Philosophy Made Simple by Robert Hellenga

the cove; the sandhill cranes who sometimes visited from the park. The kingfisher and the heron and the cranes,
     like other winter Texans, were getting ready to head north for the summer. The grebes and the kites and the hawks, like Rudy,
     would stay all year.

    He was reluctant to call Meg and Molly too often because they were still angry. At least Meg was. She couldn’t understand why he’d moved so far away from home. He wanted her to drive down with the dogs, but she didn’t think it was a good idea.
     “They miss you, Pop. Just like the rest of us. But the kids love them.” He figured she was holding them for ransom.
    This was something new for Rudy. He’d never been at odds with his daughters before. He’d read all the articles in the Sunday papers about the problems that fathers had with their daughters, but he’d never experienced these problems firsthand. Oh,
     he’d had plenty of battles with the girls, especially when they were in high school, before Helen died, but they’d always been friends, that was the important thing, they’d always been good friends. He was beginning to look forward to Mollys wedding in August the way a child might begin looking forward to Christmas, even though it was only April, because he hoped it would mend the circle that had been broken. Molly and TJ were going to India in June, returning later in the summer. He wanted to put an end to this estrangement, which tugged at his heart, drew it down like a lead sinker on the end of a fishing line.

    Early in the morning on the anniversary of Helen’s death, April 22, Rudy was down by the river. As he turned to head back to the house, his arms aching pleasantly from the weight of his binoculars, he heard a distant trumpet blast. He thought it might be a whooping crane and his heart leaped up, but he scanned the horizon with his heavy binoculars in vain.
    His fleeting experiences of beauty — and there were a lot of them — were so intense that they were painful rather than pleasurable.
     He couldn’t figure out what to make of them. The birds, like Socrates’ bird, reminded him of the soul, gazing upward and caring nothing for the world below. Norma Jean’s paintings — there was one in every room now — opened like windows onto an uncharted inland sea. The Michelangelesque curves along the top of the bookcases stirred up an ache in him, like an old war wound, every time he took a book down off a shelf. Instead of becoming happy he became irritable and impatient. He lost histemper at material objects, as if he suspected that the universe was conspiring against him, playing tricks on him. He bumped into things in the dark, tripped over his shoes; he dropped things in the kitchen; he spilled his wine at dinner; the plastic garbage sacks tore when he tried to pull them out of the trash container he’d bought for the kitchen.
    He was mildly depressed in the evening, not hungry at all, but he fixed a small panfried steak with a sauce made with garlic and balsamic vinegar. Fussing over food was important. It gave a shape to the day: breakfast, lunch, dinner; beginning, middle,
     end. He ate a Bosc pear for dessert and did the dishes. When the dishes were done, he sat at the kitchen table with a glass of Chi-anti and looked through his
Petersons Guide.
According to the guide, the whooping cranes, or “whoopers” — there were only ninety-six of them left — would have departed in March on their annual migration to the Arctic Circle, so he’d probably been mistaken. But he browsed through the
Guide
anyway. None of the other birds in the valley made a “trumpetlike call.” He was still looking through the guide when Meg called from Chicago. She’d just taken some flowers to Helen’s grave in the southeast corner of Graceland Cemetery, far from the Fields and the Pullmans and the Potter Palmers, and was weepy as she remembered how her mother had mended her favorite dress after she’d torn it on a nail on the back porch,