Sad Weirdo

What a sad weirdo I am. All day today vacation or not I’ve been reading Tracy Kidder on Haiti,  Jonathan Kozol on the Shame of the Nation and Sylvia Plath on the thinly fictionalized thoughts of an author who before her 31st birthday have will put her head in the oven, all the while trying to figure out if Abe is secretly dead and our niece Joanie who is caring for him at home is just afraid to tell us. The coyotes are everywhere, like the squeegee guys in Manhattan in the Years Before Giuliani.Abe’s sister was killed by coyotes, I know she was. One minute she was lying on the sunny patio and the next she was gone for good, and she never went anywhere, knowing well that her fleet-of-foot days were far behind her. The coyotes are just part of our lives now even in winte; last month three of them went right up onto our neighbors porch to bully and taunt their two dogs safe behind the family room windows.I couldn’t sleep in this vacation bed last night, for worry about  many things (and maybe partly because I’d just watched all two hours and 25 minutes of the movie  2012 in which the earth’s crust spills down into the void like brownie mix dumped from the pan just five minutes into the bake cycle. ) Anyway  I woke thinking mostly of Abe. I had told  Joanie last night  in a frantic text that really he won’t eat at all unless you pat him on the head with the same encouraging firmness his mamma used to use licking him to get him to nurse.  But then about three hours ago came this picture of our nice old boy in my sunny home office, as dazzled by the strong New England light as I am dazzled by its even stronger version down here by the Mexican border.