The Hair

As you can, or can’t see in the picture over there, I shaved my head this past weekend. Not all the way with a razor, but down as far as you can go with a pair of clippers. My mother in law had already lost her hair due to the radiation therapy she’s been receiving and I got it into my head that I wanted to get some pictures taken of us baldies in the family, what with the fact that one of my brothers in laws sports that cut already as well.

Sweetie’s side of the family tends to make a bigger production out of Easter than my side of the family, in that they actually have a get together, so it seemed like the perfect time to get my hair cut and get all the pictures taken.

I have for the most part, since the early 80’s, gotten my hair cut by Sharon, at Napoleon’s Barber Shop. Though Earl, the owner of the shop at that time, was technically the first person I allowed to cut my long hair off, Sharon was the one who perfected the mullet that enabled Sweetie to fall madly in love with me. Sweetie likes to say it was the guitar, and like a said a few weeks ago, the guitar absolutely played into it, but it was also the hair. I had a devastating one-two punch, nodoubtaboutit.

It took Sharon a bit of convincing to finally get the clippers out and do the whole thing. In fact she needed to take it in stages, putting on one of those clipper covers that only allows you to shave so close. Once we got it down that far though, she seemed to have a pretty good time going the rest of the way.

I don’t hardly mind the short hair at all, with one exception. My head tends to get a lot colder and I find myself walking around with my shoulders scrunched up, trying to keep the wind off the back of my neck—makes me look like a hunchback or something.

The family’s reaction to it had been pretty interesting. Sweetie’s not taken much notice of it one way or another, the Older Boy likes to sit next to me rubbing the top of my head, and Ike, who first seemed to notice it Sunday night while I was playing my guitar, now occasionally stares and laughs.

Sweetie’s mom was pretty surprised and she had no problem ditching the wig to get some pictures taken with the brother in law and me. Monday she started the Chemo back up and I haven’t talked to her to see how she’s feeling yet. She’s a pretty tough lady and though I know she will fight hard, I think we all realize that there most likely won’t me many more Easters to take silly pictures of our bald heads together.

Looking back on it now, I wish we had painted our scalps all the colors of the rainbow—smiling into the lens like a happy, though misplaced pile of eggs, inadvertently left behind on a cool spring day near the end of March.

White Button Mushrooms

It’s been a while since Minnie lived out here. In fact for all the years I’ve known her, she’s been away from our corner of world far longer than she’s called it home. Her latest jaunt into the US midlands began more than five years ago, and though I do hear sparingly from her, I wouldn’t say that we’ve chatted on the phone once since Christmas. That’s not to imply that I don’t consider her a very good friend, as I have many good friends whom I haven’t talked to in a while. Sometimes life spins you out of the circle for a while, sometimes it’s for the rest of your life—but that doesn’t mean that they stop being what I would call very good friends.

Very good friends leave traces of themselves all over, and in my book, it’s these traces that make the real difference between very good friends and everyday acquaintances.

And this also brings us, strangely, to the proper amount of white button mushrooms to buy—especially the proper amount to buy when one is about to make pizza.

You see, Minnie never really learned to cook.

Now that’s not to say that she couldn’t whip up a hamburger mac and cheese now and then, or cook up a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup, but I don’t think even she would argue that the fine art of food preparation was somewhat of a mystery to her. I’ve always gotten the impression that Minnie’s mom was never all that interested in spending time in the kitchen, at least anymore time than was absolutely necessary to keep her family fed, and that’s what lead to her kitchen ineptness, but that’s neither here nor there. I’ve never met Alma, Minnie’s mom, and though she plays an obvious roll in Minnie’s lack of kitchen skills, it’s a road I don’t really want to go down—at least not here, not now.

The way it usually works around the singlewide is that Sweetie makes the pizza dough and I toss it. It’s a trick I picked up standing alongside the late actor River Phoenix while working on a movie (and it sounds much cooler to say that and leave it at that, then it does to explain the whole thing, trust me). I like to think that tossed pizza dough makes for a better crust, in the same way saying I learned to toss pizza dough with River Phoenix, makes for a better story. It’s just a lot more fun and that’s that.

So last night I got to chopping up toppings and found the bag of mushrooms Sweetie bought. In it were the seven mushrooms. There are always seven mushrooms in the produce bag when making pizza, because to buy any other number would be to defy the ghosts of the past. To buy any other number would cheat your soul of a good friend’s legacy—to buy any other number would be to lessen ones connection to who you are.

Years ago, when our friendship was still young, Minnie, Sweetie and I all lived together in a large house up on Phinney Ridge that overlooked Crown Hill. Minnie had always been a bit of a picky eater, but one thing she always pressed for was the hand tossed pizza we would make—pizza that she had grown fond of. The way I remember it was that once, after she had made an extended trip back to the Midwest, she came home and asked if we could have that pizza. I wrote her out a list of supplies that we would need and on the list I wrote “Mushrooms”. She asked how many, and I said I thought seven or eight would be fine, so when Minnie got home from the store, there were exactly seven white button mushrooms in her grocery sack. She never asked how many mushrooms to get ever again, and in all the subsequent years that I have known her, Minnie has always bought seven white button mushrooms, regardless of what we needed them for.

Now all these years later, there’s a place in my heart where seven mushrooms lie…I knew when I opened the bag of groceries Sweetie brought home that there would be a small bag of mushrooms in it. I also knew that Sweetie would get seven of them and that when she did, she would flash upon the memory of Minnie in our kitchen, of drinking whatever strange beer Minnie would pick out from its cool label and the smell of yeast and flour dust settling on the grey linoleum floor in the wake of kneaded and tossed dough.

That she would flash on that memory just like I would. Just like I did.

Minnie hasn’t bought mushrooms for our pizza for a lot of years now, and in fact the truth is that Minnie never even liked mushrooms to begin with.

Minnie gave Sweetie and me many gifts, but there are none from her that I love more, than seeing seven white button mushrooms in a clear plastic produce bag. Very good friends, like truth and beauty, are hidden all around us, buried in the bits and pieces of our everyday lives—only sneeking out every once in a while to say hello, like when found in the guise of seven white button mushrooms at the bottom of a grocery sack.

The Cat

I could hear it the moment I got out of the car this morning. The mewling and meowing were echoing off the walls of the garage in the sort of frantic way a cat has of telling you it’s hungry or stuck or hurt or maybe just in heat and looking for a mate. The garage at the mill has large doors that close and I was thinking that perhaps it had been stuck in there overnight, but the more I looked for him the less I found him.

It’s not the first time an animal has gotten stuck behind the great metal doors. There was, of course, the crow, whose dead body I found next to my car years ago, and whose means of death is still a mystery. There have been a few pigeons, who, under some mistaken pretense, decided the garage and its few exposed beams, held promise for a nest. In fact there was once another cat that had squeezed through a crack in the cement walls and then found it impossible to go back the way he came.

I started looking under cars and in the corners, but every time I moved further away from my parking space, the direction of the cries kept bringing me back. I don’t know what made me look up, but I did, and there standing on the two-by-four beams exposed when the garage started leaking; stood the cat. I have no idea how it got up there, as there was no clear way for him to climb up that high—as least as far as I could see.

I walked into the mill, hung up my coat and put away my lunch pail—told my boss I’d be right back, and headed back into the garage. I’ve done this sort of work before—I am, if nothing else, a decent cat rescuer.

There has been an old wooden ladder in the back corner for the past year or so—Left lying there from the last time the florescent lights were changed. It was just tall enough for me to reach up past the ballasts to touch the cat. I took the fact that he didn’t immediately bite me to be a good sign. The only thing most cat’s hate more than being stuck in high places, is being rescued from high places. My feeling is that, in an effort to regain their dignity, once they get face to face, they have a tendency to put the blame of their predicament squarely upon the person they are looking at. We did fine with the petting, but the moment I grabbed him for our decent, things got a little more dicey. Though in all fairness, once he got his claws dug firmly into my shoulder blades, he calmed down enough to let me bring him down.

He was pretty pissed about the box I then put him in, but it was the only way I could figure getting him out of the garage since he wasn’t following me and had decided to just hide under cars for a while. I set him free just outside the doors, in the small green area near the Spanish Steps and though he screamed and cried and pitched a fit, once I lifted the box lid he calmed down and headed straight into the blackberry brambles.

I suppose that I could have taken him in to the Humane Society. They saved our blind cat, Zane, once, after she had gotten out of the trailer and wound up across the highway in the next trailer park over. But I didn’t want to take the chance that he’d be put to sleep, all because he was fool enough to get stuck someplace he couldn’t get down from. No…I needed to give him another chance. Let the next person take him in, or let him roam free the rest of his life.

On my way into the mill, a young black woman who lives in the shelter next door and who also parks in the garage, stepped outside and said “Thanks for rescuing that cat. He was just so high up there, I didn’t know what to do.”

Yeah, that’s me alright—the newest hero in the Kitty Liberation Army of the World’s Book of Days.

Cleaning

The trailer has reached a new level of clean. There is fresh paint everywhere, Sweetie got down on her hands and knees to scrub the kitchen and bathroom linoleum. We bought mop and glow and now they shine like they never have—not in the five years we’ve owned the trailer anyway. Sunday I rented a carpet cleaner from the evil Home Depot—a place I vowed not to go since finding out they are as red as their logo and give money to the dark side. But you can rent a nice carpet cleaner there for only 15 bucks…so I broke my own guidelines and got one.

The trailer sparkles now. Sparkles like it’s all shiny new, having just arrived, fresh from the factory floor. What is it that compels me to make the trailer look better than it ever has before, in those few weeks before we pack everything up and head down the road? I’ve become obsessive about it really…I wake up in the middle of the night making lists of things that I’ve somehow decided need to get done before it can sell.

At least I was until last night. The trailer hit the market yesterday afternoon, and after cleaning my tool bench and touching up some of the door trim, I was, for the first time in weeks, able to sleep soundly through the night, without waking up to make a single list.

Wednesdays I work a half-day at the mill. I’ve been leaving Ike with the sitter and coming to a local truck stop for a cup of coffee and the use of their free Wi-Fi. The fact that they make a decent sandwich doesn’t hurt either.

The plan right now as far as I know it, is that I’ll rest for a week or so, and then begin the long and arduous task of packing up the rest of the trailer and getting everything ready to move. Getting it ready for putting on the market has at least made me deal with all the piles of junk that seem to have accumulated around here over the past few years.

I’m hoping that the boxing up of the remains will be a relatively painless process. Though I guess that remains to be seen. When I count up all the times I’ve moved in my life I think this will be number 20—a number that makes it average exactly once every two years of my life.

Because did I mention?

Yeah, that’s right, this year I make the move solidly into the middle of my life. Right smack dab into the big 4-0.

I am not afraid.