Blog #283                                August 11, 2022

 

Here we are on Bald Head Island, our glorious, exhilarating getaway, and the most exhilarating part of the trip is always the ferry-ride over from the mainland.  Most of us ride up on deck and enjoy the wind and the spray and sometimes even get splashed by the waves.  It’s a magical twenty-minute ride, better than anything Disney World has to offer.  The most depressing part of the trip will be the ferry ride back.  We settled into our rental house and met our nearest neighbor, a five-foot Black Mud Snake resting just outside the back door.  We, at least the nature lovers among us, cautiously approached the monstrous dragon, but apparently the snake was not woke to an inter-species relationship and slithered back into the marsh.

 

Message from Shakespeare:  How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a
thankless child! (King Lear).  Sure, he’s out there playing with some stupid snake and I, his loyal and loving cat, am home all alone.  My nice neighbors take care of me, but mostly I’m pretty much alone and pretty much pissed.  A snake!  I’ll show that old man a snake! When he comes home, I’m going to bite him in the asp.  Grrr!

 

We have been on the island less than 24 hours, and I have already lost two shirts, a pair of sunglasses and a grandson.  We’ve lost him before.  He’ll show up. 

 

Hi there and welcome back.  I hope you’re feeling well, wherever you are.  Before we left, I received an email from a high-school friend, a psychiatrist living in Philadelphia.  He told me he was writing a book about mental illness and wanted to use a poem I had written back in high-school.  Why he has saved one of my 60-year-old poems till now, I can’t say.  Maybe he had a crush on me.  I won’t bore you with the poem, but it was a 12-line rhyming version of the following joke:

 

A man took his wife to a faith-healer.  “Guru,” he said, “my wife is sick.”  The Guru looked into the woman’s tired and swollen eyes, touched her pallid, shrunken skin and said, “No, my friend, your wife is well.  She only thinks she’s sick.”  A week later the man saw the healer again.  “Well,” said the Guru, “is your wife better?”  “She’s worse,” said the man.  “She thinks she’s dead.”  It figures -- I finally get a poem published and it’s in a book about mental illness!

Which brings me back to my brother and sister.  Some of you have doubted the veracity of my stories about them, but I assure you they are 100% true.  Let me finish up by telling you that when my brother died in 2001, aged 61, he owned a large old mansion near Washington University.  Although there were four stories and 7 or 8 bedrooms, he slept on a couch on the landing between the first and second floors.  The bedrooms were used for storage.  One bedroom was filled with nothing but magnificent, elaborate bows for wrapping presents.  He had made them all and saved them.  Another room contained nothing but empty, cardboard toilet-paper rolls.

My brother left no will, so his estate, minimal after creditors’ claims, went to me, my sister and my father.  By the time of the distribution in 2002, my sister had died at the age of 63 and some lawyer showed up claiming my sister had a will leaving her assets to a trust to take care of her 14 cats.  Her only asset was her share of my brother’s paltry estate.  I didn’t care; good luck to her cats.  The cats and I had had previous dealings.  More than once, I had received a call from a frantic motel owner claiming my sister had stayed a single night and her cats had destroyed the room to the tune of thousands of dollars.  How they found me, I don’t know, and how they thought I was responsible for a 60-year-old lunatic, I know even less.

 

My brother was buried in our family plot, although it turned out later that he was buried in the wrong place.  Don’t get me started.  I had nothing to do with my sister’s funeral.  Her ashes were scattered as fertilizer on a tree in an arboretum.  The ceremony was arranged by that same lawyer and attended by her friends, a group of obsequious sycophants who looked like they had just arrived from the Star Wars Cantina.  The ceremony was bizarre and included sage, a turtle and a bag of chigger repellant.  Don’t get me started.  Someday, I might tell you all about it.

 

Weekly Word:  What do want, obsequious or sycophants?  Let’s do obsequious which means obedient or attentive to a fawning degree.  Sycophants are just people who are obsequious.  There’ll be a test.

 

Our marsh-house on Baldhead contains twelve people, three dogs and enough food for the Turkish army.  There are bags of keto bark, organic peanut butter, cases of beer and kale everywhere.  Did you know that kale, by weight, is the largest food in the world?  Ten pounds of kale could fill the Grand Canyon.

 

Some days before we arrived on the island, apparently, a general call went out to every flying, crawling and slithering blood-sucking creature on the Atlantic Coast that I was headed their way.  They wasted no time crawling from the sand, oozing from the mud and dive-bombing from every direction to feast upon the tasty smorgasbord that my unprotected body provided.  By the end of the week, I was one big mega-bite.  And sunburned and exhausted besides.

 

I’m tired and bitten and achy

My skin is all burnt up and flaky

But we’re having such fun

In the sea and the sun

Though I do miss my little boy, Shakey.

 

Another Message from Shakespeare:  My tongue will tell the anger of my heart (The Taming of the Shrew).  Aww, he wrote me a limerick.  Well, it won’t work, Big Boy.  You think you’re bitten up now?  Just wait till I get a hold of you.  Meow!

 

You’ll be happy to know that my grandson showed up.  And you’d better show up next week, or I’ll sic my cat on you.  Stay well, count your blessings and enjoy the summer.  There isn’t much left of it.

 

Michael                                             Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com