Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit by Judy Grahn

Author:Judy Grahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hen Press

Only Strawberries Don’t Have Fathers

I’ve had to make my own jobs up ever since I got out of the hospital, the sixth floor ward, psych ward to be exact, so I wasn’t surprised that nobody would hire me. That was OK, or at least it was familiar, “be resourceful” I said, and collected scrap metal around town and took it over to the junk yard down on second street, that’s how you stay in cheese and bread. They had a dog there among the discarded car parts and cans, a supplement to the barbed wire on top of the fence, a Rottweiler who looked half starved so I shared my food. This worked out okay until one day the dog just went nuts, reminded me of my dad, and chewed on my arm, then it looked like a flute from wrist to elbow. Amazing regular red holes!

After a couple days my arm started to feel like it wanted to leave the material realm, well, I didn’t want to go back to the hospital for anything, fortunately someone I knew on the street, my friend Hayscoop, told me about Dr. Darby, that she would treat poor people on the spot so to speak, so I hung out in front of her clinic for a few hours and after a while there she was. Noticing me. Tender eyes. Took a short look at my flute and invited me to her house; we got into her car together. Turned out she not only cleaned everything up and gave me a shot, she listened and then told me I could sleep in a little cottage in the back of her house while she took me through a course of rabies vaccinations in case I needed, even though I wouldn’t tell her where the dog lived. Her house was a neat three-bedroom rowhouse on a 150-foot-long lot, with one of those delicious-looking two-story tumble-down cottages in back, built in the 1930s. Perfect for me, even a crawl space underneath stuffed with wild crabgrass where I could hide whenever necessary. First thing, I met her wife, Sarah, and their cat Morgan. Sarah held my flute arm just so while the doctor bandaged me.

To repay this ultra-spectacular kindness I became their gardener that very moment. Told Dr. Darby I could raise all the vegetables and fruits she and her wife Sarah could eat. They went inside their house to talk this over, which I could hear through the open window, and while they did I changed my name to Clovis. My dad would never find me with a name like that. Sarah said I could stay for a trial period if I would take a shower, comb my hair, and allow them to buy me some new clothes. Ho, I wasn’t ready for all that but said I would do some of it if they would let me go get my cat Marmalade as I was missing her, and the not-always-reliable Hayscoop was keeping her on the street while I was in the hospital.

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