Roody at my feet

The Cardinals Pope

Cardinals generally mate fore life and flock during the winter, but this particular Cardinal is a singular loner: the Pope of Cardinals. He feeds atop the Cat house and poops in the woods.

Pearl's Fiddle

A hundred years ago, young Pearl Clark and family lived in the tenant house on one of the big farm estates that thrived then where the North Syracuse suburbs are now. Papa Clark took care of the fields, barns, roofs and machinery; while Pearl, with her Mother and her sisters cooked, served, and cleaned inside the Estate House from root cellar to music room. In the music room, the lady of the house noticed that Pearl’s hands had a lovely way of tickling the piano as she breezed by with her dust cloth - the dust cloth on the border of which those same hands had embroidered perfect little roses. Because the girl had such obvious hands full of talent, the Lady arranged for music lessons with a prominent Syracuse Violinist. The prominent Violinist was immediately impressed by Pearl’s hands that seemed to know the way without being taught; but of course there was still plenty for her to learn from the old master. He taught her well and at the end of their time together … maybe near the end of HIS time altogether … he gave Pearl the violin we have here today. With a flashlight and some head-twisting you can look into the music hole of the battered old instrument and read the label which states in stately Italian terms that it was made in anno seventeen twenty-six by Stradavarius himself, who has signed it to assure us that it’s so. Well everybody knows, or else should know, that back then, before patents were invented, or just weren’t such a bother, making and selling fake Stradivarius violins was an industry with global reach, and you may even have one in your garage. Her teacher may or may not have been a victim of any illusions about the violin, but in giving it to her, he somehow gave Pearl the impression, or Pearl gave Georgia the impression … or anyway Georgia gave ME the impression that somebody thought this is a real Stradivarius. It’s a FAKE Stradavarius, but Pearl took it with her when she left the farm to live upstairs over a candy store in Syracuse. There in her bare, caramel scented room, she could put the uncased violin on her one of her two chairs, leaning it comfortably against the chair back, and if she sat in the other chair with her sewing and sang, the violin would sing took or if she walked around the room dusting and singing, the violin would hum along. In her time living over the candy store, Pearl continued to do odd jobs in the service trade, but she also took the violin on the street and made some money busking there. I don’t know if Pearl took the fiddle with her that Thanksgiving evening when she went to have dinner on her first date with George Cuningham, the disowned heir of the Cuningham meat-packing family, but the day after her night at George’s apartment, she went back to the room over the candy store to get the fiddle and …or …everything else she owned, I don’t know how much she played the fiddle when the two of them and the five kids frolicked thereafter up on Tug Hill, ; but their three boys pretty well punked the poor thing.. So we’re not about to shove Pearl’s fiddle down a Woodchuck hole; just want to get the haunted old thing pulled together for our mutual comfort. if she doesn’t sing, or if it or he does, but has a voice like Tom Waits on a tough night, that’s Okay. Might put her together myself, with the right advice. Hang her up for a security camera housing, conservation piece, and story telling device. She didn’t come with a bow anyhow. Where can I buy horse hair?

Fizz iz a Book

Off the Top if My Head

My name is Lammar (two-ems) Nuthatch and I may be crazy ( which sure I am) and I may have told a stretcher now and then (well I’d be poor company if I hadn’t) but there’s nothing in this story that glorifies me, and the facts of it are nothing that, for shame, I would want you to see; but after so long, the ever-swelling truth is literaly (as you will learn) splitting my head; it must come out, and believe you me, it’s all true, or my name’s not lammar Nuthatch with the double ems. In a nutshell : I shot the sky, and the sky fell. It happend a long time ago and it’s the reason I always wear this rag on my head.. Come nineteen sixty, when I was a young man just old enough to drive a car and hunt small game, there was a special season for hunting Rabbits at night during the full moon of February, because Rabbits are mostly nocturnal, so , with the full moon, and always (in those days) snow to amplify its light - the chances were pretty good for bagging a few bunnies, and it’s less likely that a guy might mistake another hunter or your Cat for a Rabbit then: that is, unless the sky is clouded and everything is not so bright. But there was no regulation in the law saying that it holds only on clear nights, and I was not so bright at age sixteen, and my parents wre very permissivve, so one sort of cloudy night during the full moon of Beghruary circa nineteen fiffty eight, I took the family car, and the double barreled sixteen gauge Fox shotgun that I inhereited from my Grandfather and went a hunting out by the Tompkins county airport, across the road , about where a huge Borg Warer factory was built years later, and may be still there, I haven’t been by there in many years, though when it was new and partnered with Alan Pike, using a Kelly Croswell paint spraying machine to stripe parking lots with fast drying (and toxic) paint, we actually painted stripes on the concrete floor of the Borg Warner Plant, as stupid as that may have been, considering what those naptha fumes can do to your body, your lungs, and probably your head. Before the striping years and any perceptual problems resulting to that, I was still, if not the birightest kid, still clear sighted, and still don’t wear glasses, even for teading, but on the nightt we are speaking of now, was not particularly clear, out there by the airport. For nminutes at a time, the big old moon hung there like somethng painted on a back drop, thjen it would go racing through a flock of clkouds, or would seem to, as the clouds raced by the moon: seeming to be trooping trees, ghost herds , schools of fish,, groups of fat laddies,, random objects, mountain ranges, cigars. Plenty of tracks in the snow, but no Rabbits ….not even spectoral ones hopping across in the sky…. and the sky was getting all my attentions. One of those luminous cigars, a lone cigar after a fleet of shiip clouds ahd gone by from North East to south west, one of those luminus cigars, a lone one, was not moving in that direction and maybe the wind was shifting….everyting did all of a sudden seem very different in every way….one of those cigars tilted up about thierty degrees annd then, as it slowly levele3d, int….not so slowly began growing LARGER, and as it grew largeer the cigar became more of an elipse…growing largerr and faster until when it was right over me, I could see that it was actually a dixc shape….unless it was a globe like the moon, until it hovered right over my head. To my ever lasting shame, I shot at the fiucking thing, both barrels at once, just as I had too often done when startled by a grouse bursting out of a tree, or a rabbit from a snowbank. Number six bird shot pellets from a couple of sixteen gauge shotgun shells should not be expected to bring down an aircraft, and maybe it didn’t but the doubleblast not only shattered the silence, but the sky itself, as if it were a dome of thin ice with bright lighting cracks fractalling all all over it, the pieces parting, falling slip slidey, fracaling into white, ash, ashes to dust, dust and I whited out, coming back into consciousness, flat on my back in a fog so thick I had to feel around to find my shotgun, but couldn;t find my hat , but my head hurt hard and with my hand ungloved I could feel the wound, such as it was, bloodles, as an ancient scar, raised fleshy lips, like a mouth on top of my head. I felt great shame for shootiing at whatever it was. Always after that I wore a rag or a hat or both on my head, so as not have to explain, and never…..until now when I am old and out of the way…have I mentioned it to anybody. And of course my experience doesn’t answer any of the usual questions about U.F.O.s., but I by now, after a big stretch of time during which I have matured someqhat, t, persued indepenent and guided studies, and have somewhat, oversome my childish shame and shyness, Ihave a better idea of what to make of the incident, but I would not be coming forth with this, had not te erie ips of the fleshy scar atop my head had not begin to part, which made bad fudge in my pants, as I expected blood, guts, or what was left of my brain spill up outt of there, but only a faint windy wistle at first, but then a voice in a language I didn’t understand, but then I did, and though I can’t call it up now, or at will anytime, I recall what it said, and I believe what it said, that voice in my headwind, but. It is clear to me now not just from that ongoing voice, and this may be born out by the expereiences of citizens unlucky enough to have been taken aboard UFOs, that the typical, large-brained, big-headedd beings who capture them have, during their own evolution, developed huge brains, due not to it making them any smarter, but just due to the haphazard evolution of the brain in their species, as in ours, it is an overlarge organ with many cobbed togather chambers and later-day lobes, which nature has not yet integrated in a compact version, though a good enginer COULD, and which in the meantime, and time can be a mean sort of prison, makes the process of giving birth: passing thjat huge headout of the womb through the limited portal of our, oand more so with their hips ( for have you ever heeard of a one eyed, big-headed, wide-hipped flying green alien; These…..people…. are here to fuck with us. They want to implant their outer space sperm in the wombs of our women to spare themselves the unbearable pain of childbirth, to abourt the progeny at a late stage and finish them in some kind of world wide womb industrial complex. I don’t care of you believe it or not it’s the straight truth right off the top of my head, and you can believe me or my name isn’t Lammar Nuthatch, with the double m.