CALL it six months, more or less. From where I sit at my writing window, the sun’s been making its way down Hemlock Avenue. In ten days it’ll rise in the crook of a locust tree across the old train tracks on Riverside. It’ll hang there for a while to mark time on the turnaround; a sitting still for a while. A solstice.
Imagine if people did that, sat still for a while. And stopped talking for five minutes.
Doesn’t seem likely in this Silicon Valley big bag of nothing, does it?
I was in Vermont a few weeks ago. Drove up on a Wednesday in the kids’ travel van. Worked in the woods for a few days. Dropped a lot of dead trees that look a whole lot safer rotting on the ground instead of 80 feet up.
Thawing out the dogs that night…
Reading by headlamp before turning in… Been reading Saul Bellow of late.
When Saturday rolls around, Jonny, Eduardo and Dan show up for the heavy lifting. This is on account of some wizard in the bureaucracy who shot lightning bolts from his fingertips at us. Ordered us to move the lean-to.
We cut the little building into pieces we could lug through the trees. Just enough pieces; not so many that the materials wouldn’t be worth nailing back together in the spring.
Here’s the roof coming off…
Walls coming down…
Eduardo snapped a chalk line and cut the deck down the middle. Jonny cut the rim joists…
We built the thing two years ago, back when every stick had to be carried up from the gravel road 330 feet away. You may remember Adam leaving bloody paw prints all over it.
We sited it 175 feet from the back property line, a line that abuts a 7,800-acre wildlife preserve. Now comes the state saying “no permanent structure” allowed within 200 feet of the line.
Who knew a lean-to intended for storing firewood—no foundation, no electricity, no water—is a permanent structure?
The terrain is such that you can’t hook on to the whole thing in one piece, drag it 25 feet and call it good. We had to move it 120 feet along the skirt of the hill before we could turn and come the 25 feet in the required direction.
Dan’s off-road vehicle saved the day. Here’s a clip of the guys winching the second half of the deck through the woods to where we stacked the materials for the winter.
Life goes swimmingly otherwise. The lymphoma feels stuck where it was in June 2019 when I set out for the Arctic. I don’t expect to have to do anything about it unless it starts feeling more like September of that year. If it’s planning to morph into something more formidable, so far it’s definitely going about it on the sly.
We had a nice evening out Saturday. Our neighbors rented a local VFW hall for their daughter’s first birthday, little Anabelle. Everybody was there, dance floor was full. If you want to have fun, go to a party thrown by people from the Dominican Republic. I wish I knew more Spanish. I’m lost after hola.
At one point I stepped outside into the parking lot to take a call about a writing job from Ulaanbaatar. It was 8 a.m. there, 7 p.m. in this little corner of New England. The world’s never been smaller.
On Phantom matters, we struggle on. The subset of you who give a hoot already know we’ve had three different artists on the denouement of the Wrack and Ruin series. Who’s going to jump out of the clown car next? tune in tomorrow…
My friend Mike Manley’s been in & out of the hospital. There’s more to come from what I hear. Not good…
Jeff Weigel, my partner on the Sunday strip, stepped in to save the day for us on the daily narrative. He’s been tying the ribbon on a story Mike and I launched May 24, 2021.
Jeff’s art published this morning…
On the new story set to begin soon, you’ll see Bret Blevins on the strip full time.
Mike with the diabetes, cardiac issues, me with the cancer, Bret with a broken wing that’s still mending (we’re lucky it wasn’t his drawing arm).
With the exception of Jeff, we’ve all had the big boots put to us. And yet, here’s what we look like in our heads when we walk down the street…
Not sure what we want to call our gang yet. Deluded Old Bastards? Not bad. Except for the DOB acronym, too big a stretch on the meta irony. The Hill Cresters? Too doo-woppy. I’ll work on it.
Mondays remain a delight around here. I’ll miss them when the little girl goes to kindergarten in the coming year. She and I watch Buster Keaton movies when she’s here for the day. She laughs so hard she can hardly catch her breath.
Indestructible Buster rolling around in a boxcar full of barrels, that gets her every time.
See it 9 minutes into Go West, from 1925.
My idiosyncratic influence over little D1D2 has her into the Manhattan Transfer as well. Do you believe in jazz? She answers in the affirmative. Her favorite number is Soul Food to Go. That might be about the claymation as much as the sound in the ear.
It’s a fun tune led by the late Tim Hauser (a fellow Villanova grad). And, oh my, the circa 1987 Cheryl Bentyne… wow…
Out for now.
Tony DePaul, December 12, 2023, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
