This is the End

I have been itching to write for a few days now. But distractions and the eternal demands of cleaning and upkeep have taken precedence. I am trying to tap into the mother lode, the interior monologue that runs clear and strong within. The stream that is the me of me, the purest and unfiltered languague of the self, unrestricted by naysayers and the boot heels of the world. Why is that people, not all people, but most people, want to bring others down, to limit and restrict them, to inhibit others? Why is that most people are so desperate and unhappy. unfulfilled? I speak for myself, but also for many, the mass of men. Recognizing this inner sanctum and accessing it should be my objective from now on out. Find a straw, a pipeline into the channel, then channel the energy, treating it as the 24 karat gold that it is. Be positive, be sure, and above all, be unaffected by anything pedestrian around you. Or me. It may be misapplied, but the quote from Shylock [CQ] in Othello works here: "to thine own self be true." In the weeks from early fall to Christmas, this time of transition has yielded its changes. They may yet be for the future, but the seeds are there and the time is nigh. Step out of the shadow in order to discover oneself in the both harsh and warm sunlight of the brilliant, forthcoming year! Rise up, Arjuna!

Last Mowing

I mowed the lawn yesterday and finished it today. It takes me three hours. I use a walk behind mower that is really too small for the job. Nonetheless, I have mowed my own lawn for sixteen seasons with the exception of last year when I had two men do it for me, at Sally's urging. It was a present. And one time, years ago, when neice Emilie Inoue visited, and she mowed it for me when I was off at work. Jan's Katrine may have mowed it once, too, or part of it. No matter who, I do the best job by far, but it takes me three hours. Nice neat, annal retentive, perfect rows, and I expand the lawn area. Most lawn services allow the grass to creep in, making the area they mow smaller each time, inch by inch each time. I have chosen to mow my lawn as a matter of pride, carrying it a bit too far, possibly. I have noticed that no one else on the street mows their own lawn. While I see it as a right of ownership, a kind of privilege and responsibility. I am old-fashioned, I guess. Most of the neighbors look at me sideways, as if I am some kind of a nutbar. The truth is, there are many other things to do with three hours most weekends between May and November. Many, many other things.

A few years from now, I may not be able to do this, or, maybe, I'll have my own tractor? It is not about money, exactly. I have gone through two mowers since we moved here. The first one was a Honda and it was very expensive; the current one is from Sears and it cost about half as much as the first one. Not including cleaning, I have spent about a thousand dollars on them. Professional lawn services cost about a thousand for a year. So, by my own accounting, I am about 15,000 dollars ahead,a rough computation. How do I calculate any lost opportunity cost?

Holiday Season

OK. Thanksgiving's bird is still in my stomach, and here I am thinking: the holidays are upon us again and, shit, nothing's resolved, we're broke, it's Christmas present time and no scratch, the ugly prospect of more credit card debt. On an errant, I see the pewter Porsche convertibles out on the road, the horse and trailer in the stable over at Echo Farm where Sophie's taken a group riding lesson. We are surounded by conspicuous signs of affluence. For a fleet moment, instead of remembering how much I have, I got lost. I can never have that frame of mind. It is sick. How much we have, mostly in ourselves and our great health, taken for granted most of the time, and in real estate. But I wonder, why, when I see something that I like, say a nice blue sloop, about 30 feet in length, or that great car or a dreamt of, never taken trip to the sunny Carribean, I immediately conclude that it is an impossible dream. Relatively mediocre people do the same thing. Apparaently lusting after a material goal, they achieve it. I see this all the time on the television or in the news, and on informercials like "no money down" and so on. Why am I not good enough to earn such rewards? Low or limited self-esteem must be the issue, otherwise, what separates me from my dreams, why is my reality always so desperate? This Holiday season will be the one, the upturn of the wheel of fortune. It only awaits my saying it is so. Why not? What's to lose. I always think of the Thoreau quote about the mass of men leading lives of quet desperation. Even knowing this, I am still unable to subvert its bitter taste, its mean reality.

Thanksgiving

Dateline: Hollywoods, Little Compton, November 2004. For all those years, we trekked to the Marion Osborn Sherer Memorial Woods for an outdoor, pilgrimesque Thanksgiving. Every member of the clan would arrive, usually from places like Worcester and Boston, but in recent years, from New York and Greenwich, no longer Yankee-centric, watering holes of the family as it spreads out, away from Providence, Fall River and Worcester. A fire would be blazing in the stone hearth, with a scaldingly hot urn of scorched coffee on it. Turkeys would arrive in the back seat of the cars, wrapped in newspapers and blankets to keep them warm. This was an era before the SUV, before the age of the cell phone, a time when the immediate family fit underneath the roof of Red Top Farm and a few of the year-round houses in town. Later on, as the flock grew and Red Top no longer belonged to the family, the fragmentation began. It was not so bad, probably, for some. In any family, any group, there are people who would just as well prefer to be elsewhere with other people, and the high noon meeting around the beech tree in the heart of the woods, a few drinks and a hastily gobbled down meal freed them to move on elsewhere after an hour of two of forced "togetherness." This may have always been the case, but what I remember best was how excited I always was to go there, run around in the woods with my cousins and second cousins and uncles and aunts and once-removeds. Vivid among them all was Grandpa, the patriarch, Joe Sherer in his woolen lumberjack checked plaid jacket, a khaki hat with its long, curved beak of a visor. We were so little or he was so tall, or both. Grandpa would make chewing gum--usually Beemans or Blackjack--appear as if by magic out of the radio in the kitchen. He would take me on his huge tractor while he mowed the lawns with its three gangs of rotary blades whirling. He was the grandpa who had a fireworks display on the same lawns on the forth, who fell down the front staircase on another forth of July, and the first dead person I ever saw, as he lay in an open coffin only feet from where he had fallen days before. Thanksgiving in the Hollywoods does not happen any longer. The property has been subdivided and some of it developed by 'outsiders' and the patriarch and all but a single son, a single in-law son are deceased. The world has turned on the event that in the town's tricentennial and the nation's bicentennial year had been a fixture for some fifty years. That year Yankee magazine displayed a centerfold picture of us standing around the tree, some 76 strong in 1976. It shows the value of traditions, how hard they are to establish, how easily they are lost. Memories, however, of those dozens of sometimes cold and raw, snow and icy afternoons remains with me, and everyone who was ever there, always.

The Trout

A long, long time ago, the year I first met her, my friends labelled her as contentious. It is as accurate today as it was back then. Fortunately, the mood swings and she, long since my wife and the mother of our child, is not locked in the same mode all of the time. She can be warm and loving and receptive, but more often these feelings seem directed towards and reserved for our daughter than myself. When she is irasible and confrontational, I call her Trout because I discern a slight jutting of the chin coupled with a pugnacious attitude that is prefereably avoided. I liken it to the frozen moment just before a fish lunges for a fly. If we are face to face, I know that epithets are forthcoming, sometimes even utensils, like the fork she once planted between my eyes. If we are on the phone and I sense the Trout's surfacing, the phone is sure to click, disconnected. We have lots of hang-up calls, more these days it seems. It seems as though Trout has risen to the bait many times this fall. Is it that it is a time of high tension and anxiety? Or is it a period when she is too much on her own, a time when I pick up the telephone, all I must do is listen? She monologues, sometimes pretending it is the clumnsiness of the cell phone, though mostly she is just shouting her point at unreceptive ears. The Trout has been most righteous of late, often stirred up, angry, whether it is the presidential campaign or the election results themselves, or the squirrel in the attic of our house. I tease her about the rodent that is almost never evident when I come home with the dogs. In fact, I think the Trout has jumped on land and may now need a platform, some kind of a soapbox to stand on and wage war upon its captive audience of husband and daughter. Trout at Speaker's Corner! Command Performance! Perhaps the Trout will go to deeper waters for the winter. We do not like its churlishness; we do not like its bite.

Sleeping With Dogs

I've been sleeping with the dogs this fall, especially as it gets cold. Nothing brings the animal fraternity closer than cold or hunger, I think. One dog is usually down by my feet, behind my knees, while the other is alongside, stretched out like a human. More often than not, I wake up with a dog's head next to my own on a pillow, and the dog alarm clock is probably as infallible as any wake up call, although that licking on my neck or hands is at the edge of my tolerance, I appreciate their gesture. Most important, the dogs are warm and the want to be next to me, pushing against me, wedged in tight. They seem to look forward to bedding down for the night and once lodged in, they seldom move all night. I guess they can be dirty, so I tend to brush them more, knowing that they are going to jump onto my bed. They are a bit hard on the bedding, without a doubt, and I am not wild about their breath and the ocasional fart. Truth is, they flatulate less than my wife does, sleep cozier and without question are more appreciative of my company than the wife. Sincce we never have sex since our daughter arrived thirteen years ago, the wife and dogs are even on that score. So, now, here's what I am wondering: should I tell her that I'm moving to my own bed, that it is either she and the dogs and deal with it, or do I deprive myself of their company, and the dogs one of their great pleasures by relegating them back to the sofa? So who will suffer more when the family gets back together, the dogs or the wife? It has been an honor to have been so welcome in the four-legged animal kingdom, if only for a while. It is going to be a bit sad to return to sleeping in a fetal position on my side of the bed, all around. The moral of the story, if there is one? It is nice to be appreciated! I don't know how this will be resolved right now.

Joe and Bill

There are two octogenarian uncles up the field and laneway from me. They seldom speak. I have no idea whether there is antipathy, or what it is the way it is. Both are strong men, leaders in their time. Bill has been cut down by cancer of the tongue and throat, and can no longer speak, literally. Still spry, he rattles around his house, alone most of the time. Joe is normally healthy and vigorous as a horse, married to a ar younger "trophy" woman, and he fishes, plays golf and travels all over the world in pursuit of salmon, trout and upland grouse. He even pulls his own lobster pots during the summer months.

Both men went to Harvard as undergraduates after years at private preparatory schools, and they both lived in Massachusetts much of their adult lives. Both have had major, life-threatening health issues this fall, one an aortic aneuryism and the other a serious lung infection. I should throw in my own father here. He lives only a few miles East in the same town. He, too, lives with a woman and so has constant company and an abundance of visitors. He, too, attended elite schools and has all his degrees from Princeton. I have seen him but once all fall. We argue. It is preferable to coexist nearby in isolation to expressing the rage of a son towards a father, and that of a father towards a son. Many things about him set me off, most of which I can overlook, except that I do not wish to be betlittled. There is built-in antipathy to this universal relationship which I understand all too well. He is gregarious and pleasant to most other people in the universe, so I am the odd man out, seeming the ingrate while I am merely trying to survive psychologically.

So this makes four of us who seldom speak, with the exception that I visit Bill every couple of days at least, my uncle and father once in a month or three. Although I am no actuary, in five years, I would guess it is unlikely that two of the three will be alive. I am assuming my own longevity. All these well wrought, human warships, passing uncaring by day as well as in the night, warily.

Equilibrium

Equilibrium. A big word. An important sounding word, denoting balance, harmony and peace. Hard to imagine a world in equilibrium. Skyscrapers in Houston float in a state called isostatic equilibrium. If the engineers calculate the weight of the building correctly and the cubic footage of the hold for the foundation, the building stays put; if not, it will rise or sink accordingly. Just look at the sidewalks around them.

These bonus days must come in the fall and the spring as temperate ranges of the land and sea approach equality. I am no scientist, but the stillness--both natural and totally unnatual seeming--is rare and precious. Waters, normally swept with whitecaps in summer, in the southwesterly "fair weather" breeze that powers in nearly every afternoon, and in winter, arriving with a cold, moist punch from the northwest points on the compass are like a mirror. If they often appear feral and wild, today they are passive and reflective, windows into the sky above, or distant shores bouncing below the horizon in exaggerated stripes, distortions one sees in the Fun House of an amusement park, or even a tranquil inland lake, but not as often by the sea.

At night, I notice fisherman out trawling their nets, taking final advantage of the mild conditions. For weeks, there have been few boats at all, but now, they do not squander the opportunity to fish qith relative ease. Many of them will call it a year after this reprieve; a hardy few will tough it out all winter long. I see their lights criss-crossing the estuary. Since land and sea are so balanced, the view is strangely clear. I only wonder, how long can this last? Three days, maybe four, or five, at most?

Were there such a thing as pathetic fallacy and isostasy [cq definition of isostasy and equilibrium], would the powers of war and disharmony, greed and malace be silenced, could there ever be such a moratorium, we would all be the better for it. Days and especially nights such as these, more than Christmas for the Western World, should be called silent and holy nights. Equilibrium yields contemplative time, a moment for introspection. It is impossible to make enough of this.

Helger's Turkey Farm

This is a bad week for turkeys. Every day I pass by Helger's Turkey Farm and glance off the the raised cages where they spend their entire lives enclosed behind chicken wire, with lights on 24/7. All of these turkeys are white. I know. White turkeys. Big joke. Next week most of these birds will be brown and stuffed with all manner of chestnuts and bread crumbs and onions and sage and on and on and on. And they will be a the epicenter of so many American families. How enobling, dying for one's country like they do. I know there has been a push to make the wild turkey the national bird in lieu of the apparently squalid and endangered bald-headed eagle, but that's beside the point. And Martha Stewart will be behind bars for this year's Thanksgiving meal. As to whether it is a "good thing" in her words, or not is anybody's guess. As for me, I think it is a waste of federal resources. So all these white turkeys that I have passed since the day last summer when they presumably arrived in their gulag to be raised, fattened and slaughtered, I bid you farewell. Yours what not to reason why. Yours, for that matter, was never to fly.

Tire Kickers

Goddamit. So we are amidst selling the wonderful old house of ours, warts and all. A few months back, to get the business, one real estate agency said our house should sell for what seemed like a whole lot of money. Several others appeared to corroborate the price, with one lone exception. Choice of agents made, now things have turned south on us, amidst a "hot" market.

Hot! Fuggedaboudit. We have had lots of lookers, open houses, more open houses. And not a single offer. We have lowered the price once, by 50,000 dollars and again, by another 50,000. The real estate team have not lowered their bite one iota, and to be fair, we have yet to ask them to do this. We just want the place to sell and move on. I am pretty sure it is about price. We, the real estate companies, have set it too high. So here we sit upon our thumbs, broke or nearly so. But we can't say this too loudly, as we'll signal our vulnerability to a harsh, unkind world. One interested couple are hemming and hawing. They live nearby, the wife wants it, the husband doesn't and they cannote quite survey for the most recent asking price and they don't want to sell the house they now live in, and yadda, yadda, yadda, that maybe, mind you, there's yet to be an offer made, they can co something in the 700s, yadda, yadda, yadda. I don't want to hear about or know their problem. Once again, it feels as though we are being played as fools, that we are supposed to soften and feel for them and find some way to get, as they say in France, fucked. Merde, alors! I want an offer that makes sense. Not a lowball offer, not a "we are worried about" this or that. A truly old house on a beautiful lot, a quiet road, with a barn and two outbuildings, a well, a white picket fence. Believe me, there are problems with it and whomwever buys a 1751 two bay Cape style house should know this, or not even bother thinking about such a place. All I ask is that someone happen by immediately and make a reasonable offer, say for $795,000 and the place is theirs, and we will all be very fortunate. But no more tire kicking, no more we can't quite do what you are asking because we want our cake and to eat it, too, at your expense. It angers me. It is boringh. Tire kickers should all be rounded up, and shot at dawn

"You're Nothing Compared to Me!"

This is an actual quote, from a father to his eldest son. Add on, "...at my age" to make the sentence complete. It was delivered on a Sunday evening meal, the end of a weekend visiting the parents. Sally and I left in the middle of the meal to drive back to New York. My mother and step-grandmother were present. I cannot recollect who else, one of my sisters, perhaps. Neither of them would remember such a moment anyway, as they are in total denial about the failure of the father-son relationship. I make all of them uneasy. They feel criticized, even when I do not criticize. I make them feel "insecure." And on it goes. The issue gets back to the notion of "measuring up." I guess the father needs to better better than his father, and somehow, he needs more, he needs to be better than his son. I don't understand this quite, since nothing that I am, I guess, all I want for my daughter--not having a son--is that she be fulflled, happy. I want everything for her, nothing less. I want to give her everything I possibly have to give. I cannot forgive my father because he is emotionally desperate. I cannot forgive him because he tries to crush me. I cannot forgive him, yet according to everyone, I must. I must, somehow, before it comes to an end, make some sort of peace. I must be so steeped in war I cannot see the forest for the trees. A lifetime full of never measuring up and being nothing is bigger than my capacity to say it is all O.K. Sally says I may regret this. I wonder. Alll I can say, right now, is "no, I won't."

White Fields

This morning I was not elysium, but on earth, for me, it probably came close. I guess I could get into a plane and fly, say, to Nepal or hike up to the snows of Kilamanjaro, or Yosemite Valley after a vintage Ansel Adams snow. But day to day, out my own window, a view I hope to have forever, this is it. A beautiful, high pressure system has locked itself into the region for the next few days. Still and without any cloud cover, a hard cold settled in and when I awoke this mornings everything from the shingles on the rotten roof to the fields above and below the house, was white. Not a little bit white, but a solid, wintery white. It has all burned off today and may not return for another week or two, but it was a harbinger of a winter only weeks away. These next few mornings may well have frosts, but by day, the air temperature should climb into the 50s, governed mostly by the temperature of the ocean. They will be "bonus days," a godsend, a special gift to cherish and appreciate when such warmth and beauty will be rare until a time when the days will once again grow longer and the crocii return. This is my faith, that they will and that I, immortal, will be here to see their return.

Zeroing In

No. I am not thinking about Japanese pilots over the Pacific. I took my two rifles out of their cases and shot them the other day. The occassion for shouldering the weapons was that a rather formidable-sized coyote was hanging out around the place, and my dogs would be no match for him or his pack. Coyotes and coydogs have taken over the ecosystem here in the past decade or two. They have no predators, aside from man with guns or poison. The rabbit and skunk and possum population is in control; the number of missing and unaccountable domestic pets is as high as it has ever been. So I had the coyote dead in my sights with a 30-30 and fired. I had not shot the rifle in so long, I had no idea whether I was high or low, left or right. As the early dawn sun was behind me and the coyote was confused, I actually pulled off a second shot, again without result. So yesterday, I hammered an old garbage can top to a tree about 125 yards across the field and began firing a few shots at a time, looking for a pattern. Only one 30-30 slug grazed the tree; one .22 bullet nicked the bark much lower on the trunk. And thus I began the process of sight adjustment, a click or two at a time. Three clusters later, the .22 is deadly accurate. I have grouped shots in clusters no bigger than a silver dollar. The next time I see old Wily out there, I'll reach for the varmit rifle instead of the 1894 Winchester, knowing that an accurately placed shot will be far more deadly. I am now zeroed in.

Measuring Up

The great, overarching issue is measuring up. The concept is seen in a pack of wolves, or lions, or with human politics and values. Who is the top dog? Who gets the lioness? Who is the president? Who has the biggest and best toys? Who regulates the competition? Nobody. Who allows the competition? Each of us. What drives us towards the inevitable failure we will encounter? There is always going to be someone bigger, faster, smarter or even, if you can accept it, luckier. And if you are the fastest man in the world and win an olympic gold medal, in a matter of months or very few years, you will be slower. There will be a new champion, a more ferocious dog, a more rapacious capitalist, and so on. The great crippling effect is living beneath the shadow of greatness. The standard is virtuallly unapproachable, and practically speaking, is impossible. The survivalist in me says eschew the fray, you will only come out defeated, or at the very least, chose a different venue where there may be a probability, however remote, of succeeding. The measuring up invades everything, like a tea steeped for a lifetime, with the danger of its becoming bitter. Or of inhibiting every attempt to push beyond the walls, to break through them to find freedom and sunlight. I realize that this is very much my issue. And when the ruling bodies--the headmaster, the boss, the father and mother--spend energy trying to control you, to make you feel less, to make you feel smaller than you actually are, you get a double whammy, a doube incentive to clam up tight. And, if the ember is not extinguished, the kernel of something more deep, nearly lost, inside. Greatness out of greatness comes, and the genes are there, the aspirations masked, but everpresent. The occluded ember is my hope, my persisitent dream, my way of looking forward to a satisfaction. One hope that life's mysteries do not intrude before one achieves one's destiny. I sometimes think of the positive aspects of the saying, "to whom much is given; much is expected." How long can one avoid being measured?

Middle of the Night, Awake Blues

The cold snap's passed for a time, thank god. It was pretty miserable around here for a few days, hovering around the fireplace, or the space heaters. We made the best of it, I think. But I welcome the return of more "seasonable weather". Now I am awake, feeling like the money's running out, that we have bills to pay and no offer to buy our house in sight. I am increasingly worried. We have tapped out our lines of credit and barring a deus ex machina of some sort, the margin between being fine and disaster is very, very thin. So I worry. And then I think about the move and what am I going to be doing? If I had a job, an income, a set of work friends to bounce off of instead of just a teenage daughter and a wife on a mission to create Art, I would feel much more balanced. The thing is to just keep walking, whether it perceived as a precipice or as wide as an interstate highway, it is unimportant. What is important is simple fortitude. Keep on walking. Things have a way of resolving themselves, and if we just hang on, they will resolve themselves for the better, not for worse.

Snow?

It is white outside. This is the first time that I have been here for a snowstorm. During the night, I noticed how the heavy rain that had been drumming on the roof had stopped, It had only turned into snow. There's about an inch or two and it continues, driven from the northeast in the classic, New England fashion. It is very exciting, even more so for Sophie. The dogs, initially intrigued, have resumed their positions, one on the sofa and the other curled in a chair near the fireplace. It is cold enough that we see our breath before us; it isn't so bad, actually, with long underwear, a shirt, a heavy Irish wool sweater and a fiberpile fleece jacket, a winter hat with its earflaps down found on the beach last spring. Two little space heaters in the bathroom and kitchen are keeping up with the temperature right now, but we are on the edge, I am sure. I am going to be appalled when I see my electrical bill for the month. And Sally wants us to tough it out until December 1, when we have an available apartment next door to the one we have leased from late December through May. I want to go outside and see our new surroundings. Snow makes everything different, as though we see things through a completely new lens.

Stone

The big boys and their toys are here. After two years of chasing down the local stone man, at a time when I had a bit more money in my pocket than I do today, Bobby Carr shows up to square the walls at the entrance to our driveway. As you might know, these projects change with each zephyr of wind. No problem, I'll put such and such a stone in vertically as a cap to end the wall, and I'll crawl along the edge of the property, "you'll be amazed at how much this machine can do" and we'll fill up a day. Well. The day is still a day, as far as I know. But Bobby has been here and away and back again a dozen times in the past three days, usually leaving Steve to fiddle with the excavator, or Billy with the broken teeth. On this third day on the job, the end cap has turned into a pair of returns at the entrance, no end caps, no holes drilled for chain. And Bobby was talking about not marking the stones when he lifts them, but there are scratches and gashes on all of them, so I don't know. Was I not enough in control of the project? I am pretty much trusting in Bobby's eye and experience here. I wonder what The Wife will say when she sees the results? I am wondering, for that matter, what I will think of them later today, when they are done working. I need to go up and say hello to them soon, and check out what they are doing. One thing we have a lot of here is material. There are more rocks here at Stone Pile than almost anywhere, and Bobby says they would cost a fortune to buy. And they are beautiful, huge stones. There is a pile of brush that they have cleared off of the wall which they plan to burn today. I am watching a breeze come up from the north and wondering if this is the best time for them to burn anything out of doors?

Susan's Breasts

Susan had the most perfect, symmetrical breasts I ever saw and touched. Neiether the largest nor the smallest, just, absolutely perfect, uplifted, responsive. Did I ever tell her that, back then? It is distasteful to dissect or worship body parts, so probably not. You take what you get, it's an all or nothing package deal. This is my recollection all these years later. I know I thought it, and I doubt that she needed to be told this by me, not being her only boy friend, yet, who doesn't want to be told they are beautiful by someone that they love? How can one ever say love and beautiful enough? One cannot.

Perfection, in this relationship, was skin deep: we did not last together long. Perfection breaks both ways; we were flawed, unlike Susan's breasts. I left for a three week trip out west, flying to Portland to pick up a new car, drive north to meet friends in Idaho, then down to California, then west to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Aspen and eventually from Lake Ogalalla across the wide, dry plains and back to lush, manicured Connecticut. It was before the age of cellular phones and constant contact, and I wanted to be free. Intuitively, I knew something was not working. I was relieved to leave New York, and Susan and even her lovely breasts. Nevertheless, I was surprised--even hurt--when I returned to an empty SoHo loft at summer's end, only to find all traces of her gone. Had I really thought that she would still be there, waiting for me to caress her perfect melon breasts beneath me after alll those weeks away? Had I understood that no one with any self-respect would have stayed on in my room without some indication from me that they were really wanted there, not sort of wanted, but invited to please stay? She had wanted to go west with me, I intuited, never asking her, but I had not wanted her to come. What I knew was that I wanted "space." I probably never used that word. I hope. But this is hindsight and it is easy to see my own youthful self-absorption and inexperience; it was unlikely that I would understand this ahead of time. My trip was really just another one of the "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover" that Paul Simon sang about that year. There were many ways I left and how I was left behind. One always remembers the latter, if not always the former, though I would like to say that I remember everyone I loved or who loved me, I am sure I do not.

I remember much more about Susan than her perfect breasts. I think that she loved me, I remember thinking that she was a wounded bird. Her mother had committed suicide in the Stanhope Hotel when Susan was a little girl, with young Susan discovering her dead after school. I remember meeting Susan's relatives, being trotted around to meet them, and Susan's remark "this is it, what's left of my family." They were all nice enough, but this was premature. My bond with Susan was not secure enough for such emotional overload. Susan's father died around the time we knew each other, leaving most of his considerable estate to a former nun, Susan's stepmother in name alone. There was no relationship between the two, no "there, there." The father was the last of his German Jewish financier tribe. Imagine that, he married a former Catholic nun? Imagine, his only daughter growing up between Palm Beach, Easthampton, Deal, and NYC's Stanhope Hotel. Later she would board at the Balwin School in Philadelphia and a private, college in upstate New York. She turned into a photographer of some reknown, publishing several books of photographs, a young heiress with absoloutely perfect breasts. I'd like to look her up, and down, and see how they, and she, have weathered over all these years. A married man, I can only think and write about them: I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Sign on the Line

It is official. A contract; a deposit check. We are tenants through Memorial Day, 2005. Sally's pushing us to stay in the freeze through December 1st. There is ice on the elbow joint of the outside shower and there are frozen icicles hanging from the showerhead. It is cold, for sure. Two flocks of Canadian geese wing swiftly south, headed more towards Sakonnet Point then along the eastern shore. I wonder if their navigation system is so subtle that they do not need to curve and follow the land; they just fly the straight and shortest route to, say, Maryland, sleeping on the water if they need to pause at night. Do they, or are they like sailors, running their ships around the clock. Only with a goose, there cannot be a watch system. It would either be fly, or float, or, that failing, sink. Another gaggle honks its way by, between the river and my windows. It is about right, signing a lease, the pipes freezing, the birds heading for more hospitable territory.

My mother stayed here until about this time ten years ago. She had cancer; she knew she was near the end. She knew that she probably would never see another spring. I know she cried when she drove up the lane on a similar November day, raw and rainy. She was no coward. She did not complain. She wanted more, however circumcribed her life had become. She wanted her snowdrops and muscarii to push through the thawing earth, the buds on the trees to swell, the air grow warmer, sweeter, and to see the geese heading up, not down the river of no return. No one ever told me how it was that fall day, but I know it was just this way. How could she have known, or we, that within one month she would be gone?

Big Enchilada

The Whole Family is here tonight. That is, The Wife; The Daughter; The Twai Doggies; and I, The Dad. It is hard to believe that it is November, the north winds are blowing, it is not quite freezing and the rasberries have finally met their match over the weekend with a hard frost. "Alack, Ruin! They shout from the trees. Stupid bloody acorns!" [Spike Hawkins, circa late 1960s, London]. Sophie is playing the piano very beautifully. Sally is reorganizing the bookshelves; I've been building a new pantry or a china closet, and a clothes closete where once there was a furnace. We visited Uncle Bill this evening, walking the dogs. It is so hard to see him and communicate. He cannot speak; he cannot hear well. But I love him. He is an important person in the galaxy that I have known. I am guessing that he is 83, since dad is 82. A wonderful soup--salt pork, escarole, white beans, garlic, olive oil--is brewing on the stove. I can feel the wind gusting, ripping through the uninsulated walls. But the whole family is here. We are together. We are well; it is as good as it gets, but I won't say anything because drawing attention to something good is sure to derail it. There has never been such music at Stonepile! Now, if only... The worm, the worm!

Seller's Angst

We're waiting. Waiting. Waiting. The scenario in a hot market was to sell the house at three times the purchase price and move on with our lives. Six or seven weeks have passed. The traffic is slow; the offers are nill. And we have dropped the price twice now, a mere hundred thousand less than we started. There was yet another open house today. Let it be said that our broker has been working hard to get things going. Three "live ones" visited today, a beautiful, moderate fall afternoon in South Salem. The house looks pretty good right now. Someone should want to buy it. The prospect of winter and oil, no cash and so on is a nightmare. And, of course, the buyers sense this. And we thought it was an optimal time to sell, a hot market, lower interest rates than many will see again for years, a time the Wall Street Journal touted as the best to sell in an unstable climate. I hope we have not botched it, missing the prime opportunity to sell in a seller's market. Timing is everything. Timing. Timing. And we are waiting. Waiting.

Post Election Day Blues

It happened. The United States will be governed by its heartland, the conservative, Bible-thumping, moralistic and ignorant right-of-center majority. It is grim and depressing. This is a group that do not like education and intelligence, preferring the simple and country act of George the 44th, I think it is. We are the horror of the world. We have a self-proclaimed "strong leader" who does not lead but is lead by his handlers. Woe be to separation of church and state; woe be to individual freedoms to marry, to abort; woe be to the environment, to the concept of global inter-relatedness and unity. Woe to science in lieu of creationist dogma. We had an opportunity to choose ideas, hope and fairness, but we choose to continue our present state of disaster, fear-mongering and the scorching view of the world. America is the biggest ostrich in the world, a big, stupid bird with its head far beneath the sands of time. How is it that there are so many uninformed voters in this country, so many fools marching over a cliff and off to war?

The Son of a Preacher Mam

The son of a Presbyterian minister wrote me a note and asked me if I would read his "common essay" for applying to universities this year. He is a nice kid, and he is smart and has much to recommend him. But he has a flaw. He either is, or he seems to be, arrogant. He wrote an essay about an experience he had had at a religious retreat, and how, protected, white, privileged, he fell silent among others in the group, thinking he might not have much to share. Some of them had experienced hardships he had never seen. Years later he decides how much he actually knows and had to share. The problem is, he is still the same person, slightly evolved, but still aloof and more full of his own wisdom. I am afraid that the College Admissions reviewers will read his essay as a superficial treatment by a glib young man of an interesting topic. I have tried to suggest that he rewrite the piece, but expect that my comments may not be very well received. Having once been 18 and just as conceited, I am sure, I suspect my attempt to help will be rebuffed and my self and opinion to be reviled.