(no subject)
Ed Groat owned the canoe. He was a hoarder in a house his parents owned in Hyde Park.
His neighbors were always after him. Writing to city council.
Dear Mr. Groat, the letter would tell Ed, and they would use words like delinquency, and derelict, and dilapidated. Premises, and yard, and things like forthwith, and heretofore. Chattel too.
What a stupid, archaic word; chattel.
“Yeah, dem somebitches send me letters every once in a while,” he said, “but I got them off my back for right now.”
Ed told me he had gone down to Ernie the Attorney’s place, and fixed his patio, in exchange for legal council.
“That somebitch Ernie is a good man,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Got dem somebitches off my back,” he said.
For a while afterward, as a sort of vestigial smoldering resentment against his neighbors, Ed would collect the piles of dog feces these Hyde Park yuppies’ dogs would make on his cobble pocked lawn. Pomeranians. Afghans. Sleek blue eyed huskies, which without a doubt would be owned by a thirty something balding white male accountant who drove an SUV, and fancied himself as an outdoor type. Let’s see. Schnauzers. Yorkshire terriers, with papers. Jack Russells, for the intellectual owner. And of course Lhasa Apsos.
Ed would collect all these little piles in his front yard, and let them dry out in paper bags under his back porch, out of the rain. On sunny hot days he would pull all the bags out into his back yard and let them sun cure, he called it.
“Yeah, gotta sun cure dem somebitches,” he said.
“What for?” I asked.
William Comparetto
© 2006