Gerald & Loretta Hausman
TO MY GOOD FRIEND AND STORYTELLER GERALD HAUSMAN WHO WAS TOLD BY SOMEONE AT THE MIAMI PUBLIC LIBRARY'S "THE ART OF STORYTELLING" ANNUAL FESTIVAL THAT HE TOLD A "TALL-TALE"
Good morning sunshine coming down on the living room floor, while the upstairs floor above my head, in our bedroom, where Sweetheart is moving around, is squeaking and crying out loud. I remember the young fellow carpenter me who put that floor down one-two-three. I bet I could have found out how maybe to keep the squeaking out. But where would be the fun?
Kokomo (Cutie~Pie) is beside me, licking and cleaning. Another sort of gentle squeaking.
Yesterday I rebuilt and made twice as wide a stone stairway up onto one side of the living room porch. Last spring I built steps three times longer on the other side of the porch. I was wondering where stone could be found for this new expanded stone stairway...and lo and behold, the stone was all there (hidden). I dug out under the original stairway and found a perfectly fine flat riding rock that could be used as one of the steps...then another was hidden as filler (a waste to me now looking at it — who knows what I was thinking at age 30 when building?), and finally a lovely and mossy stone was cobbed off one of the stone walls in the yard and brought over for the top-step on the new stairway. There are plenty of other stones to replace that one. I'm stealing from my own work, which goes to show, it's never done. And in the wheelbarrow there is a full build of stones I'll stack into a cairn atop one of the stone walls as a little totem for the front of the yard. A place for the eagle (or chickadee or phoebe) to land. Right now the oriole sings. It's early in the season with the earlier than usual apple blossoms.
With stone work you want it to look like it was built yesterday. Today is wood. Stone is yesterday.
All to say I am telling no tall tales here. But then I never think of tales as anything but tales, whether tall or short. Fibs or exaggerations. Lies and wing-dingers. Whoppers. It takes away from the event of telling. To say you have just heard a "tall tale", I think, exaggerates the size of the telling. It's all a telling. It may be best to live within the event happening and not pass judgment short of enjoying. We all want to be bigger than life.
Okay, today I will go back and continue building this great wall to China.
We see from Gerry's blog he is back home on the island after the big city.
But what about that oil island the size of Delaware west of his Florida shores? Will it grow to the size of Texas? It's out of the earth and into spreading waters.
