Down to Earth
I’m looking out my window at the front lawn. The grass is cut low, but not because I cut it. My wife deals with the lawn maintenance because, honestly, she does a better job at it than I do. I don’t feel upset at that because I admit to it, but when she lets me I try my best to mimic her lawn care techniques. When I did mow regularly I used the push mower, even though the yard is not small. It’s how I got my workout back in the day. But I doubt the grass was this low back then.
Beyond the lawn is the sidewalk, which was freshly poured approximately three years ago, separated into blocks of concrete straight and true. It leads in a direct line toward the north of the village, where it dead-ends in a thick patch of woods. Odd, that a thick patch of woods would impinge upon an otherwise civilized place, but nevertheless it is the case. When I go for a walk, I can follow the path only so far until I have to take to the street to avoid the atrocity. Continue reading “Down to Earth”
I remember the first time I beheld a signed copy of a popular novel. It was one of those Lawrence Block tomes about a seedy character named Matthew Scudder, books that I used to eat up like Frosted Flakes. They were vapid, but somehow kept my interest the way few books did in the early ’90s. Then, I saw a book in a bookstore (I don’t even remember what book it was, but it was in Borders) that had a sticker on its cover that proudly read “Autographed Copy.” I wondered at how a book could blatantly lie like that, but then when I opened the cover, there it was, just as advertised, the author’s signature. I thought, “It’s got to suck to be famous because everyone wants a piece of you,” and then I realized that particular author wasn’t famous. Oops.
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