Summer Vignettes

Recently acquired outdoor funk for the House of Owls and Bats, because, you gotta have the funk. It has been named R. T. Tavi...

Sabina planted sunflowers along the south side of the house. Everything is green and budding, if not blossoming. Our columbines, pinkish-red in their countenance, have popped into a full bouquet. Lilacs have finally bloomed in town and on our walks through the dusty streets, Sabina stops to bury her nose the abundant flowers. The short, sweet, season is upon us.

***
My daughter, having spent a week in New York City-New York City! Git a rope!-found herself feeling the affects of altitude sickness when we started up Kearney Gulch. It makes me glad we didn't try climbing Mount Bierstadt, which was our alternate walkabout. She may have been worse off. As it stands, we made it about quarter to half a mile before turning back. We spoke of astrobiology and black holes on the way down in between water breaks. The fact we got out into the bush in one another's company was enough.

At home, we played chess and rummy. For dinner, with the scant bit of leftover lamb from Father's day I made a Sri Lankan curry. Something that could easily become my new favorite curry. We concluded our visit a day later grilling a jumbo lobster tail, which my daughter insisted I share with her, despite me telling her I'd eat the vile devil meat and she could content herself with salmon. She had garlic butter with her half whilst I had north African chermoula butter with mine. The way we tried to take one another's portions and defend our own could be likened to wolves fighting over a kill.

***

No one seems surprised at all that with the coming of hot weather I am reading a book called Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places by Bill Streever. Of course you are, my daughter, Sabina, and Jezebel have all said. Fucking women. It's not the only book I'm reading. I tend to read between three and six at a go-there is so much consume-but this is the main one. One of five. Oh, and a Calvin and Hobbes compilation when I don't want to commit to a chapter in one of my tomes.

***

Sometimes, I wonder if I'm not becoming more like my father. Whilst grilling, Sabina had our few minutes of growlies. This happens around cooking time. Despite our years together, I can still sometimes-a lot of times-get territorial in my kitchen.

"The reason you drink?" Our Montanan import asked me.

"Yeh," I chuckled. "Oh, we snarl sometimes, but we're devoted to each other. I enjoy her company most of the time...a lot of the time...some of the time...okay, I tolerate her because she pays the other half of the mortgage."

He laughed. As did I. The thing is, my parents would say the same thing about one another, and the only reason my father is no longer with my mother is because her immolated bones are scattered near the ruins of Waldorf. So it goes.

***

Warm sun, cool breezes, thunderstorms, and graupel up high. Brilliant stars and chimenias with wine and smores. The tourist crowds are thick, even on the weekdays. The shadow of the season.

We look forward to meals and trips, either on foot or by vehicle. There'll be camping sometime in the coming months, before the green leaves turn the color rust, flame, and spun gold. Summer may be short and sweet up here, but I feel I have all the time in the world and our days are just packed.

A Walkabout, A Roadtrip, and Omens of a Meal

Some mood music...

It is possible runoff has peaked. The river does not roar quiet as fiercely at night and my oh fuck! rock becomes steadily drier. I've gotten back my creekside footrests for when I go to watch the water. This makes me happy. I only hope the standing water out back begins to abate soon. It is doubtful Sabina has enough ammunition in her pistol to deal with the mosquitoes that may be born out there.

***

I had been promising Milarepa a walkabout with me for almost a month, but had not gotten around to it. This will not do. Not keeping a promise, whether it's to something that walks upon two legs or four, is a bad scene. It'd been at least a year since I'd walked as far as Pavilion Point up the Argentine trail. Milarepa very excitedly walked with me up the trail.

The intrepid mountain hound in question shooting me a downright adorable look at the ruins...

All that's left of the old dance hall is a chimney. That's not stopped it from being a popular place to hang. Any time I've been there, I've found empty beer cans and spent bullet casings. I noticed a fresh windbreak erected of the chimney and some stones set up like a bench, making it look like more the party place.

I'm all for a funky place to camp or drink a beer in the shadow of a bonfire, but this kind of bothered me. Perhaps I wondered how long it would be before pot hunters started disassembling the chimney brick by brick. I question when that hilltop will catch fire from the carelessness of some revelers. 

***

Further meditation, debate, and discussion on self-inflicting my phobias;

Mount Evans is something of anti-climatic fourteener. Like Pike's Peak, it is one you can summit without climbing. Well, not climbing in boots, if you dig my meaning. The Mount Evans Road was suppose to be part of a link in the fourteener chain between Pike's and Long's Peaks respectively. Obviously, that never happened, and this stretch of tundra pavement stands as a testimony to that endeavor. The highest road in the whole of North America.

You probably remember me mentioning my issues with heights. So how, out of nothing other than something to do, driving up a narrow, steep, winding mountain road with no guardrails and thousand foot drops had become a good idea seems more than a little daft. Even and especially when a storm battered the mountain with wind and sleet. White-knuckled, reciting every mantra I knew, I pressed on for the summit. Tenacity kept me from turning back. Turning back would've been failure.

The true summit of the mountain at the end of the lot...

"Are you going to be okay?" Sabina asked me at the top. "Should I drive down?"

"'I must not fear...'" I whispered to myself. "No, I know my vehicle, like you know yours. I'll handle it."

After all, you don't climb up something you cannot climb back down...

The clouds broke and the sun shone across the tundra once more. It was striking, as were the views. There was something so very primeval about the landscape. A strange mysticism that grabs my attention about the alpine. As if one could be forgiven for expecting to see long-extinct megafauna around the next bend. 

We wandered around and took a few pictures. I got into Old Scratch and started the engine. With a deep breath, I prepared to head back down. I recited cartoon litanies to myself;

Sheer drop off? Yeh. Jagged rocks? Uh-huh. Certain death? Yep...

"Bring it on," I whispered to myself as placed my foot on the accelerator. "Muthafucka..."

***

It is official, my daughter's making an effort to come up for the Hallmark that is Father's Day. One never knows, what with her mother, but that's another story. For the occasion, I pull a leg of lamb I acquired out of the freezer. It'll get rubbed with some salt, pepper, and Moroccan spices and let sit a few days. A simple something, of which I salivate about when I think of it.

She's hoping to stay a few days. I mention the possibility of either Kearney Gulch or Mount Bierstadt for a dad and daughter adventure. She expresses excitement at both. The fact she's coming for dinner is thrilling enough. Either possible walkabout is just an added treat.

Pet Cemetary

Oh, c'mon! It's the Ramones!

We'd only been up here but a few months when my cat, Judas, the niger daemonium feles, had his kidneys finally fail. A six year long battle I fought along side him, which he lost. A devastating defeat because it seemed we had the problem licked. I got good and drunk and buried him out back. Sabina had a stone made to mark the spot. A sweet gesture, but would've known where it was even without a marker. I'd have never admitted it when he was alive, but we had a bond.

A couple years later, Mom Cat Luna French Kitteh gave birth to a litter of four kittens, one of which died the first day. Whether stillborn or accidentally crushed by its mother we never bothered to find out. I put the body in the freezer to be taken out with the trash, what was done with stillborn puppies on the farmsteads of which I grew up. Both my daughter and Sabina wouldn't stand for it, insisting I bury the kitten they'd named Ickle Meeper-something I found only slightly less absurd as human mothers naming their miscarriages things like Nevaeh. With a garden trowel, I put the feline body not far from where I'd buried Judas.

There was the unfortunate events of a couple weeks ago. Something I still catch myself thinking isn't quiet real, despite the very vivid reality of it all. I watch Chevy arthritically trundle about and Milarepa spasmodically frolics. The cats play, hunt, and rest. My eyes drift toward that spot out back, by the square of granite, and I think of the rudimentary necropolis I've assembled of passed on familiars and failed offspring. I used to tell my mother she could bury me out back, should I get bored enough to die.

The swampy conditions of a truly impressive, and, somewhat frightening, runoff continue to advance. The ground in front of the willow that is not underwater makes squishy sounds when a foot falls upon it. Water sneaks up through the grass briefly at those points. I can see standing water in the freshly turned earth by that granite slab.

When I first started dancing with dead for money, way back then, Job remarked that he always saw me as possessed of a curious and questing nature with an underlying sense of morbidity. In his estimation, triaging potential organ and tissue donors was perhaps one of the best ways for me to make money, and I did find the gig savagely interesting for the five years I did it, even if I fought almost daily with the bureaucracy that ran it. As I watch the water rise out back, I morbidly wonder if hundreds of thousands of years from now, when archaeologists are excavating the bones of this little 'berg, if they'll come across the remains of my buried familiars. Preserved, like peat-bog mummies.    

Vertigo

I suppose some might find it a right rib-tickler that despite being very nearly six and a half feet tall and living in an area with a lot of vertical geography of which I like to get up on top of as to see my tiny world from on high, I kind of have a problem with heights. There are probably those, critics, who would say-baselessly!-that this makes sense, for I am full of contradiction. I take it as something of an annoyance, like seasonal allergies.

After all, I have deeper, darker, fears. Late at night, when the demons come for tea, we sometimes discuss them. At length.

Curiously, my worst times of vertigo occurred down below, in the greater metroplex, not the mountains. Once was a soccer game I attended with Jezebel and Belushi. The second was when I saw the Dalai Lama. Both instances involved nose-bleed seats and narrow walkways. Throngs of humanity pulsed around me like some mega-organism. Sometimes, when I think about those two incidents, I wonder if my subtle terror came from the great crowds of eking and scratching half-bald primates surrounding me and not the idea of what would happen if I lost my footing and fell.

I firmly believe my Kashmir is place where playing outside is a holy sacrament. Coming from someone who describes themselves as heretic, that might not mean much, but maybe it means everything. Perhaps it doesn't matter.

The rock walls around the ruins of the Mendota Mine, at the far west edge of town had been calling my name with a siren's sing-song voice. So, I clipped on my chalk bag and away I went. I never climb much higher than twenty feet off the ground. Miguel Loco once warned me to never climb up something I cannot climb back down. Sound advice.

Although, at one point or another, I inevitability look down and everything drops away. I freeze. Only for a heartbeat, but, time being the abstract that it is, that is a very long heartbeat. It is said fear profits no man, and panic, even at ten or twenty feet off the ground could be disastrous. With a deep breath, I look up once more.

Before I learned any of the Buddhist mantras, this was my jam;

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn my inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain..."

Hearken, and be made glad, congregation, at the good news; the gospel of Frank Herbert...

Of course I made it to the top. I made it back down too, obviously, having had a grand time playing about on the rocks. This little muse-brought to you by the First Syllable, Om-would not have happened otherwise.

Around my neck, one of my fetishes is a fossilized shark's tooth. It was found in the deserts of Morocco, and is said to be around twenty million years old. I imagine critics snickering at that one.

Of course you do. It's ancient and from Morocco. Ain't that just your funny little way?

Funny or not, I've mentioned being frightened of sharks, but I also respect them. My shark's tooth is a talisman and a reminder. It tells me there are things in this world, which scare me, but that it would be folly to allow myself to be in the thrall of my fears. After all, I bear my jugular to no one; god, man, or mental state.

Bayou

I think the title says it all...

When the first prospectors and miners came up here, this was beaver bog. As the first tents, houses, and other buildings went up, because of the richness of the soil, it became the town's cattle pasture. One-hundred thirty-four years ago, upon that stretch of land, a miner built a cabin, which would eventually morph into a funky-gotta have the funk!-one bedroom Victorian cottage we call the House of Owls and Bats.

For the first time in five years, there is standing water out back. Ankle deep around the willow. I throw out mosquito dunks, silently wondering if I'll have to kill them with a shovel-perhaps a gun?-this year. The further back into the property you walk, the spongier the ground becomes. I consider gumbo in the near future, for I find it in context.

Across the street, at the river, there is a rock I like to sit out with something liquid and watch the water and the world amble by. It's relaxing. Here and now, I can hear the leviathan. Two of my footrest rocks and one of the others I use to measure the level of the river are under water. Across the river is a large flat stone I refer to as the oh fuck! rock. When it gets submerged, there's street flooding and sandbagging in the lower-lying areas of town. Here and now, the water line is halfway up.

Yessirie, the excitement never stops...

Embracing and Letting Go

A perfect song from a perfect album...

It was me who re-introduced Sabina to the Refreshments. Their debut album, Fizzy Fuzzy, Big & Buzzy, was a staple in my stereo along with Peter Gabriel's Up, anything from Space Team Electra, Bad Brains, and my various African musics. One of our first dates was a Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers-the Refreshments current incarnation, just in case anyone fell asleep there-concert. When Lee caught Sabina kissing me-I tried to stop her, honest-he was very thrilled and no at all surprised. Then again, it played out no one really was.

Roger Clyne is Sabina's boyfriend. She'll ask if he missed her whenever a Refreshments or Peacemakers album is put on. Because of this luminous crush, for the last few years, on the muthafuckingSaturdaybeforeMemorialDay we find ourselves attending the Denver's Day of Rock along the grand bazaar of Sixteenth Street. By the end of the show, Sabina is all excited and giddy having seen her boyfriend, and me, having hung back as far as I could, but still surrounded by far too many people, is ready to kill everyone around me. Even the children.

Especially the children...

I remember my daughter asking me about missing the city. An acquaintance asked me about missing smoking when I mentioned wandering into a cigar and wine shoppe on Sixteenth. It's interesting how interwoven those past things are; the smell of really good tobacco, that palpable energy when walking amongst the monoliths of downtown. Time was I enjoyed both. Sometimes simultaneously. That time is not now, and I find I do not require exposure to either, even if, so many years later, I can still somewhat appreciate them.

***

There was rain and fog and mud. When the sun finally broke through the cobwebbed chains of cloud, it was as if it was in the full force of high mountain summer. I welcome the new season with the embrace reserved for those dear you've not seen in a bit.

The river and seeps roar with force of early runoff. Sabina told me just how far we could get up Grizzly Gulch before snowshoes would be required, and those water crossing might be tantamount to madness without a four by four. Along the road to the ruins of Waldorf, one can make it mile, so it may be weeks yet before those of us who steward the Santiago Mill can reach that ruin. I am edgy to see the outback of the tundra in its summer clothes.

***

I admit it, I've been neurotic about Chevy the last few days. When he doesn't drink as much or eat as fast I worry. Any time his arthritic back-end gives out, causing him to stumble, or worse, fall, I growl, finding I am not emotionally ready to deal with another dog collapsing. He and Whistler grew up together and I've seen Chevy sniffing those last few spots his brother was laying before I took him to the vet. When Chevy decided to wander down toward the mechanic's shop I was in borderline hysterics.

This too shall pass...

I did go up the Bull's Head like I said I would. Although it'd been a couple years since Whistler had accompanied me to the top of the rock formation from which the trail takes its name, that's where I set his collar. My mother never did that walkabout, but it never stopped me from leaving a string of prayer flags for her just before she died.

Because my phone's camera is not the best, you'll just have to give a wrinkle and squint and the benefit of a doubt about the prayer flag remnants...

I felt unburdened after the fact. The catharsis that comes with letting go. Being Tuesday, afternoon tea proceeds cocktail hour. I sat out with a book and some steaming jasmine. The hot sun caressing my face. When Whistler was happy, or, approved of something, he would give a chomp. Perhaps it was just my imagination running away with me, but as I sat back on the early summer afternoon after it was all said and done and over, I almost thought I heard a delighted chomp.

Cocktail hour a couple months back, Whistler obviously worn out. The cats are Mom Cat, Luna French Kitteh and her daughter, Eeeva Tiny-Voice...

Whistler

From that walkabout back in October Whistler and I did to the ruins of the Illinois Mine, off the the 730 trail. And just last week he went on walkabout with me...

You'd never had known it, but we didn't always get along. Until four years ago, he was edgy and standoffish around me. My father would say he was my mother's dog, contrary and an overall pain in the ass. My mother would say he was my father's dog; aloof with a strong dislike of people.

"No wonder you two are such good friends!" The bruja said when I gave those descriptions, Whistler sitting companionably at my feet. Fucking woman.

After my mother died and my father decided to leave the Rub 'al Khali of the badlands of eastern Colorado, he began to get rid of all of the dogs. He'd parted with most of the kennel stock when my mother got sick, sick. Whistler and Chevy, the Grumpy Old Men, retired from their showing and herding days, were now the house dogs. The place my father was moving to did not allow dogs, and it fell to me to take them.

"I may be your way to life," I snarled at Whistler in a moment of jungle rules during that chaotic time of my father's move. "Show me some fucking respect!"

Chevy was brought up to the house first, then Whistler. He was still standoffish toward me until he saw Chevy, his three month younger half-brother, again. The way Whistler ran to him, it was like one of those syrupy bitch films where the couple crosses a beach to fall into one another's arms.

After that, we were as thick as thieves. Whistler, having some separation anxiety what with my parents leaving him in one form or fashion, was my canid shadow. Only the slow march of years would limit just how far he could follow me.

***

At first, it presented like IVS, the uneasy movements and the head-tilt. With that condition, you hide and wait for three days to see if the dog gets better. As the days passed, his condition worsened. Suddenly, his back legs stopped working. I wondered if it wasn't tick paralysis, but there were no ticks on him. Then, he turned down food.

It doesn't take a physic or someone who has been involved in the medical field to know what that meant...

The vet figured his something went wrong within his spine. That he'd been actively dying the last few days and it would be abject cruelty to keep him alive through the weekend. Whistler's mind was fully intact, but not his body. Were I to antropomorphise, one of the last looks he gave me was as if to say the number was up and it was time to say goodbye.

"Oh child of the noble family, Twist, listen, and be without distraction; you are about to enter the bardo. You may choose to be reborn, or you can choose to attain the ultimate liberation of enlightenment," was the Tibetan death prayer I whispered in his ear after he was give the hospice dose. "Om mani padme hum."

I used to figure when the time came, I'd have Whistler cremated and scattered his ashes across the many trails he walked with me. The time has come and Sabina and my daughter helped me bury him out back. I took his collar and a lock of fur and will leave them somewhere along the Bull's Head. That was last trail we walked together.

Because of his arthritis, I always figured Chevy would go first, not Whistler, who was so much more active. Chevy, arthritic and oblivious, lays at my feet. I wonder if he comprehends his brother is gone. My mother had Chevy trained as a therapy dog once upon a time. I wonder if he knows how therapeutic his presence at my feet is here and now.



Roger Clyne wrote this after scattering the ashes of his best friend...

Hot Day Lunch Date

What for the juxtaposition...

It was positively hot as my daughter and trekked along the Notch to get a lunch of Mex-'Merican at the cantia down valley. I mean, it must have been seventy if it was a degree. I told my daughter perhaps the house would need to be outfitted with an air conditioner.

She asked me if I missed the city at all and I reminded her how the junction, six miles from my front door, is too far east these days. I mentioned how when I lived in the historical district, I quite enjoyed it, but there came time to leave. No, I do not miss the metroplex in the least, but nor do I regret my time there, for I also experienced a spark of uniqueness and adventure amongst the neon and back-alleys.

"Does this ever get tiresome?" A traveler with a thick Arkansas accent asked me the other day.

"Oh, it can be tough," I said quite gravely. "In the years I've been here I've had to hike, bike, mountain climb, rock scrabble, roadtrip, snowshoe, get beer from small breweries and attend festivals. It's been perdition." I sighed heavily. "But I take that bullet, nay, shoulder that burden. For the team."

It was shocking enough that he didn't believe me, but it bordered upon insulting when he started to laugh, as if I was joking!

"Imagine," my daughter said with a chuckle after I related to her that tale. "Dad, you're proud that you live where others come to vacation."

"Pride is a sin," I retorted. "It was taught to us in a moving picture show with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, and you know those things don't lie."

"Dad, you're a Buddhist," my daughter said. "And you once told me you don't believe in sin."

Contemptuous fucking whelp. She gets this from her mother, you know. Stop fucking snickering!

After a lovely lunch of build-your-own tacos and burritos we cut up the canyon, which the narrow gage railroad snakes up. From the time we left in the late morning to our walking back time, more leaves had appeared on the aspens. The deciduous finally putting on their summer plumage at ninety-one sixty. It filled me with joy. We concluded our afternoon sitting in the adirondacks along the east side of the house with the hot sun caressing our faces. With a wicked grin of joy I recalled what I said to an acquaintance as I introduced my daughter;

"This is the true love of my life. Sabina is the other woman."

Roads

Sabina found the perfect place to picnic on the shores the reservoir with musics of rushing water and the cries of ospreys for the backbeat. Fantastic. We had summer sausage, cheeses, crackers. bread, chocolate, and a old vine tempranillo. The landscape we had driven across reminded us of what a fantastic place we had come to call home. We discussed alternate routes to get to the Great Stupa for our yearly pilgrimage, which would involve not leaving the mountains at all.

"Bet when you gave me that paper wasp's nest you didn't think it'd play out like this," I said as we toasted. "Such a sweet thing."

"Sweeter than the acorn?" Sabina asked me and I nodded. She smiled her I-love-you smile. "I guess I had you at wasp's nest."

"If you had gotten me a tarantula, I might've swooned," I said.

Sabina, because she's a girl, shuddered. I've never gotten the fear of spiders given any human is hundreds of times bigger than any arachnid and their blood has no coagulants. Of course, my irrational animal fear is sharks, made even more irrational by the fact I live very far from any ocean. Any time someone chides me for that but shudders at the mention of how I once kept spiders, I chuckle at the absurdity. I also fondly remember how my daughter asked me for a tarantula for her sixth birthday.

Excuse me...there's some dust in the room...no! It's nothing! I'm fine!

Stop laughing...

Job called me from the desert that night to let me know he made it. I told him his new role as caregiver to the blind parents of a friend was a good thing. He was once a constable and even did security work. It seemed hardwired into him to serve and protect. Although we spoke of keeping in touch, the conversation had shades of goodbye, which depressed me, because, in my personal construct, goodbye means over and done with for forever and ever, amen. Because we've sometimes gone for long periods without talking, another part of me warns myself not to panic.

I have been meditating upon the concept of burnt bridges. Both unintentional and otherwise. Job's phone call somehow got me to remembering back to when we buried my father's mother. I'd not set foot in North Carolina in sixteen years at that time and hadn't felt bad about it, but it'd been over a year since I'd seen my father. Sure, we'd spoken on the phone once or twice, but not physically been in one another's presence for the time it takes the world to truck around the sun.

"You need to stop worrying about it, boy," my father said in his rich Carolina accent. "The road goes both ways."

That said, that remembered, was a nice little metaphoric backfist. A reminder that losing touch with some of the cats from high school I may have once considered friends, university chums, or even friends from my ten years in the metroplex, is not the end of the world-actually, the end of the world is the eastern border of our Sahel as far as I'm concerned and here be dragons. John and Paul-the Beatles, not the biblical prophets-may have summed it up best;

"Ob-la dee,
Ob-la da,
Life goes on...well,
Na-na-na
life goes on..."

It's queer, but I've gotten funny looks and eye-rolls when I mention that bit of wisdom...

I do find it interesting the roads we've all taken. Sabina and I on the path of pine needles and smoothed river stones with our grand mountain adventure, Job with his sojourn into the deserts. Sabina's friend will be here in a day, his road down out Montana, to hopefully dance with the wolves. There is something to be said for the metaphor of the road going on forever, because, as far as I'm concerned, the day you reach the end it is the day it's lights out.

I can't speak for ya'll, even if I knew the language, but I'm far too busy for that...      

Special Day

It was a special day; Sabina and I mark one of myriad anniversaries. I was going to throw together a little chicken paprikash for supper, just because. The next time the sun rises, we'll go on a road daytrip with a picnic. It's been a bit since we've done that, the picnic aspect, that is.

It was a special day; he'd not gone walking with me in a bit. Gone are the days when Whistler could bushwhack up a twelve-thousand foot peak with me, and then, the next day, when I could barely walk, he'd herd-chomp at my ankles, wanting to know what the day's new adventure was. These days, two years later, a mile is an effort. What a drag it is getting old.

It was just the Bull's Head in this late spring mush that got the Rockies to make national news-ya'll do know it can snow here at any time of year, riiiiiiiiiiiiight? Whistler made a brave show of it. This part of the valley, in most places, seems the steepest. Even at a quarter mile, he was showing signs of fatigue. I did my best to encourage him. He did his best to keep up with me on my long shanks.

There's a point, after the ruins of the Diamond Mine, I am scrambling along terraced levels to another set of ruins, before coming out at the far east end of town. A residual of his IVS, when he gets tired, his equilibrium gets screwy. Even at the drop-offs by the Diamond, I had him on a leash, as to help prevent him pitching off the edge of the tailings. We reached the intersection with the 730 and headed home. I didn't do my usual loop, but that was fine. The two of us got to walk together, and that's becoming increasingly rare.

"Thank you for the company, lo jen" I said to Whistler as he achingly followed me home. "It was, as always, lovely."