The Jangle Of Badges

The jangle of badges, sashes and keys draped over the mirror of the big oak bureau in the bedroom when the drawer shuts. The drawers do not go in and out smoothly, always a bit sticky, not a fault of the oak, or carpentry, but the humidity of the northwest climate. Discovering the tonal differences (A major to B flat major) in “Strawberry Fields Forever” are due to splicing and highly sophisticated engineering fifty-four years later. It was originally in C major. Thanks to benign prostatic hyperplasia, my piss goes sideways, due to inadequate pressure. I’ve noticed the way the crows bring their wings in to pick up speed, then spread them out to land, their legs dangling down like landing gear. Learning how to whistle has weirdly become a feature of my life. I whistle to call Louise, the lame crow I feed with unsalted peanuts. She lives close by in our neighborhood. She’s usually there at the corner of Highland and Bigelow when I get there after a walk or run but if she’s not I’ll whistle to let her know I’m there. But I’ve never been very good at whistling. So now I’m trying to get better. And I wonder about the mechanics of it. What happens? What happens is the lips vibrate subtly and so does the air around the lips and inside the mouth and these vibrations cause the air molecules to vibrate and create compressions and depressions in the air, which in turn cause sound waves. A high-pitched sound. A whistle. I look at a world map showing color coded rates of coronavirus. Sweden and the U.S. are the darkest color. The worst. This is disturbing. And to think of the teenage kids I saw this afternoon playing basketball at the grade school playground. About 12 or 13 of them, and only one wearing a mask. This virus is going to be with us a long time. Why do the YouTube algorithms keep coughing up “Whiter Shade Of Pale”? They must think I’m an old hippie. The sad, melancholy hues running from gold to pink in the light of the sky, the random elongations and sketchy borders between air and vapor, clear light and dimmed light in the clouds above a copse of bare-limbed trees, the gentle roll of the hills and powdery, virgin snow in the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota, a watercolor my father painted in his retirement years living in a cottage by Lake Louise. The odd spectacle I made for two nearby women on the sidewalk jumping up and down, frantically patting my body, shaking out my jacket, after discovering ticks in my clothes while dining in a Chinese restaurant in the little town of Boissevain, Manitoba, Canada, in May, 1997. They must’ve gotten on my clothes when I walked down to relieve myself in an old grove of elm on my grandparent’s old farm. Which was totally gone. House, barn, chicken house, dairy shed, workshop, bunkhouse, even the old flagstones that led up to the house were so utterly gone, so totally vanished, that you couldn’t tell where’d they’d been. Even the foundations were gone. Nothing is wasted in North Dakota. Everything is put to use on the prairie. The sun doesn’t set without someone dusting it off and making sure it’s in good condition for the next day.