The weather outside, frightful, etc. | Photo: Hal Walter
There are many reasons why I do not miss living in Crusty County and this is one of them.
My man Hal Walter has been enjoying the sort of lifestyle E.B. White wrote about in his 1958 essay “A Report in January,” in which White observed that “just to live in New England in winter is a full-time job; you don’t have to ‘do’ anything. The idle pursuit of making-a-living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.”
Sixty-six years later and several thousand feet up at his snowbound acreage in Colorado, Hal has had his good truck develop a sick headache, just as he prepared to take his son, Harrison, to the dentist in Pueblo, 50-some-odd miles east and down; borrowed his wife’s SUV for the trip only to bury that vehicle up to the axles in a snowdrift on the return trip, just 50 yards from his gate; shoveled it out in a single-digit wind chill; returned to doctoring his own rig, successfully, without having to call a tow truck (“If I were to need to have this thing towed, nobody could even get in here.”); and dug a path for it up his driveway to the county road, newly plowed.
This was in addition to the usual chores: delivering hay to the burros, grub to the family, wood to the stove, Harrison to Colorado Mountain College in Leadville (slated today, the last I heard), and so on and so forth.
If, like White, Hal wonders when he would once again “get a chance to ‘do’ something — like sit at a typewriter,” or even his MacBook Air, he has not mentioned it to me.
Well, this is a tough way to start the New Year. It seems Les McCann went west on us this past Friday.
He was 88, which just happens to be the number of keys on a piano.
And man, could he play those 88 keys.
He was best known for “Compared to What,” which was part of an unscheduled performance with tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris and trumpeter Benny Bailey, who joined McCann’s trio during the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.
From The New York Times:
Neither had played with Mr. McCann before, and there was no time for rehearsal. But the performance was to be recorded and filmed for broadcast. Despite the pressure, or perhaps because of it, as Mr. McCann recalled in the liner notes for the 1996 CD reissue of the concert album, which was released in 1969 as “Swiss Movement,” “Just before we went onstage, and for the first time in my life, I smoked some hash.” When he got to the bandstand, he wrote, “I didn’t know where the hell I was. I was totally disoriented. The other guys said, ‘OK, play, man!’ Somehow I got myself together, and after that, everything just took off.”
If I’d known a fella could take off like that, I’d have smoked more hash.
El Rancho Pendejo in The Duck! City was the perfect spot to catch the 2023 annular solar eclipse.
Herself scored some paper safety goggles and we inspected the celestial event at our leisure, from the back patio.
Things grew dark and chilly, the birds went all radio silence, and the sun looked like a big Power button just waiting for Someone to click it off. Happily, no one did.
And you bet your ass I howled at the sucker like a werewolf. Got to keep the neighbors on their toes.
The light throughout was truly weird, with acid-flashback shadows on the brick pavers and concrete walkway. Put me in mind of Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” it did.
You see, it was the eclipse. It came into my mind in the nick of time, how Columbus, or Cortez, or one of those people, played an eclipse as a saving trump once, on some savages, and I saw my chance. I could play it myself, now, and it wouldn’t be any plagiarism, either, because I should get it in nearly a thousand years ahead of those parties.
But unlike Hank Morgan, I couldn’t derive any profit from the eclipse; our modern lords and ladies mostly keep their heads where the sun don’t ever shine, preferring to work their mischiefs in the dark. So I just enjoyed it.
The New York Times spent most of yesterday pitching live episodes of “Let’s Make a Deal” from the nation’s capital. And today they’re telling me that nobody could give a shit; they’d all rather be watching “The Golden Bachelor.”
Well. Sounds like poor editorial judgment to me. Should’ve led with another Taylor Swift story.
Well, I gave a shit — no, not about “The Golden Bachelor” or Taylor Swift, who gets more eyeballs than a TikTok video of kitties in a titty bar — but rather the brinksmanship peacockery so deplorably on display in DeeCee.
It’s a weakness. But I could afford to indulge it.
Dinner was leftovers from Friday night — Melissa Clark’s paprika chicken with taters and turnips — so cooking was a rerun, or, more precisely, a reheat, at 350° for 20 minutes.
This left me at liberty to observe, and screech, and curse, and place bets with myself about what would finally emerge from all the shit-talking, gesticulating, and shoving that usually precedes a whole bunch of nothing happening on the middle-school playground of your choice.
This is pointless idiocy, of course. Right up there with cashing out the 401(k) and putting it all into bitcoin and NFTs; playing poker with a man named “Doc;” or gambling in any of the various casinos masquerading as “sports” in this world.
By closing time, the can had gotten kicked another 45 days down the road and I had lost every bet.
Still, could be worse.
Ukraine must be wondering how they wound up out on the sidewalk with an IOU in one pocket of the fatigues puddled around their ankles. And the woodlice gnawing on Charlie McCarthy’s balsa-sack apparently found out this wasn’t an all-you-can-eat deal.
This morning I decided this class in Political Science Fiction 101 reminded me of a scene from “Cannery Row,” in which John Steinbeck describes the upshot of an uprising by “a group of high-minded ladies” in Monterey demanding the closure of “dens of vice” like Dora Flood’s Bear Flag Restaurant, which was not a sandwich shop but rather a “sporting house.”
Writes Steinbeck:
This happened about once a year in the dead period between the Fourth of July and the County Fair. Dora usually closed the Bear Flag for a week when it happened. It wasn’t so bad. Everyone got a vacation and little repairs to the plumbing and the walls could be made. But this year the ladies went on a real crusade. They wanted somebody’s scalp. It had been a dull summer and they were restless. It got so bad that they had to be told who actually owned the property where vice was practiced, what the rents were and what little hardships might be the result of their closing. That was how close they were to being a serious menace.
You think maybe the high-minded ladies in DeeCee got told who really owns this whore-House? And if so, did they get the message? Who knows? Not me, cousin. But we have 45 days to find out.
Anyway, once the cartoon was over we got straight to the featured attraction, which included the aforementioned leftovers; rewatching “Reservation Dogs,” which concluded its three-season run this past Wednesday; and debating whether we should take down our hummingbird feeders, which hadn’t been getting many (if any) customers the past few days.
I argued for staying open, and boom! Just like that a hummer appeared at one of the backyard feeders, which are visible from the living-room couch. Maybe he was an elder who didn’t care to make the trek to Mexico this fall. Maybe she likes the new landscaping. Maybe they like “Reservation Dogs.” Pronouns are a bitch.
Anyway, we reloaded those two feeders and called it a night. This morning, The Last Hummingbird Standing brought a cousin over for breakfast. It wasn’t Matt Gaetz. I’ll call that a win.
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