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BigHead
I saw BigHead yesterday and he did not, in the traditional sense, look all that well. His head is still big, which may bring you some small measure of comfort--that things you have come to expect are exactly as you expected them to be. And he looked like he had recently done battle--his face had a deep bloody scar, a thing also consistent with my memory of him, and his gait, although clearly suffering from the penalty of age, was proud if somewhat less than swaggering.
He walks the sidewalks in broad daylight, as many neighborhood cats are for good reason fearful to do--predators are plentiful--and on this occasion was on my side of Rocheblave apparently heading for Miss L's yard which is a strewn mess of mid-reconstruction garbage and probably harbors a good many rodents, yum.
Everything behind the head is gaunt. His flanks if cheeks would be described as cadaverous. His fur if skin, sallow, his legs if legs…okay never mind. His black is still black but his white is considerably less than bright.
He came by again today while I sat on that little side landing and when I called out to him from a hundred feet away he stopped. I cooed and he considered. He walked toward me and I went for the camera. He stopped about twenty feet away out in the now neatly trimmed Pentecostal grass and I took a few not very good shots and one very grainy video. When he got bored with me he headed off for the gap to Iberville.
There's a kid on Dumaine who shares my initials and has recently shunned the rap music of his peers to embrace heavy metal. I sense he is going through some hard time, not tied to the brotherhood of gang and also disengaged from the schoolyard; he wasn't passing the standardized tests which allow one to proceed forward. The other day I asked him if he had an mp3 player and he said no. I considered getting him one for his birthday but I can't afford one on account of I am currently a lazy non-working bastard. I have a pretty fair amount of music in the mp3 format, a lot of it metal and rock, not to mention the complete work of Coltrane, but most of these street kids ain't too interested in jazz, despite (or because of) their proximity to the birthplace thereof. So I went out and bought a spindle of 50 CD-Rs for fifteen bucks and now I'm burning him some stuff. So far he's getting Led Zeppelin's I, II, III, IV, and Physical Graffiti, and a full sampling from Queensryche, Iron Maiden, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Korn, Ozzy Osborne, Machine Head, Megadeth, Metallica, Alice in Chains, and a little Critter Buggin to cleanse the palate. Depending on his response to these, or frankly, whether he wants it or not, he also will get a full plate of Hendrix. I want him to know we are all the same--existing, nothing but existing. And that's not all bad.