caleb walker

fireworks and such

KR and I ventured out of the house last night to drive to Spring Hill for dinner with friends who built their own house, a Bauhausian tower in the midst of a neighborhood of old brick Pittsburgh-squares.

After dinner, from the roof, we saw fireworks in every direction. Though we couldn't see Pittsburgh's main fireworks show (there was a hill in the way), we saw a surprising number of little homegrown explosions along the river downtown. Big round colorful explosions were coming up from the horizon beyond the city and further along to the east. From our vantage point we saw neighborhoods full of houses, lots of lit windows. Among them, little sparkles and flashes off into the distance, like colorful fireflies among the field of lights.

At the horizons we figured we saw Monroeville's show way off to the east and Aspinwall's behind us. Then a luminous jellyfish appeared from between the houses nearby. A single transparent balloon, lit by a little flame inside, rose and drifted to the south. It seems to me now that everything paused as the thing went by, getting higher and higher. We watched until we could no longer see its flicker.

At some point over the Hill or the South Side or maybe even over Mount Washington or further the flame would have gone out and the thing would have drifted to the ground or into a tree. But while it was in the air it seemed magical. Amid the noise and sparkle, this silent thing held our attention for several minutes.

worms

Before everything went insane last Friday evening I was sitting on the front porch reading, as usual, while the dogs were in the front yard. I noticed Kaden with his face in the ivy over by the forsythia. When I got over there I saw that he had vomited his dinner and was trying to reintroduce it to his digestive system. After getting him away from it I cleaned up as much as I could and saw a long earthworm squirming away from my bare foot between the ivy leaves.

I realized it had been quite a long time since I'd seen a live earthworm, and even longer since I'd seen one so long and so active.

Later that night, after our neighbor came up for a visit with her dog (as she often does on their evening walk) and Kaden got into a big fight with him, after it broke up leaving us all covered in mud and blood, after we searched for an hour or more for Kaden, who had fled the scene on (we later discovered) a broken leg, after KR and I retrieved him from the police station, after all that, in the veterinary emergency room, after the receptionists had gone home at midnight and given me the TV remote so I and the other guy in the waiting room could switch away from the weather channel (we found Fight Club, appropriately enough), after all that I saw a long black millipede walking between my feet on the tiled vet's waiting room floor and I thought again of that earthworm.

the magic word

My inbox is filling up. I don't know, I'm able to start replies to incoming email messages, but am somehow unable to finish them. So, sorry. It's not you, it's me. So let's see if I can begin and finish a blog post. Here goes.

Kaden has come into his voice lately. He hums, howls, grunts, growls. And he barks at every little thing. None of our dogs have been big barkers, so we don't know what to do with him. A couple air molecules will collide out on the front porch and Kaden will run to the screen door and bark and yow, he has a good solid bark.

So I'll yell at him to stop it or shut up or be quiet because I'm still not sure what words will make the noise stop. The other day, though, I'd reached the end of my rope and hollered, "Kaden, would you fucking stop barking?" and he stopped. Found it.

getting to know the new boy

We're learning more about the new dog every day. He does a lot of things we've never had to deal with before.

• He follows me everywhere, from bed to closet to bathroom to bed to dresser to office to... I step on him at least once a day.
• He loves to wrestle. I separate the two dogs for at least a couple hours every day just to give Georgia a break.
• He drinks from the toilet.
• He doesn't chew them, but he carries our socks around the house.
• He gets on the furniture. I found him on the couch one day, curled into a tight ball. This morning when I was still in bed, KR was walking Georgia and Kaden, left behind, was whining at the top of the steps. I called him over and before I knew it he was lying on the bed.

It's exhausting, like a damn babysitting job.

kaden

Kaden. It's pronounced KAY-den and it's the new dog's name.

We've been looking for a second dog for months, and there have been a few candidates who KR and I liked, but Georgia would have nothing to do with them. This time something clicked. When we introduced them at the shelter she let him sniff her and even to put his hands on her. We're not sure who's going to be top dog, but it looks like they'll figure it out without killing one another.

He's a german-shepherd/rottweiller mix, so he has a big solid head, though he's very skinny. He's only a year old, and was taken to the shelter due to a home foreclosure. We're guessing that his other home was a single-story place because he doesn't understand steps. (And if you know our house, you know he's got to understand steps pretty quickly around here.) He stands at the bottom, looking upstairs, crying a little bit.

So far he's claimed Georgia's Nylabone and she's claimed his new bed.

the birthday post

A few things of note:

• Today's the birthday of Albert Finney, Candice Bergen, J.M. Barrie, Mike Wallace, me, and Dana Perino.
• If my life were The Big Lebowski, today I'd be at 1:04:54, where The Dude is in a doctor's office listening to Elvis Costello on headphones.
• Earlier this week I received in the mail four copies of Progenitor, a literary magazine, and I flipped to page 17 where my story, "Otto's Bob Jacket," begins.

Yesterday my job at CMU finally ended. It had ended on September 30, December 30, January 31, March 15, and May 1. But the actual end date kept sliding until it finally stuck on May 8. KR had a cold bottle of prosecco for us that evening and we toasted to one door closing and ten more opening.

It was, of course, an odd day. But oddest of all was how much it resembled the finale of a tv show where all the characters from the past appear. I ran into almost everyone I've worked with over the past couple years. People I hadn't seen for weeks or months. While sipping prosecco last night I remembered how dumb I thought the finale of Scrubs was, with JD seeing all those past characters from the show. But here I was, having the same experience.

So I'm another year older and unemployed, but it's hard to feel too bad about either of those things. Yesterday at the end of the work day, sitting in my emptied-out office, I had a phone interview with Anaconda, Inc. (I think as I write about my job search I'll use alphabetical pseudonyms for the company names). And I have KR and Georgia and a house surrounded by trees. Things really aren't so bad.

powers

I was going to write something hilarious yesterday, but Typepad was so slow that the "Write a Hilarious New Post" form never appeared. And today, when I'm not nearly as funny, I don't remember what I was going to write about. Probably something about Georgia or KR or the bus.

It's warm and sunny in Pittsburgh this evening, so I'm sitting out on the front porch in a plastic Adirondack chair with my old MacBook, a wee dram of Powers Irish Whiskey balanced at my elbow, Georgia lying on the top porch step in the sunshine, and bees flying around my head. (A punctuation mark just appeared on my screen and it wasn't until it moved that I realized it was a tiny bug.) I hope the bees haven't built a nest under my chair, I really do. If KR wasn't coming home with a friend I'd be sitting in my boxers, it's that warm.

On every holiday friends of ours invite KR and me to dinner: Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Whathaveyou. I love going there, one of the reasons is that the master of the house always breaks open his liquor cabinet and lets me ogle and point at the bottles and he'll pour me a glass of anything he's got. And everything he's got is better than anything I've got at home.

This past Easter he recommended a Powers Irish Whiskey. Powers, it seems, was James Joyce's favorite whiskey. He recited, with an Irish accent, a quote he attributed to Mr. Joyce in which the author arranges to meet a friend someplace and offers to bring two bottles of Powers.

Here in Pennsylvania, where liquor is just this side of illegal, it's tricky to find Powers. So I was surprised to find it at my local state store. And that's what's in my glass now. While googling that Joyce quote I learned that Bushmills, my usual, is Protestant whiskey, while Jamesons is a good Catholic whiskey. I don't know where Powers comes from, but it's more earthy than either of them, to my taste.

I think I'll go pour a second while I wait for the ladies to arrive.

life = pretty good

It's been a rough few months, and by "few" I mean several, meaning something like five. Since December. Or maybe earlier. Between the leg pains and a crazy project deadline that kept slipping so I was in last-minute panic mode for the past four months and such, I've been wishing for better days every day.

On Monday I drove to work and parked up on the golf course. It had been weeks since I'd done that. I'd been bussing, like usual, but on days when my ruptured disk was at its worst I drove halfway to work and parked near a bus stop to minimize the steps I took. So on Monday the golf course was like a new landscape to me.

I left the office at the end of the day and walked across campus, another path I hadn't taken for weeks. Campus was unchanged. Except the addition they're building onto the business school, which is all weird angles, as if the blueprints slipped. It's like sometimes architects do weird shit just because they can, ignoring beauty and usability.

Up the hill to the golf course. A tree was split down the middle, one half of it lying on the ground. A large hawk sat in another tree. All but the highest tire swings had been removed from the tree where the kid hung himself a couple years ago. Several trees along the country club's road had been taken down, and the buckeye trees had been trimmed.

It was cool and overcast, and I pushed the car's heater lever up. I was in a real funk. But the radio was playing some good songs - Shawn Colvin, Gomez, Billy Bragg - then Paul Simon started singing and I understood "I've reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland" for the first time and I realized I'm happy to live in a world with Mr. Simon in it.

remember me?

Hi. How you doin'?

No matter how necessary I think an apology is, I won't apologize or even mention that it's been a long time since I've posted anything longer than a single sentence on this old blog. (Oops, sorry. Oops again.) Here's what's kept me busy.

For about three months I've had some nasty pains in my left leg that had me limping and rootching around in my seat trying to get comfortable. An MRI last week showed a ruptured disk pinching my sciatic nerve. That would do it. So I'm on my second round of corticosteroids and the pain's gone. I just have some lingering numbness in my toe and weakness in whichever calf muscle keeps me from walking like I have a swim fin on my foot. Here's me: step flap step flap step flap. But enough moaning about my health.

I've been ridiculously busy with work since December. Building a website that was due to launch Dec 31, then Jan 31, then Mar 13, then yesterday, and now maybe Monday. It's a slippery deadline that has had me in "final week" mode over and over. I've never put in so many evenings and weekends on a job. I do appreciate that my dept head has kept me employed this whole time. Really. But I learned a few things. Number one: enlist the help of others; you can't do it all yourself without going a little nutzo and rupturing your spine.

Has anything else happened this year? A college literary magazine agreed to publish my story, "Otto's Bob Jacket." I've been struggling with a new story. ("Struggling" means something other than "writing.") I find myself actually watching presidential speeches. I'm looking for work, but not with my full attention. KR and I are planning a week in Stonington Maine again this summer.

Yeah, I guess that's enough for now. See you later.

seven.

This is somewhat interesting. The post I made on this blog on this date seven years ago was the first one.