Floyd and Tobacco - The Monday Morning Memo

“On this earnest August morning Donald moved restlessly about the place. Joe Rabbit didn’t want him and said so. Joe had no manners. Aunt Theresa had put the house out of bounds for the near future. He watched the school bus stop for Willard, and then there was nothing to do but help around the place. He helped a tawny hen proclaim the miracle and the misery of an egg. He refereed a quick and vicious battle between young roosters who had neither heart nor skill. With a broken rake handle, he helped a pig scratch the hard-to-reach place between shoulder blades. He joined Rupert One Ear, the cat, near an open gopher hole under a mallow weed until Rupert sneered at him and left. He encouraged a small silly white cloud over the Santa Lucia mountains to the west and squatted where an impatient spider rigged and clewed up a mizzen web in the fork of a rose bush. A man can keep busy if he sets his mind to it. But Donald’s heart wasn’t in his work. Something was calling to him, sweetly and insistently and he didn’t know what it was. The quiet August morning call of fate perhaps – delicate as steel, wise and strong as an unhurt girl. But the call came from everywhere – from sky and earth and mountains and from his own skin. He couldn’t put a fix on it.

He wandered into the open carriage shed where vehicles like strange artillery were lined up hub to hub – a surrey, and a hayrake, disk plows, a high-seated cultivator, a 1951 Plymouth 4-door sedan, and a war surplus Willys jeep, as scarred and brown and dangerous as an aged lion.”

- – John Steinbeck, from his unpublished manuscript of Don Keehan, the Marshal of Manchon, p 24. This is where the middle aged Quixote discovers his Rocinante

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