Some More Book In Progress - 11/7/2021 - Been A Bad Ol' Booger But He's Come 'n' Gone

        Driving is a good time for dreaming. Tires churn things up.  My plane was hours late getting into the airport, stupid stuff, like we had to disembark because they forgot to weigh the plane without passengers. Does anybody out there even know they did that? Dumb as dumb could be. I was bone tired and just wanted my bed.

    Nurses Without Borders had sent me up the Yukon giving measles vaccinations and flu shots to kids in isolated Athapaskan villages, Eagle and Circle being two of them. When we finally landed after an unexpected and unexplained stop somewhere in the boonies of Saskatchewan, I was too worn out to drive the hundred miles home. I picked up my car and spent the night at a friend’s. Next morning I’d do some grocery shopping, stock up on books at the local bookstore, and drive home to my mountains for some R & R.

    RuAnne first called me when I was in the shower, so I couldn’t hear the ring. Next time she called I was toweling down. The phone slipped out of my wet hand and clattered to the floor. It was not easy to get a grip on, but somehow triggered “talk”. 

 “Hey, Teddy, that you? You there? Theodora! Pick the hell up.”

`    “I’m here. I’m here.”

    “Why aren’t you here?”

  “Because I didn’t want to die on the highway last night.”

   “It’s RuAnne”.

“No kidding. I’m on my way. Just got out of the shower.”

”They don’t have showers in igloos?”

    “Stop it, Ru. Cut to the chase.”

    “You won’t believe this one.”

“Try me.”

“State Police - Trooper Colby? - You know him. He's been here before - we get a call come get Gramps. They had him at the station. He’d gone down to the highway, stretched a logging chain across the road. Sat down behind it on a barrel with a shotgun across his lap. Had that old dog of his by his side. Buster Fleabag. Colby was really nice to him, asked him kindly,
                    “Whatcha doin’, Poppa?” 

         “Keepin’ the furriners out,” Poppa said, deadly serious.

             “I believe the country’s grateful for your service, sir, but it’s safe to go now. We got everything under control."

    Poppa asked him if he was sure and Colby assured him he was, then Poppa thanked him and just went along, no problem. They called me to come down to the station house to fetch him. I got there, he and Colby were playing chess.”

     “Where’s Poppa now?”

     “Back here. Workin’ on another bird house.”

    “What’s it this time?”

    “The Taj.”

    “Majal?”

    “You know another Taj?”

Poppa was Michelangelo in wood. At some point, he decided he wanted to create bird houses in the form of classical structures, like the Taj but also St. Peter’s in Rome, Stonehenge outside of London, Ellis Island in New York harbor, the Bastille in Paris, France and such, even a termite mound and an Apache wickiup. Sold them for a fortune. If something struck him, he’d find a way to do it. If something didn’t, he wouldn’t. You never could figure out what Poppa was going to do next, even, they tell me, when he was younger, but what he would do mostly made some sense if you thought about it much which I did.  Poppa had been all over the world, seen so much, took it all in. He didn’t just see what he saw, he thought hard about it: who built it; why; materials used; materials quarried...He saw what was never written, the souls of the folks who thought of these things, the souls of the people who needed these things, the lives of the workers who laid the stones at the tops of tall towers, the thousand year myths that gave rise to it all. He never just visited places, he worked in them - dug wells, taught school, tilled fields, held babies, dug bodies out of mudslides, repaired roofs shredded by monsoons. Poppa was a civil engineer by training, a doer of good deeds by constitution. He dreamed of  building roads where there weren’t any.