My friend Leo is at or near the age of eighty-four. This time of year, we sometimes bump into each other at the lakeshore and sit under the shade of his giant golden willow, watching as thin young people in shiny ski boats with lurid graphics swing skiers and tubers and boarders across the water in front of us. We often talk about politics and family and whatever weeds are pestering our property at a given time. The weed at present is what we call Chinese clover.
Funny how I regard Leo a close friend these days, especially when you consider he is actually the father of one of my best friends, and when you further consider that he frightened the hell out of me as a kid. He was big and often bearded and teased with a dry style that children never fully comprehend. Most alarming of all, he hung on the front door of his house a sign that read “Don’t Go Away Mad, Just Go Away.” Let me assure you, I only knocked on that door with great reluctance as a kid, always hoping that Leo would not answer. And then there is the time he volunteered to cut my hair and shaved my head bald as I squirmed in panic. My mother phoned a scathing protest his way following that. My mother, at the time, liked a new group of musicians, with longish hair, called The Beatles.
Yesterday, during the shimmering heat of late afternoon, we met at the shore and chatted as he sat on his four-wheeler, which he uses constantly due to hip and knee malfunction and pain. Eventually, the subject turned to animals—both pets and the wild turkeys we have been seeing recently. As a boat with thumping music sliced across the lake, generating waves that nearly rolled up onto the grass at my feet, Leo told me that something came up onto the porch of his house late the other night and sprayed urine on his front door. “I guess it could have been a feral cat or something,” he speculated.
“I don’t know, Leo,” I answered after some thought, “Might have been one of your relatives.”
--Mitchell Hegman
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