Saturday, Old Folks got up and wrote for
a couple of hours.
He let Brenda's chickens out.
They put themselves
in their roost at night, and Brew or Brenda closed the door and hooked it after they
put themselves up. During the day, they scratch for bugs.
Brenda made herself
a breakfast and sewed something, or died something in the washing machine. A project.
When the mail was up, Old Folks rode his mountain bike to the post office, then to
the supermarket. He bought the makings for spaghetti. The grejencies.
He
put them in his backpack.
"On your bicycle, eh?" the cashier said.
"Yep," Old Folks said.
When you're on a bicycle, people assume
it is because you have a DWI.
* * *
Larry has a basket on a frame he carries on his back. When they stopped at
the Arabella Station, a man asked Larry where he got it, he said he got it from L.
L. Bean, 30 years ago.
"And has used it every day since," Old Folks
said. "When you shop for groceries in a basket, you have to go to the store
every single day."
Larry laughed.
"But you don't have to
refrigerate anything," Old Folks said.
* * *
Brenda made a tuna salad for lunch. With romaine and vine-ripe tomato.
* * *
In the afternoon, they went to the library, downtown.
Brenda found
a book on weddings by Martha Stewart that showed her how to make a wedding cake.
For Balder and Jennifer's wedding.
* * *
On the way home, they went through Millville, so Brenda could buy a raccoon
trap at Boyette & Casey hardware store. Since they were there, the went across
the street to Gene's and had a dozen oysters each.
* * *
When they got home from that, Brenda made a red sauce, for spaghetti, with
ground beef and Italian sausage in it. A meat sauce.
She likes to cook something
nice on the weekends, to give Old Folks a break, but when they look down their list
of favorite meals, for an idea, they never get past spahgetti, because they can make
lasagna, out of the leftover red sauce.
* * *
After supper, Old Folks went for a walk, around the block, then did some
exercises with his barbells and stretched.
Whenever be did his exercises
he thought of the picture of Bukowski with the set of barbells.
He started
out with a 30 minute walk and planned to work up to an hour.
* * *
Old Folks had ordered a comedy by the man from Iceland who directed Such
a Long Journey, a movie they watched last week. The movie takes place in Newfoundland
and is called Rare Birds. They got it from Netflix.
After his walk,
and a shower, he and Brenda watched it, and after that, Brenda went to her room and
Old Folks watched a prize fight in the living room.
* * *
He was disappointed in Cinderella Man. He thought it was melodramatic,
and too violent.
A fight, he could follow the action, and know who was scoring
the telling blows.
But in the movie, he had to depend on the announcer's
play-by-play. He couldn't tell which fighter was which. Who was mashing whose face
in.
* * *
After the boxing, Old Folks went to his room and read.
He was reading
a book called Them, by Jon Ronson. About conspiracy theorists.
He
would have called it Dem.
To some blacks, white people are dem.
* * *
To some black people Old Folks was dem.
Well, did they ever think
that some black people were dem to him?
A cashier, a black woman, short-changed
him $10 at the movie yesterday.
He called her on it and she gave him a $10
bill, like it was an honest mistake.
Like, "Get out my face."
He didn't like her attitude.
There was nothing he could do about it, though.
There was nothing Old Folks could do about how a black person acted.
A black
person was going to act however he or she felt like acting, and there was nothing
Old Folks could do about it.