"Good going, Anton, you just got yourself a winter of filling in ruts."
A good way to get angrier, still, is to make a mountain out of a mole hill. Tallying up the number of mole mounds required for my Winter Of The Ruts, I got so angry, I failed to realize it had started pouring. Soaked, I headed for the Blue House where, in the furnace room, I kept a change of clothes.
Pulling the dry hood over my hatted head, I exited the basement door. Coming up the patio steps, I spied Ezra in the woods behind Wood. Just like a professor; heading up the trail I'd built to nowhere.
"Ezra," I said, sticking my head through the windrow of hemlocks, "that trail will get you nowhere, you know."
"I know," he said, coming over. "Just getting my head screwed on right." He tipped his head towards the Blue House. "Got a meeting with the President's cabinet."
I kicked some English ivy. "Jeez, Ezra; English ivy and hemlocks is no place for a man to get his head screwed on right. We got the orchard for that."
"I just came up from down there." Ezra looked down, plowed a mole mound to the side with his shoe. "Too much truth down there." Ezra looked me in the eye. "Truth don't cut it with cabinetry--too professional for anything as clean as that. You don't know how good you got it, Anton; working with Mother Nature as opposed to working for humans. Well, administrators. A bunch of manure spreaders is what they are."
"That's my lot," I said, eyeing the mud stuck to Ezra's shoe. "Just not cut out for spreading shit."
Ezra didn't say anything.
"Say, Ezra, you're not going to go tracking mud up the front steps of Admin are you? I don't want to have to get my hose out this late in the day."
Ezra lifted his shoe, shook it. Where the row of hemlocks ended, nowhere began. Gazing there, Ezra said, "My lot was to teach art. I got my degree, and here I am, a professor. And I'm a damned good in the classroom, too. But does that matter to the cabinet? No. In their eyes I'm a failure. Why? Because I can't keep the books."
"Books?"
"Money, Anton. Turns out one needs a degree in Accounting to teach Art. And, no, it's not that I'm incapable of keeping the books. I mean, it's debits and credits. Christ, I'm the son of a math teacher, I have multivarious calculus strung along my genome. It's the principle, Anton. ACCW is a friggin not-for-profit for christ sakes."
I didn't say anything--too busy sequencing my own genome. Let's see, what did I get from my father? No, I'd never learned what, exactly, my dad did down at the plant. So I focused in on what he did in the garage. Yes, just look at them, strung up along my double helix; that string of monstrous fish lures hanging by their hooks.
"I don't know," Ezra was saying, "don't know why I bother. I mean, I'll go in, sit. The CFO will lecture me on why I need to be fiscally responsible. I'll stand, lecture them on how we're an institution for higher learning--a branch of the Humanities, not a bank branch."
I didn't find money at all interesting--maybe that's why I had none--so I thought it best if I made light of the Humanities.
"Ezra, you say I work with the Mother Nature. Well, I work for humans, too. And who are the humans are I work for? All you fucking artists, that's who. No, Ezra, sometimes I wish ACCW was bank branch."
"What?"
"Think about it, Ezra: I work the ground you damned artists walk. My work is always on display. What do artists do with work on display? They critique it, that's what."
Ezra laughed.
Hoping to get Ezra laughing harder, I said, "Oh, sure, Ezra, laugh. But how would you like it if I tracked mud into your department, told you and all your little Stieglitz's how to develop film in the dark?"
Ezra did laugh harder.
"Ezra, I'm serious; could you bring that up with the cabinet? How ACCW would be a lot better off if we'd all stop sticking our noses in other departments' armpits?"
Look at them, the groundskeeper and the professor, laughing their fool heads off, all the while looking down the path to nowhere.
****
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