You, you who are not my ma ma are my friend. If you have not seen my hair dew or me among the dead end people, then you have not observed the social freedom I have indulged in since I have left the streets coated with merbromin in the effort the pharmacy has taken in my hometown burg to keep the sidewalk sanitary. My ma ma sent me to a communal theocratic day school housed in a Quonset hut. On my end, people have come to me and behaved as if you and I have and you and I were always among the rotting trees where delicate flowering fungi fingered the rim of the maple trunk. Someone said to me what do you want to do with so many finches? Says I, I want to huff the stench of fowl because I can no longer eat after the health regime imposed on me by the strict limit of items I was allowed to ingest by the bylaws of my communal theocratic day school. I cannot indulge in hazardous but delicious comestibles. I instead inhale the vapors of benign and pungent meats, vegetation, and especially mixed compounds prepared to the exact measure found in my ma ma’s deck of cards.

Examine the photo of my ma ma. She always wore her dresses inside out so that she did not expose her buttons. She wouldn’t expose her buttons because exposed buttons are things for unfastening clothes. The makers made clothing to keep decent people decent. My ma ma was scandalized by zippers. She froze in throbbing Victorian rage at the sight of exposed dainties such as lace or white athletic socks with red bands around the calves. Clothing should have no visible opening, she said. Scandal is a matter of perspective, I suppose. Some people can see a long distance. My ma ma taught me to observe blue beetles foraging in the fallen maple leaves. My ma ma died in a gunnysack.

I know you have wondered why I wear my Sunday clothes on Monday. At first I believe you thought it was because I slept in them. You believed I had slept lightly as my decent-making items were not wrinkled and in fact appeared to be crisply creased by a white-hot iron. This would be a very strange thing to happen if you were a stockinet cloud and not so strange if you were a cloud freshly laundered and the laundry working crew had just pulled you out of the tumbler and you had ironed yourself. For you, though, this is not true. You cannot use the iron yourself because you are afraid of hot things and cold things are so much like you that you would never want to leave them. A magnet is a cold item so attracted to itself that when it finds another one it doesn’t want to leave it. You drink room temperature water from a room temperature tumbler. You do not drink water directly from the tap when you pour water into your pewter tumbler from your container. The water sits in a pitcher on your desk secured so that it will not be knocked over by your cat hurling himself onto the hand drawn landscape where you play your one-sixth of an inch scale miniature battle games. You know you are not allowed to retain anything that might get damaged by the cat’s bodily blows. You let the cat out when the cat squeaks like a human infant. When the cat goes out you sit at the window and hold a miniature grenadier with an ostrich plume hat. The cat walks into the yard and undulates under the humming utility wire that is a perch for a charm of finches. I’ve never known you to wear ocher. I’ve never known you to write down your address. I have never known you to do anything twice. Except for these items of note: You wear crumbled slacks and a natty sweater. You wear a hat when you exit your door, even if the sun burns through the fog, even if wind does not move the branches, even if you have to leave a ringing phone behind. You wear a hat except when you go indoors and then you remove your hat. You are a person who needs a hat rack. Because of this I am sure we will never get along, completely. I don’t even own a chest of drawers. For my clean clothes I keep a cardboard box. The other box contains my cast off decent-makers. A piece of clothing absorbs oil, dust, and the grime of cast off indecency. Soiling and washing my clothes are the two activities essential to blocking out the dangers that surround me. These dangers risk penetrating and making myself a producer of danger. Something has shifted to change my body. There’s nothing I can do about it. You can tell this is the kind of person I am because my clothes are always clean and worn from the wash. You, however, do not sneeze because a sneeze risks repetition. And because you do not do anything twice, I am never certain if we will ever meet again. Nonetheless, I count you with your hat and rumpled clothing as my two-minded friend.