I was going for my daily walk.

I say “daily,” because I should but don’t always because, as you know, I’m lazy. Undisciplined. In need of behavior modification. All those words that apply to me.

So I packed myself up, my pouch with my phone, my walking poles, I took my hat with the evergreen pine needle sprig that Kristina had stuck in to look like feathers on a Bavarian huntsman’s hat. You know the type.

And I headed left this time uphill and turned right at the corner past the corner neighbors’ house I need to get to know better, and went along the flat parallel because I had already climbed up a little.

I had told Kristina I had been this way before, but now that I looked at it I wasn’t sure. I tried to remember the street and wondered if it remembered me.

Then I came to a cross street going further up to the left, and, if I remember correctly, I went up that way and decided I hadn’t been that way before.

It’s always nice to discover something new.

At least it is when it’s nice.

And I looked at the houses periodically often, because they’re all different, and each one has something. Very few have to be felt sorry for.

So I went on some more, then turned to a block going down lower and came back the same way.

I tend to stop and rest.

I find a low wall to sit on, in available shade, and rest too long and talk to myself shaping the next blog like this one.

On one of those stop pauses, I sat down in the middle of a conversation going on across the street.

Both guys were about the same age old, the one on the right getting ready to go through his gate down the path to his house.

The other oldster, green shirt and overalls, was standing by the shiny dark pickup truck he had apparently just got out of. I was witnessing the middle of a conversation about birds on cars.

“I have nothing against birds in general. Except when they get on my car. Then I want to shoot them all.”

The other guy said, “Uh huh.”

“But these aren’t the birds I like. I like quail. They don’t want to let you shoot them around here. But down in Mexico they breed like crazy and you can shoot them all you want.”

The other guy said, “Uh huh.”

Then he went through his gate down the path and went in his house.

Green shirt overalls got in his pickup truck, talked for a while to the passenger who wasn’t there, then started the truck and drove away.

Then he turned around and drove back right past me. He didn’t notice me, which is easy to do.

So I sat a Iittle longer on the wall in the shade and thought how I could have added to the conversation.

“My step-father-in-law hated peacocks. They were loose in the neighborhood and got on the roof of his fancy car and clawed the fabric. He said he wanted to shoot them and probably would have if he had a gun. He had to settle for shooing them. Then he bought a car with a shiny metal roof and they lost interest.”

This was during the time when my Mother-in-law was in decline, and my sweet wife who was a loving daughter would sit with her for hours in the bay window and look over the porch at the neighborhood.

Peacocks came up on the porch, so they were a show and you could watch them for hours all afternoon. Shirley put out food for them so they’d stick around.

There was this one peacock. He was shorter, like the runt of the litter, and only had one leg. We never knew how he lost the other leg, but he hopped around on his one good leg, and the other peacocks bullied him and wouldn’t let him eat from their feeding bowl.

So Shirley secretly prepared a little bowl just for him and put it in the corner away from the other birds and he hopped right to it. She called him Hoppy.

Then the guy in the pickup truck came back and parked in front of his house, so the two of them really were neighbors, and he had finished doing whatever he went out to do, and all green shirt and overalls of him went in his own house next door to the other one, and I decided the show was over, at least for me, for now.

So I got up reluctantly, took my poles, and started to walk further along the street, as I heard sounds coming from the green shirt overalls bird shooter house, like he was moving boxes around, and I left him to it.