Tag: E.B. White

Black (and Blue) Friday

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Interdimensional gateway to a timeline where Beelzebozo lost the election? Naw, just our solstice tree reflected in a painting.

Turkey Day is done and dusted, and Black Friday is upon us like Nosferatu with the munchies.

We harmed no turkeys. But three chickens are missing thighs and I don’t think prosthetics or wheelchairs will help them cross the road anytime soon.

I cooked Melissa Clark’s sheet-pan chicken with sweet taters and bell peppers, plus a side of Martha Rose Shulman’s stir-fried succotash with edamame. Herself kicked in a delicious raspberry cobbler for dessert.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla got a yummy StinkCube® with her kibble. When I make tuna salad for sandwiches I squeeze the water from the tuna and we thin it with drinking water before freezing it in ice-cube trays to give Her Majesty a couple weeks’ worth of tasty treats.

I should’ve taken some pix, but after a four-mile trail run and all that cookery we just sat down and chowed down. The grub was gone before I even considered preserving the moment in pixels. If I remember I’ll take some snaps when we wipe out the leftovers this evening.

Herself texted with her sisters, I did likewise with my bros (not blood kin, the chosen variety), and we rang up my sis and her husband to exchange holiday greetings and gnaw our livers over the Pestilence-Erect. Good times, etc.

Today I hope to buy a big bag of nuttin’. Either that or I may hit Page 1 Books for some fresh brain food because I find myself rereading old books again.

There’s nothing wrong with revisiting “Nobody’s Fool” by Richard Russo or “Essays of E.B. White.” But there are roads out there not yet taken.

A Report in January 2024

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
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.