Life In The Slow Lane

Lace Cap Hydrangea.
Voodoo Lily
Close-up of the stem.


Okay. I guess I've finally learned my lesson.
I think that my favorite hen, Shalayla, is gone. I haven't found any feathers but she's not around. Owen and I were on the front porch this afternoon and I saw Elvis standing in the corner of the front yard. Something about the way he was standing- as still as a statue- gave me a little frisson of fear. The other three hens were standing back in the bamboo, hidden, and I told myself, "Aw, nah. She's fine. She's on the nest." I'd just seen her a few hours earlier on the front porch.
But she wasn't on the nest and I haven't seen her since and it's getting on towards sunset and she's not with the other sister-wives and usually, by this time of night they're all together, getting their last bits of bugs and sips of water and letting Elvis have his good-night sex with them before they go to roost.
Shit.
Mr. Moon told me not to let them out of the coop. And yet, I did.
Lord- how many times have I saved that hen's life? Our old rooster Sam couldn't get enough of her and he pecked an honest-to-god hole in her head and practically skinned her back when he fucked her and I treated her with a salve made of golden seal and antibiotic ointment and we killed Sam and ate him because he was mean and we couldn't tolerate that.
Oh Shaylala.

Life in the 'hood. What you gonna do? Keep those sweet hens and Elvis shut up, no matter how much they want out, no matter how much I love watching them scratch around the yard.

Besides that, it's been a good day. Owen kept me running, kept me busy.

Do you remember when Roseanne was Roseanne Barr and first started her career? Not unless you're of a certain age, but she did this bit where she talked about her husband coming home from work, looking around the house and saying, "What in hell do you DO all day?" and she said, "You get home and these kids are still alive, I've done my job."
I have to tell you, that line gave me a lot of comfort in the years when I had kids at home from the ages of thirteen-down-to-newborn. Four of them.
And with Owen, that's my job too. Keeping him alive. And every day he's learning things and doing things that are making that harder and harder.

Just today he learned to open the gate in the fence. He's been trying to figure this out for some time now and today, he did. He walked right through it and looked at me and raised his hands in the air in victory and jubilation and I just went, "Aw, Jeez."
I turned my back for one second when he was in the house and he was halfway up the stairs.
He handed me a knife that you could use to gut a pig. I don't even know how he got it.
And when I was fixing his lunch in the kitchen, which is about five feet away from the dining room, I said, "Go on in and get in your high chair."
He went in the dining room and slammed the door and I put his food on his plate and took it into the dining room and he wasn't there. The door into the Panther Room was shut. The dining room is not a big room, y'all. I wondered if he'd been transported, perhaps even Raptured.
"Owen, where ARE you?" I didn't panic but I was mystified and I know how fast he can get in trouble so yes, I was a bit worried. Finally I opened up the closet door, and there he was, giggling at having figured out how to add another dimension to Peek-A-Boo.
Again- Aw, Jeez.

And then this- we were in the garden and were picking green beans. He had one in each hand. "Two!" he announced.
Do you know how profound that is? He knows the concept of two. More than one. Two. We do count things around here. Mostly eggs. Now beans.
That boy.
He put on my red cowboy boots and was walking around with them on. They come up to his hips so he's all straight-legged and he's falling over and getting up and taking pigeon steps and he's laughing and I'm laughing so hard that I had to sit on the floor. We laughed and laughed.

That's all one day. One day. And I had him yesterday so it's not like it's been a month.

And so it goes. Hawks get hens and boys learn new things. We went for a walk today and there was a train stopped behind the post office. We wheeled over and checked it out. Two giant engines and Owen was entranced. Finally the engineer (or the guy who sits next to him), slid his window open and waved at us. We waved back and watched him drink his coke, watched him check his notebook. Finally, the airbrakes let off and the engines revved and the whistle blew and slowly, slowly, the train moved away, the heartbeat rhythm chug, chug, chug and we were entranced. We saw puppies on our walk. "More and more" as Owen said. Lots of puppies. More than two.

It's been a good day except that Shalayla is gone. I weeded cucumbers, I found one ready to eat. The tomatoes are really coming in. The yard-long beans are at least nine inches long. I killed two yellow flies. Smack. Done. I'm going to eat curried vegetables again tonight.
Mr. Moon may be home tomorrow. He's flying out of Las Vegas late tonight and I miss him so. Whether he needs to stay at his sister's and finish up some painting there will determine his arrival here. I've almost forgotten what it's like to have a husband.
Yeah. Probably not.
I still know how to ride a bicycle and it's been quite some time. Longer than a week.

It's been a good week in Lloyd. Except...
Shalayla.

I'm a bad chicken-mama, wanting to give them freedom and offering them death on the wing instead.

Well. I kept that boy alive.

I've done my job. For today at least, I've done my job.

Extra, Extra. Read All About It.

Oh my God. A train with passenger cars just went by. With lights on in the windowed compartments. I don't think I've ever, in my five and a half years here, seen passenger cars go by. And now, same train- flats of trucks and truck containers are slowly making their way past my house. Strange to see vehicles meant for the road slip through my back woods on rails.
When people see how close the tracks are behind my house, they ask me how often the train goes by and I can't even tell them. I don't know if one seldom does or if I'm just so used to it that it doesn't even register any more. I do know that after a big storm the silence of no train traffic at all makes me realize that more trains go by than I probably realize.

I didn't mean to write about trains this morning. I meant to write about newspapers but they are related. Both are part of our history, and still part of our present, even if we do think of them as anachronisms. I live within yards of a train track, I still get a newspaper daily. The train still provides good value for transportation dollars. I am sure of that. But newspapers? Do they still serve us?

Our local newspaper, The Tallahassee Democrat, has gotten so small and so, well, ridiculous, that every day I wonder why I bother to pay for it, why I bother to read it. It's mostly Tallahassee news and the only thing that keeps getting bigger about it is the Zing! column which is where anonymous asshats can submit witty little bon mots such as this one in today's paper:

I went to the Post Office today for some 98-cent international stamps. They were sold out. I hope when I need a stent, Obamacare isn't sold out.

Pithy, eh? And hardly what you'd call news.

Mostly what I read in the paper are editorials, which is funny, because what's a blog but a personal editorial column? For me, anyway. Leonard Pitts, Jr. and Garrison Keillor are my favorites. We have some local columnists who aren't bad. But the other stuff? I don't give a good goddam if the NCAA turns over documents about FSU or not. I suppose if I followed sports I would and actually, the sports section seems to be holding its own. I say seems to be because I don't read it.
The comics seem pretty stupid to me these days and Ann Landers is dead.



I'm sorry- Annie's Mailbox is not Ann Landers. She talked about masturbation and homosexuality when no one else did. In a reasonable and unhysterical way. She was a jewel, that old broad. She was a big part of my education about life because I was allowed to read the newspaper as soon as I could, well, read. I never could get my hands on enough reading material and so I just grabbed up anything with print on it and thankfully, my mother allowed me to do that.

It's funny. The first newspaper I remember reading was the Miami Herald, which my grandfather got daily in a box across the street from his house in Roseland, Florida which was also yards away from the railroad track. In fact, a trestle bridge built by Henry Flagler crossed the river which his house was built on. It's still there, that bridge, and it looks the same and the train still crosses it. Here's a picture I took of it in 2006:


And so the train and the newspaper are linked in my mind from an early age.

I started out reading the comics, as most children do. Or did. This was back in the DAY, people. There were comics which were not unlike soap operas, Mary Worth,


and that crazy empty-nickel eyed girl Little Orphan Annie and her equally empty-eyed dog.


They quite frankly scared me.

My favorite was Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter, because she had an exciting life and traveled all over the world to get stories and had a lover with an eye patch who was always searching for the mysterious and legendary black orchid.

But even when I was very young, it was the columnists I loved. I remember distinctly reading the columns of a man whose name I cannot remember, no matter how hard I try. I'm sure his work was not worthy of a Pulitzer and he wrote about things like hangnails but I loved it. Jack Somebody, his name was.

I've always gotten the newspaper. I read about John Lennon's death in the newspaper. I've done thousands of crosswords, lined hundreds of bird cages, read millions of words in newspapers. My ultimate weekend treat is to buy a copy of the NY Times, shelling over my five or six bucks for a week's worth of print to consume at my leisure.

And now I'm wondering- is it time to let my subscription go? But part of me, despite my frustration with the "news" I get from the paper, would feel so guilty if I quit getting the paper. Getting the paper is what grown-ups DO. It's what informed citizens do. It's what intelligent people do.
Or it used to be, anyway.
Now people watch the news on TV. You can't go into a restaurant, doctor's office or airport waiting area without being bombarded by CNN or Fox. And I'd hardly call Fox News news. I get news from NPR and the Huffington Post which is, admittedly, pretty left-leaning. Not NPR. The Huffington Post. I trust NPR more than any other source and that's just the truth.
But let's face it- by the time I get the news in the newspaper, I've heard it or read it already.
So does it still make any logical sense to get it?
I don't know.
Yesterday I read in the Democrat that one of my old FSU biology professors had died. I wouldn't have gotten that information on NPR. But I don't plan on going to the funeral. I didn't really know him although he was certainly one of those teachers you don't forget.
A few weeks ago there was an article about a house that I lived in briefly when I first moved to Tallahassee which has some history to it and which has been moved from where it was when I lived there and which is going to be restored. That was interesting and the only place I would have discovered the story was in the paper. I still get information that I wouldn't get anywhere else in the local paper. I do.
And so it does still have some value to me, I suppose.

Trains and newspapers are connected in more ways than just my own personal experience. It was the railways that made this country accessible and it was the newspapers which made it civilized. The newspaper used to be the only way to get information, just as the railways were the only way to travel, to ship things, to cross this country from one side to the other, the way for the tracks dynamited through mountains, the trestles for them spanning the rivers. And reporters used to be sent far and wide throughout the world to gather information, to bring it back, to write it up and then sent out into the world for people to read, to be informed. You weren't really married if your wedding announcement wasn't in the paper. You weren't really dead if your obit wasn't printed there.

But now there's such a myriad of ways to get information out. And here I sit, contributing to the internet, not really news, but a column of sorts.

It's sad to me to see the great newspapers and the small ones too, fail and fall. I hate it. Reporters used to be something. Journalists were too. There was a real value in what they did, there was respect for what they did. They were intrepid, they were honest, they got the story and they gave it to the world's readers.

Could there ever be a Brenda Starr, Girl Blogger? Sure, but she wouldn't be as glamorous or wear the clothes or travel to the places that Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter did. Nah, Brenda Starr, Girl Blogger sits in her PJ's and travels the world via the internet, Tweets, and hell, I don't even know. She doesn't care about black orchids. She doesn't have a mysterious, handsome man with an eye patch. She doesn't even have that gorgeous red hair and she certainly doesn't have stars in her eyes. She's probably not even brushed her hair today and she's wearing glasses.

Sad. And I guess until the day of the newspaper with its tactile pleasure, it's print and fonts and pictures and fold-and-carryablity are entirely gone, I'll still subscribe. I may bitch about it and call it the Tallahassee Pamphlet and I may bemoan the fact that I read blogs every day which are of higher quality than the columns in that paper but dammit, I'm an adult, I'm intelligent. I am civilized. I need to get the paper. And besides, what do people spread under the pumpkin when they carve it if they don't get the paper? What do they start their fires with? You can check the game scores online and you can check the movie schedule online but by god, you cannot wrap a fish in an iPhone.

No. I'll keep going out to get my paper, dressed like a homeless person, pretending that no one can see me if I don't look at them, and then bring it in to sit and read on my back porch and occasionally, a train will go by while I'm reading, picking out the tidbits that I wouldn't find anywhere else, the train carrying people who look out their windows to see this old house, these trees, my chickens and garden and they must wonder what kind of a person lives in such a place?

The kind of person who still reads a newspaper, I guess. Who fell in love with the printed word a million years ago, who perhaps dreamed a little bit of growing up to be Jack Somebody who could get paid to entertain people writing about such prosaic things as hangnails. Who harbored a desire to grow up to be Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter, a pad and pen always at the ready, a mysterious man with an eye patch ready to take her in his arms, a black orchid, waiting to be found somewhere in the world and then written about for the entire world to be awed by.

The train still goes by. The paper still gets delivered. The world still turns in the same old way, even as it changes with the speed of light into a future we can't even imagine. What will they think of trains when we can teletransport huge cargo containers of goods and ourselves too with a tiny transmitter device? What will they think of newspapers when we have chips in our heads that give us every bit of information in the world to ponder?

I don't know and I doubt I'll be around to know.

In the meantime, here I am. On my back porch. With the newspaper spread around me, even as I type on this computer, one foot in one century, another foot in this one. At the moment, the stretch still feels comfortable. Mostly. A train will probably come by in awhile.

And now I'll sign off, Mary Moon, Woman Blogger, with the regular daily edition of the news of her heart, her life, her tiny piece of this big world linked to it with words transmitted by magic, as well as rails which pass by her house, both carrying things from one place to another, from Jacksonville to Jackson, Wyoming. From Lloyd to Lisbon.

Kinda cool, don't you think?
I do. And I'm not giving up the newspaper yet. It may be an anachronism but so am I.

So am I.