great wall 3

 Was watching the local news last night and there was The Ravenswood.  Kind of a big deal I guess, a hip new joint for those of us thinking about hip replacements.  They had several shots of what appeared to be common rooms.  I think one of them was a library or a reading room, all looked pretty good.  I am looking forward to hearing how he is doing up there and maybe tales of interesting blokes and blokettes that he may run into.

But I am worried about Beagles.  Haven't heard from him all week, and at our age it is not nice to not at least check in at least once a week.

I was even thinking of putting in some political stuff to get his blood boiling.

There is the matter of the Trumpists backing away from their agreement over the bipartisan infrastructure deal.  Oh they are always looking for ways to back out of anything, but this time the point that they are turning up their noses at is the money for the IRS so that it can audit tax cheats so that they have to pay their fair share.  Of course they have always been the party of tax cuts for the very rich, but that apparently is not enough for them and now they want to insure that they can cheat on their taxes with impunity.

Remember when they were crying about the shutdowns because they were bad for business?  Well now that we have a vaccine that can end the pandemic and bring the country back to normalcy and get business humming again, they have become anti vaxxers.  Here is a scourge on the country causing deep illness and death and costing piles of money and they are all for it.

Beagles and I have been kumbaya-ing of late so I am not sure if he would disagree on me on both these points, but anyway wishing him the best and eager to hear from him.

And now a little more of the current story.

I didn’t finish clearing off the bar until lunch was over.  I felt a little better with that mess gone, the bar shining good as new, rows of sparkling glasses, a clean ashtray positioned in front of every other bar stool, everything ready for another night just like the night before.

“Hey Sailor,” Dawn said jumping onto a stool and pounding one of her heroic little fists on the bar, “What’s a gal got to do to get a drink around here?”  She startled me so that I jumped and then she laughed.

She wasn’t laughing at me though, she was laughing at herself, the absurdity of her, little Dawn, bellying up to the bar and doing that ‘Hey Sailor’ thing.  It was a phrase her father had taught her when she was a little girl, sitting in front of her oatmeal in the breakfast nook and asking for her orange juice.  It always got a laugh out of her folks.  Seeing the bar and the empty stools, she thought she’d try it out.

I went over to her and poured her an orange juice. I lifted the vodka bottle teasingly and she spread her hands and shook her head in mock horror.  No, no, she didn’t drink at all.

Sam had brought in a handful of empty one-ounce scotch bottles from his flight.  In cleaning up the bar I had set them aside, and now they were standing at attention in a little line on the ledge of the bar in front of Dawn who picked up their leader and squinted her eyes at his tiny label.

“Glenlivet,” she read,  “That’s the kind of scotch my dad drank,” then she went down the line turning each little bottle so that the label faced her.  “What are you going to do with these?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said, a little embarrassed now that I hadn’t pitched them with the rest of last night’s debris.

“Can I have them then?” she asked and I nodded and she picked up each one and dropped them carefully into her purse.

“It’s just that they remind me of my dad,” she explained.  “He used to call me Princess Winterspringsummerfall.  That always made me smile. Oh, when I skinned my knee or bumped my head, or any of those things kids do all the time you know that end up with them crying, he would say,” and then she paused trying to remember.  “Shrug it off.”

“Shrug it off,” I repeated, looking down at her, confused and amused.

She laughed again, her modest embarrassed little laugh.  “Sounds silly doesn’t it?  ‘Shrug it off’ what kind of advice is that to give a little girl?  But I didn’t know any better.  I guess it was like ‘no use crying over spilt milk,’ ‘don’t look back,’ ‘get on with life.’  I’d be kneeling on the sidewalk, maybe I’d fallen off my roller skates or something, and remember how bright and red your blood looked when you were a kid, and he’d kind of give me a little punch in the shoulder, and say ‘Shrug it off,’ and I would, and I’d feel better.”

I stood there in silence looking down at her blushing face, and then she added, looking straight ahead and past me, “And then he died.”

Couldn’t shrug that one off, I was going to say, but I’m glad that I didn’t.  Conversation kind of dropped off after that though.  She emptied her orange juice and then she slipped away to Annette’s table.