Enjoy, it’s Read Free Fortnight
Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Friday, October 16
Boy, it was cold for the walk this morning…I set out a bit after 0600, well, maybe 0615, and it was 21 out…This, of course, calls for full bundling up and the winter coat made its first appearance of the season…(After the walk, the winter coat took its place on a hook on the hall tree I assembled and put in the kitchen in the spring.)…Also making its first appearance of the season were the new gloves I bought last New Year’s Day in the big city and the hood, which is really warm, tho I still wore the black watch cap, more for looks than anything else.
Because it was still dark the Post Office Route was planned but as I set out from The Shire and headed to South Street as if taking the Fairgrounds Route, the goal being – despite wearing my reflector vest – to avoid the cars coming towards you on the few blocks of Main Street that do not have a sidewalk…When I got to the street the library is on, I would head back to Main Street…This turned out to be a lousy move on a couple of fronts.
One, I’d barely stepped onto Maple Street and every damn dog in town started barking…Not only that, when I turned onto South Street a loose dog was actually barking at my feet…Christ!!!…Odds are it’s not rabid and looking to kill, but who the hell knows???…I continue and there are more dogs barking so a block later I turn right to head back to Main Street…For those of you keeping score at home ol’ Sparrow is, of course, a block away from The Shire.
Even walking the one block back to Main Street was fraught with peril, tho, because there are a couple of people pulling out of their driveways and who knows if some resident wasn’t alarmed by the dogs barking and grabbed his gun in order to shoot the guy walking down the street…I don’t need that.
The walk will have to be started earlier, tho…Between eating and cutting up veggies and showering and whatnot, I didn’t get to the Veterans Service Office (VSO) until 0815…This doesn’t really matter…I am my own boss and decide what days and what hours I work and there wasn’t an 0800 appointment to miss.
There was a message waiting for me from Wade. who sounded rather tedious on the message but turned out to be rather pleasant to get along with…He was calling because his mother is in the local senior home and his dead, long deceased, was a vet and he was wondering if there might be any VA benefits available for Mom…I got the impression they could afford the home but, you know, there isn’t any reason to pay all of it if you don’t have to.
He bored with me a story – ‘by way of information” – about mom, none of which I needed to hear but it comforts people in this situation to be able to blab…I told him there were a couple of options: one the VA does provide a pension for veterans – and their widows – if the veteran had qualifying wartime service – during the war, they didn’t actually have to have been in it – and their assets can’t be more than $127,00 and their income had to fall below the federal poverty level, about 12 grand a year for one person…She is also eligible to stay – for about $175 a day, including medications – in one of the state veteran homes up here…That didn’t interest him, tho, because the nearest one is four hours away from here.
He said, tho, that Mom still gets his dad’s pension from work and that will probably disqualify her, and he said he didn’t know where Dad’s discharge papers were but he had a box of stuff from his time in the service and maybe it was in that. I told him to find out for sure what her assets are and to bring the box of paperwork and I’d be happy to sort thru it with him.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log:
1800 Thursday until 0100 Friday
1730 Friday until 2130 Friday
11.0 hours for the day and 36.5 hours for the week…The 11.5 hours is a bit less than we’re accustomed to for the Thursday Night Sleep Session but it’s actually ideal because regular readers of this crap know that too much sleep Thursday and Friday makes it tuff to get to sleep after the hotel on Saturday morning.
The 36.5 hour total, of course, blows, with that four-hour session Tuesday really throwing a wrench into the sleep week…I don’t whine…Well, yes I do, but I try to keep it to a minimum.
The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.
It was inspired by the 19th-century British novel of the same name.
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