Daily Log, September 29, 2015

Nehi and a Moon Pie

I might start with the statement, "where'd this month go anyhow?"  That is just plain absurd because I know the earth and the moon have corkscrewed around the sun for billions of years. This will continue for billions of years into the future.  Days, weeks and months pass uncounted by the cosmos.  Whether I have had a fast month or an excruciatingly slow month as I did when I was a child has no bearing on Father Time.  God knows how fast we are spinning around the galaxy and how fast the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are closing on each other.  The moon races around the earth, the earth and moon around the sun, the sun, a truly tiny pinpoint of light, rotates around the galaxy in its designated spot on some obscure arm of the Milky Way and the galaxy is speeding toward its neighboring galaxy.  All of this is happening at dizzying, gee whiz speeds.   No wonder I feel dizzy.  

As I take my last breath and the lights go out, the Black Holes of our galaxy and the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy, M31, will continue to close on one another and I will be turned into the same stardust from whence I was formed. Maybe a few molecules of the star dust that made me the first time will have the good fortune of turning up in a sentient being once again.  Maybe there is life after death and just maybe the transition won't be so painful next time around.  Growing old ain’t easy.

My thoughts about science, billions of years, billions of stars and my own personal mythological beliefs are probably a fairly common social construct that many television watching folks have bought into.  I tend to believe the scientists and what they have to say about the natural world.  Carl Sagan was a very convincing fellow.  If I push myself to be honest I have to admit that I take everything on faith.  I don't have access to large telescopes and even larger and higher mathematics. If Carl Sagan and his scientist buddies tell me that the distance to M31 is two and a half million light years I tend to believe them.  When they tell me that the distance is actually very nearby I also believe that.  When I was told that Jesus went 40 days and nights without food in the desert I believed that, hook, line and sinker. (This Blog was to be about fishing.) I operate mostly on my belief system and the social constructs that society has gifted me.  There is some discernment on my part, I suspect, because I am having a hard time believing what Donald Trump is telling me.  

The bigger than a silver dollar yellow garden spider (Argiope aurantia) outside the study window weaves its lethal orb and trims it with an exquisite z ladder, day-in, day-out, day-in, day-out.  Its eight magic legs wrap its little captured honey bees in perfectly fitting funeral shrouds and sends them off, I know not where. Stardust?  Her fate may be the same as mine.

Today was a good day.  No meals out, only a bag of cashews (I thought I bought peanuts, damn) and a Coca Cola.  Coca Cola, what a perfect sound it makes rolling off my tongue.  I still like to drop peanuts into my coke bottle like my North Carolina Daddy taught me over sixty-five years ago.   A good marriage in a plastic bottle, but not quite as well consummated as it would have been in glass.  The Mexican Coca Colas are superior to ours.  They use sugar cane instead of fructose and they honor the blend with glass bottles.  

I remember Ronnie Doyle and me.  Seven years old we were, dropping our hard won nickels into a big red coke machine at the gas station near the flood wall.  Out came Nehi Sodas and we both felt cheated.  It tasted awful to two West Virginia boys raised on Coca Cola. We poured the golden liquid out onto the concrete, out back, around by the men's room.  Then we pulled out our half pint peckers and peed into the bottles.  We set them down next to the air hose and hoped someone would pick them up and mistake them for sodas and maybe even drink them.  The misbehavior was delicious, an immense feeling of power and independence.   We laughed all the way home and no one ever found out 'til just now.  

Ronnie graduated with a BS in engineering from Rensselaer Polytech and died before he hit thirty.  I hope there's more in the cards for him than stardust and my memories of Nehi Sodas.  

I passed Supermax on the Florence road and stopped at a Loaf and Jug.  The girl at the counter was worn thin by life.  She couldn't be bothered to point out where the $1.00 scratch-off cards were in the counter display case.  She couldn't be bothered to count out proper change.  She shorted me four cents.  "What the hell," I thought.  "The older I get, the more invisible I become. No one would notice if I went around the side of the building and peed in a bottle."  I dismissed the absurd thought. Besides, peeing in bottles is for little kids, not old men.   She never had a shot at really great life like Ronnie and I had.  What can you expect out of a prison town on the edge of the Great Plains?   

I stopped at a coffee shop in Canon City.  It was closed.  Disappointed I took up residence on a street bench for some long minutes.  The warm Colorado sun felt good.  I mused, Rocky Mountain High, Rocky Mountain Nehi.  An old couple, older than me, sat on a nearby bench and complained about prison work to a passerby they knew.  The young man, as bald as a billiard ball, contorted his face and its unremarkable features to say, "Hell, he pulled out a razor and told me I'd pay with my life."  

"Well that's exactly why I retired two years early, ain't it so Martha." 

Martha nodded yes.

"You know what they did?," asked the younger man.

"Hell, let me guess . . . NUTHU'N!  THEY DIDN'T DO NUTHU'N. "

"Well, that's close enough," the young man lamented, "they took away his TV for twelve hours."  

"Inmates just ain't what they used to be," the old man said.

I thought they would all laugh at this irony, but they were serious.  

His wife, a kindly looking woman, nodded her head.  She had heard a variation on the same story a hundred times before.  

They'll be stardust soon, just like me. 

I drove west up the Arkansas River and wet a few flies in the riffles.   An old fisherman happened by and said, "the fish are jumping; they just aren't biting.  Try a grasshopper, that's what I'm trying next."  A middle age woman walked up to the two of us, trying to keep her wet Labrador retriever from jumping on us.  The dog was a beauty and the woman had a taste for treating the beast with love.  I liked both of these people, the old guy and the middle age woman.  The wind kicked up and I did a few roll casts.

 Wham!  a hook in the base of my right thumb. "What the hell," I said.  I put on my spectacles and saw the barb was barely sunk into my skin.  Go ahead and tell me that a fish hook doesn't hurt a fish.  Think I'll buy barbless hooks from now on.  I yanked it out and kept talking.  

The old guy owned the best of the best fly fishing gear.  He wore the most ragged beat up undershirt I've seen in this lifetime.  I kid you not. I thought, gosh, he's awfully attached to that undershirt.  Maybe it's his lucky fly fishing undershirt, or maybe he's wearing his Mormon under-garments and his faith just isn't what it used to be.  My mind drifts.  

The pleasant woman with the black lab and the big ass Ram Dodge with duallys chatted with me for a while.  Her only son had just started college.  Her mom had just passed into the next phase of making stardust and she was free.  Oglethorpe, or Ogie for short, had helped her through her grief.   Her fifth-wheel trailer was parked at the KOA and she was seeing the country, tied to the dog and the memories of her youth.  Not much different than me thinking about Ronnie.  

There was a downpour on the way back home to Pueblo. It was a late season semi-impressive hailstorm.  The prison workers and guards, having just been released from their daytime prison shifts, were racing by each other and jockeying for a better position on the four-lane, not much different than two little boys pissing into empty Nehi bottles.  

Linda cooked a fine meal tonight.  Life is good.

Sheppard Hobgood