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Sorry. I don’t have time to think when I’m on the trail in the woods with my brother either behind or in front of me (we simply do not often walk side-by-side), with “The Baddest Girls in Cook County.” Daphne the English cocker spaniel stopping and staring at me too long, so I cast her off. Foxy the Brittany spaniel barking at squirrels and chipmunks. There are just too many things on my mind. So, I apologize for not having any thoughts.
I’m often preoccupied with my pups, as you know. Daphne is here in the thimbleberries and bracken fern. Her nose is to the ground and her tail being practically shook off for excitement, and she makes figure-eights here in the underbrush and then makes a four-leafed clover. And I’m thinking that a ruffed grouse has been here recently.
Foxy is ranging too far in the woods. She barks in earnest 200 feet away down the gradual decline from the Bogus Lake height of land to the stillwaters on the Kadunce River, and Daphne goes after her. Sometimes they’re out of whistle-shot.
Foxy continues to bark and my brother is in there, down into the birch and poplar and maple. I wonder what Foxy was barking at? I wonder where my brother is?
I stood at the head of a clearing with Bogus Lake way up to the north over the slope and my brother and our pups way down the near slope, and I thought that I wished I could stay there forever.
I wasn’t thinking of the dream I had last night. I’m the opposite of insomniac – I sleep too well. With all the chemicals in my brain I have very clear and powerful and crushing dreams. I have a rule in writing never to write about dreams (interestingly, another rule I have is not to write about thinking in the first person), but this doesn’t count because I wasn’t thinking about the dream. I wasn’t as much thinking of the dream as being overcome by it.
We were in this empty one-star Third-World style restaurant – me and this girl that I haven’t thought of or seen in 35 years, Kathy. We ordered a pizza.
The pizza came and I went for a slice. But inside the slice I found a big, sharp piece of plastic, sort of like a mirror. And apparently the waitresses or waiters or cooks didn’t like us. Or didn’t like me.
Now again I was at the football-field sized, level clearing on the shelf on the slope of the Bogus Lake height, and trees cannot break into the open space because it was an old mill site, so the ground had been compacted and spilled with tar and oil and grease and saturated with tannic acid. It was far enough into the woods – not tall, green, brushy woods, but white and yellow and medium-height brushy woods – that only a couple visitors came a year. Maybe. Grouse or deer hunters. Or a single hunter.
I wasn’t thinking, though. What do you call it when you’re walking the edge of a clearing and you look and identify gray sage and willow and green wild strawberry and clover and faded goldenrod? Or when you imagine examining the craw of a partridge, to find green, fresh clover leaves and strawberry leaves, and an alder twig. A twig? What would you think? Is that thinking?
Sorry, I definitely don’t have time to think about my brother when we are out with the pups on the trail in the woods. I don’t raise his opinion of the potential of the current trail to produce partridge. I shouldn’t ask his opinion of the effectiveness of my two fairly well-trained pups. I’m elsewhere when we cross the massive bedrock promontory that reminds us of Gorbachev’s forehead, or when we cross the North-South gully that makes a hollow between Bogus and the Kadunce, or cross into the old, mixed woods beyond the trail, where the trail stopped because foreigners couldn’t traverse it. And the baddest girls in the county flush a grouse, and my brother went down and in again, and there were other grouse.
So yes, I guess I did think clearly then. And in my thinking, I have very few solutions, and to my brother I cannot express my thoughts, but with regards to Cook County, I think I am sorry for something. I still feel the need to apologize. Sometimes without knowing for what.
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