Lord Luvvadukk (Part 3)

Luvvadukk stopped in the middle of the work room and looked right and looked left and looked right at the cut glass ashtray that sat on the windowsill with three half cigars.  He picked one up and put it in the breast pocket of his yellow denim shirt that was unbuttoned up and loose at the wrists and opened the window to shoo the fly out.  The fly dodged this assault and being a feeble minded fly refused to fly out the open and bounced around up at the top.  Luvvadukk sparred with the fly for nearly ten minutes and began to think that this might never end, that his niece might come next week and find him still fighting to get the fly outside or he may even die before this happened.  Sometimes a fly is so bent, its best to let them do the wrong thing and beat their wings against the glass until they drop dead on the windowsill for the wisp of a corner spider to prize.  Lord Luvvadukk stopped fighting with the obdurate and padded silently back to the door, where he turned and took a one minute look at the fly who was now stalling the inevitable and resting on the window lock.  For this entire minute neither of the two characters moved.  To the fly, it seemed as if time was flying by and for the man it seemed as if time did not exist and the fly was so big and so bright, flicking on the white window sill, that it was the contradiction of life, the unenviable state of knowing enough to know you are trapped alive but not knowing enough to save yourself from your own inspired death.  Luvvadukk knew about as much as the fly did in this regards. 

Lord Luvvadukk (Part 2)

Turning away from the edge of the sun splintered porch, Luvvadukk took the four steps slowly to screen door and paused to hear the red tail hawk break the silence of thousands of crickets and grasshoppers playing their wings in the grass gone to seed.  The barn swallows shooting in and out of the open hayloft did not pause in their loops and the crickets did not cease.  In fact, the crickets and grasshoppers only seemed to grow louder in response to this encroach on their own wild chirping. The screen door slammed and settled on crazy hinges back to a perpetual ten centimeters ajar.  On loafers Luvvadukk was a silent man.  Not that there was a soul there to not hear him pad over the kitchen floor and into the work room.  Despite the silent tread, in the work room, some glass jars holding unassorted nails and screws bounced together and a fly took off and buzzed feebly against the sagging glass window panes.  The floor joists in the work room had had a spring ever since the house was built by Old Man Otto Luvvadukk circa 130 years ago.  Back in that time, as it is still, lumber was scarce, used sparingly, and the long boards for the floor joists had been given more than the customary spacing and the pillars in the center of the plan had been completely neglected or poorly secured to the timber and knocked over long ago by truant skunks and other wandering animals.  The deflection was only mildly alarming and Luvvadukk had no plans to crawl under the house to inspect the situation and definitely no desire to tear up the floor and make adjustments.  The floor decking was also original, faux tongue and groove cedar planking, scarred up badly from a century of hard boots and hard drinking and hard iron tools.  Nearly everyone in this county was a hard drinker and had hard boots and nearly everyone in this county had spent an evening in the Luvvadukk work room.  In his early years, before the town ran out of water, Luvvadukk was a jack of all trades, though strictly a hobbyist.  Folks with intractable problems came to him for quick and cheap fixes.  Lately though, Luvvadukk was turning away the few projects and problems that still came through the big red gates of the Luvvadukk estate, had trouble concentrating and was thinking less applied, more theoretical.  Sometimes he would find himself with a piece of wood in his hands, a door knob, or a trowel, or a box of salt, or a broken balloon and not know what to do with it or why he should do what was to be done in the first place, if that at all. This state of mind was puzzling and it was a puzzlement why this state was more frequently enveloping him as if it was a fog and he a golf course.  Luvvadukk thought that the fog was perhaps a consequence of his being there, but it was situational, it was a fog he walked into.  Outside the work room the air was clear, the sun was bright, and the atmosphere was not viscous, and Luvvadukk was always purposeful.

Lord Luvvadukk (Part 1)

Lord Luvvadukk stepped out into the stunning sunshine 

that is only stunning and hot and humid and cloudy 

like this in west Kansas, also known as Colby County, 

also known as the birthplace of various famous figures and native dignitaries.   

By the incidence angle, 

Lord Luvvadukk knew that it was around mid afternoon, 

after lunch enough to take an afternoon break 

to walk the perimeter 

and break in a new pair of boots 

and smoke the bad cigar 

been working on since the middle of last week.  

 Lord Luvvadukk was wearing loafers at the moment, 

having been sitting in the twilight of the living room 

reading expired New Yorkers 

that Aunt Luvvaduvv brought ten years ago 

on her way through from New York to San Francisco, 

as it is so common of New Yorkers to do, 

to pause long enough on route 

from New York to San Francisco 

to leave something behind.   

The New Yorker thinks about that, 

but cannot turn back, 

the mentality of every block a battle, 

every subway a potential terrorist target, 

every wasted step a wasted step.  But 

Lord Luvvadukk, 

as a simple prairie man, 

could not toss the magazines in the burn pile, 

could not imagine that Aunt Luvvaduvv would not return for them.  

 It took 9 years, 

or about one year ago, 

today, 

before Luvvadukk opened the pages and started reading.   

The talk of the town was the mismanagement of some nuclear reactor 

someplace or another 

and the consequence of fiscal meltdown 

or somesuch disaster.  

 Frankly, Lord Luvvadukk could not really care.   

The significance of it all was all so far removed 

from Kansas and the perimeter of the Luvvadukk estate.