Saturday morning
11 February 2017

— a proper sunrise of pink and blue ribbon candy.

Good Morning All,

I confess to secret pleasure when one or another of you fires off a brief e-mail to the effect: “Listen, you s.o.b., your damn Day Book got me looking up something, and one thing lead to another, and before I knew it half the morning was shot.”

I often recriminate myself in that same genteel fashion. Why am I wasting my time with such frivolities as surfing the Web when there are pencils to be sharpened, toenails to be cut, pillows to be fluffed, and God knows what other pressing matters that attend to people of the retired persuasion.

On second thought, maybe the toenails can go another week or two. In my bare feet I do not yet sound like your basic hound hastening across the linoleum. (I can just about hear one of you calling to your husband in the other room, “Oh, no, Ted, today he’s talking about his toenails!) 

Attending to said toenails has become something of a challenge. Since my late teens, they have been at a far remove from the rest of me, something like the Falkland Islands to the rest of Great Britain. Now that my doctor has insisted I step up my caloric intake and try to put on a little weight around my middle, along with my back and assorted leg joints being nothing like as limber as they used to be, toenail trimming has become an adventure. I usually have to do it while lying on the floor so that in the middle of the proceedings I don’t lose my balance and topple into the bathtub. And even then, they (the toenails) seem to smiling at me, as if saying, “It won’t be long now, pal, before we’ll be curling around under your feet like shower slippers, and you won’t need shoes any more.”

Anyway, I’d never heard of today’s poet, John Moffit. Since I have been reading a ton of poetry over the past year, I was curious, so I looked him up. There is precious little about him. Here’s just about all I could find:

John Moffitt spent his last 60 years in Castle Rock, WA where he delivered mail and socked away big money from logging his land. He was a reclusive and mysterious millionaire who passed away in 1989. He lived in a shack and cared for a pack of nearly wild dogs. He loved writing poetry, gardening, playing the piano and collecting things.To this day the John Moffitt Foundation annually donates as much as $150,000 to local and international  charitable organizations. When he was alive the donations ended whenever a recipient did not honor his anonymity.

And here’s his picture:

He looks like a the kind of kindred spirit with whom I could have a decent toenail chat. He might even like one of the poems another obscure poet, C. R. Magwaza, wrote—with apologies to Ms Dickinson--some years ago:

The Soles Select 
C. R. Magwaza

I’m doing something about my athlete’s feet at last,
These wrinkled soles and toes once so daring and so fleet;
I’m trying powders, cotton socks with holes,  Dr. Scholls
Odor eaters, —by any other name a rose.

I’m doing something about the cracking skin of my feet at last.
God knows how far we’ve walked these streets together,
This itchy semi-friendly fungus that grows so well
And goes with me alive—a form of company you might suppose.

I’m doing something about the bottoms of my feet at last.
Who knows what cures Fleming might have found here
For measles, common colds, loneliness, perhaps,
Beneath the bottoms of my feet at last.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron