Don’t Know Much About History

I don’t know why the town I live in has a statue of Billy Mays with an ax standing guard over it. I don’t know a lot of things.

I don’t know when spring’s supposed to begin. I ran out of firewood about a month ago. But I didn’t run out of winter.  It’s thirty-three degrees right now, at 3:30 in the afternoon. It’s snowing. Earlier it was sleeting. I don’t have a Bible handy to figure out what might happen next.  I didn’t move to western Maine expecting palm trees or anything, but I expected the bears to be brown around here, at least.

There’s a disreputable heap of snow in my front yard. It’s about 18″ deep. It’s the distillation of all the snow that was heaped there all winter. I don’t know if it has tuberculosis, or leprosy, but it certainly doesn’t look well. It’s waiting to be euthanized by the spring. I want to drive to Punxsutawney and insert a few fistfuls of it into Phil.

I don’t know why the cat’s angry with me. I open the door to let him out, and he glares at me. Perhaps he figures this is all my fault. He occasionally comes into my workroom downstairs, and wants to be let out the door I have there, which leads to a ramp to the ground. I think he figures that since it’s still winter out the front door, he’ll go out the side door instead, because it’s most likely summer if you go out there.

I don’t know why the cat is the only creature in my house that knows how to enter my workshop properly. He simply walks noiselessly way out in front of me and looks at me until I see him. Everyone else in the house sneaks up on me inadvertently and startles me. I’ll lose a finger someday over it. I’ve lost my temper over it already, but a temper is never as effective as amputations for fixing things in people’s minds. I don’t know why the cat is so solicitous about his comings and goings. I know in my heart that he’d eat my amputated finger off the floor if he thought he could get away with it.

I don’t know exactly why, but I pretended I didn’t know something, to get along with somebody else. I haven’t done that in a long time. When I was young, I did it a lot. I went to school, and then worked with people that distrusted intellect, so I hid mine. It’s not manners; I didn’t refrain from telling someone with a big nose that they had a big nose. I acted dumb to get along. The world is becoming a place where that’s about all you can do. Dumb people seem happier anyway. I don’t know; maybe I should hit myself in the head with a shovel until I’m ebullient.

I don’t know why, but my little son once memorized all the Presidents, and did a little mathematical trick with the order of them. It was quite sweet and precocious of him, and the charm in it was multiplied by the accent his missing teeth offered to the proceedings.  He was asked to repeat it — endlessly. Eventually he got tired of it, and lied like a Turk in a bazaar and said, “I don’t know,” when someone asked him about it for the umpteenth time. It’s boring being a human filing cabinet, and he rebelled against it. That’s my boy.

Jeezum Crow, the plow just went by. I don’t know why.