Morning Birdsong Calls Ryokan Off the Shelf
I am nostalgic during the warming up time of year. 21 Aprils ago I finished a manuscript that got me through some big change that eventually brought me to the painting above. Here are two stories from On Rainy Days the Monk Ryokan Feels Sorry for Himself. One sad, one glad.
Paddle-To-The-Sea
I want to write about Oswego’s physical beauty. The lake, the river, the trees—there’s even a teahouse in someone’s backyard. Oswego is a beautiful place to live, in summer. Just around the bend are some cheerful thoughts about the flora and fauna of my fair city. However, presently I am unable to write about the grackle snapping at the raindrops without including wet sheets of plastic wrap, a beer can, and a torn piece of stinky milk carton... I would like to wait until the ugly wears away completely before I attempt to write about the real beauty Oswego hasn’t destroyed yet. By July most of man’s winter litter is sufficiently hidden by things that actually thrive being seen alive. Why waste words writing about a lake if the lake smells like dead worms? Why sit through an afternoon of fog to watch a river flow gray and muddy when you know at its end swirl a hundred small pools of floating garbage?
There’s a book in print entitled Paddle-to-the-Sea. Once I took it out of the children’s library to read to my daughter. Recently I bought it for myself to call back some forgotten or non-existent wonder of my childhood. Paddle is a carved wooden indian sitting in a birch-bark canoe. A Canadian boy made him and set him atop a mountain of snow. The snow melted into a stream, the stream into a river, and the river into Lake Superior. That spring, Paddle set out to have many adventures, caught up in the zig-zag currents of the Great Lakes. This book expresses the true, innocent goodness of man coexisting with the hardy rough beauty of nature. With cheerful determination they work together for as long as it takes Paddle to get to France.
Paddle-to-the-Sea was published in the 1940s, before science got devilishly curious enough to ruin our lives with its half-life testings. The author is proud of men and their machines. The moose and bear congratulate the tanner and commercial fisherman—Here is a book about the state of the Great Lakes as seen through the eyes of a healthy mind seventy years ago. It’s like reading an alien’s description of his planet of plenty.
A very clean book. I suggest that all Great Lake locals read it and wonder why a man can no longer make his living on the lake’s bounty beneath. Set the book down. Take a walk to the lake. Stand on the edge of the bluff. Sit on a large flat stone. Look out to the sea. Since 1950 man has managed to give all the fish cancer.
Seventy years have passed. Duluth, Detroit, Chicago, Oswego. Death to the largest fresh water lake chain in the world. Deep delicious water teeming with billions and billions of creatures. Every single living thing breathing the water that rolls over your toes, was poisoned for the next twenty thousand years so mankind could have its choice of laundry detergent.
Now it remains a surface visual beauty that I promise to write about once the weather improves. “Fish at your own risk,” the government tells the man. “Salmon not good for nursing mothers. Neurological disorders to the newborn. Child grows up wanting to eat carcinogenic fish.” Yet how regularly every season the fools line up along the riverbank for their catch to bring home. Bad time of year for me to take my walks down there. Men from New Jersey drive up to Oswego by the truck-load to catch horny salmon. One could dangle a rubber girl salmon five feet above the water and catch leaping fish all day long. No. These misogynistic sportsmen would rather stand together in the river with the best equipment fishing magazines can offer. I could live for a year on what one of these guys paid for his gear. He could buy twenty years’ supply of unmirexed, farm-raised salmon if he’d sell that goofy truck he loves more than his own wife, wearing nothing besides rubber thigh-high boots in his perverted, fishy dreams.
A walk along the river in November rekindles my cyclic winter bitterness. For now let us be overjoyed with the knowledge that in two generations, our parents and grandparents poisoned an entire lake and river. Rejoice in the present acid elimination of all Adirondack fish! Neighbors and friends, let’s put our hands together and pray to God for the strength we need to kill every swimming underwater thing in existence. First the sissy Canadian fish. Then those oily Mexican fish. I got enough boxes of All Tempacheer to devastate Lake Chapala in a day! Stand together my friends. We need to buy all the plastic we can stuff into our homes at once. More stuff we cannot eat. More factories. More oil. Drill in sensitive areas. Down two miles, three miles, down a thousand miles, why not? Suck out a trillion gallons into the sea! More hazardous materials. More radiation poured into steal mesh balls and rolled into a coral reef. More nuclear testing. A lot more. Blow the fish sky high! Indiscriminately launch our entire arsenal on the oceans of the planet. I want proof that every swimming thing is floating dead by next week. Hurry up. There’s so little time. Someone quick, get down there to Florida. Poison that pompous pricey pompano. You, to the sharks! You to the flounders. I don’t care how you do it; I just want every fish dead by twelve noon next Thursday. Stock your chlorinated pool with a thousand guppies and goldfish. Everyone piss in the backyard stream. Pump anthrax off the shores of Newfoundland, ignite an oil rig—more mercury, aluminum, liquid copper to melt all the fish brains in the South Pacific...
Who would have guessed that the wrath of God was going to begin the moment man morphed from monkey? It is so clear to me that we are now in control of our own demise. Eager to be created to begin destroying. How easy to forget what we have been born to do. We are sent reminders of the encircling doom. Yesterday God sent a memo through the mail. Just another one of his pocket blueprints of destruction. Open up to page 3 in your Oswego County Emergency Planning and You booklet. Look at that face. Ring a bell? Isn’t he one of the antichrist’s smiling helpers? Mr. Almustead, Chief Executive Officer. The most comfortable man in Oswego. He owns a couple classic cars, a pretty wife, and a pretty little camp set up along the Salmon River. He looks happy and content being a helper to the mass murder of you and the fish. He fries the salmon fresh out of the river. You can see for yourself the tumors pushing out from his neck skin. He sure knows how to groom himself for a snapshot before the blood-dripping human organs hit the fan.
Turn the page, and another happy helper, holding a pointer against a blackboard, looks like he’s counting out loud the number of fish he can kill in a day. There is even a list of radio stations that one can tune in to to find out the exact time the earth will begin screaming. On page six some jolly firemen helpers get ready to release more radiation into the atmosphere. More black and white photos showing exactly where the wrath will be unleashed in this region. “In the event of a natural or man-made disaster, some residents may need special attention because of their physical impairments or transportation problems. Please fill out and mail the following card so we can make it look now like we won’t be laughing later, as you struggle in your lameness to get to the designated evacuation site. Wait all day if you like, crippled Sally. That bus ain’t gonna come. You can wait until the sky turns puke green and you cough your body up into a cloud of dust. Trust us. No bus is coming.”
Oswegonians must think “Chernobyl” means “go out and play darts ‘til a quarter to three”. Ask the first five pot-bellied men slurping bacon fat at the Ritz Diner where they earn the kind of money that can afford an omelet a day for the rest of their lives. Three out of five will say, “I work out at the plant.” The plant. The plant. It pays well. If they didn’t have the plant to pay well, every man with his cup of coffee would be a dishwasher or a janitor mopping floors. If the plant wasn’t there for eighty grand a year, Oswego might improve itself into a proud American hometown. Unfortunately today townie pride remains whatever Ford or Chevy built tough this year. Security guards making eighty thousand dollars on fire watch? What is fire watch? You sit in a room and if it catches on fire, you run screaming out of the room. What if a van load of determined jihadists break through security (which they could do with balloons if they wanted to), and jog straight into the reactor core? They will confront the janitor, my chef from the restaurant. He’s down on his hands and knees waxing tile while talking on his cell phone to Ron Throop, the ex-cook/writer of ill repute. The chef was not qualified to wipe down walls in a reactor core. He applied anyway, after being fired at the restaurant for keeping a loaded gun in the file cabinet. “What?” asked the boss. “I got Wyatt Earp to braise my chickens?” He called up my chef and told him to 86 the gun and himself from the premises. My chef had a temper tantrum but thank God he didn’t shoot anyone. Within two weeks the plant hired him to wash the walls of the reactor core. Presently he’s on a six week stint for eight grand.
That’s a lot of money for an itchin’ trigger finger to pick an ass with all day long. It’s hush money. So many of us got our dirty fingers on it, that it’s bound to be respected. The chef mops walls and wipes floors. What do you think the smiling CEO antichrist with the fat neck makes? A million maybe? I don’t know for sure, but it’s enough to sedate the obese electrician who just got hired at the power plant. He’ll make twenty thousand during the next six weeks. That is cash for darts and beer on Wednesday nights and state-of-the-dart-art snowmobile to breeze through the powder this winter, even if his autistic kid drinks a gallon of lake water a day and miraculously grows a third hand.
Oswego County has the second highest cancer rate in the state. The number one county was once the world’s leading producer of asbestos. Why should that matter to anyone as long as they’re getting their fair share? Always death by long illness to end a poorly-lived life. A hot dog and beer benefit to help pay the exorbitant sums the doctors demand to care for another human being. And not a soul is getting angry (besides the cancer patient, maybe). We know what carcinogens are. It’s like knowing the murderer personally. Yet who’s got the big salt potato balls to deliver the antichrist’s ears to the benefit? Impossible. The antichrist is a standing army of every one of us, eating the “best grilled chicken we ever had!”
What is cancer? Are we too afraid to demand the truth? “Ah, Dick’s got cancer.” Then the funeral. Then everyone back to work. The eulogy was short and sweet because Dick’s best friend was working the shutdown at the power plant. If he missed just one more day, he’d have to go on unemployment and make only four hundred a week. Dick is dead and the crow caws. No one thinks Dick’s best friend is septic-sludge, because they know that Dick would have done the same. What a fool Dick’s friend would be to take such a drastic cut in pay just for mourning. A waste of time. That won’t bring Dick back. Anyway, the best friend has two other mouths to feed and raise insanely. Go back to work, Dick’s best friend. You have already replaced Dick. We understand. We are exactly the same. Anyway, in a lifetime, what did Dick give? Dick gave to Dick and Dick got cancer. Those who loved him had a benefit. Everyone gobbled up hot dogs. No one besides me felt sorry for the pig. I know there are three stations set up for the proper processing of a dead pig. You need ten clean sheets for the blood alone. What do you do with a pig’s freshly slaughtered heart? Let it bleed.
And then?
Eat the hot dog. Eat the bun. Eat the ketchup, the mustard, the gun. Eat the car, eat the wallet, eat the kid’s new clothes, eat the meat, all the meat, eat anything that grows. Eat the earth, the sky, eat the other guy. Eat motor oil, and gunk if it’s good, or potatoes, eat more potatoes. Eat four things on a plate, no, five—eat your mate, eat the stars, eat a book about cars. Eat cancer. Eat your friend who’s got cancer. Eat the cancer before the cancer. Eat cancer’s cancer. Eat all morals for dessert. Eat more, never less, and never ever gobble up the middle best.
Cancer is you and me. Childhood cancer? Unexplainable? Cruel? Yes! It scares the bleeding stools out of me, too. I love. I am no different from you. But admitting dying children into a Ronald McDonald House is insane. Do you know what Ronald does to cows? Have you any idea? And you’re sending children into his giggling grease trap? Don’t make your child crazy and sick because you allow that clown’s CEO to bulldoze dead cows into a gigantic cow chipper. We are so desensitized that I feel silly and beyond naive just writing this down. “They’re just cows,” I am thinking. It’s not vegetarianism I am asking for. It is wisdom-ism. Wasn’t it Eisenhower who warned us about the malignant growth of the Industrial Guilt Complex? How can a man close his eyes to the way in which his food is prepared, and open them, just briefly, while his baby girl dies of cancer? His eyes will close in a silent agony after she is gone. Opened to drive to and from work, or to eat the saltiest carcinogens off the aluminum tray a lá Stoeffer or Swanson. He’ll want to hate himself for her untimely death. Why? When we all know that Ronald McDonald is the most guilty one. If Dad could see, and was not afraid of seeing, he would publicly accuse the clown of child murder. Tobacco companies are liable? Then so are clowns who sell us poison to eat. Ronald stripped her land to raise cows for slaughter. How does that give a little girl cancer? Look for yourself. They keep adding another billion sold onto that sign. I know the creator takes five hundred of ours for every million of theirs. Flesh-eaters buying their meat from a clown. Top of the food chain? Cancer rots our flesh. It chews our meat. It purrs with satisfaction, then settles down to savor the delicacy of our organs for dessert. Cancer is king and we are its obedient servants.
Now, how to avoid this hungry predator...
Don’t buy a Big Mac. Do as the Buddhists, who have known all along that cancer is a stupid, impressionable beast. Lay off the meat! There is a balance, whether we like it or not. One cannot eat up all the non-human death, and not get it back eventually. All she needed was to be born into excellent loving care. What is the best that you can give? Right now. Without waiting for the invisible scientist to tell you. The new wildness is human indifference. Clown apathy. The persistent hum of mellow heartbeats from delusional humanity. Its motto? To kill and not suffer.
“Eat your burger honey. A pothead in Oklahoma works very hard pushing dead cows into a grinder.”
“Daddy, I don’t want to eat the happy cow.”
“You eat it right now, missy, or no Hot Apple Pie for you! What, did you expect me to do everything I do, and prepare your dinner too?”
Fast food should be emergency food only. The rancher leaves an ax against a fence post along the highway. The children are weak from hunger on the drive back from Fort Lauderdale. It’s okay. Dad can get out of the car, take the ax, chop off a piece of the cow, and leave a twenty dollar bill under the rancher’s bleeding ax. Otherwise it’s more cancer at McDonald’s. And some more at Burger King, since their CEO was not crafty enough to set up a charity house in the name of their ridiculously dangerous, cancer-wielding mascot.
I will set the record straight. The death mess is everywhere, and unavoidable until we avoid it. Ronald McDonald is just one evil clown. There are more. The Burger King and Wendy, the Pippy-Longstocking look-alike. Any fast food cancer hole that markets its death-in-a-wrapper to children under ninety. In fact, don’t eat any place where profit is the first concern. These clowns play Russian roulette with our children because we invite them to. Can you slaughter six thousand cattle a day? If you’re a multi-millionaire you can. Or if you are a pothead in Oklahoma, you’ll bulldoze the dead heap for the promise of more pot and one kickass wage. The clown will do almost anything to get them to digest his cancer. Shall we continue until the moon crashes into us out of disgust? Are we feeling alive? Sometimes I think I am writing invisible letters to stones. Ronald lives in McDonaldland with the Hamburglar, the Grimace, the goblins, and a horror-house stuffed with a million other fast food monsters. They’re on the take. Their hush money infects humanity. Corporate executives in private jets have cocktails while discussing the clown’s next funny television commercial.
“Hey, how about this: Ronald can take the Grimace by his purple flabby head skin and bury his nose into the dirt of a child’s grave. All of the sudden like, the Hamburglar pops out of the ground, juggling a cow’s vital organs.”
“That’s not funny Ray.”
“No, but it’s true, ain’t it boys?”
“Yea, you got us there. Here’s to you Ray!”
And the happy executives toast each other’s greed while flying off on their mission to destroy faster than the creator creates.
What am I going to do? And this isn’t enough I suppose? You want me to fall back in line this morning, find a good job, and do to Saturday what every man does with a Saturday after he gets a good job. I could make a thousand Saturdays to come my own private, special world, and grow up just like that miserable neighbor of mine, Tim the snow-blower. Of course if it’s snowing on Saturday, the day after I get the great job to beat all jobs; if it’s snowing and I could be leaning back on the couch in celebration, I’ll make sure to shovel the driveway first, just to relax and not get too excited about my excellent job. Of course it must not matter to you that I would actually jump through the roof if I sold a piece of my writing for five dollars to an interested reader. No, the great job has come into my life with benefits and all those sick and personal days accrued. That there is a difference between being sick and personal I never knew. The employer must anticipate the employee being a big fat liar. The personal day was invented for the employee to call in sick and not worry about being seen at the McDonald’s drive-thru.
401K, dental plan, health insurance, excellent pay with room for more? I could shovel my driveway and hope to get a great job. I could spend all day Saturday dreaming that I am as good as the next guy. But I don’t want to be as good as him. Probably because I don’t think he’s any good. It’s too careful and safe a thing to be employed with benefits. Because somewhere at the top of that ladder there’s a millionaire emptying his filth bucket over you. The price paid for security is high, too high to spend any night on a couch waiting patiently to view a movie made for television. Was it just a dream last Saturday, of some time long ago when I ran shirtless along the rock face and leaped off into the shimmering light dancing on the water? I don’t want the past. I’d rather the holy spirit slap me on the back and my teeth fall out. 401K? Man, I repel the future as much as the past. God, how can any man think that far past tomorrow? Why would he want to? What spell has come over the men of this country for them to wonder if at seventy there will be any hair left to comb? A powerful spell it must have been to have such foolish worries when knowing that hair or no hair, there’s still those flabby titties to consider? Is everyone with a good job a frightened, quivering bunny with a car payment? If I ever got a good job I’d be too embarrassed to walk out my door with my head held high. How humiliating to be given a title that the world of men can understand.
“What does he do?”
“He’s a mailman.”
“Wow, I hear they got great benefits at the post office.”
“Yes, but he had to pee into a tiny plastic cup. He got some drips on his fingers, and walked over to the nurse with his head down. She got pee on her fingers too, when he handed it over. She blushed and giggled with embarrassment, not because of the piss (she gets that all day long), but because she knew that getting a good job is a very humiliating thing to happen to a humble man.
And then there is the rectal exam to consider. Your employer needs to know about your colon. In fact, a good interviewer will decide immediately if you’re the right man for the job. Any man is the right man who would allow a stranger’s finger in his ass. It can only go up so far, but once that’s checked out, it’s three percent of yours to five percent of theirs until you hit sixty-five, and are considered by your employer to be dead and gone, no matter how many strong Saturdays you think you have left. Don’t bother getting your shovel out to prove a thing! You could have cleared the whole block of snow, but if you pick up a fifty pound box of staples and a disc pops out of your backside, then it’s an early retirement for you. We’re sorry, but the truth is you are a highly expendable piece of furniture. Which means we don’t give a bird about you, Mr. Folding Chair! Your great personality cannot pick up that box of staples, can it? So sayonara! What good are you to us without a strong back? Heck, you can always fall back on the benefits, which is a safer thing than finding a gruesome abnormality up your ass, which might have eliminated any hope for you to get hired in the first place. A bump in your colon or a broken back? Neither are very beneficial, but one is much safer in the long run, don’t you think?
I like to think of my brother in law, who shovels his walkway like a pro because he has a good job and would never eat crow no matter how many times they got him to drop his drawers for pay. His colon and urine got a clean bill of health. Now he is as free as he’ll ever be, with a good job to boot. It is always his own special Saturday to be exactly the same as the next guy.
Here is something men these days will not talk about. I think they buy new trucks to cover for the humiliation of dropping their pants for a job. Any job that pays well with benefits.
You might think that it is a personal quirk of mine, but no amount of money or security is worth a stranger’s finger in my rectum. Thank you. Now I’d like to welcome prostate cancer and poverty to my retirement dinner. And leave all empty pillboxes at the door. I don’t have a penny to fill them.
Thinking on my retirement... How wonderful it will be to work for minimum wage again. I am practicing that feeling now, by considering a bookseller’s job. Who am I kidding? I want it. I’ll take it and keep it for as long as it remains in business. Provided the boss doesn’t ask any more of me than greetings to the customers, general shelf arrangement, dusting, vacuuming, and register check out. If I decide to retire come old age, rotten teeth, and an all-night wrenching abdominal pain, I will bow to my employer, expecting nothing in return besides the good memories we shared selling books. First I’ll make sure my wife and I have a little something put away. Enough for first month’s rent and deposit, plus two bus tickets to the Florida beaches. Leave it all up to providence I say. I’ll get a job cleaning pools or selling bait and tackle from a stool. Because I want no one collecting my stool, I have thought out my retirement through and through. I will not pay that high a price for shoveling my walk on a snowy Saturday. I don’t need to dream about the golden days, which was any time before succumbing to the acquisition of a good job. I am living them right now, for as long as I can hold out against the piss-in-the-cup and finger probing mob.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if everyone you knew took on a minimum wage job? Your brother and sister? Your best friend? Joy is simplicity shared. I know this to be true because I have experienced it and so have you, dear reader. But you have forgotten. We were young yesterday. I write to tell you that tomorrow we can become young again. Why wait fifty years not knowing where or what will become of you. The age of beauty is just around the corner. Prepare for it now. It is easy to see the end of money. I am a living example of that future world. And I am not a lone anomaly. There are millions alive like me who desire life shed of all its warm and cozy money blankets. I cannot find many of them. I should not have to look much further. I already know enough people who are fit to play some of the many games which the creator has graciously set up for us. Life is play. Your wife, brother-in-law, best friend, your father, mother, and anyone else that you know and they know, must burn their stinking piles of pretend money. It’s time to play. We have our homes, the knowledge and ability to make food and collect it with our hands. But there is a long time lasting between the first seed planted and the harvesting of crops. I get so damn sad watching the old people die off without ever coming to this realization. Well.., never expressing it anyway. I suggest a playtime for the rest of our lives. Can you show me a better way? Can you honestly say the path you’re on now is the right one? Or is it just the safest way to afford your coffin and save you the embarrassment of being dead and in debt?
But I tell you the truth and the truth says the reality of tomorrow is Ron’s poetry today. I like you all well enough for surface conversation. Don’t you think now is the time to dig deeper and pull ourselves out of this pit money’s buried us in? Moments of clarity sing of this one, all encompassing truth. That we have suffered enough already, no one would deny. The age of beauty is flowering before our very own eyes. Why do we remain blind and crouched low inside our deep holes? We don’t want to know about the easiness of sharing. We think that is a sin because the President tells us communism is a sin. Stop. Put the book down and dream about the sweet and happy passing of your childhood. I like to think about the football games I starred in after school. There’s my room in the evening, and those mysterious jaunts to the dangerous lands within the boundary of my parent’s yard. Even then they had us practicing to be alone. To take things as they come, alone. To live alone to die alone. It was a rare occasion when I was forced to share with my little friends. But when pressed, I didn’t complain. A toy truck, a train, the igloo block maker... The grown-ups paid lip service to the virtue of sharing, but never practiced it. No example. Never. Never ever. Oh, Mom might offer her friend coffee, but not the house, at least not for too long. She would share her dinner, four, maybe five times a year, but not one square inch of her land. She would share the money with the borrower’s promise to pay back fast and on time. But share it all as if it wasn’t hers to give? And for a lifetime? Holy mother of God no, no, NO!
Now I will show all of you how to share. Let’s have just enough money to buy us some time with friends who are smart enough to want to play games. This is what everyone needs after the roof, the food, the clothing and the heat. What is all this stuff we got if not a constant reminder of what little we have? Imagine now without my help the massive, smothering amount of waste laying about you. Layer upon layer. This is not an earth of you all alone with wild animals and no place to sleep. We have many places to sleep. We have the heaps of crap we’ve accumulated thus far. Some of it is worth keeping for survival in the age of beauty. In our homes, among our things, each will find what he needs to live out his natural life alone. Yet who is strong enough to brave the poverty and loneliness? In the age of beauty, it’s time to use each other, to exchange only those ideas which bring us closer together, to share our energy and love before we die. This is not a good will paragraph. This is the truth. Once we remained together for the purpose of survival. That was noble and necessary. A warm wisdom in a cold world. Fences went up. The work was hard. For some, getting food was the most demanding chore. Now in the world of 246,964 boxes of Fruity Pebbles waiting at this moment on grocery shelves all across America, can we stop for a day and reevaluate the meaning of our existence? Do you think it will all go to pot without the Fruity Pebble factory? I don’t. In fact I think our lives much improved without it, and the million or so other useless commodities. Uh-oh, without them some of you will lose your jobs. When a grown man loses his job he might as well slash his throat, since he has been conditioned to believe all his life that the job is the man, and vice-versa. Don’t laugh! You’re just happy that it’s not you. Oh what a pleasantly cruel and pitiless intelligence we are! Human beings capable of wisdom again? What a long shot! In fact, all other creatures in existence are the wiser. The human being is a million years old? And this is what he has to show for it? God mocks us. But I don’t have to tell you that. Go to your home old man, and I’ll drive over to mine. And someday we’ll visit our daughters and go out on Friday night with the Miller’s and the Moody’s. Everyone condemned to their separate house, separate home, separate family, separate friendships, separate possessions, separate ideas, separate hopes, separate plans for a future that most certainly will come exactly how we imagined it, because we bent over willingly and allowed a stranger’s finger up our butts. It is the cruelest of jokes we play upon ourselves, to be so separately the same until death sets us free.
What is any wisdom worth if it cannot provide the outline for a deliriously happy existence? What old man wants to die unfulfilled? How can we respect the old man who died without ever giving us permission to play for the rest of our lives? These are questions to ask yourself before you are an old man, young man. I don’t think I am crazy to desire my street to open up its doors this Saturday morning to show the people running out into the sunlight looking to catch the start of the next game. But it is so quiet today. All I can hear is the lone, cold snow shoveling from the nice old lady next door.
I read some of your excellent screed and had to stop--else my heart might.
I am only sad that those who need the info will not bother themselves to question their lives.