." really? i think not. any kind of glue? how about a little blindfold, because i'm pretty sure getting an eyeful of glue is going to crash that poor bat's assurance. pretty sure.) the diamondback rattlesnake painting shows a rattler slithering over a human leg that's lying on the ground. the rest of the person is somewhere, dying, out of frame. there are two tiny fang holes on the ankle. whitefish might just be the creepiest. the whitefish photo is just a jumble of fish in a net. and the text next to is is mostly an uncomfortable description of artificial propagation of said fishes.

but it's the captions that got me most. they're supposed to sum up in a phrase the essence of the animal. these are some of the finer ones.

something of something:
ruffed grouse: chicken of the forest
common tern: swallow of the sea
road runner: clown of the desert
chimney swift: the bow and arrow of the sky
swordfish: tiger of the sea

personality/charm and poise:
flicker: man about town
gila monster: gentle in spite of its name (this is a curious choice because gila monsters are the only poisonous lizard in america. the paragraph goes on to say you can put one in a cage in the house and it will be mellow and gentle. who knew cooler temperatures could slow down cold-blooded beasts?)
baltimore oriole: a scrap of sunset with a voice (okay, fine. i wish i'd written that. i do.)
small-mouth bass: a strong and plucky spirit(this is only funny with the companion painting, which shows a bass, open-mouthed and belly up, floating on top of the water. as far as i can tell, this is not how plucky bass actually swim. this is how dead bass swim.)





opossum: star of southern folklore (star of the pavement beneath my tires.)
weasel: a handsome killer (never thought of a weasel as handsome. i'll look again one of these days.)
wolverine: a disagreeable countryman (the first line of the info tells us a "despicably mean character is the outstanding trait of this northern savage". i was expecting "tangerine of the wolf world".)
timber wolf: cruel killer, kind parent (it should be noted the wolf in the painting appears to be dead in a snowstorm. i have no idea, but i think the caption should read "you won this round, blizzard! avenge me, pups!")



for the most part i just didn't get these next few or i got them and they were creepy.
smelt: a tasty dish, and a candle burning (i get the tasty dish. i do not, even a little bit, get the candle burning. is this how you cook the tasty dish?)
dolphin: a miracle in death (this would be the dolphin fish, not the actual dolphin. evidently, when fisherguys haul up a dolphin fish it changes color as it slowly dies. folks report its death to be rather stunning, something to see, like the aurora borealis. "dude, let's go get drunk on one of those boats and watch the dolphin fish croak!")
nine-banded armadillo: his cousins are fossils (everyone's cousins are fossils.)
may beetle: also known as the june bug, relative of the scarab, is shown crawling around a stubby, snuffed out candle. i have never seen them do this. i don't think they do. it's stupid. and why does this bug have a may name and a june name. how about just "early summer beetle"?
bald eagle: the bird on the quarter (sure it's on the quarter. it's on the dollar bill. it perches atop flagpoles. it flies by where we go to fish. and it's our national symbol. the quarter isn't really the one you go with there.)
mosquitoes: blood is a very special juice (yes. yes it is.)

and i realize as i set down the words here they may not seem as funny to you. nor are you likely to find them nearly as charming. it's not just the words, it's the whole thing. it's the tone of the book. reference books for mass consumption used to all be more like this. conversational. conspiratorial. i've told you this and now we both know this clever secret. and i like being drawn in. who doesn't? i like being told secrets. no matter that a book might have sold plenty of copies when it was new. that book has been sleeping for years. whispering amiably to nobody. and while fifty or so years ago plenty of people were finding out that the flicker truly is a man about town, today nobody found that out but me. and sure i told the sweetie, sat next to him on the couch and read aloud from the book little bits i thought he needed, turned paintings toward him and demanded his undivided attention to the poor bass. and it's all yours now, too. this useless pile of words that doesn't go very far in helping you really know and animal, plant, etc. but opening that book the first time, letting my eyes drop down onto all those images and words, i felt like a pioneer, and explorer of new places. i felt like there was so much more out there, the way i did when i was eight or nine.