A Little About Kleadrap

 A Little About Kleadrap

I suppose I ought to tell you a little more about Kleadrap. As I said earlier, it's a small town. The main street runs east and west with perhaps five or six streets intersecting at a strange angle. It seems the surveyor who laid out the grid for the town was new at the game and failed to take into account the magnetic declination for the area, roughly 25 degrees. As a result all the cross streets intersect the main business street at something greater or less than 90 degrees. Each block thereby became a parallelogram. To compound matters, when the early pioneers constructed their homes they measured from the center of the nearby cross streets to lay out the foundations of their homes rather than employ the 3:4:5 ratio. As a result all the buildings in Kleadrap are parallelograms. The one time visitor may not be aware of this as the difference is slight and as all buildings in Kleadrap conform to this aberration it is not particularly noticeable. Visitors may leave with a nagging sense that something didn’t seem quite right but be unable to identify the reason for their unease. Of course the inhabitants are made aware of this aberration every time they lay down tile or wall-to-wall carpeting. None of the walls in these homes meet at a right angle.

Kleadrap has a population of around 600 people, a few more during the summer and fall when picking season (beets, rutabagas, and onions) is in full swing.

Main street accommodates one market, one gasoline station, one tavern, two gift shops, a post office, and two other buildings that are vacant most of the time, or house various businesses with a shelf life of only a few months.

Tax time sees and accountant move in and rent one of the apartments above the tavern, and once in a while a local, or occasionally an out-of-state, artist sets up shop, but there are too few people in the community, either permanent or transient to make any business thrive.

This was not always so. An opera house once stood at the corner of Third and A street. A twelve-grade school house, located next to the falling-down grange building, graduated twenty-seven classes over twenty-seven years. Now only the discovery of an agate marble, or tip from a spinning top indicates the activity that once took place.

Time dissolves everything, even memories.

Whistling Dixie for Beckett

 Whistling Dixie for Beckett

We have put the ghosts to bed and tucked them in. Alice will climb the stairs and sing them a lullaby and kiss their formless, gossamer foreheads. I will yank the cork from another bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and get a fresh glass from the dusty cupboard. Time is whistling Dixie in the withered leaves of the trees outside the sliding glass door. From a neighbor’s field of old growth conifers our resident owl sings for its supper; hoots religiously, as it does every evening, as if nothing of significance has happened in the world since yesterday to pause its mournful, haunting cries. Ritual can become dogma.

I hear the ghosts turning in their sheets and fluffing-up their pillows. The darkness grows deeper, longer. The cabernet descends as I raise my glass.

There was a time in my life when I considered becoming human, or at least attempting a facsimile. That urge passed quickly.

Winter continues, despite my best effort to ignore it.

My discontent is meaningless, but no less real. I wait.

The only sunshine available is behind my eyes, and I have many anxious seeds.