Ed Cline, author of thousands of brilliant essay and myriad well acclaimed books was informed that he is on an ISIS hit list. His landlady insisted that he leave his apartment and he is now located somewhere in Texas…..rsk
I settled into my new apartment here in the “Heart of Texas” (the town shall remain nameless to all but those close to me) which is, from all outward appearances, an intellectual wasteland, I began to make some observations. Trying my best to acclimatize myself to the heat and realign my sense of direction, in the beginning I would sit for a while on a neighbor’s steps and endeavor to de-simmer.
The town is like Las Vegas; tawdry on one hand, without character on the other. It shares also with Vegas the heat. However, whereas in Vegas, there are few pleasantly cool mornings, until the heat that collects in its basin soars dramatically as the day wears on reaching the uppermost neighborhoods, here there are many evenings and nights when I needed to cover myself with a blanket, it was so cold. The mornings are pleasant enough, until the heat builds and climaxes a little past noon. And here, because the place is relatively flat, winds blow the heat around, but not fast enough to make it miserable. Air conditioning is an absolute necessity. It makes one wonder, as I often did about Vegas, how people managed to live without A/C, crawling in their wagons at oxen-speed through hostile terrain and onto Death Valley and California beyond or ensconced in their adobe or tin roof huts cooking hot meals under broiling sun
There is a nursing home beyond the wire fence facing my patio. I have a magnificent view of two of its dumpsters, and a regular parade of nursing home personnel hauling trash to those dumpsters, taking their time to have a smoke on the way and to yak about the day’s developments inside the home. The nursing home itself resembles a morgue or a crematorium.
For a while I would sit and stare at the pitiful sight of a dead sparrow that had tried to fly through the fence, near the bottom. Its head and neck drooped on the wire, and its feathers would flutter in the breeze. It served to deepen my depression for my circumstances. I felt like I had a personal connection with that bird.
I grew tired of seeing it. One afternoon I rose and walked over to the fence to nudge it with my shoe so that it would drop out of sight into the nursing home parking lot and I wouldn’t need to see it again. To my surprise, it wasn’t a sparrow at all or any other kind of hapless bird; it was a tiny twig with several gray-grown leaves. The discovery served to raise my spirits a smidgen. I nudged the faux bird over the fence.
