Coyotes live in the city. You hardly ever see them, though. This one was entirely too interested in me walking my dog at around six thirty in the morning. You can see the hungry look in his eyes. It made him brave and brassy enough to walk up right behind us on the sidewalk in the park just after the sun had come up. I got a chance to look him right in the foxy-eyed stare he was giving us. He had fully planned to snatch Jade, my Cardigan corgi from behind if I hadn’t turned around in time.
Old Wiley Coyote would’ve successfully snatched her too, if I hadn’t noticed him out of the corner of my eye and turned around on him. But shouting at him only made him back off, not flee. He was a big coyote, big enough to give me a really bad day if he wanted to go through with the planned attack. Who knows? Maybe he breakfasted on old men before too.
Jade bristled at him and talked really tough, but she was scared witless. And he was obviously bold and bad enough to be confident that he didn’t need to immediately run away. He stayed there looking at us with his evil yellow wolf eyes. He stayed long enough to allow me to take a picture of him. And he didn’t leave until we chased him just a bit to show him we were not afraid (even though we really were). (The dog told me after that my face had gone ghost white.)
Being stalked by a hungry coyote early in the morning is sort of a bad omen to begin a day with, especially when so many other things have been going wrong for me. But, as always, I laugh about it and write about it and make it seem of little consequence by doing so. Still, I am not a road runner. And that coyote had murder on his mind.
It seems I am rather good at it, too. Who knew that a life spent as a teacher would make you into the sort of Jeopardy genius that could earn a million dollars on a show that you will never ever have a chance to get on, and if, by some miracle, you did, you would get a first round question about the atomic weight of molybdenum and you’d say, “What is 42?” because that is the element’s atomic number (and the answer to life, the universe, and everything) instead of 95.94, the correct answer, which you knew, but you got nervous and went for the jokier answer.
Of course, there is the opposite problem too. Some writers are not hard to understand at all. They only use simple sentences. They only use ideas that lots of other people have used before. You don’t have to think about what they write. You only need to react. They are the reasons that words like “trite”, “hackneyed”, “boring”, and “cliche” exist in English. But simple, boring writing isn’t written by stupid people. Hemingway is like that. Pared down to the basics. No frills. Yet able to yield complex thoughts, insights, and relationships.
Catch a Falling Star 
Lyrical Lessons from Life
I am still in lazy mode, not quite making the effort for 500 words… But, in my defense, a picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words. So, the picture above should count as 1,042 words because of the words in it.
Poetry is like that. Even bad poetry. This doggerel verse is capable of meaning far more things than it specifically, literally states. But I shouldn’t point that out. You should never explain a poem… or defend a poem… a poem should simply be. Even a bad poem.
And there are those who will say it is not a bad poem. It speaks to simple farmer wisdom, the kind I learned while yet a boy in Iowa 50 years ago. Did you realize that I made this meme on a photo of my own unweeded flower garden, grown in the unforgiving Texas heat?
That’s all there is to today’s post. A picture/poem… a tiny bit of wisdom… on the first hot Sunday in June.
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