June 2008 During June’s first week, a visit to West Point: after a tour of the academy grounds, a concert in the Cadet Chapel. Its organ, first installed in 1911 with 2406 pipes, now (through a “multitude of gifts”), has become the largest church organ in the world, with approximately 23,500 pipes—though none of these were played on this afternoon, which instead spotlighted young talent, including the Clubwala’s younger daughter, who both sang & played the piano. On the ride back to Middletown I was driven through Kiryas Joel, the village which has the youngest median age (15.0) of any population center of over 5000 residents in the United States (the overwhelming majority of KJ residents being Hasidic Jews of the Satmar sect).

June’s second week found me in New York City; its third week, in Texas. Now that my mother’s home is car-free, I have become the talk of the town as the eccentric visitor who wanders about Floresville on foot during the heat of the day. I frankly enjoy walking, and am rarely out after 1pm (after which the summer heat does become severe), and appreciate the obligation to get in some cardiovascular stimulation. But the majority of local residents are convinced that I am loco (and/or maybe penniless), and periodically people “take pity” on me & offer me lifts. Several times I’ve been collected from the road by our 90-year-young neighbor Hilda, who delivers me all the most recent town gossip. On the morning after my return from the East Coast I got an earful, her comments punctuated by regular “rat-a-tat-a-tats” as a woodpecker pecked repeatedly (and fruitlessly) on the metal ventilator atop her roof.

Later that week I met Lone Star, his age at that time being about one month. He had been found two weeks previously by a neighbor of my cousin Bill; the game warden told them to release the fawn back into the wild, which they did, only to find him back in their yard the very next day, which is where he has stayed, being bottle-fed by Bill’s younger son until he can go off on his own. From Bill & his family I learned several useful details about raising young deer, including that the feeding bottle has to be held vertical (or the milk will get into the lungs); and that the doe has to lick the baby’s backside in order to get it to pee and poop (humans duplicate this step with a wet wipe).

On the night of June 21 I sat in the back garden watching Jupiter, the moon, and Scorpio; on hearing a rumpus behind me I turned around and trained the beam of my flashlight on a possum nosing about for sustenance in the dry weeds.

On the night of June 28 the sky was crystal clear, with the brilliant Jupiter & Scorpio separated by the Milky Way. Around midnight a pronounced rustling began behind me, the rustler moseying generally in my direction until beginning to head straight for me. Though I remained still to avoid alerting it to my presence, a sudden gust of wind from directly behind me sent my scent into its nostrils, whereupon the prowler immediately, carefully & silently retreated from earshot before I could determine its identity.

On the afternoon of June 30, near the back garden fence: a small dead animal, falling apart, a symbol, conceivably, of month’s end, the culmination of the year’s first half, and my completion of yet another year of existence. Rarely do I scoff when Nature offers figures of speech; as Robert Frost puts it in our quote of the month, from his essay “Education by Poetry”: “Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.” Amen to that.

Link to News of the Past