Dave was a mail carrier. He wasn’t a very good one. He also wasn’t a mail carrier anymore. He died. He died a not great carrier. He didn’t love it, he didn’t die doing what he loved. He died being hit by a Federal Express truck, the white void arrow between the E and X of Fedex pointing right at him. He died being chased by an unleashed terrier. A Yorkshire terrier I believe. Very tiny dog. Dave died being chased into the street by a very tiny unleashed Yorkshire terrier and in his terror failed to look both ways. He hadn’t looked both ways because he tripped on his unlaced shoes, taking a header right into the street, the mail bag spilling Bed Bath and Beyond coupons and copies of The Lighthouse onto the oily pavement. His shoes were unlaced because previous to the chase he had been bent down, kneeling, retying the left boot, when the Yorkshire terrier clocked him. He loved retying the laces on his boots. Why didn’t he die doing that? Discreet and dexterous tasks. He loved them. Tying knots was the epitome. He was very good at tying knots. He didn’t just tie knots to tie them either, the knots had to have a purpose, and shoes with laces were the epitome of having a purpose for a knot. Dave loved epitomes. A sturdy knot taken to jostling, but not difficult to undo in a quick pinch. The classic bow knot for shoe laces usually, but he had taken to trying slightly more complex slip knots. And he had no problem taking his time to get the knot right, tying and retying. This kind of time-taking and focus on these type of simple tasks was one of the reasons he wasn’t a very good postal worker, though it’s possibly why mail carrier was the only job Dave was actually suited to. Sure he was still delivering mail after the sun went down… sometimes well past midnight, he wasn’t a very good mail carrier but he was dedicated to completing the daily yield of mail.
And so here Dave was, in his final moments, unbeknownst to him otherwise perhaps he would have happily stayed crouched down working on this shoelace knot while the terrier bolted at him and jumped all over him licking his face and perhaps pulling on his sleeve or pant legs… we’ll never know. Because as Dave was working on this new complicated knot that he had been designing on his own, Ms. Lynn Trinh-Woods let her precious yorkshire terrier named Sir Hercule Gurrough out for his evening widdle and sniff. Ms. Lynn Trinh-Woods didn’t believe in leashes or shock collars or invisible fences or any kind of cage of discipline for her pets or children, she believed that they were affects of a slavery and incarceration obsessed culture, and that there were more humane ways of building good behavior in all members of society, including dogs. Unfortunately for Dave the mail carrier, the one habit that Sir Hercule Gurrough had no control over was competing in the well known competition of Dog Versus Stranger. Ms. Lynn Trinh-Woods, through a concentrated effort of positive reenforcement and restorative justice pedagogy, had gotten Sir Hercule Gurrough to remain stoic in the face of most strangers, uniformed or no, but something about the blue and gray uniform of the post carrier, the bucket hat that Dave favored, the shorts, the long socks, something about the combination of the sunglasses on a lanyard, the army surplus combat boots and the woody woodpecker tattoo that peaked over the end of Dave’s shirt sleeves, something about all these things conspired to break Sir Hercule Gurrough’s moral upbringing and sent him back to the primal plain that lives inside every dog. The Ur-dog. The compulsion to chase, through which no philosophy could be inhibited. And so, as Mr. Hercule Gurrough bounded out the front door free to roam the front yard for a few minutes, do their business, and return to the house unhindered and unsupervised, a right that Mr. Hercule Gurrough had earned by demonstrating an unbending stoicism regardless of the sight of squirrel or jogger or bicycle messenger, the dog’s vision did alight upon the prone mail carrier Dave, and all of Mr. Hercule Gurrough’s thoughts became unhinged. And thus a chain of events were set in motion that led to Dave’s untimely and grissly death.
Ms. Lynn Trinh-Woods was working on a canvas while all this transpired. She had her sunlit artist loft down to her residence to let out Mr. Hercule Gurrough as a short break to readjust her thinking on the matter of the canvas. It was an extremely large canvas. The largest Ms. Lynn Trinh-Woods had ever worked on. She was also expecting the Fedex man to arrive with the new batch of oil paints even though she loathed seeing that obnoxious arrow logo, she much preferred the US Postal Service but her neighborhood had the slowest letter carrier she had ever encountered. Somethings you could only trust to corporations.
