Blackie and the birds

I was sitting at my computer this morning when I heard a terrible racket outside being made by what sounded like a Hitchcock movie: The Birds.

In truth it was some apparently very angry birds. I had seen mockingbirds in this type of mood before and glanced around.

Aha! Sure enough. It was my friendly neighborhood cat - Blackie Detroit. (Explanation: When he first showed up, frightened and wary of me, I slowly befriended him and named him Blackie. Later one of our neighbors and I had a conversation about him and she said she called him "Detroit". Hence his strange compound name.)

At any rate, he was just making a slow reconnoiter of our backyard, seemingly unconcerned about the noisy birds who would occasionally dive-bomb him. But I suspect he was more cunning than he appeared.

Eventually, he went under the fence and disappeared. But still I heard the birds in "high dudgeon". I later looked over the fence and found Blackie Detroit casually reclining on another neighbor's picnic table, just waiting for one of those noisy birds to get within claws reach, I suspect.

At this point, he has moved on again, as have the birds. The outcome is yet to be decided.

Mag 23

The flames! All around me. The heat! Becoming more and more intense. Then the smoke! Choking me. I began to cough and the coughing woke me from this terrible nightmare.

I lay in the bed, drenched with sweat, trying to reason it out. Why, why, had I suffered this agony in a dream? As I lay there, I realized I had not opened the window when I took to my bed. I rose and opened it now and a cooling breeze entered the room.

I sat on the edge of the bed, holding my head in my hands, still thinking about what had caused this terrible inferno in my dreams, nearly taking my life.

I got up, went to the kitchen for a drink of water. I left the lights off and simply felt my way.

Absent-mindedly I walked as if still in a dream into the hallway. Wham! What the hell was that? My toes had slammed into something hard and the pain was now real and intense. I cursed at whatever object I had struck.

I backed a short distance away and reached for the light switch on the wall. The glare was intense at first and then, as my eyes adjusted, I saw what I had walked into.

A fire extinguisher! A huge, old, heavy fire extinguisher. I had purchased the antique the day before at a garage sale. Undecided where to place it, I had left it in the hallway the previous evening. Then I had forgotten it until I walked into it in the dark.

Damnable old life saver.

I thought to myself, "they sure made them heavy in those days."

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The lovely Willow has instigated writers . . and people like myself who think they're writers . . to try their hand at a visual prompt each week. If you'd like to read others go to Magpie Tales and enjoy some more.

Tlaloc toys with us

Tlaloc has been lurking in our area, playing with our hopes and emotions. But, so far, he has not lingered long. Here for a couple of instants, then gone in a mist.

We await.

Mag 22 explanation

This, my friends, is a red herring.

A red herring is defined as "a deliberate attempt to divert attention."

And that's what this sentence is: "The old magus actually timed out everyone's summer."

In fact . . . it doesn't mean anything. However, if you extract the first letter of each word in the sentence, you will see what the devious author was up to: T O M A T O E S

Mag 22

The old magus actually timed out everyone's summer.

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If you figure this one out, other offerings can be found in Willow's garden at Magpie Tales.

A new intersection

The new Side Road intersection has been under construction for months. But progress is finally being seen.

The highlight, of course, is a new overpass crossing Highway 89-A.

It finally is spanning the highway though much finish work is still to be done.

I wonder, by the way, who came up with the scintillating name of "Side Road" for . . . a side road.

Mag 21

This one is a little different. It's actually a true story.

I lived in Mexico for nearly five years back in the late 1980’s. It was a great half a decade. Lots of parties, lots of new experiences, lots of new friends.

One of my best friends during those days was a guy from Harlingen, Texas, who spent probably 30 years before retiring to Mexico living in New York City. He’s gone now but he was the father of someone you may have heard about. My friend’s name was Walter Nixon and his daughter was Cynthia Nixon. If you don’t know the name, you’ve been off the planet for awhile. Cynthia is a New York actress who currently is best known for playing Miranda in the "Sex and the City" television series and movies.

But back to Walter. He had a love for language and loved nothing better than discovering a new word or phrase in Spanish. One day he was delighted to tell me he had discovered the Spanish word for firecrackers. It was, he said with a grin, triquitraque . . . pronounced tree-key-trah-kay. As Walter pointed out the word was perfect because it sounded just like the firecrackers exploding.

As I prepared to write this, I dug out my Larousse English-Spanish dictionary to verify the story. Firecracker, it said, could be translated as cohete or petardo. So then I went the other way and looked up triquitraque. Sure enough, along with "clickety-clack, bang, and boom" was the word "firecracker."

So thanks, Walter. Firecrackers will always be triquitraques to me.

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You can read more writers' stories by going to Magpie Tales.