Bryan Beus

Highlight from last week’s posts to @300words

There was an unsolved (to me) mystery in front of my library for several years. The library has a very bright Gothic feel to the architecture.  There are several large spinnerets, colonnades, and jagged scaffolding all across the steep roof.  The windows are long and thin with striped bars, and the front entrance has a royal archway with a grand stairway leading into the foyer.  There is another staircase also that leads to a shaded arched balcony with locked doors.  In front of the library is a statue of a beehive—our state symbol—and an American flag raised high on a flag pole.  At the bottom of the beehive statue always rests an overloaded grocery shopping cart.

Naturally the shopping cart belongs to someone, but to whom was never apparent to me.  Every day it sits there, loaded with black plastic sacks, tarps, blankets, and with grocery bags holding empty bottles tied to the side.  Underneath it are milk jugs containing an unknown liquid covered by a rugged striped towel, and on top is a decent back-country backpack filled tight.  Though many people pass, including tidy looking library administrators, no one ever touches it save the pigeons.

Today, the owner revealed himself.  I sat down in the morning sunlight to observe the impressive architecture.  Sitting with my back against a lamp post, I pulled out my sketchbook and scribbled.  At exactly 12:30 I heard the tapping sound of someone approaching on crutches.  A man in baggy pants, a tan hat, sun-glasses, and dark green shoes came stride by stride towards the beehive statue.  Not wanting to spoil the revelation, I kept my head down and continued drawing.  He approached the shopping cart, took some bird seed out of a plastic sack and fed it to a pigeon, then picked up one of the water bottles and drank generously.

Then he left again, unworried that the shopping cart would be stolen. Thinking that he was careless for leaving it unattended, I returned to my drawing.  But when I glanced up at my drawing subject, I saw him staring back at me.  He had climbed up the second stairway to the shaded balcony and was observing me through the stone banister.  I didn’t want to stare or cause trouble, so I continued my drawing, and he continued staring for at least a quarter of an hour.

When I finished my drawing I looked back up to see him, but we was invisible again.  I gathered up my drawing utensils and zipped up my backpack.  I passed by the grocery cart and observed that it must indeed hold everything he owns.  As I walked into the library I passed by the shaded balcony with locked doors.  When I drew near enough I could see him lying on his back, his legs crossed, and a pigeon on his hat, enjoying the cool shade.

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Bryan Beus

w: www.bryanbeus.com

t: @bryanbeus

That fresh scent of…

My roommates bought a sugar glider as a pet.  It’s a marsupial similar in nature to the flying squirrel.  If you’ve ever owned one of those, you know that they seem like a great idea at first until mating season.  Then the male will secrete a saliva and a hormone that marks his territory.  The smell is akin to the smell of dead meat, and so–as I was only vaguely aware of my roommates pet–that’s what I started looking for.

Our apartment house has a history of dead meat.  The previous owner of the house lives three states away and she checks the house to find out if there are any problems with it every three or four years accordingly.  She would care more, but the last time she came she found ten more tenants living in the house on mattresses in the living room than she had contracts for.  Though she did get rid of the house’s stowaway tenants, she’s since decided she’d rather not know what happens under this roof.

The contract I signed before moving in said that cleaning checks would happen every month.  I’m a somewhat clean person, so when I saw that this place would be clean at least once a month, I was satisfied.  But when cleaning checks actually came about the first month, I learned I was perhaps the only one in the house who took it seriously.  The previous—and then current—landlady certainly didn’t.

So, when the house sold to a new owner I voiced my excitement for cleaning checks.  The new owner was glad to see that one tenant in the house needed no prodding, and we had a cleaning check the first week upon her closing the deal.  My roommate Taylor was excited too—perhaps more so because with the closing, all of the other tenants on our floor moved out and left their kitchen cupboards full of free food.  But the refridgerator was scary.

We found green bags of ham from 2007.  I think Sam, from Green Eggs and Ham, would not have lived to finish his story had he tried it.  There was more too: two-year old mayonnaise, some stripey and freezer-burned meet that must have been chicken, and jars that could only be discerned as jam by their labels.

All in all, we threw away four trash bags of old food.  It took six black grocery bags to hold the non-smelling trash we found throughout the house, but we were mostly glad to get rid of the first four.  Within a few weeks, with a little daily effort, our floor of the house—the main floor—was clean enough to have guests over.

And then…mating season.