Free Philosophy Made Simple by Robert Hellenga Page B

canvas?
    The Russian could be found every afternoon in front of his little barn at the edge of Medardo’s trailer park, sitting on a canvas chair while Norma Jean stood at her easel and painted. Rudy, who went into town every day to shop at Lopez Bros.
     Grocery and at a Lebanese deli in McAllen — to have daily contact with other people — would stop on his way home to watch.
     He bought several more paintings, and each time he bought one the Russian offered him a glass of vodka and they’d admire the new purchase together. The Russian had his own view of beauty: “Beauty is like death,” he’d say, lifting his glass. “You can’t understand it without vodka.”
    Rudy laughed. They were looking at a painting called
Ants Climbing a Tree.
    “Where do you get the titles?” he asked.
    “I get them out of a Chinese cookbook.”
    “What happens when you get to the end of the book?”
    “I just start over again. It take me about two years.”

    Afraid of chaos, afraid of disintegrating, Rudy spent a lot of time getting organized: kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, barn. He organized Helen’s record albums on the lower shelves and then arranged and rearranged her books. There were art books, history books, a few novels, an edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and the
Collected Poems of Robert Frost,
but there were also a lot of books that defied any kind of classification, even alphabetical order. What was he supposed to do with all the books on death that they’d bought at Kroch’s & Brentano’s when Helen got back from Italy? What was he supposed to do with
Woman’s Day Home Decorating Ideas
#1, and with
Intimacy, Sensitivity, Sex, and the Art of Love,
in which the authors “explain the use of the ‘bioloop,’ the recently developed method of controlling mentally what had previously been thought of as autonomous bodily functions”? Where had these books come from?
    When he’d finished arranging the books, he took up birding. His grove was located between the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge and the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park, right at the convergence of the Central and Mississippi flyways. Along the river in the morning, and again in the evening, the birds made a terrific racket. Rudy’s mother had been a serious birder,
     a member of the Audubon Society who had over four hundred birds on her life list and who could imitate the sounds of dozens of birds. She participated in the Christmas Bird Count every year, and one fall she took Rudy with her to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to watch as thousands of migrating birds — raptors, waterbirds, songbirds — were funneled through a natural corridor to Whitefish Point. He’d started a life list of his own after the trip, but he hadn’t kept it up.
    He bought Petersons
Field Guide to the Birds of Texas
and started a new list, getting up at four o’clock and heading over to the state park, a six-hundred-acre stand of subtropical vegetation only three miles upstream. Bentsen was home to almost three hundred documented species, and he soon had a list of seventy birds, but by sunrise every morning the trail that looped through the park was so crowded with birders searching for elusive “life birds” that he preferred to do his birding at home, sitting on the stump of an old mesquite tree that he’d cut up for firewood, near the spot where he’d waited for the Second Coming, and simply enjoying the society that presented itself to him: the great kiskadees that nested in the flowering mesquite trees and greeted him on his way to the river by calling out their name:
kis-ka-dee,
and the strange chickenlike chachalacas from Mexico who clattered like castanets; high-flying hook-billed kites, a pair of Harris’s hawks, a family of least grebes who swam in Creaky’s old swimming hole, a little cove carved out of the northern bank of the river; the belted kingfisher who guarded Rudy’s stretch of shoreline, and the small green heron who crouched on the edge of