NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Rank Majors greets me outside the Cavendish Pie Shop doffing his bright red MAGA hat with an exaggerated sweep of his arm. The last blackened mound of weekend snow melts in a stream at our feet.
“Going for coffee?”
“Yes, and something chocolate.”
“Right on, let’s buzz beyond the afternoon Zs.”
He opens the glass door and steps in. A huge white Pyrenees Mountain Dog sniffs his crotch. Then puts a paw on his shoulder to sniff his ear.
“Rank! You know my wife won’t restrain him.”
“Okay, I like friendly dogs.”
“What’s that thing on your head?”
Gertie sits back. Her massive bosom fills her dark green shirt, styled with epaulets and pocket flaps.
“Fred, this Gertie Stone.”
She points across the table in a stabbing gesture.
“That is Felicity Tock.”
Felicity’s thick black braid, rests on her shoulder like a hawser.
“See! Alf always picks the friendly ones.”
“That is not the point, Fil.”
Fil brushes white dog hairs from her sunny yellow turtleneck.
“Fred, you can call me Fil.”
The dog has both paws on Rank’s shoulder and looks at him at eye level, mouth slightly open in a canine smile.
“Down, Alf.”
Felicity rubs dog hairs from between her fingers onto an empty plate while Gertie grabs Alf’s collar, keeping her eye on Rank.
“I still want to know why you are wearing that damn fool hat?”
“It keeps the sun out of my eyes.”
“Did you look at the thing before putting it on?”
“I did.”
“Aren’t you embarrassed for God’s sake?”
“I want a great country, with border security, and ah, low taxes, you know.”
“Don’t be a damn fool, Rank.”
“Gertie, stop it! You are rude, rude, rude!”
“My dearest love, I call ‘em like I see ‘em, and what I see here is sheer foolishness!”
“Anyway, Rank, shall we all sit together at one of the big tables? Hope you will join us Fred. If Gertie can calm down.”
“Let’s move it, Fil.”
Gertie carries her ebony walking stick with silver pommel, tweed deerstalker and matching coat to one of the big dragon tables. Fil follows with Alf who spreads his Alpine white underneath, with his chin on her black suede boot.
Mrs. Rutherford is bent behind one of the glass-fronted display cases. She doesn’t look up from the cherry cupcakes she places on display.
“Mr. Majors, have you been away? Haven’t seen you around.”
“Yeah, extended business trip.”
“One of those!”
“When did you start letting dogs in here?”
“When Alf came in.”
Mrs. Rutherford stands and puts her tray aside.
“He shouldn’t be in here, but he is a favorite of mine.”
Her ringtones end the conversation with their Westminster Chimes. She fills our orders keeping one ear to the phone. Rank sits down opposite Gertie who is leaning back with her hand out to the side on the silver pommel of her stick.
“I never would have thought it, twenty-five years ago-or was it thirty? when we were working together. Never took you for a sucker, Rank. You were a mighty sharp young captain.”
“So, you guys go back a ways. Where was this?”
Rank shakes his head.
“Can’t comment, Fred.”
“Fred, I was a linguist until my disaffection.”
“And what was that about?”
“The first oil grab, Bush one moved our troops into Saudi and then invaded Iraq.”
Gertie looks in her empty blue paper coffee cup and crushes it in the fist of her free hand.
“Then I resigned and moved to France. Now I am glad to be back. Happy, can you believe it? In a mad raucous country so high on hype it’s going to hell like any other addict.”
Gertie laughs and bangs her stick on the floor for emphasis.
“Where were you when you resigned?”
“One of those places Fred, that’s so secret you can see it mentioned regularly.”
“One of the seventeen acronyms!”
“Mind what you say Fil, oh love of my life.”
“Gertie Stone, take me for a fool if you want. We’ll see who the fools are when the country is so overrun with illegals you will have to be a linguist to get through the day.”
“We shall see Rank Majors, and if that happens, I will welcome them all and pick up another language.”
“And what about the rule of law?”
“Yes, it is flouted liberally by our conservative rulers.”
“Without control of the borders we aren’t a country at all.”
Gertie looks out the window.
“Rank, try to relax! Consider this February weather, the current flock of cabinet secretaries, the complexity of the twigs and branches growing in the trees over there, corporate Congressional influence, and that crow perched right outside, on the dumpster.”
“Yeah, okay, ah, so what?”
Fil breaks into uncontrolled giggling.
“Scavengers!”
Rank grins at her, coffee in hand.
“Trees, Congress, nice warm weather, a crow? I guess I don’t get it!”
Fil gently takes hold of his wrist and without spilling any coffee, pulls his cup over to her mouth and takes a sip.
“You always were such a sweet guy Rank, ready to protect a vulnerable woman and ready to stand up for what is right!”
“Do you need protection, Fil?”
She shakes her head.
“No Fred, kidding, you know, trying to lighten it up a little.”
Gertie leans forward.
“Rank, do you know what is right?”
“You bet I do!”
She leans back again to look out of the window.
“Just what I suspected!”
“Gertie, stop talking in riddles and get real, will you?”
“Riddles, fiddles and diddles, the currency is debased. I can’t get any verbal purchase on reality in political discussions. So, I express my intentions indirectly. Allowing you to use your imagination and stretch yourself, Rank. Your mind is congealed into a hyperbolic mess.”
“You think I am gravy or what?”
Fil gets up and embraces Rank, pressing her head against his.
“My stoical hero!”
“You two are like a comedy act!”
“Is that what you call it, Fred?”
“You are talking right past each other!”
“Fil, leave the fellow alone!”
“Okay, okay, Fil, I can take a joke, but Gertie, you owe me a plain explanation.”
“Rank, go to my blog at, “A Snowflake in the Blizzard.com” and read the section, ‘Stone’s Throw.’
“You are doing one of those?”
“Yup! Let the images and ideas roll around in your mind. See what happens. You might also look at my translations of Osama bin Laden’s output.”
“He’s a terrorist. He killed about three thousand people here in the States.”
“No denying that.”
“Why are you promoting terrorism?”
“Rank! Rank! RANK! This is not promotion. As a one-time-intelligence officer, it should be obvious!”
“Sure, knowing the enemy. That is always a good idea.”
“There you are. Osama had a point of view and we would all do well to understand it.”
“I don’t think the public needs any of it. I think you should take it down.”
Gertie puts one hand on the table and slowly stands. Then props her stick against her chair and retrains Alf, sniffing Fil’s plate with his paws on the table.
“We have to go.”
“Oh, so soon? They haven’t finished their coffees, and look, Fred still has a lot of chocolate cake.”
“I have work to do, love. Let’s move it.”
Fil puts on her coat and helps Gertie with her hat and coat. Alf swipes her with his tail, trying to get to Gertie’s stick.
“Nice seeing you again, Rank!”
“Sure Fil, I’ll check it out Gertie!”
“Here’s your stick. Goodbye Fred, nice meeting you.”
Fil and Gertie walk out the door and across the parking lot, stick tapping, arm in arm with Alf at Fil’s side.
“You took quite a shellacking, there, Rank! and took it very well.”
Rank pulls out his phone and works hard with his thumbs.
“She’s always been abrupt, but she isn’t mean. I owe Gertie. She helped me a good deal.”
He goes on taping his phone.
“Okay, here it is!”
He puts the phone on the table and the screen is filled with, “Stone’s Throw”.
I am moved by an impulse to speak. Though no one is nearby to listen. No one can get back where words take on the shape of thought. One might try looking at the spectrum of a dream, uninhibited by the physics of a prism’s revelation. An eye possessing its objects by light of mental associations which can make nonsense of speech.
I walk through the city sunlight for my own reasons, a random passerby to everyone else, a mystery casting its shadow at an intersection. Some sleep in the park, some hurry by, others stroll with their intimates, lovers and other preoccupations. While many are absorbed by their phones. Traffic winds its tail around the surrounding rectangles. Block after block of decisions planners made for it. The city crowd is unlike an army of ants, a herd of antelope or a murmuration of starlings. We move in a crowd while being apart and pressed close on the Metro, the most one utters is an apology or a request to be excused for moving to the door.
I observe the city built with machines according to the minds of appointed and elected officials, according to law and custom and persuasive offers from persistent interests. Fissiparous by nature, it is restless trying to grow into its rationality. A grid constructed according to the shortest distance between two points. Two singularities conjured by abstraction, materialized by a drafting program. Bricks, windows, floor-tiles, doors, the city square, the TV framing fantasies and longing, what other organism is evolving into rectangles? It takes a mineral!
I have seen aerial photographs reveal an organic pattern in the curvy linear design of hillside suburban neighborhoods. Each house on the stalk of its gray concrete driveway grows out of a small street, which connects to a network drawn on the earth in black top, like graphite on the page of its conception. When rain turns the city’s page, it reveals a plan of gutters and sewers and storm drains, rubber, plastic, and gravel spread on flat roofs. Each rock about the size of a raindrop, disperses its impact among the neighbors. Dispersed randomly as wealth, as the daily stock averages, as a squirrel’s buried acorn on the freshly fertilized front lawn. Each mowed patch of green blades, a proud carpet of privileged suburban prosperity.
I wander into the future and through alternative histories, trying to find the present, which is always here, but where am I? Here I am, gone cyber, grown out of my youth, into my infirmities, and new-found strength. Each year is a smaller proportion of my life span, getting that much faster into the wealth of rich late color.”
