The Journeys of January

By R. E. Kelsay

This is a story about several people and a dog. At least, that's how it starts out. One of them dies before the story even begins, but in many ways, she may be the one this book is really about. Some other fine people have a part in this story, too, although no one can ever take the place of the one who is gone. What you'll think about the cantankerous old geezer who takes care of the dog ‐‐ or maybe it's the other way around ‐‐ there's no way of knowing. He's the one who is writing this story, though, and as long as you like his dog, he's ornery enough so that he doesn't much care what you think of him. And it's hard to tell whether you'll agree with him that a Winnebago makes a pretty good home. Even though he's an old grouch most of the time, he sincerely hopes that you'll enjoy reading his story as much as he enjoyed writing it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R. E. Kelsay
• Release date: Aug 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005445324

Book preview

The Journeys of January

by Royal E. Kelsay

Published by Pam Foye

© 2020

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed only for your personal enjoyment. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Birth and death are the only

experiences of human life which

are completely and unalterably factual.

All the incidents that occur between

these two events comprise fiction,

in imperfect stages of purity.

No author, therefore,

can either envision or execute

a work of genuinely pure fable.

But despite the impurities of fact which

intrude upon this story, the author

guarantees that it is, indeed,

a work of imagination.

CHAPTER ONE

Shake Hands With January

Yes, that's a name. His name.

No, it doesn't appear on his birth certificate, but it's the one his father bestowed upon him nearly sixty-four years ago, when the nurse brought his red, wrinkled firstborn to the door of the delivery room an hour after his birth.

Isn't he pretty? she cooed. The father replied that the baby was about as pretty as a January day in Amarillo and the name became a permanent part of his life.

The nurse wouldn't call him pretty any more; not even a mother would. Like toll booths along a turnpike, the years have exhausted the roll of quarters his youth once represented. The V-shaped wrinkles on his forehead, and the lines along his neck, are chevrons and hash marks enough to outfit an escort of Master Sergeants. Liver spots -- their enumeration now a source of jokes with cronies in the coffee shop -- have replaced the freckles of his early summers, and a faint haze now dims the clear, sparkling eyes of childhood.

January looks like the other old men who drive the highways of western America; his motor home looks like many of the others, too. But most of them have two people aboard. January travels alone. Well, that's not entirely accurate; February rides with him.

February is his friend and companion -- ninety pounds of black, devoted Labrador Retriever. January's wife used to travel with them; her name was Glenda, but now she is gone. Years ago, when they first brought the puppy home, she insisted that he be named February because he always followed January, stumbling along behind his master with grim determination on the stubby little legs that would soon become so long and powerful.

The man is already old, and he realizes it; the dog is aging, also, and who can say whether he is aware of it or not. Both of them spend many hours reliving the past. The dog dreams of rabbits and armadillos he has chased, and the quail he flushed in the oak forests of their former home.

The man remembers friends and adversaries, travels, and the triumphs and fiascoes of his business career. He knows that he is neither wise nor articulate, but in the recent solitude of his life, he has diligently organized his thoughts. He spends hours without end recalling the details of the long and happy years he shared with Glenda.

January has about the same hairline as he did at thirty, but it wasn't much to brag about even then. His hair still looks brown when wet, but it grays again as it dries. When he stands before the mirror after a shower, he often kids himself: good as new, give or take. Like the 1938 Packard his father had driven for so many years, he thought. When it was washed, it gleamed and looked black and shiny again, but when it dried, the scratches and the fading paint became conspicuous once more.

He was in pretty fair shape, considering, he told himself occasionally. But his back and hips informed him every morning that he was no longer twenty, and repeated the message more urgently every time he stood in one place for too long. Bursitis sometimes bothered his shoulders when he drove too long without stopping, but his elbows and knees were fine so far. And he still had big, strong, healthy hands.

There isn't one of these, he sometimes observed, looking at his fingers holding the steering wheel before him, that hasn't been hit time and again with hammers, cut with pocket knives, stuck with screwdrivers, and snagged on fish hooks and barbed wire. Ugly things, they are, wrinkled by hard work and too much sun. They look hard and rough like the rest of my shell, he thought, but the palms are still pink and tender, like the heart that only Glenda knew was within his gruff exterior. And that heart, broken or not, is still inside the shell, too.

He remembered the time long ago when he was a boy in Kilgore, and old Ernest showed him a similar phenomenon. The backs of his hand were scarred and rough and black. But the palms...

Looky here. You, January. The front side of my hands I done the work with all these years, they pinky, see. Just like yours. They ain't black like the rest of me. I done wore all the black off that part, workin' and carryin' boards at your daddy's lumber yard all these years.

Ernest had been January's friend, and his father's, too. Now they were both gone, of course. If there really was a heaven, Ernest and his dad were probably busy and happy, running a lumber yard way up there beyond the sky. And he called himself a chuckleheaded old man every time that thought and others like it came to mind.

Over the years, January had formulated a number of firmly-held, biased opinions that he seldom shared with anyone but Glenda. And even she had often called him a bigoted old redneck. He'd sometimes try to deny her charge, but never very convincingly.

He was not a complex character, nor was he given to intellectual pondering, and his many prejudices helped him understand and simplify the world around him. The social acceptability, morality and logic behind his opinions are immaterial; they are an inseparable part of the man as he is, not as he should be.

Over the years, he has observed that women age more gracefully than men. Statistics show that they live longer. Now he'd come to realize that they adapt far better to being alone. He was always convinced that women's lives were less intense, and that they don't have as much fun as men do.

They're wiser, though, about most matters; few women waste time trying to prove that they're the meanest dog on the block, a common failing among males of all species. Are their lives more productive? Sometimes, or perhaps that should read usually. But there is no question about it, women live longer. Or at least they should.

You marry in your twenties, hormones securely in command of virtually all aspects of your lives. You're both convinced that you share immortality.

That you could someday be writing 1980 or 1990 on a check stub never crosses your mind. You don't ponder subjects like how long you'll be around, but you've already attended enough family funerals to realize that women ordinarily outlive their mates.

When the life expectancy numbers go awry, as they did in Glenda's case, you get a fluke, an anomaly like this old man, driving along the highways with his dog.

Mother Nature bungles the weather sometimes, and you get a warm January, a blessing most of the world appreciates. In this case, she fumbled the actuarial tables, and produced a lonesome one. It amuses the man to think that his name, in this usage, describes a lot more than a period of thirty-one days starting shortly after the winter solstice. It also describes an eternity, or so it seems to one who bears the name of a cold and depressing month, and who must now live in a world of perpetual winter without the sunshine of the one he loved so deeply for so long.

What happens to old men who are left alone? What do they do with the solitary lives for which they are, by nature and training, so poorly prepared? Many die soon after their bereavement; most of them want to, at least for a while.

If they're still reasonably active, some old men learn to bowl; others join clubs of all varieties in search of relief from their loneliness. If they live in the country, they clutter up the feed stores and court house squares as members of the local spit-and-whittle congregations. Some even start playing dominoes, as if to show the abysmal depths to which the human mind can descend in its quest for diversion.

But January, whose world and life for over forty years had revolved around one person with whom he shared a deep love for solitude and self-sufficiency, refused to surrender his independence. He took his dog and his Winnebago and went traveling.

Old men may be too numerous today to be considered anomalies, but most recreational vehicles certainly fall into that category. They are too big, too expensive, and they use far too much fuel. January was convinced that motor homes would eventually be outlawed by the same government do-gooders who had once insisted that the people who drove the Washington Beltway and those who traveled the nearly endless highways of Nevada must be compelled to drive the same size vehicle at the same speed.

And if that didn't finally come to pass, January prophesied, RV's would eventually be forced off the road by gasoline taxes. Such noble causes as protection of the environment, highway improvement, and energy conservation would provide splendid justification for the taxes, but more of the money would ultimately be spent on programs designed to get politicians re-elected than would ever be invested in steel and concrete.

January believed that the extinction of the motor home was inevitable and nearer at hand than most realized, and he had no interest whatever in surviving that development. His Winnebago, at this point, was one of the stabilizing, central factors of his life.

Despite his own advancing years, January wasn't especially comfortable around old people. His own parents had died early by today's standards, his father at 65 and his mother at 72. Yes, people live longer now, he acknowledged, and they claim to enjoy it more than old folks used to, but a lot of that enjoyment, in January's opinion, was a matter of lowering some expectations that he didn't plan to lower.

He was convinced that if you can't eat what you want, drink what you want, and do what you damn please when you want to, no significant benefits could possibly result from a few extra years of life.

Glenda's mother was a sweet little lady who died at 80. Her father had lived to 98; he was blind for his last ten years, but remained alert and intelligent until his final day, and was one of the few old people that January had ever truly enjoyed being around.

Two of her father's sisters had lived to well past 90. The only one of the family who died early, of course, was Glenda. In comparison to most of her close relatives, she was barely old enough at the time of her death to enroll in the Girl Scouts. She had not lived out her life, nor anything close to it, before it was cut short.

As much as he enjoyed traveling in his motor home, the pattern of life in the RV set brought January into constant contact with older people, whose customs and activities often annoyed him. Old coots pull into a campground and hang lights on their awnings, he'd mutter. Wastes electricity, and it's nothing but a signal to let the world know that their stock in trade is conversation and that they are open for business.

They all wanted to tell you about their grandchildren in Cleveland, supplying names and birthdates for each, and giving you an update on its outstanding success in honors classes. And the latest news of their daughter in Albuquerque, you know, the one who married the doctor and drives a gray Mercedes and has two cats, and a dog just like yours. When he found himself trapped into listening to their endless recitations of trivia, unspoken comments ran helter-skelter through his mind, but few were printable.

And the ones who carried the carved wooden signs to every corner of America were equally irritating. Everyone has seen them: We're Billy and Nell from San Marcos, Texas. Well, I don't give a damn who you are or where you're from, January grumbled every time he saw one, and why should I? You're none of my business, and I'm none of yours, and I intend to keep it that way. February often growled as if he understood his master's ruminations and agreed.

February was lucky. At least he could pee on the signs if the owners set them up near the roadway.

When man and dog returned to the motor home, January would continue his monologue aloud, convinced that his companion could understand it, given that he had more common sense and perception than most of the old folks they met. He often told the dog that the lights and signs were only minor annoyances; the major ones were the constant requests to attend pinochle games, pancake breakfasts, and the invitations to other boring, insipid social gatherings that an old man alone was subjected to.

And the RV parks were also gathering places for the AARP crowd, those often-pompous Senior Citizens or Golden Agers whose attitudes and political leanings seldom failed to arouse his ire. Some years ago, Glenda had enrolled both of them in the organization. The membership charge was minimal. The ten percent discounts on motel rooms far more than paid the dues. You couldn't afford not to belong, he was forced to agree.

But the opinions and attitudes of the organization's leadership disgusted January. Their Modern Maturity magazine featured photographs of hale and handsome couples, supposedly in their fifties or sixties, who looked like a bunch of touched up teen-agers, all living the Good Life that only membership in the AARP would permit them to achieve. Blatant propaganda, it was. Enough to make you sick, he used to tell her every month, and Glenda would shake her head in stoic disapproval of her crotchety husband's unyielding prejudices.

In January's opinion -- and he was at least fair-minded enough to realize that many of his attitudes were out of step with modern society -- the AARP was part of a power play by the world's old nincompoops, aimed at raising their Social Security income at the expense of the young folks who did all the work.

If the leaders of the AARP had their way, school taxes would be lowered to the point where the country would have to quit educating the kids. January accused the organization of many other nefarious, do-gooder conspiracies that occurred to him at the time, describing them all as part of the grand scheme of the left-wingers intent on destroying America.

And beyond what he regarded as their effort to spend the country into poverty to benefit the old folks, the AARP's positions on medical care, consumerism, the environment, and many other issues were out of step with January's interests and with those of most thinking people, in his opinion, whatever their age.

Bunch of aging yuppy socialists, that's what they are, he'd mutter. Bet you that not a single one of them ever did a day's work out in the dust and the heat, getting grease on his hands. Too busy sittin' around in white clothes, lookin' pretty for their magazine pictures.

Glenda quietly pointed out that AARP had millions of members, and that a majority of the country's older population must agree with the people in charge, at least most of the time.

It was the lobbying that worried him most, he'd explain. He wanted his children and grandchildren to have a better life than his, and if the government kowtowed too much to a powerful old folks' special-interest group, they wouldn't.

Yes, January resented old age and never hesitated to air his views about it. The years -- like an endless horde of alligators -- might be dragging him into the geriatric swamp, but he struggled every step of the way.

He was winning the title match, he thought, and those advancing years had never won a round until he lost Glenda.

But now his gloves were getting heavy, and his footwork was slowing. Any referee could see that the years were getting ahead on points and that this beat-up old man would never be able to finish the whole fifteen rounds in this, the last bout he'd ever enter...

CHAPTER TWO

Glenda Made The Sun Shine,

Glenda Hung The Moon

She enjoyed the Winnebago. It was the most expensive single purchase they had ever made, except for the farm, and cost far more than any of the first three houses they had owned. Neither of them ever regretted their extravagance in the least.

January often said that she could make living in a motor home more fun and less work than anyone he had ever seen. He'd tease her about being able to go on a two-week trip without ever washing a dish, just as long as the paper towels held out. They'd come home after fifteen hundred miles of travel, he'd grumble, with a single dirty spoon in the sink: that was the one she used to serve February's Alpo, and she knew there'd be a strenuous objection if she used it for dog food, and then tried to pretend it was clean enough to stir January's coffee with.

Well-worn attempts at humor aside, Glenda washed dishes every other day or so, and January usually helped. The chore was done the old-fashioned way, in the sink. January took the dishes out of the hot rinse water with tongs, put them on a towel, and dried each item individually. He sent back for reprocessing those that weren't clean enough to suit him. With some frequency, Glenda called him a fussy old coot.

They remembered the first automatic dishwasher they had bought, back when they were newlyweds. It was a small, portable model built by Thor, whose name has long since disappeared from America's roster of appliance manufacturers. It would wash a small load of dishes -- although not very thoroughly -- if you were patient and didn't mind the noise.

Now they both considered dishwashers a melancholy sort of invention -- one that kept people apart. Washing dishes the old-fashioned way brought them closer. As they worked together in the narrow aisle of the Winnebago, gentle collisions were frequent. January always sang a few bars of Dancing Cheek to Cheek and Glenda laughed as if it were the first time she'd heard that old joke instead of the hundredth.

And they sometimes talked about what both considered their remarkable marriage, and wondered if other couples did the same. Their life together had been one of rare harmony and never-failing affection, marred by very few serious troubles or disagreements.

Other women throw things and slam doors when they get angry, he once told her, but you never did.

Well, at least not that you knew of, Glenda replied softly. January later thought to himself that a woman had to be a lot smarter than most people in the world to slam doors only when her husband couldn't hear them. He was right, and she was.

From the very first, they had enjoyed the same activities, the same food, the same entertainment; their tastes differed in so few ways as to be exceptional. Both spent a great deal of time reading. She watched two soap operas during the early afternoon if it was convenient, and as a rule enjoyed television more than he did, but this seldom caused friction.

January tired of watching ice skating before she did, and Glenda soon grew bored with programs about history, especially of the Civil War variety. Neither of them had much interest in sports. Watching the World Series and the Super Bowl every year was part of their schedule, but they seldom cared much who won either contest.

They both loved music, classical, semi-classical, and the many numbers they recalled with nostalgia from the 1930's and '40's. In one of his infrequent letters to their children, January once mentioned how happy their life was together, and how much they enjoyed the music they shared:

We watched Lawrence Welk a few nights ago, while we were eating dinner. The old guy was bouncing around like a teenager and I even found myself wishing I had learned to play an accordion back when I was a kid. We enjoyed the program thoroughly. The rhythm and lyrics of some of the numbers might be enough to make you young folks ill, but it brought back many happy memories to us old folks.

It made me think of you kids because I assume you are all convinced that growing old is something that will never happen to you. Mom and I used to feel the same.

Welk's bunch played Secret Love and a few other old numbers you've probably never heard, and I got to feeling sentimental. So I patted Mom on the knee and told her that you old girls sure looked a lot better in your day than the new herd does. How one like that Madonna made the cut, I'll never know. Mom teased me for dripping a sentimental tear on my enchilada, but I told her that's okay, they needed more salt, anyway.

And we went on watching TV and thinking of 1948, the year we met, and a lot of other things. Someday it will be your turn to grow old. Don't rush it, though. As unlikely as it may sound right now, you'll someday live your own moments of nostalgia.

Your kids won't understand, and you won't be able to explain it to them any better than I can to you.

Now January sat in the living room, watching Glenda as she dozed in her chair. When she was young, her posture had always been perfect; she sat erect and upright, almost rigidly at times, her feet planted squarely on the floor before her. But no longer.

When they met, he recalled, her legs and ankles were so slender. She was agile, her movements graceful and silken like the ballet dancers whose pictures and figurines she enjoyed so much. Now those lovely long legs move slowly, he thought, as do mine.

He remembered the first time he saw her as if it were yesterday. Well-dressed in a light blue suit, standing with a friend, one of her college roommates, outside a small country church in the pines. They were attending a wedding; January was a friend of the groom, and Glenda a friend of the bride.

It was a good way to start, they later agreed. And he recalled just as clearly the botanical center where they parked beside a rose garden on a Saturday afternoon a year later, so that he could take her hand and put the engagement ring on her finger.

That hand is still soft and beautiful. But mine is covered with lizard skin now, all wrinkles and ugly brown spots. Still strong, though, and well able to use a wrench, or an axe for a short while. But some of our happiest hours of our lives together have been spent in the mountains, in forests and parks, and I've lost all my desire to cut down any more trees.

She was so lovely, he thought as he watched her, and to me, she still is. That's the way women are. I wonder why it is that little boys, even though they often start out so cute and beautiful, get progressively uglier as the years go by. He remembered the Spanish proverb: El hombre, como el oso. Cuanto mas feo, mas hermoso. The man, like the bear. The uglier he is, the more beautiful.

The dictionary says that feo means ugly. It also means tough, stern, grizzled, even ferocious. The beginning student of Spanish will give you a confident, unqualified definition of the adjective; one who has studied the language for several decades will hesitate to define it with such authority.

Her hands: As strong as mine, maybe, when they needed to be. Certainly prettier even now, and seldom at rest as they are while she naps. They sewed on buttons, changed diapers, and turned the collars on my white shirts when we couldn't afford new ones. And they peeled years of potatoes, washed decades of dishes, and scrubbed acres of floors.

But those hands always held that tender touch in the early morning, when the birds first sang; the soft caress that sparked the first expressions of desire, and told me yes, even before I asked, and pulled me gently to her to share our love.

She doesn't sit as straight now as she did before, and her head nods forward. It looks as if it would hurt, but when I awaken her, she says it doesn't.

She tries to watch television or to read one of the endless succession of murder mysteries that I should think would soon bore someone with her intelligence.

But she is tired; another day is over. How many more will there be, and who will care for her after I am gone?

Through his mind ran the memories of the many songs they shared, and he wished that he could express as well as the songwriters sometimes did the mute adoration of an old man for -- how can it be said otherwise -- an old lady resting, dozing, and paying no heed whatever to his devoted gaze, nor to that of the dog at her feet.

Despite the years, she still looked like a bride, in his eyes, at least.

February scratched at the door. January wiped the mist from his eyes, kissed Glenda to awaken her so she could make the coffee for tomorrow, and took the dog for his evening walk.

They would read a while, then sleep...

CHAPTER THREE

Shake Hands, February. Good Boy!

Now Fetch The Dictionary And Sit, Please.

The American Heritage Dictionary -- Second College Edition:

Labrador retriever n. A retriever largely developed in England from stock originating in Newfoundland and characterized by a short, dense usu. black coat and notable breadth of head and chest."

This is accurate enough as far as it goes; regrettably, it is limited to a purely physical description. It makes no mention of the breed's exceptional intellect and understanding, and its devotion to humanity. An equally restrained description of the Grand Canyon might refer to it as a wide, deep hole in the ground in Arizona, formed by riverine erosion.

It wouldn't include a single word about the incredible beauty of its colors at sunrise, or how sunshine and shadow can turn it into a wonderland during a summer storm, or about the magic that its history of adventure and mystery brings to those who peer over its brink with a touch of imagination and a sense of romance.

From the same source:

Anthropocentric