.Friday Firesmith

Back in 2014, Jonco emailed me, and he asked if he could crowdfund the bill for my dog, Lucas, who had cancer. I was in pretty bad financial shape to begin with, just bought a new truck, and the vet bill was going to be more than I could come up with. But Jonco’s plan worked, and the people who donated money to Lucas and me saved me from having to sell everything I owned.

One of the biggest donors was a guy I had never met or even heard of, who called himself XOXOXOBruce. I offered to pay Bruce back for the money he sent me and he scoffed at the idea. “You’ll pay it forward,” he told me, and since that point in time, I’ve pitched in where and to who I could, anyone with an ailing dog, or cat. Bruce was like that, I would learn, for his generosity was boundless. Bruce billed himself a curmudgeon, but the truth was found in his heart of gold.

Bruce and I began an email conversation, which led to him sending me his “Daily Dose” of funny things he found on the internet and shared with a small group of friends.

Bruce, and his real first name was Bruce, and I became friends. He lived in Pennsylvania. He liked World War Two stuff like I did, and we talked about a lot of weird stuff. He commented on nearly everything I wrote here for a while, but as time went on, Bruce apparently had some health problems, and I started hearing from him less. One day, the daily dose stopped. And on the 27^th of January Mike emailed me to say Bruce had died on the 17^th.

I didn’t know Bruce’s family. He had a girlfriend for a while, and she and I were friends for a while, but then they broke up.

Bruce liked cars and stuff like that. He knew a lot more than I about guns. He would send me random emails about odd things that somehow, he knew I would like.

One day he sent me this pin. No warning, no conversation about it, the thing just showed up, and Bruce was like that. He did things because he was thinking about his friends.

You will live one of two lives. You will die before the people you love, and never know the grief of loss. Or you will outlive the people you love, and you will know grief. Grief is made not of sorrow and loss, no, not at all. It is made of love and of life.

Or it would not exist.

And neither would you.

I miss you, Bruce,

Mike

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There’s time to think during the forty minute drive, and time to prepare. I’m meeting with a young writer who has never written a word in his life, but wants to write a book. It happens like this, sometimes, and this time, I actually think he has a book to write. The death of his father, and the grief that followed calls to him to write. I’ve spoken with him twice about it, and I think he can do it.

The meeting room at the local coffee shop is occupied even though I have it reserved. The barista offers to ask the people to leave, but the young writer isn’t here yet, and neither is the other writer I invited to join us. She’s young, too, but her organizational skills and her knack for stories are needed here. I tell the barista the people can stay until my people arrive.

As I enter the room the two interlopers offer to leave, but I tell them they can keep working until my people show. I intend to write quietly but the man is a talker.

One of my favorite stories is me working in the garden when a man appears and wants to talk. I ask him if he’s a preacher or an insurance salesman, because those are the only two classes of people who will interrupt a man working in the yard. The guy stopping me in the garden was a preacher. He fled eventually.

This guy is both a preacher and an insurance salesman. His name is Mike. It’s too weird of a coincidence for me not to talk to him.

Mike has a ready stack of business cards that he fumbles and drops as he tries to hand them to me because I don’t reach for them.

“No thank you,” I tell him.

“They aren’t insurance card,” he assures me.

“No thank you,” I repeat.

“Oh. Okay.” And Mike is a little put off by my tone of voice.

His daughter is with him, and she never speaks a word. She’s young, high school maybe, but she doesn’t look at me, smile, or speak the entire time I’m there.

Mike doesn’t ask me what I’m writing but does ask what our group writes. This edges into AI because he knows preachers who use it. I tell him if you’re looking for an expected story from an audience who sees it coming, AI is perfect. But if originality is key, a writer, or a reader, can tell AI immediately.

“It has no soul,” I tell Mike, and he agrees but I can tell he’s a little unnerved by the idea AI is detectable.

Mike and his daughter are writing thank you notes to his insurance customers, and he does them all by hand, writing in cursive, and licking the stamps himself. “It’s a nice touch,” he says without a trace of irony.

My organized writer friend arrives, and Mike and his daughter pack their stuff. They were nearly through anyway.

We shake hands, but he’s not unhappy to get away from me. His daughter doesn’t speak. I tell my friend who they were and what they were doing, and she asks why I was in a small room with a preacher, and no one left pissed off.

I’m civil to anyone who will allow me to be. Neither Mike nor his daughter were pushy or rude, and most importantly, they didn’t waste my time, which I cannot tolerate. Mike had something to do in that room, I had no reason to interfere, and we were able to have a decent conversation about a subject that will trouble us both.

I think Mike has no time to waste, either, and likely he’s got to get ready for a sermon this weekend, and find something to write about. I hope I have helped him as much as he helped me.

Take Care,

Mike

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Back during August of ’24, I cut a lot of firewood. Even before the two hurricanes that hit in September and October, I was still trying to clear the debris from last year, and the back of the property was still flooded. My neighbor helped me cut a large tree limb from a Live Oak that was leaning, and just moving it from the front yard to the back took a lot of doing. At one point, the middle of August, I started early in the morning, and by eleven the temperature rose to close to one hundred. I was splitting wood in the backyard. I wear a heartrate monitor that turns work into points and on a good day I can get 100-150 points but that day I was over 500 points when the device overheated and stopped working. So did I.The next day I moved some smaller stuff, but even without exertion my heartrate when up simply because of the heat. I drank a gallon of water every two hours, and still felt like I was dying of thirst. I ate a lot more than I usually do, and discovered snacking as a lifesaving ritual. I lost ten pounds in one week, and had to shut down for a while. When the final hurricane of this year, hit in October, there was simply no way to keep up with what needed to be done. The flooded part of the property expanded, and with that, more and more trees died, creating more and more work to do. I can stack wood up, and pile up branches, but there’s no safe place to burn anymore on this island. Worse, as if Summer needed any pepper, tick season now lasts from March until the first real cold spell, which is sometime in late December. Ticks are tiny, hard to see, impossible to prevent without a bath in some chemical, and they leave permanent scars as reminders they outlasted the dinosaurs, the comet that killed them, and likely they’ll survive the nuclear holocaust to come. At the time of this writing the water is still high, not seeping into the ground or evaporating, it rained last night, and the forecast is for rain this week. A giant pine has drowned and needs to be dropped before it decides to fall towards the shed or the house or on a dog. The cold isn’t keeping me from work as much as the water is. Yet when I can get out and work in the cold, my heartrate doesn’t go up as high, and I’m not as fatigued when I’m done. No mosquitoes, no ticks, no chiggers, and no stinging insects flying around. The undergrowth is less and not as grabby. Sweat arrives late, and sharpening the axe doesn’t seem to take as long. In my late thirties, I became more of an inside worker than outside. I never liked office work but the heat began to get to me. Now that I can pick and choose how much time I spend in the heat, and how much work I do, I find I enjoy the heat more than the cold. I have no idea why. It doesn’t make sense at all.

Take Care,Mike

(Many apologies to all, I’m not sure what happened when I set this up at 1am ~ Mikeco)

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