Harold’s Room
Chapter Six
I’m back. I had a few things to deal with here in Harold’s room. Sometimes he can be a little messy, even messier than I am, but Lisa might argue that. My messes are bigger. His are harder to clean up. I deal with both. By the time I got those issues taken care of my work shirts were dry, so I took care of those, too. When I stepped down into Harold’s room I looked out the back door and thought Harold had gone for a walk. I could not find him, and there is a very brightly marked turtle out on the right hand red plate having some banana. Phil hasn’t come today, and the little groundhog we have started calling Philippe is very skittish and has not started eating from the plates, so there is still a half of a banana and a wedge of peeled cantaloupe on each one. But it isn’t Harold eating the banana. First off, I can’t for the life of me get Harold to eat a banana. Secondly, the bright yellow, beautiful markings look like that butterfly’s wings I mentioned earlier, not asymmetrical in the least. Hate to say this little buddy, but our guest is as handsome and as big as you are. I noticed you aren’t excited he’s out there. You’re not at the door pacing. Actually, I still have no idea where Harold is. I’ll look for him when our guest is finished eating. I know this gentleman. He comes to our diner on a fairly regular basis, and he has gotten to know me, too. He knows that when he finishes eating there is a sixty-forty chance I will come out and pick him up to say hi and see how he is getting along. So, he watches the door. I walked up to it fairly quickly when he was here earlier in the week, and he took off like a shot into the underbrush. He did not care to chat that day. I started calling him The Watcher after that, naturally. Just now I walked up to the door smoothly and at a moderate pace with my phone so I could take a shot through the screen to send to Lisa. His head popped up from that banana and he watched me the whole way to the door, through the taking of the shot, and all the way back to my chair. THEN he buried his beak back in the banana again. He is done now, and sploosh! He dove into the pond just like Harold does the hot tub, but it’s an easier slide into the pond because he does not have to climb a hut or a ramp. Now out he comes across on the other side, and into the underbrush. Ten seconds and poof, I cannot see him for the life of me. Now, where is the turtle that is in the room with me? He manages to be just as invisible as The Watcher, and can be very, very quiet when he wants to be.
HA! I found him. He wiggled just a little bit too much, I heard him, and I could tell from whence came the sound. He was ensconced in the potted jungle. I looked back there earlier. When I was cleaning up his courtyard floor I moved the slatted bamboo pot to the left a bit, away from the brown pot. Herman sits in front of the opening between those two, and behind there is where Harold goes to peek out at us. The pots used to be farther apart than they have been lately, so I left them spread out. Why? So Harold could see out between them better, of course. All is for Harold. I guess he had gotten used to them being closer together and now he felt too exposed. He was sitting on top of the square, one quart take-out container that I made into a fruit fly trap. On top of it, I say, and peeking around the brown planter watching me. I had to drop Lisa a note to tell her she had trained her spy boy well. If he hadn’t made that little noise I do not know how long it might have taken me to find him. I would never have thought to look there.
I decided to take a picture of the tiny bit of banana The Watcher left on the plate to send to Lisa. Harold was at the screen door and wanted to go with me. He doesn’t go out too often. I told him he could if he would behave himself, and he agreed. I set him down in the grass at the edge of the patio and walked out to the plate, took the picture, checked the feeders and turned around to go back in. I figured Harold couldn’t have travelled more than eight or ten feet at most and would be easy to spot. I was wrong. It was easier than that. He hadn’t moved one inch. He was still sitting in exactly the same spot in the exact same pose as when I set him down and walked away, watching me. “Well, alrighty,” I said. “It’s time to go back in. You missed your shot.” He did not seem to be upset in the least. Harold’s word is his bond, as they say, and he promised he would behave. Now he’s parading back and forth in front of the screen door again. You just can’t please him. Have I mentioned that sometimes Harold sees doves outside, and I believe he thinks they are female turtles. He just watches them, and watches them, and he gets kind of antsy. There are five of them out by the red plates now. I keep telling him…
It’s Sunday evening. The Steelers played another preseason game today. Harold had his cape on, but Captain Carapace did not make an appearance. No hut perching, no heroic poses. Harold was just Harold the Steelers fan today. He paraded around a bit in his finery early on, but he got a bit worried as the game progressed and the injuries mounted in the first half. “No! Not Pouncey! We need Pouncey!” Harold cried. “No! Not Gradkowski! We love Gradkowski! He looks like Uncle Paul!” Harold was crushed after “Uncle Paul” went down, and he retired to the potted jungle where he sat listening attentively throughout the afternoon. He was delighted when they took the lead in the fourth and finally pulled one out. He decided he would like to sleep in his Steelers cape tonight and camp out in the potted jungle. He does that sometimes when he is feeling good. And brave. Nothing like a win to make you feel good and brave.
I mentioned earlier that Harold is fond of hummingbirds. We have one female ruby throated hummingbird this year that he is particularly fond of. She is extremely territorial, chasing away anyone who approaches the hot air balloon feeder hanging at the corner of the sunroom, which she considers to be her very own. She will let them drink from the blue glass bottle feeder in the main feeding area, but that is the limit of her tolerance. If anyone gets anywhere near her balloon the war is on and the aerial dogfights begin. She comes out of her tree like a scud missile and is on them in a heartbeat. No quarter is given to these interlopers. She does allow the male who lives in the tree with her to feed there, so we surmise they must be acquainted. She is extremely inquisitive and convivial, too. She patrols the whole feeding area, checking out who is at the water dish, who is on the seed feeders, who is perched on “Squirrel Bridge” (a small, dead tree trunk I fastened between two trees with deck screws in the woods just beyond the feeding area). She even confronted a young broad-winged hawk that was sitting in the tree above the right hand squirrel feeder watching a squirrel nibble sunflower seeds. She is fearless. She frequently hovers in front of the patio door and Harold’s lower windows to see who is in his room, and what they are doing. Harold loves to watch hummingbirds fly, and so of course is extremely pleased when she drops down to his level and hangs there stationary in the air in front of him. He finds it fascinating. Lisa is pleased, too, when she hovers in front of the door, because she is usually looking at Lisa when she does so. She does not flit in and flit out, rather she remains in these locations for quite some time, occasionally darting to the left or right, observing what is going on inside the glass cage where the small, shelled reptile and the two mammals are kept. Apparently she likewise finds these interactive mutual observations fascinating. She does it frequently. For the past few years we had a similar lady we called Queenie who policed the front yard much as this one does the back. Queenie would perch on the ornate, floral latticework panel Lisa had me hang from the eaves on the south side of the front porch directly below the feeder, and right next to one of the front porch chairs. She would allow us to sit in that chair in extremely close proximity to her and she did not mind in the least. A close-up of Queenie, blown up at least four times her actual size, perched on her latticework guard station with her remarkable tongue extended is one of the pictures on the wall behind me. I was sitting in the chair not three feet from her when I took that one. We have not seen her out front this year, and given the familiarity of this female, we wonder if this is Queenie, relocated to the back yard. We sincerely hope so. Lisa and I were quite fond of her, and if indeed this is she, Harold has grown to feel much the same.
Our retirement village is comprised of free-standing houses set in a wooded area, as you may have surmised. The wooded part I mean. We own and are responsible for everything in the interior of the building. The exterior and the property belong to the homeowners’ association. The houses are a bit closer together than I prefer, as in “stick me in the middle of a five acre wooded lot with neighbors no closer than one hundred yards beyond the property line and I’d be happier.” But hey, I don’t have to cut the grass (Don’t get me started about three acres with steep hills, and chasing runaway tractors down said hills, which ended badly for me but not the tractor. Amazingly it got to the bottom upright. I was rubbing a knot on my forehead and picking grass out of my teeth when I drove it back up a less steep section of the slope.). And if the roof or the siding blow off the association takes care of it. Fair trade. The view out of Harold’s room and our friends out there are major pluses, and were likewise a major factor when I agreed with Lisa that the retirement village would not be tantamount to living just outside the seventh gate of hell. Harold likes the fact that our neighbor’s foundation is only ten feet or so away from his window. It faces south, and during the afternoon when it is well lit and warm several blue-tailed skinks like to scrabble back on forth on the concrete block just below the vinyl siding. There are adults, completely amber in color, and juveniles, which are black with the aforementioned blue tail. Harold loves to sit and watch them. I’m not sure why, but there was one incident that causes me some concern. A year or so ago one of the juveniles somehow managed to get into Harold’s room. The little stinkers are quick and hard to catch, and of course if you grab them by the tail it breaks off, so after some futile attempts with the tiny lizard escaping behind all of the obstacles in Harold’s enclave, I gave up. I figured Harold could use a friend since he seemed to like them so much anyway. I never saw the skink again. I asked Harold about it, but he wasn’t talking. He gave me “the stank eye” and then looked away and refused to discuss it. I sincerely hope the little guy got out the same way he got in. But I just don’t know. Box turtles are omnivores after all. Harold remains silent on the matter, and still watches them.
You’ll recall I mentioned the backyard guardian facing off with a broad-winged hawk. In our time here we have seen quite a few hawks. At the old house I only had two seed feeders outside the sitting room windows, one squirrel feeder I built and mounted on a tree fifteen feet off to the north side of the patio, and three hummingbird feeders, one hanging in a tree twenty feet from the back of the patio, one hanging from a branch of the tree with the squirrel feeder, and one in the north kitchen window. When we moved here the nice lady who owned the house previously left behind all of her shepherds crooks and feeders. Here at the retirement village we have the one green glass bottle hummingbird feeder hanging from the south eave of the front porch, the hot air balloon hanging from the eave of 7Harold’s eave, the blue glass bottle in the feeding area with my two old redwood seed feeders I’ve had for twenty years, the ones that were outside the sitting room windows at the old house, a caged tube feeder only small birds can get to that Lisa gave me for my birthday, two wire mesh thistle feeders, also gifts from Lisa, that replaced the cheap plastic ones that were here, three double cake suet feeders that were also here and are excellent and we did not replace, and the two squirrel seed feeders which replaced the ear corn feeders the nice lady had. When given the choice squirrels choose black oil sunflower seed over corn every time. The raccoons also like sunflower seed and at night they eat from them, too. As you can imagine business at the diner can be quite brisk at times, and the hawks have taken notice. Occasionally everyone out back scatters. Think rats from a sinking ship. I’ll notice the ruckus, look out back, and sure enough there is a hawk winging its way through the woods or the feeding area, sitting in a tree nearby, or hurtling between the houses trying to catch someone off guard. Sometimes they are successful. I have watched them snatch a bird off of one of my redwood feeders like a child plucking a peach from a tree. Last summer Harold and I were watching some doves scavenge seed from the ground below the pink house window feeder, when suddenly everyone scattered as if a bomb had gone off, and a gray blur came streaking between the houses. One unfortunate dove could not decide which way to go and hesitated a tenth of a second too long. As it left the ground “POW!” just like in the old Batman TV show. The hawk hit the dove so hard the downy feathers exploded as if someone had stuck a cherry bomb inside a goose down pillow. The dove dropped to the ground and never moved again. The hawk landed five feet away from it near the patio, looking slightly stunned for just a few seconds, then pounced on the flaccid dove, gave two short wing strokes to carry it to the patio, and proceeded to pluck it right there in front of us. It all happened so fast Harold and I simply watched in amazement, slack-jawed the entire time. Well, I was slack-jawed. The hawk noticed us watching and flew off into the woods about twenty or thirty yards away and continued with the preparation of his dinner. I looked at Harold, Harold looked at me. “A fella’s gotta eat,” I said as I shrugged. Harold shrugged back. The rest of the doves returned as the hawk began tearing chunks of flesh from the denuded carcass. He was occupied and no longer a threat, and life went on, except for the hawk’s unfortunate, indecisive entrée. Lisa would have been horrified.
Most mornings when I get up I go straight to the bathroom to take care of urgent urological business, then I don my plush lined slippers and my mottled seafoam and red bathrobe I call my “Cloak of Many Colors” and go to the kitchen to pour my first cup of coffee which Lisa started brewing in our Bunn before she went to take her shower. I then take it to the bathroom, set it on the vanity to cool a bit and walk out to the paper box at the end of our driveway. I invariably do this in daylight or darkness, fair weather or foul spitting snow and frozen rain, unless it is Saturday morning and I fall back asleep when Lisa gets in the shower, or it’s Sunday and I either sat up too late writing, or got drunk, or both, as sometimes happens. Like tonight, but it’s just Friday. In my defense, it was a bad week. We didn’t win the lottery this week, so, you know. At any rate, I came home today, chucked Harold in the tub, fixed myself a gin and tonic Terry style with a ton of lime juice in it, took care of minor chores while Harold lounged in the tub and listened to Frank Zappa on the beast, which was turned up just “moderately loud” so Harold could hear it in the bathroom., and when he was through I went in and told him, “Harold, prepare yourself. I am about to tick you off royally. I warned you I was going to scrub your shell tonight. Tuck in and shut your eyes.” I “attacked him savagely,” as he puts it, with my scrubby abrasive sponge saturated with lanolin enriched hand cleaner. Harold doesn’t have much contact with plant leaves or mud or other abrasives to scour his shell in the sunroom, so I scrub him a bit once a month or so to keep his shell clean and bright like the wild turtles. No, I don’t put Turtle Wax on him, but once in a while I do rub him down with a little coconut oil if he looks a bit dried out. Always after his bath to seal in the moisture. He considers all of this manhandling at the least, and physical assault at the worst end of the spectrum. Oh my he does get put out with me. Tonight I brought him back in the sunroom and set him down to the left of my chair in the middle of the inner doorway. He took off and headed for his hidey hole behind Dunbar, stopped and stared back at me for a minute or so, the turned, climbed the hut and immediately dove into the pool, no back claw brakes applied. From there he scrambled out of the pool, paused behind the Chesire Cat to stare at me another minute or two, then disappeared into the potted jungle. A few moments later I noticed two beady little red-orange eyes peering at me from between the pots over the top of a new addition to the potted jungle. Harold and I made up. I asked him to sit on my lap for a few minutes while I scratched his back and rubbed his nose. When I set him down on the floor he ambled off to the slatted metal table and hung out there looking out the window for a while, and then as it got dark he wandered off to the hut and went to bed. He’s all better now. My dad, George, turned eighty-eight this week. He finally had to move into an assisted living facility this year. He had still been bowling and such not that long ago, but time finally caught up with him. At first he was not too pleased, but I believe he is beginning to really like it there now. He already knew several people out there, and has made some new friends. He is easy to get along with. At any rate, the gist of this is I had no idea what to get him for his birthday. He needs nothing, and he wants nothing. For several years now Lisa and I have gotten him consumable gifts so he could gobble them up and not have to worry about in which closet or on what shelf he was going to store them. He has always enjoyed “good stuff,” so it seemed the perfect compromise. Since his health started to slide a bit my younger sister Pam and my baby sister Judy have been monitoring his intake of “good stuff,” so summer sausage, hard salami and wonderfully aromatic cheeses are no longer an option. This year I was at a total loss. For Christmas we got him a “Health-full Gift Basket” which wasn’t too bad, and for Fathers’ Day Lisa went and bought a purple plastic wash tub, a big one, and filled it with all kinds of tasty, healthy goodies, and even some beer products that clever people had figured out how to make taste like cocktails. I struggled with the idea of going that route again for his birthday. Anything gets old after a while. But what could I give him? Then a thought occurred to me: Has my father ever read anything that I have written? I have somewhere between one and two hundred poems, quite a few short stories and several plays scattered in folders in my file drawer. A few have been published, but I haven’t submitted anything for consideration in years. I do not believe he has seen any of them. So I thought to myself, “Self, what do you think about this idea?” My note to him basically said I was giving him something to consume again, but with his mind this time, straight from my heart, filtered through my brain to my fingertips, into the computer and onto the paper. I gave him the first four chapters of this book, somewhat rougher of course since my proof readers were still helping me. When he got his copy he joined Harold’s Legion and is giving me feed-back too. This delights me, and Harold. Dad knows Harold very well. They have spent some quality time together in Harold’s room while he was still able to drive, and he is the one who provided the addition to the potted jungle. Judy remembered seeing a small cast resin stone in one of the boxes when they moved him to the assisted living facility. She showed it to him and he decided Harold and I should have it. He signed and dated the bottom and sent it with her to the girl’s birthday dinner. It is now sitting where Herman was previously, and Herman has been moved back to where he was last year, near the bamboo slatted pot and Harold’s food dish between the table legs in the entryway to his courtyard. The first time Harold came around the bamboo pot after I moved Herman he stopped and gave him the nose pointed to the ceiling, then chin on the floor, face right, face left Harold Finch inspection. “What in the world are you doing over here?” I believe he asked. He has gotten used to the rock being in Herman’s former spot and likes it because he can see over it better than he could Herman. Makes for easier spying. On the rock is a “carved” turtle, very similar in form to the happy, smiling Herman, and above that is carved the word “Inspiration.” I have to ask myself, why would my father have that particular object in his possession, and why would it somehow make an appearance at this particular time? I get it Ruby. I get it.
It wasn’t a squirrel or a raccoon that distracted me this time, although there are several of the latter out on the patio eating tater tots, pancakes and cinnamon rolls at the moment, and I did wander off the subject. We were talking about fetching the paper, weren’t we? Ah yes, the paper. One morning not long after we moved here, I don’t remember quite when, but it was black as pitch and cold as, well… I hesitate to say how cold it was for fear that young ears might be listening. Let’s just say it was very, very cold. I was headed down the sidewalk and just passing the corner of the garage into the driveway when I noticed a movement out of the corner of my right eye. I stopped and looked in that direction, and there standing on the far side of the corner of my neighbor’s garage just stepping into his driveway and looking me dead in the eye was a red fox. He had evidently just had the same experience I had from the opposite perspective. We stood there looking at each other for a moment, and then he melted into the underbrush and we both went about our respective business. Foxes are extremely secretive and elusive. I have only seen one four other times since we’ve lived here, and Lisa once, but the last two times I saw one it was extremely close and personal. The first time was this year on a Sunday morning in mid-June. I was in Harold’s room squatting on the floor with him talking to Little Bit. I believe I had been cleaning up “something” Harold had left under the hickory chair. Harold, would you care to comment? I thought not. Lisa was in the kitchen fixing brunch. I saw a flash of red fur come streaking out of the edge of the woods headed for the pink window feeder where Little Bit was sitting. I didn’t think too much about it for the first tenth of a second or so. The squirrels attack and run each other off of the feeders all the time. Business as usual basically. Then I realized this red streak was much bigger than most, at least four times as big, with large, pointy ears with black tips. It was a red fox, and it was bearing down on the squirrel. The second tenth of a second my “let nature take its course” mentality started to kick in, and then it hit me: “That’s Little Bit, our friend, and she sits here because she trusts that nothing bad will happen to her.” Lisa heard the sliding door slam against the frame and looked up to see me still in my bathrobe and my fuzzy slippers tearing through the backyard into the woods jumping over logs and poison ivy yelling at the top of my lungs. I saw the fox grab Little Bit and shake her while looking at me to see if I would stop. I would not. I was closing ground rapidly, still jumping over poison ivy patches, bushes and logs with my robe tails billowing behind me when Little Bit broke free from the startled fox, leaped six feet to the nearest tree trunk and started trying to scrabble up it as fast as she could. The fox’s eyes got very big when he realized that I was almost on him, still coming, and was not going to stop for God nor devil. I like foxes, I truly do, and I seldom interfere as nature plays out its dramas, but Little Bit is our friend, Harold’s, Lisa’s and mine, and if it was within my power to stop anything from happening to her I was determined I would not falter. I have often faltered in my obligations to friends and loved ones in this life, way too often, but not this time. NOT! THIS! TIME! I was afraid Little Bit might be injured and might not be able to get up the tree out of reach of the fox in time, so I kept going. The fox leapt to my left behind the tree Little Bit was trying to climb, and I followed. He really started to move then, and the last I saw of him he had crossed the gulley and was racing up the hill on the opposite side a hundred yards away. I looked for Little Bit but did not see her on the ground or in the tree, so I walked back to the house. Lisa and Harold were waiting at the door. “What happened?” Lisa asked. “Why did you do that?”
“A fox was after Little Bit,” I replied. Her eyes widened, like the fox’s.
“Oh no!” she gasped. “He didn’t get her, did he?”
“He had her,” I replied, “but I made him drop her.”
“Is she okay?” Lisa asked.
“I hope so,” I replied. “She made it up the tree. We’ll just have to see if she shows up at the window later.”
“Oh I hope so!” she exclaimed. “What would Harold do without Little Bit to keep him company while we’re gone?” she asked.
“I hope we don’t have to find out,” I replied.
“What were you going to do if it didn’t run?” she asked.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said. “I guess I would have started kicking at it.”
“But you’re wearing your slippers! And no pants! It might have bitten you!” she exclaimed.
“Then I guess you would have had to take me to the emergency room. I think I could handle a fox bite better than Little Bit could,” I replied.
“I hope she’s okay,” Lisa said.
“We’ll know in a day or two I imagine,” was my response.
We watched the squirrels that came to the window feeder for the next few days very carefully, but they all ran when we approached, so we knew they were not Little Bit. She never runs from us. And then, on the third day, I noticed one sitting on the feeder and walked to the window. It did not run. I knelt down by the chair and it just looked at me. “Little Bit? Is that you?” I asked. She continued to look at me while she chewed. Then I noticed her tail was square on the end. There was a tiny bit missing. I tapped the window glass, and she gave me that “Please! I’m trying to eat!” look. “Lisa!” I yelled. “It’s Little Bit! She’s here!”
“Oh thank God!” Lisa yelled back, and she ran in and joined me at the window.
I have noticed that Little Bit is more observant of the edge of the woods when she comes to the window feeder now, and that’s good. I can’t be here all of the time.
I had one more confrontation with a fox recently. I believe it was the same one. This time I was standing in the patio doorway when it came bounding out of the bushes and tried to snare one of the five squirrels on the ground foraging in the feeding area. The two on the tree mounted feeders leapt to the ground and ran, which I thought was extremely ill-advised. It was hot on one’s tail when I ran out onto the patio clapping my hands and yelling. This time the fox took off immediately, but the squirrel it was after was evidently not as fortunate as Little Bit. Several hours later I noticed one sitting on the right side tree mounted feeder. It quickly caught my attention because fully half of that tail the fox was “on” earlier was missing, and there was blood dripping from the end of what was left of it onto the ground below. We call him Stumpy.