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         [  My Neighbors & I  ]                   [  By Eric Chaet  ]


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MY NEIGHBORS & I
(c) 2002 by Eric Chaet


     I DRINK HALF REGULAR coffee, half decaf, & eat oatmeal, & sometimes
eggs & toast, at the Farmer's Friend, at a crossroads called Tillman.
Houses are being built there, rapidly now, streets being extended, crews
digging along the concentric edges, laying sewer pipes.

     I sit at a counter, &, gradually, over the years, my neighbors - most
of them dairy farmers or mill-workers - confide bits of information to me.
Mostly, tho, they confine themselves to remarks about the weather, equipment
& prices, & "clever" remarks at the expense of "the suits."

     One morning, I was talking with Ellison, a thin, bespectacled guy about
my age, who, after milking his cows, often smells of the barn.  Lately, he
has told me about a water bottling business that he has started, using water
from an artesian well that's been on his land all along.  (He was born &
raised on the farm, & returned to it after being drafted & fighting in the
war in Vietnam - where his older brother was killed.)  The price paid the
farmers for milk has been so low, so long, that almost all the dairy farmers
have either quit or diversified.

     Ellison says, "I can pretty well figure out how much has to come in
each month....  I'm looking at this bill, & I say to Janey, 'This ain't
right.  What's this five thousand dollars for?'  She doesn't know....  It
says Promotion.  Well, promoting WHAT?  We're selling them bottled water,
they're putting their label on it, & giving it away to good causes.  It's
got THEIR label on it.  Nowhere is there any label for US.  How do WE get
promoted?  We don't!  'Get on the phone & find out,' I said.

     "Lots of money for promotion.  DuPont pays five million dollars to have
their name on So & So's Nascar race-car.  For a little label, this big" - he
makes a rectangle with the fingers of his hands - "$75,000.  And it's on the
wrong side of the car, too.  Who's going to see it?  Ya know what I'm
sayin'?

     "Lost a quarter of a million dollar account, because someone found oil
in the water.  Where did the oil come from? - they're checking for purity
all the time, everything is filtered, all the filters are serviced all the
time.

     "Turns out, it was from the bottles.  They were heating up the mold too
hot.  Some of the petroleum the plastic's made of was leaching right thru
from the outside in.  We're filling the bottles with pure water.  The oil
residue left in the bottle - you couldn't taste it, but you could smell it."

     And the bottle company tried to charge him for the bottles, too.  Good
thing he figured out the codes, which show which shifts produced which
bottles, including the bad ones.

     "I've already paid for the good ones," he told them.

     Meanwhile, he'd spent thousands of dollars buying new equipment,
thinking, just maybe, somehow, his equipment was getting oil into the water.
An oil-less compressor, for instance, $1,200 - & you have to take it apart &
replace all the teflon parts once a year.  It wears out, because - no oil.

     Alone, Ellison, too small, couldn't fight, wouldn't be believed.
Together - another company had already spent $300,000 buying new equipment,
thinking that the problem was just maybe with their equipment - they were a
class.  So, they could file a class action suit.

     "Ya know what I'm sayin'?"

     The company that sold Ellison the bottles sent him a nasty note, saying
he was overdue on his payments, & they were turning his account over to a
collection agency.   Since his credit was now no good, other companies he
approached for bottles wanted only certified checks, up front, before they
would give him any bottles!

     But now that Ellison had a stronger ally, the company that sold him the
bad bottles wrote to tell him they were forgiving the debt.  Forgiving!

     The son of Ellison's veterinarian (the father died of cancer; the son
has cancer, too, but he's still alive) needed some land to operate on.  But
they were charging $26,000 an acre.  Ellison said, "How much land do you
need?"

     "An acre."

     "Well, let's get 7."

     (Another time Ellison told me that he had invested in MCI many years
ago, & the stock had appreciated so much in value that he was rich now.  But
Roy, the veal entrepreneur, told me that Ellison lies.)

     Anyway, Ellison says he bought the veterinarian's son 7 acres.

     On one acre is the new vet place, across the street from where they
just built the brand new high school - the one that looks just like that
school in Colorado, Columbine, where the 2 kids shot up their classmates.
"You'd think they wouldn't want to build schools just like that one.  You'd
think they'd try to make things as different as they could figure out.  Ya
know what I'm sayin'?"

     Nine years later, Ellison sold his six acres at a quarter of million
dollars each.

     "Ya know what I'm sayin'?"


     ANOTHER MORNING, another talk with Ellison at the Farmer's Friend:

     Seems that the recent arrivals from Mexico buy an animal from him
occasionally - not a calf, but not a full grown steer or cow, either.  They
like them medium.  They like to butcher them their own way.  It's a ritual.
It's okay with Ellison.  He lets them use a piece of land, maybe 60 feet
wide, about 175 feet long.  They have a picnic, maybe once a month.

     Also, he sells them bottled water.  "Once in a while, one of the
bottles gets dented, or one of the labels gets put on the wrong side -
otherwise, nothing wrong with it - ya know what I'm saying?

     "It's $10.95 for a 5 gallon bottle.  But one guy paid the first time,
then kept taking one a week for 5 weeks, without paying.

     "All these guys know one another.  So I tell this one guy about the
other guy who hasn't paid.  'I want to get paid,' I say.  I say, 'Fifty
bucks would straighten it out.'  He takes out a roll, & peels off a 50.  He
says, 'I take care of it.'

     "A few hours later, he comes back with the empty."


     EARLY SEPTEMBER, morning fog, on Algonquin Road:  I was noticing the
corn.

     There was a khaki layer on top, then the bright green leaves & the
amazingly sturdy stalk, with the "beard" - pouring out from the green leaves
encasing the ear of corn - also khaki, mixed with green, about a foot or 2
above the khaki-colored dried-out grasses at the foot of the row of corn
closest to the road.

     "Good morning, Ted!" I shouted to my neighbor, who was climbing down
from his small, old, blue tractor, amid his silos, vehicles, & sheds.

     Ted turned, & slowed down.   I asked how the corn was doing - it got
off to such a poor start: there was so much rain in the spring, the ground
was flooded for most of 2 months.

     "Looks like it turned out pretty good," I ventured.

     "Not really," he said.  "There's just little tiny kernels on the cob.
We'll have to grind up the whole thing for silage."

     "The cows will eat it all?"

     "Oh, yeah.  Not much hay, either, this year.  More protein in the hay.
Have to buy feed for protein."

     "I read," I said, "that the protein in the feed comes from slaughtered
cattle that's cooked at a rendering plant, at 300 degrees.  Somebody said
that Mad Cow Disease is being spread that way, that the bacteria or virus, I
don't know which, survives up to 360 degrees.  Also said that Alzheimer's
might be the human version of Mad Cow Disease."

     "I dunno," Ted said.  "There've always been senile old people."

     "Yeah, maybe we just live longer, more of us, to get senile."

     Ted once told me that his father had started their farm, here, when the
foundry he was working at, in Milwaukee, stopped operating during the Great
Depression.

     He also told me that he'd been in the Navy in the 50's, and had been on
a big ship that, during a storm, was in troughs, with big waves towering
above.

     Hard to imagine:  Ted is so relaxed, & he looks like he was born in the
faded overalls he wears.

     "Say, Ted, what's that" - I held up 5 fingers - "brown thing on top of
the corn plant?  Is it like stamen & pistils, pollen?  Is that what the bees
go for?"

     "Well," he said, "the tassel" (he called it TAH-sel) "is the male part.
The pollen's there.  I don't think it needs any bees, tho.  When it's ready,
the rain knocks it down to where the cobs grow - that's the female part.
You know, the corn silk, those HAIRS?"

     "Yeah."

     "There's a hair attached to each kernel on the cob.  Those hairs were
the female part of the flower."

     "Well, look," I said.  "I can see that corn is GIANT GRASS - but what's
the equivalent of the COB for REGULAR GRASS?"

     "It's not grass.  When I spray, I kill all the grass, but not the
corn."

     "Huh.  It must be grass wed to something else.  I'll let you get back
to work."

     Ted headed back toward his tractor, & I resumed my walk on Algonquin
Road.


     MY ATTEMPTS TO GET MY WORK INTO CIRCULATION, & to get paid, nearly
always came to a big fat nothing.  But I always managed to find some kind of
work, &, since my spending habits were, essentially, spending nothing that
was not required to exist - except occasionally to pay for some envelopes or
postage, or coffee or oatmeal or eggs at the Farmer's Friend - I frequently
had time to myself.  Some of the time, I enjoyed - reading, working out,
working on this or that song or story.  But, frequently - what with all the
construction going on around me - & everyone else, including Eileen, always
at work, or talking about work, or shopping with what they earned at work -
& almost never any recognition - or, if there was recognition, after a
little while, I'd think, so what? the world is still being turned into a
desert by the worst people squeezing everything & everyone dry - I'd feel
pretty useless & ashamed of doing so little about it all.

     I tried not to get addicted to anything with too terrible consequences:
I took walks, sometimes I watched a lot of television, I read a lot....
Probably everyone thinks that the things that they do when they don't know
what else to do aren't serious indulgences, with serious consequences, that
everyone else's are worse.  Probably the drunkard & heroin-addicts think,
Hey, at least I'm not a general, addicted to battle, or a politician
addicted to building up people's false hopes.  But there were serious
consequences to my indulgences.  I was mostly alone.  There was less & less
chance that, by interacting with people, I would have a chance to right any
wrongs, let alone advance myself.  And I was getting used to the situation,
that was the worst thing.


     IF CORN'S not GRASS - or only PARTIALLY grass - what is it? I wondered,
one day, walking around outside after a few desperate hours of trying to
achieve something - but what? - at my desk - & pacing around in the house.

     Corn has cones:  kernels on a cob.  These kernel-laden cones are the
fruit resulting when FLOWERS are fertilized by pollen from tassels above.

     I looked around:  gymnosperms (the evergreens:  pines, spruces, cedars)
are similar:  there were dozens within sight, along the road, & beyond a
field recently plowed under, on the golf course that's always so busy these
days.

     The gymnosperms don't have flowers with PETALS, like corn's pale blue
flowers.  Their flowers  are tiny, & clustered around a stem in a
rude-looking, dull-colored cylinder, so that they don't look like what
people usually call flowers, at all.

     When pollinated, they produce woody, spiral-toothed cones, with little
nuts under each TOOTH, or WING, or SPROCKET, equivalent to corn kernels.

     Gymnosperms are woodies, whereas the corn - & grass - are herbacious.

     The gymnosperms don't have leaves, like the giant grass-blades the corn
uses to gather in sun-light.  Rather, the "leaves" are needles coming out in
all directions from a branch (so that you can't grab the branch), or
clusters of needles (2's, 3's, & 5's), or - in the case of cedars - green,
over-lapping, ramifying SCALES, resembling FISH scales - tho the wrong
color, & not on a finned, swimming vertebrate.

     The branches of the gymnosperms are mostly arranged - like the
"sprockets" of the cones & the kernels of corn - in a spiral pattern.

     Tho some, like big White & Norwegian Pines, ramify, with major "forks"
along the onward & upward road of growth, like the broad-leafed maples,
oaks, birches, & elms.


     THE PRICE OF MILK.  At the Farmer's Friend, Edgar sits down next to me
- he seems to like me.  He's kind of boyish - tho probably at least 10 years
older than me, & with more mass than a boy.  A little chubby, side-burns,
open face, moves a little in slow-motion.  He wears flannel shirts & jeans,
& the same kind of baseball-type caps most of us wear, who don't wear suits,
around here.

     He's talking about the extra cost of building a manure pit, due to 2
government workers whose entire job is watching the 10 guys who are doing
the actual work, to make sure regulations are being followed.

     I commiserate with him, but point out that, if the government didn't
treat us all like we're cheaters, the cheaters would get away with building,
for instance, leaky manure pits.  But that, those of us who are honest are
always being offended at being treated like cheaters, while those inclined
to cheat are never offended.

     "They'd find a way to get away with it, anyway," Edgar points out.

     Another day, Edgar told me that he makes money buying & selling old
Studebaker cars.  He goes all over the country to pick up the ones he buys,
using a trade paper, & fixes them up himself.  His kids do most of the
farming, now - tho he still helps out a lot.

     Today, he says that he doesn't have any money, but he has a lot of land
- he sank whatever money he did have into it.

     "Probably worth a lot now," I offer.

     "Probably," he says, without enthusiasm.  "When I started," he says,
"we got $12 & something for milk.  That lasted about 10 years.  Since then,
it's gone up & down a little, but it's been mostly where it is now, down
around $9.  Can't make any money that way.  But it's a good job.  If you
like it.

     "For the first 30 years, my wife & I never took a vacation, or ate in a
restaurant."

     He's eating, now, two eggs over hard, with "home-made" toast, butter, &
coffee.  He says he doesn't guess the price of milk will ever go up again.

     "Sure, it will," I say, "but not until they've driven all the small
farmers out of business."

     Edgar grunts in agreement.  "Then they'll be able to set the price," he
says.


     IT'S BEEN MONTHS SINCE RON SAT DOWN NEXT TO ME - partly because I
rarely get to the Farmer's Friend before 6 AM any more.  He's a little man,
hair cut short, t-shirt & jeans, pugnacious, wise-cracky.

     I doubt if he remembers, but the last time he sat near me, a few stools
down the counter, he grinned & leaned toward me - where I was reading one of
Immanuel Wallerstein's histories of the economic world-system & drinking
coffee - &, acting as tho my reading a book was a cry of loneliness, said,
"Aw, should I come over & keep you company?"

     "You can insult me just as well from over there," I said.

     Anyway, today, he sits down next to where I'm reading the local paper,
drinking coffee, & waiting for my bowl of oatmeal, & starts by asking, "What
have you been doing, Goldberg?"

     Goldberg's not my name.  I guess he's decided that I'm Jewish - he's
noticed that I read books occasionally - &, Goldberg is his name for a Jew.

     Why not? I think.  And I start to tell him about my current project:
I've been given 2 weeks to gather the information that will make it possible
to certify (thru state & federal government agencies) a (sub-orbital,
educational) space-port at Kickapoo, about 50 miles east of here, along Lake
Michigan.

     I've been dragging my sorry ass around feeling sorry for myself,
because I couldn't earn money, so - tho it's not my idea of the way I want
to focus my attention, the pay is good - I'm feeling more confident than I
have in a while.

     But Ron is already telling Janice - the gray-haired, always-dependable,
& usually-cheerful waitress who has come to take his order - a joke, & what
he wants to eat & drink.   I realize, AGAIN, that he doesn't really care
what I'm doing - it's just idle (& brief) curiosity, & impolite politeness.

     So I say, "What are YOU up to these days?" which most people would
rather talk about - & I'd prefer to learn his business than tell him mine,
anyway.

     "Well, I was going to do some roofing, but if it keeps raining, I don't
know what I'll do.  I guess move a truck-load of runny jam & too-solid
peanut butter.

     "What do you do with runny jam & too-solid peanut butter?"

     "Sell it to people in the U.P." - pronounced YOU-PEE, meaning Upper
Peninsula of Michigan - "for bear bait.  Ran an ad in the paper up there.
Doing pretty good."

     I also learn that the property he owns in Nicolet, where he & his wife
have been selling "antiques" - old junk, mainly, from the looks of what's on
display in the window - is all paid off, & that a doctor from Green Bay is
interested in buying it.

     "Good thing, too - with me being just a couple of years away from
retirement."

     He also tells me that he is now selling the "antiques" at a place in
the mall in Appleton that he's been renting since February.

     I've finished the brief summary of national & world news in the local
paper, & turn to the one page business summary.

     Ron glances at it.  "Stock market's not going up like it was," he
offers.

     "Nope, pretty steady now for about 6 months.  How did you get in on the
runny jam & too-solid peanut butter business?" I ask him.

     "Oh, my cousins at Carrothers Feed used to do it.  But they don't have
any storage space any more, so I took it over.  I work for them, sometimes."

     Seems that when the manufacturers switch from making strawberry to
grape jam or vice versa, sometimes a batch is too runny to sell, & that
sometimes a load of peanut butter is kept in the freezer too long.

     "Very resourceful," I tell Ron.

     Ron has owned & operated a tavern on the edge of an Indian reservation,
& built all kinds of things for a locally-owned chain of department stores.
Then, for the last 10 years, he's re-modeled homes for dozens, maybe
hundreds of people around here - a jack of all the building trades.  He's
got a lot of energy, likes to tease.  He's so ornery & independent, I'd love
him, if there was anything he aspired to beyond acquisition, & retirement
from the effort of acquisition. And if he wasn't always trying to let me
know - because he is getting more money than he ever expected to, & I, an
idea-guy, anyway, have let it be known that I'm looking for work - that he
is my superior, as a person & a man - as a getter.


    I LIVE ALONG THE BEAVER RIVER - so named by more than one of the tribes
that are no longer here.  The French explorers in the early 17th century
thought the Beaver would lead them from Lake Michigan to the South Sea &
China.  It proved to be rich with otters, beavers, & fish.  The otters &
beavers are gone - beaver hats were all the thing in 17th century Western
European big cities - & so are most of the fish - their reproductive
processes disturbed by PCB's from the paper factories.

     Most of the people around here travel the roads on either side of the
river early in the day, then around 5 or 6 in the afternoon, into & out of
Green Bay and Appleton, working their pay-check jobs.


     THE ONLY PERSON AROUND HERE willing to pay me to do anything is Red
Finster. He recognizes my intelligence, & I make it a point not to express
my ideas, but to make it clear that it is my intention to use my
intelligence conscientiously in his behalf.  He's an irrepressible
development booster - with a thriving ceramics business (his father ran a
similar business in Cincinnati) that he mastered long ago.  Except for an
occasional big deal, the ceramics business bores him.

     Red originally hired me as an "executive assistant" - for 4 months,
helping him form a trade association of companies in the state that were
somehow, anyhow, involved in space exploration.  He wouldn't put me on the
pay-roll.  I had to submit an invoice every two weeks, as a consultant.  So,
after the 4 months, I told him that my job was done, & if he wanted me to
work for him any more, I would be glad to - & I handed him a business card I
had had printed up:  I was now a consultant, & my rates would be a bit
higher.

     Red has me researching space-ports, launch procedures, federal & state
regulation & legislation, life-support systems, & helium-3 (a radioactive
isotope on the Moon that he thinks will one day provide Earth with a lot of
its electric power).

     I keep working at my songs, tho the market I once thought barely
existed for the kinds of serious songs I was writing seems to have totally
evaporated - &, anyway, I'm old now, & songs are sold to the young,
performed by young musicians & singers.  Celebration of youth--cynical
pandering--seems to be mainly what is being sold--rather than any particular
song.  Except that the songs shouldn't interfere with making youths feel
like they are the highest rung of evolution, without anything being required
of them, mentally, spiritually, or - over a period requiring determination &
endurance - physically.

     So my life hasn't turned out as I hoped.  The dairy farmers would say
the same.  And the cows - what would the cows say?


     THERE WAS A POUNDING ON THE DOOR, & I ran downstairs to answer.  It was
Johnny, bright red blood running down his forehead, & off the tip of his
nose.

     "Come in!" I said, & he did.

     We went into the kitchen.  I yelled upstairs to Eileen, "Eileen!
Johnny's hurt.  Get lots of hydrogen peroxide, & come here!"

     "Sit down," I told Johnny.

     "I don't want to get blood on the rug," he said.

     "Sit down!" I said, & he sat down at the kitchen table, tho careful to
lean in such a way as to avoid dripping blood on the rug.

     Johnny is one of the two reasons I agreed when Eileen decided to buy
this house - which is big & plain & not especially attractive.
 
     Eileen was earning enough, by then, to get a mortgage & pay it off, if
that's what she wanted to do.  Since I was earning just enough to pay half
the rent of our tiny cottage by the golf course - & sometimes not even that
- she was only listening, to the extent that she WAS listening to me, out of
kindness.

      "If you must buy a house, buy this one.  You've got a river running
just beyond the road in front of the house.   And you've got a good
neighbor.  Good neighbors are precious."

      While Eileen was showing me around inside, trying, at least, to get me
not to hate the idea of her getting us involved with a mountain of mortgage
debt, & our moving (I'd have to spend money to print more business cards) -
Johnny had come over & knocked, to offer any help he could, tho the realtors
had warned him not to bother prospective buyers.

     The house had been built by his family, when he was a boy - he had been
partly raised in it, & lived in it many of his adult years, taking care of
his father.

     Johnny is tall & gawky & not sophisticated - eager to please,
forthright, & handy.  He always cuts the the lawn here - there is a lot of
lawn.  When he lived here, he cut it - & he has kept right on cutting the
lawn since we moved in.

     "Is it okay?" he asks occasionally.

     "Okay?  It's great!  You're doing our work for us."

     He uses a gas-powered lawnmower, so we occasionally pay for some of the
gas.  When he wanted to buy a new mower, the kind you ride around on, we
paid a third of the price.

     He didn't buy the kind his company makes - he works in a factory
producing lawnmowers & snowblowers - he bought a competitor's model.  He
said they were almost exact equivalents, tho the competitor's model was
designed just a little better, & cost only 2/3 what one of the kind he
produces would have cost.

     Johnny's not terribly impressed with the management since "the old man"
retired, & the son runs the company.  Johnny has spent months at a time,
traveling around - to warehouses in Detroit & Baltimore, for instance -
fixing hundreds of snow-blowers, that had been paid for & shipped out, with
defects that the purchasers complained about.

     "You can't do that - especially with all the mild winters, lately," he
points out.

     Johnny lives on the land next door, & mows his lawn - there's a lot of
it - & ours, together, several times a week.  It's his main hobby,
apparently.

     In the winter, he also snow-blows our driveway clear.

     Eileen put a compress with hydrogen peroxide on Johnny's bald head.  He
was fixing up his tool shed in back, & a plank from the roof he was
re-building fell on his bald head, a corner gashing deep into the flesh.  We
drove him to the emergency room of the hospital.

     It was no big deal, kind of a pleasant excursion - the fields are full,
just shy of harvest - & a chance to do some good.

     "Bonkus-on-nogginus," the young emergency room doctor joked after
looking at it, briefly - & the wound turned out to need only a few stitches,
& to have no serious effects.  And Johnny had insurance, from work, that
covered it.

     Last winter, Johnny had his feet operated on, first one, then the
other.  He was laid up for months - in the little house he & his brothers
built out of two trailers, on the land next to ours.

      I visited every day, except a few days when one of his sisters kept
him company.  I fetched his mail from the post office 6 days a week, &
occasionally bought him a quart of milk.

     We talked about the Green Bay Packers football team.  He was reading a
book about its famous coach, Vince Lombardi - a perfectionist, who led the
team to several championships, against much better financed teams, from New
York & Chicago, for instance.

     "He treated all the players equally - like dirt!" Johnny told me.

     Then he read a bunch of magazines about Arizona - put out by the
Arizona Department of Tourism.  Johnny sometimes goes to Arizona, with his
brother, Bob, on vacation.  He showed me some pictures of desert plants.

     And he told me a lot about his family - he has pictures of mother &
father & brothers & sisters all over the place - old days in the nearby town
& this neighborhood.  "So much building going on around here now!"

     I'm terribly impatient - I always want to get to work - tho,
frequently, when I have the chance to work, I find I can't do it, anyway.
But I made myself stay at least ten minutes, &, often, a half an hour or
more.

     And once a week, Eileen & I ate a meal with him, over at his place.  He
loved that.

     You have to love the guy.  He certainly loves you.

     He has been working at the factory that produces lawnmowers &
snowblowers for 30 years - tho all he ever wanted to do was be a farmer.  He
used to be truant from school - he'd be operating a neighbor's tractor all
day.  When the principal of the high school said something less than
respectful about his family, just before he was due to graduate, Johnny
threw a book at the principal, walked out, & never graduated.  He's been
working at the factory, ever since he came back from the Vietnam War, which
he describes as "a farce," shaking his head, but without bitterness.

     The last day he was in Vietnam, he came closest to being in trouble.
He was operating a radio - his job the whole time he was there - in a shed.
A bomb went off right next to the shed.

     He'd had a relatively safe time of it, til then, working behind the
lines.  But just as he was leaving, there was no more "behind the lines."


     IT USED TO BE - after the Indians were displaced - Black Hawk War,
1830's - that most of the people around here were dairy farming families.
That's not so, any more - as a lot more people live here than used to, most
of them working in the towns & small cities & commuting in & back.  A lot of
the dairy farms have failed, too.  Both the market & government incentives
favor big operations over the family farms.

     In any case, as I am speaking about my neighbors, I should say that a
lot of my neighbors are dairy farmers & dairy farm families - but a lot of
my neighbors, too, are cows.

     Most of them are black & white Holsteins, & they live pretty much
penned up in small areas, adjacent to iron-red wood barns in various states
of decrepitude - tho a few, more than 100 years old, seem still to be solid,
& are regularly painted over.


     OCCASIONALLY, AN OWL flies by, low & purposefully, dull gray or dull
brown, or some dull intermediate color.  Or a hawk is perched quietly erect,
or with its head tucked, asleep, on the dead branch of a tree, or on some
weather-worn wooden fence-post.  The hawk, also dully brown or gray, may
have a slight reddish-tinge to the tail - in which case it's called a
red-tailed hawk.  Nothing flashy, tho.

     An eagle or a pair of them, high above, cruise by occasionally, letting
out a kind of metallic cry, neither harsh nor melodic, either -
other-worldly - easy to ignore, if you're busy, as something mechanical,
maybe something to do with one of the freight trains that occasionally goes
by across the river, or something to do with some farmer's equipment, or
with some big truck moving to or from a construction site.

     The eagles fly very high.  Sometimes you see them, flying silently by -
sometimes, rarely, not much higher than the peak of a house, following the
river.  But sometimes, tho you hear their cry, you could look up for them,
but they're flying too high, & you can't make them out - they're less than
specks, part of a haze....

     You could be here for years:  earning money however you earn it; paying
for your house; paying your taxes; getting along as best you can with your
spouse & family, & with your spouse's family; & the county, state, & federal
governments, all the agencies; keeping the lawn mowed, oil or gas in the
furnace, car running; hearing about the high school football team, &
extension of the sewer lines to where, til recently, there were only dairy
farms; reading in the paper about the ruinously low price of milk &
ruinously high price of oil - & you'd never even know that the eagles,
hawks, & owls are living here, occasionally moved to seek out & concentrate
on one particular mouse, mole, or chipmunk - necessary to go on.

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 uXu #597              Underground eXperts United 2002              uXu #597
                      1991-2001 uXu ten years 1991-2001
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