Indian Summer: Musings On The Gift Of Life

Indian Summer

Other Books by Sam Pickering Essay Collections A Continuing Education The Right Distance May Days Still Life Let It Ride Trespassing The Blue Caterpillar Living to Prowl Deprived of Unhappiness A Little Fling The Last Book The Best of Pickering Travel Walkabout Year Waltzing the Magpies Literary Studies The Moral Tradition in English Fiction, 1785–1850 John Locke and Children’s Books in Eighteenth-Century England Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children, 1749–1820 Teaching Letters to a Teacher

Indian Summer Musings on the Gift of Life

S A M PI C K E RI N G

University of Missouri Press Columbia and London

Copyright © 2005 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 09 08 07 06 05 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pickering, Samuel F., 1941– Indian summer : musings on the gift of life / Sam Pickering. p. cm. ISBN 0-8262-1596-3 (alk. paper) I. Title. AC8.P6624 2005 081—dc22 2005002047 ™This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Kristie Lee Typesetter: Crane Composition, Inc. Printer and binder: The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Typefaces: Berkeley Book, Myriad MM, and Christophs Quill ITC The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following publications in which essays in this volume first appeared: Agni, Chariton Review, Fourth Genre, Jabberwock Review, River Teeth, Southeast Review.

For George Core and Jay Parini, my dear, dear friends

Contents

Introduction 1 Early April 8 Alone 12 Maintenance 20 June 34 In the Good Summertime 51 Changing 75 Wrong Number 83 What? 91 Toolless 101 Writers’ Colony 116 Dog Days 172 A Brown Bird Sang in the Apple Tree 182 Lasting 190 Raking 199 Absurd 205 Time for Black & Decker 212 End Papers 218

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Indian Summer

Introduction

“I think I’ll call the book Maintenance. I’m not as peppy as I used to be,” I said, wrapping an elastic bandage around my left ankle. “That’s a terrible title,” Vicki said. “It smacks of gaskets, diesel fumes, leaky carburetors, and mufflers rumply with piles.” “Call the book Indian Summer,” Vicki said at dinner that night. “The phrase is poetic and appealing, redolent with pumpkins, wine-red apples and leaves stitched into dusty gold carpets. Besides,” she continued, changing her tone and staring at me while rolling her fingers around a glass of merlot, “you’ve reached the Indian summer of life. You’re no longer a stripling. Your hide is wrinkled. Your hair has molted into gray, and your limbs have shed their muscles. Here’s to snowbirds and words as sharp as ice,” Vicki said, bolting the contents of her glass, after which she cackled long and loud, sounding, I thought, irritatingly like a blue jay in November. Still, I followed Vicki’s advice and changed the title. Of course, anticipating reaction is chancy. This fall Eliza started Harvard. In September Vicki and I drove to Boston for the “Opening Exercises.” Near the end of the ceremony the president of the university spoke. He said friendships made at college lasted a lifetime. The previous night, he explained, a friend from his own undergraduate days at MIT had stayed at his house. The friend’s son, the president then added, addressing freshmen, “is a member of your class.” “Good Lord,” Vicki exclaimed. “Did the kids understand the implication of that story? Learning about influence is important, but stripping innocence away at eighteen, before a single course has met, is harsh.” “The man didn’t mean to do that,” I said. “He was describing friendship.” “He may have thought he was talking about friendship, but he wasn’t,” Vicki said. 1

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Essayists frame fugitive moments and create galleries of paragraphs. If one reads quickly and doesn’t pause to analyze brushstrokes, a book of essays may convey the richness of life. Frames surrounding my paragraphs vary. While some are plain, others are decorated, not gilded with tumblers of swelling grapes and tubby naked boys blowing horns, but ornate with seasons. In a dish atop my desk sit two seeds removed from a pod of bur cucumber. Each seed is three-fourths of an inch long and five-sixteenths wide. The seeds are gray and shaped like arrowheads. Their edges are rough, almost beveled. Yet, instead of catching ridges of skin, the seeds slide though my hands. When I turn thumb and index finger into tweezers and pinch the seeds tightly, they lose body and slip away unnoticed. Next to the dish lies a stunted ear of corn, the cob four and a half inches long, rows of kernels squeezed into spirals, the kernels out of proportion, some full and toothy, others flakes of yellow enamel. Black fungus speckles the shucks, and the silk is stiff and grainy. Seeing often depends as much upon books as upon observation. Three years ago in Nova Scotia I watched a large dragonfly eat a small dragonfly. In a notebook I jotted down descriptions of the insects. The large dragonfly had green eyes and was three and a half inches long. Two yellow stripes slashed across its thorax while a chain of yellow tacks ran linked atop its abdomen, the sharp tip of each tack balanced on the flat head of the next tack. Looking like minute signal flags, red triangles decorated the smaller dragonfly’s abdomen while from its hind wings saddlebags swung out red and brown. Although I searched the university library, I wasn’t able to identify the dragonflies until the publication of A Field Guide to the Dragonflies and Damselflies of Massachusetts this past summer. Then I learned that the larger insect was a clubtail, the ferocious Dragonhunter, while the smaller was a Calico Pennant, both insects habitués of streams and the boggy edges of woods. I’m bookish. I have also aged into becoming my yesterdays. Much as I prefer to ponder old not new experience, so, when I’m not flipping pages of a guidebook in order to decorate moments, I roam byways of literature. Paths aren’t crowded and I can always find a bench and, sitting down, doze or contemplate. Let the young and the ambitious race literary turnpikes, college catalogues and lists of best books directing

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their reading. In November I read John Moultrie’s poetry. Moultrie lived from 1799 to 1874. In 1825 he became rector of the Anglican Church in Rugby in Warwickshire, England. As a poet Moultrie enjoyed a small popularity. His verse wasn’t very good, however, and today he is forgotten. Still, I enjoyed reading Moultrie’s poems. In the nineteenth century “The Three Sons” appeared in anthologies compiled for schoolchildren. In the poem the narrator described his three boys, the first a “grave and wise” five-year-old and the second “a simple child of three,” playfellow “to all.” “I have a son, a third sweet son; his age I cannot tell,” Moultrie began the final stanza. “For they reckon not by years and months where he is gone to dwell. / To us, for fourteen anxious months, his infant smiles were given, / And then he bade farewell to Earth, and went to live in Heaven.” The pleasures of youth are not those of age. My second son, Edward, is a student at Middlebury College. In August he flew to Scotland to spend a semester at St. Andrews University. While the narrator of “The Three Sons” said he could not guess “how bright a glory” crowned the brow of his dead boy, Edward’s optimism beams quick from his letters. After graduating from Middlebury, he wrote recently, “I plan to attend the best graduate school I can.” Following hard on graduate school were a teaching post overseas and adventure, in the course of which Edward wanted to write travel essays. Eventually, Edward said, he’d return to the United States and teach English, after which he intended to become a college president and then run for Congress. “I figure it is doable,” he wrote. By the next letter Edward’s plans had changed. “I had an epiphany this morning,” he declared, explaining he’d decided to apply for a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. The fellowship underwrites twelve months of travel and research outside the United States. “I’ve stumbled across a winning idea. The title of my proposal will be ‘Reading Railroads Abroad.’ I’d spend a year traveling national railroad networks, exploring their social and literary significances. I know that Indian railroads have played a central role in contemporary Indian history and appear throughout Anglo-Indian literature. Think of Kim. I’d spend several months riding India’s trains, jotting down impressions—interviewing passengers and conductors, unearthing references to railroads in Anglo-Indian fiction and nonfiction. Imagine the places I could go! I could travel the Trans-Siberian! How about a chapter on Japanese bullet

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trains? And South America! And Africa! The possibilities are endless. Perth to Sydney, anyone?” Bright, youthful dreams make me dizzy. Instead of a world the horizon of which beckons like an open hand, I prefer confined places. I enjoy wandering that melancholy time just after sunset when purple skies darken into brown. Oddity lurks amid shadows. Recently I heard about a demon that tore off her head in a fit of anger and threw it into a watermelon patch. The head did not die, however. Instead it thrived, feeding upon watermelons and occasionally fingers, these last snapped off people who didn’t examine melons carefully before picking them. “But what,” Eliza said, seeing clearly, “happened to the melons the head ate? Did the hunks slide through the monster’s throat and tumble onto the dirt in red mounds?” “That’s the stuff of another tale,” I said, opening Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robinson, a popular Anglican minister who died in 1853. “The study of the history of bees and ants would do people,” I read aloud, “as much good as the study of human history.” “What?” Eliza said. “Volume two, page 153 at the top, the 1866 edition, published by Ticknor and Fields in Boston,” I said. Although dusk appeals to me more than dawn, occasionally I give advice. The advice is usually aphoristic and, from Eliza’s point of view, tainted by evening, statements such as “When hard put, the smart fox joins the dogs and hunts himself” or “Of the fifty-three tricks used in fighting, flight is the best.” Libraries resemble old barns. I spend hours in them roaming stalls and shifting bales of books about. In lofts I uncover musty stories. These I place in Carthage, a real town, once home to three generations of my family, but in my pages now host to fiction. Often I take afternoons off from doings in Connecticut and, hopping a transition, travel to Carthage. Hollis Hunnewell owns a carnival and is always on the lookout for exhibitions. Last month the carnival opened in Carthage. One night after a performance, Vardaman Cobb suggested to Hollis that his great-grandfather Bilbo Cobb, Smith County’s oldest inhabitant, would make a fine exhibit. “Grandpa Pappy is 102 years old,” Vardaman said. “Isn’t that wonderful?” “Well, that depends,” Hollis said, pausing for a moment. “It sure took him a long time to reach 102. If he’d done it in half or maybe a third of the time, then he’d really be something.”

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My life in Storrs is as slow as doings in Carthage, as befits someone prone to dusky wanderings. Last Thursday I woke at four thirty and after eating breakfast and grading a handful of papers went to the English department, getting there at seven o’clock. Because coffee in the café attached to the Chemistry Building costs $1.15, I stuffed a dollar, a dime, and what I thought was a nickel into my trousers before leaving home. In the café the nickel proved to be a penny. The woman selling coffee having been forbidden to give credit, I had to find four cents. I found the first penny in a parking lot beside the Arts Building, in a space reserved for a handicapped driver. I shook the second penny out of a Windbreaker I’d left in my office. My friend Raymond also arrived early, and when he turned his jacket upside down another penny fell out. I returned to the parking lot and with my foot raked the leaves along the curb. “Have you lost something?” a janitor said, getting out of a university truck. “Let me help you.” On my explaining that I was hunting for a penny in order to buy coffee, the man opened a blue coin purse and handed me a new penny. “That made my day,” I told Vicki. “What a gift.” The next morning I went to the Husky Bean, a local café, and while I was describing the search for pennies to my friend Ellen, the janitor walked in. I had one penny in my pocket. Unlike the man’s penny, mine was old and battered, dated 1955. Still, I repaid him, and we smiled. Essayists frequent hedgerows, not beating bushes in order to write about contemporary matters but startling the little and the neglected. Occasionally, however, a reporter telephones and asks about the present. Recently a reporter wanted to know what I thought about gay marriage. “I don’t care,” I said, “if a man marries a linen closet, a sofa, or a birdcage. If marriage betters his life, then bring on the preacher.” Aside from rolling aphorisms about, I don’t meddle. Since frequently I don’t know what is best for me, how can I know what is fitting for others? “It’s always easier to decide for other people,” my friend Josh said later. “Many people who can’t manage a single wife or husband think they can manage not simply the lives of strangers but also nature, the economy, other religions, indeed other countries.” Josh is older than I, and his gums have shrunk. Words which once would have caught on incisors and canines now slip the cage of teeth. Yesterday he told a politician to get in touch with his inner adult. One

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afternoon in September he discovered a poster taped to the door of his classroom, heavy black letters commanding “Teach the Whole Child.” Immediately Josh took a pen out of his satchel and printed “Except Private Parts” across the poster. Environment influences behavior. One morning last August Josh talked to me for an hour, after which I taught summer school. Josh’s spirit accompanied me to the classroom. Students handed in papers. I perused them and then read bits aloud to the class. “I always walk alone, and when I do, I feel isolated,” a boy wrote. “Well, of course you feel isolated,” I said after reading the line. “You’re walking alone, nitwit.” The next morning at seven thirty I flew to Tennessee. That night I gave a chautauqua address in the chapel at the Sunday School Assembly in Monteagle. In hopes of purging biting words from mind, I spent the afternoon roaming trails which swung out from the Assembly like green hinges, walking to Warren’s Point, then along Stagecoach Road until it slumped into a creek bed. A boa of butterfly pea draped across a broken limb. Black-eyed Susan, Queen Anne’s lace, snakeroot, Jerusalem artichoke, and wild sweet William transformed dry sockets of soil into puddles of color. Grape, kudzu, and poison ivy sagged between trees, holding trunks together like cables supporting towers on suspension bridges. Trumpet vine draped over fences. Beneath a veil of mimosa a red clay road turned soft and dappled, and English ivy cloaked foundation holes, making them look like corners torn from foxhunting prints. A question-mark butterfly drifted by, its flight a wilting interrogative. A katydid jacked itself into a leaf, and cicadas fiddled at the edge of hearing. Sassafras and cherry pushed together like clamps, pinching tulip trees, condemning saplings to perpetual, leggy adolescence. Along chestnut oak bark rose into shelly ridges, then fell eroded into mazes of crooked streambeds. Near the Assembly oakleaf hydrangea thickened into hedges and petals slipped from hibiscus, papering the ground white and purple. That night I was mellow, only a single remark buzzing into irritation. Earlier in the summer the Southern Baptist Convention banned women from the pulpit. “What a stunning ecumenical move toward rapprochement with Rome,” Josh said at the time. “With the creation of a Baptist priesthood, acceptance of papal infallibility cannot be far behind.” On my mentioning theological similarities between Southern Baptists and

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Roman Catholics, two people walked out of the chapel. I’ve almost tempered matters in the following pages, and so I hope few readers will stalk away from this book. Most will probably slump in their chairs, none praying, many dozing, but some, maybe, finding matter for amusement and thought.

Early April

A mockingbird dozed on multiflora rose, wings wrapping its body in dreamy warmth. Beneath the bird, canes curled upward out of waterlogged softness. In woods, rock tripe wrinkled over a chin of granite. Around a cornfield, male flowers on willows turned yellow, their fragrance light and sweet, smacking of lilies and the afterglow of Easter. In the field itself, robins bounced amid clods of newly turned earth. Along an abandoned road, green rind peeled from the blossoms of spicebush. A phoebe perched atop mullein, its tail bobbing, making the shaft of the plant waver like temperature. Near the beaver pond, the waxed red horns of skunk cabbage clawed from the damp while leaves of false hellebore slid through dirt smooth as trowels. Six boys hurried out of the woods and followed a track beside the pond. Distance runners on the E. O. Smith track team, the boys ran in a silent huddle, arms clasped to sides like sweaters. By month’s end, spring would unfurl, and the boys’ strides would lengthen. Mockingbirds would toss wings into clattering flight, and leaves of hellebore would splay into shovels. Hairy rock cress would dapple gravel, ferns would sing into fiddleheads, and marsh marigold would bunch above the lips of streams like gold coins spilling through fingers. Spring comes fitfully to Connecticut. One morning the sun bites like a lemon. The next afternoon gray clouds curtain the sky and snow blows in raking screens. Hints of spring tease patience and mood flourishes. In April impatience for spring often provokes me to mull the past. On dark days memories blanket hours like compost and I sit in the warm study and ponder buds that didn’t bloom. In early April my ponderings were familial and numerical. In 1943, when I was two years 8

Early April

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old, Mother lost twins, and I remained an only child. How different life would have been if siblings had shared the last 21,535 days of my life. With two other children cluttering their lives, Mother and Father would not have hovered so lovingly about me. As a result I would have felt freer and, dreaming less of wider spaces, might have married and settled in Nashville. Thirteen thousand one hundred forty days ago, I almost married Pat. If we had married, my children would have graduated from college by now, and I’d be a grandfather. Because Francis, Edward, and Eliza are still in school and at my pulse I sense a cardiovascular storm thundering near, I will never cradle a grandchild. “No matter,” Vicki said. “Because you are so old, you are not only the children’s father but also their grandfather, and they, of course, are both your children and grandchildren.” Numbers appear less arbitrary than weather and smack more of the doldrums than tempests. Although recollection of subtractions from life provokes gusts of melancholy, the past is more placid than early April. On April 3, Eliza was born and Mother died. For me the day is an emblem of the month itself, bright at sunrise, dark by afternoon. Throughout the first half of April, mood shadows my classes. Last week I criticized television, saying no channel appealed to me: MTV, Food Network, Disney, Cartoon Network, ESPN, and MSNBC, among others. “You’d think differently,” a girl interrupted, “if there were an Old English Teacher Channel.” Immediately clouds vanished and the rest of the day was sunny, this despite snow drizzling across the evening. Age, of course, is partly responsible for my gloom. No matter the calendar, I inhabit the November of life. In contrast, not even allergies can dampen youth. No matter how bleak my remarks, optimism spreads like mold through students. Occasionally, however, a student throws a shadow over an hour, something that cheers me wondrously. This past Friday I found a pin on the floor of my office. Round and black with white letters stamped on the face, the pin was small, measuring an inch in diameter. Printed on the pin were two sentences: “It’s not that I’m anti-social. I just don’t like you.” The pin probably fell off the backpack of one of my advisees. Still, I’d like to think a disgruntled student tossed it on the floor in hopes that I’d find it. Late that afternoon, Kimberly asked me to write a recommendation for graduate school. Before leaving my office, she

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handed me a résumé. To help pay for schooling, Kimberly worked four years at Subway as, she wrote, a “Sandwich Artist.” Alas, in April students swell into uplift, not anger. Unfortunately a few blossom before their intellectual seasons. “A school education,” a boy wrote on a midterm, “can be beneficial to those whom obtain one.” For extra credit in one of my courses, students wrote stories. The stories were uniformly inspirational. A girl swam to her personal best in two events as the university swimming team defeated “its arch rival Rutgers.” A long pass won a football game; as time ran out, a threepoint shot tossed in desperation from midcourt won a basketball game. A shy girl rode to renown in “walk-trot equitation.” To help his team, a baseball player changed from pitcher to catcher, jeopardizing a career in the “Big Leagues.” The boy’s generosity was rewarded. The next summer he made the California Angels and at the end of his first season starred in the World Series. The athletic optimism depressed me. On bright days, my muscles call for the earth, having become corpses of their former selves. “Ignorant as carp,” I muttered, dropping the papers on the floor. Suddenly, dark sayings ran weedy through my mind. “Not only does the old man know mankind, but he knows mankind knows him, and that makes him wary.” “I do not heed the man the more / Who hangs religion at his door.” No mood lasts long in early April, however. One spring years ago when scab wrung leaves into knots, I created Josh in order to raise my spirits. In April, Josh suffers from puns. He visited my office soon after I read the stories. Bees, he told me, were paradoxical creatures, explaining that although they were stingy they were not parsimonious. Why, he hurried on, do washerwomen lose clothespins in grass? On my looking puzzled, he said, “Because when clothespins fall to the ground, they become terrapins and crawl away.” Rain, Josh continued, transformed not simply natural landscapes but also artistic terrains. Downpours turned huge statues into mere statue-wets. The first week in April has passed, and green days are coming. On Sunday a pair of bluebirds frolicked above the dell outside my study window. West of Unnamed Pond, bobolinks foraged through grass, ruffling the cornfield. This morning Francis drove the Toyota to West Farms Mall on the other side of Hartford to buy clothes for a semester in Germany, and Vicki left in the Mazda for New Jersey to visit her Aunt

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Sallie. At noon I suddenly remembered that I had a dentist’s appointment at two o’clock. I walked to Dr. Raynor’s office on Route 195. Cars swarmed past, throbbing angrily. Twice, bumpers drifted near my right leg and I hopped off the shoulder of the road. I reached the office unscathed. “I know I am a little early for the tooth scrubbing,” I said to the receptionist, “but I always get places ahead of time.” “You have outdone yourself today,” the receptionist said, studying Dr. Raynor’s schedule. “Your appointment is tomorrow.” “What sort of dentist is Dr. Raynor?” Josh asked me later. “He should have telephoned before you left home and told you that you were going to be a day early.” In the mail that afternoon, I received a letter from Turlow Gutheridge. Spring had come to Carthage, and optimism flourished. Last Saturday, Turlow recounted, Wally Hogue fainted when his wife, Cora, was buried. “Call Dr. Sollows,” Proverbs Goforth said, looking at Wally splayed out in the lilies. “Don’t you worry none,” Loppie Groat said, leaning over and pulling up Wally’s left eyelid. “Wally’s healthy as can be. He’ll soon rewive.”

Alone

This April Vicki and I spent Easter alone. Not for two decades had we celebrated Easter without the children. On Easter Sunday the telephone didn’t ring. During the previous week no cards arrived decorated with pink and blue eggs or nests of bunnies, these last picnicking amid lilies, far from the chaps of long-legged dogs. “Do you suppose the children are thinking about us?” Vicki said that afternoon. “Ten days ago I sent the boys chocolate rabbits.” “No,” I said, “the rabbits have been eaten and forgotten. Still,” I continued, “yesterday we did not think about the children.” Events sprouted from Saturday like flowers in bonnets. Early that morning we watched plowing matches sponsored by the Eastern Draft Horse Association and held in fallow field behind the old police station. While the great horses rolled dirt into pudding, in the distance a tractor pulled a green and yellow manure spreader across a cornfield. Willow fingerlings swam into bloom beside a dirt road. Grackles gabbled about Unnamed Pond, and around the thick limbs of maples winter dissolved into rosy mists of flowers. “The horses are strong,” an arthritic man folded into a plastic chair said, “but they can’t measure up to mules.” “Mules are extinct in Connecticut,” I said. “There are plenty left in Pennsylvania,” the man said, “and they can really plow.” Shortly after talking to the man, Vicki and I drove to Willimantic and ate lunch in the Plum Tomato. We split a “Sammy the Bull” sandwich, a feedlot fatty with spinach, onion, tomato, bacon, chicken, and gorgonzola. After lunch we watched a track meet at the university. Eight teams competed. In the five-thousand-meter run the boy who watches over me when I swim in Brundage Pool finished second. “Go, life12

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guard!” I shouted when he sprinted through the final turn, holding off a runner from Brown. Later that afternoon, in hopes of polling the effects of Sammy, we took the dogs for a walk along Bean Hill. During the walk I found five turkey feathers. I stuck the feathers into the band of my hat, and Vicki called me Chief Cinq Feathers. For dinner Vicki cooked lamb, and we ate in the television room and watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. During the first movie about Harry Potter, Vicki fell asleep. This time, I dozed. “Too much Easter,” I said later. In truth, aside from Easter Sunday I cannot remember ever feeling alone, this despite being an only child. Of course I have aged, and recollections of both full and empty days have slipped from memory, leaving behind the sentiment that the past was better than the present. Other people have similar thoughts. In January the mother of a close friend from childhood died. I wrote Jeffrey a nostalgic letter. “We were fortunate,” he answered, “to have been raised in a wonderfully naive and safe time. Summers wrapped us in protective cloaks of innocence, letting us forget the pressures of being unathletic, not glamorous, and certainly not rich. Our mothers were wonderful blessings,” Jeffrey continued. “They guided us with light hands and never asked us to grow up before we wanted to.” In the letter Jeffrey recalled visiting me one hot afternoon. “Mrs. Pick,” he asked, “where’s Sammy?” “Lord, child,” Mother answered, “he’s in the backyard lifting his rock.” I was a freshman in high school and wanted to make the football team. I was skinny and needed to build muscle. Because I didn’t own weights, I dug a heavy flat rock out of the vacant lot next door and used it as a barbell. As I held the letter, recollection flourished: Jeffrey in his green Henry J and my parents’ clapboard house on Iroquois Avenue, boxwood bushy before the front windows and daffodils wrinkling green and yellow along the driveway. Like violets white in spring grass, memory blossomed for a moment and then, alas, blew. Time has beaten my ties to people and place thin. Gardens are the foundations of place. In setting plants, people establish their own roots. As gardens flourish, so people thrive, vigorous and blight-free. For years spring turned the dell below my study window into a palette oily with color. Now the dell is bald. “Daddy,” Eliza said last spring, “why don’t

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you plant a bushel of new flowers in the fall?” “Okay,” I said. But when nursery catalogues arrived that summer, I tossed them unread into the recycle bin. Despite what I said to Eliza, I’m too old to dig. No longer does a shovel raise visions milky with promise. Why should I prune my little plot when daily the world grows weedier—its broad pastures overgrown with rancorous thistle, smooth velvet leaf, and venomous, narcotic jimsonweed? Almost every day an acquaintance falls from the tree of life. In stripping people away, Death rips story from days. Lives lose beginnings and middles and become ends, all of which are ultimately the same. As being intrigued and distracted by the particulars of lives has grown harder, I have become more committed to abstractions, mostly the stuff of virtue: tolerance, decency, honesty, and integrity. Because the behavior of people occupying high places seems to reflect little more than selfishness and expediency, or at best ignorance, I’ve become curmudgeonly. “The higher the elevation, the lower the man,” Josh said last month, adding, “Optimism is the fool’s pabulum.” To divert myself from spleen, I managed the lives of the children longer than I should have. As a result they communicate with me only when necessary, thus avoiding entanglements associated with celebrations like Easter. People whose children have matured into distance and whose circles of friends have shrunk to arcs contact old acquaintances in hopes that conversation will dull sharp pessimism. The week after Easter, Ed, my roommate at Sewanee, telephoned from Arizona. “I just wanted to hear your voice,” Ed said, then quoted the old rhyme, There’s many a lad I knew is dead, And many a lass grown old; And as the lesson strikes my head, My weary heart grows cold.

Two days later George called. He and I attended Vanderbilt together for a year. I had not heard from him in forty-three years. “For some reason,” George said, “you came to mind. How have the years treated you?” The next afternoon a package arrived from New Mexico. A friend from summers spent in Maine in the early sixties sent a raku-fired vase, a Mott Pott, he dubbed it, applying his name to it like an appliqué. “If

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you have room, the pott would be honored to take up residence in your house.” “I always have room for old friends,” I said to Vicki, placing the vase on the windowsill in the study. Like life itself my temper has shortened. Five days a week I join seven friends for lunch in a seminar room in the English department. Most times I eat only an orange. I bicycle to the department for lunch because I’ve known the group for twenty-five years. “I can’t retire,” I told Raymond. “I’d miss you too much. My emotions would dry, and I’d shrivel.” My friend Roger is quick and sometimes caustic; his favorite expression being “So what’s your point?” In April one of Roger’s remarks so irritated me that I stood and shouted “Fuck you”—actually, eight F-yous, Tom told me later. After hammering the word home, I stalked out of the room, strode down the hall to my office, and dropped heavily into the chair behind my desk. I didn’t stay there long. “What have I done?” I suddenly thought. “Life without these friends would be barren.” Hurrying back to the seminar room, I burst through the door and said, “I think I misspoke myself.” In part, routine fills days and palliates loneliness. Genes have me by the arteries, and four times a year I give blood in order to lower my blood pressure. For years I have bought books. No longer, however, do I purchase new books. Instead I buy used books, volumes which resemble me: stained, creased, edges rubbed, and dust jackets lost. Recently I bought two volumes of Agnes Repplier’s essays: Americans and Others, published in 1912, and In Pursuit of Laughter (1936). The library of St. Charles Seminary in Carthagena, Ohio, once owned the books. In Laughter I found a small red card, two and a half by three and a quarter inches. A pair of hands holding a chalice, surplice rumpling back from the wrists, rose clean and pure through the red. Behind the chalice, spokes of white rays revolved around a white sun. Stamped in black on the back of the card was the name John A. Samis, C.PP.S. Under the name was the phrase “Ordained to the Holy Priesthood September 8, 1940.” “Don’t you want to know more about Reverend Samis?” Vicki said after I showed her the card. “No,” I said, “lives are not arteries. Instead of sweeping the unknown into sight like an angioplasty, I prefer that some things remain mysterious.” At the end of April Josh visits me in my office, sap having risen through his cortex, forcing absurdity from his lips. One sunny morning

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a student asked Josh if his class could meet outside. “Certainly not,” Josh replied, then started a tale. “Fourteen years ago my friend Elihu Labuttock at Mississippi succumbed to season and convened his class on Realism on the grass outside the English department. While he lectured on Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a beetle detached itself from the greenery. Crawling under the cuff on the left leg of the professor’s trousers, the bug scampered over calf and thigh like an experienced hurdler, scarcely nicking a barrier. Not until the bug bored into his anus,” Josh recounted, “was Elihu aware of any untoward intimacy. By then, plucking was fruitless, although the professor gave it the college try, converting the thumb and index finger of his right hand into tweezers. Eventually interns from the college infirmary carted him to a hospital where a gynecologist removed the beetle with obstetrical forceps.” “Was the procedure painful?” the student asked Josh. “You bet your ass it was,” Josh said. “The forceps twisted Elihu’s rectum into a semicolon. Never again could he stomach Realism, and every time he broke wind he skipped, then hiccupped.” Late one February afternoon the ringing of the telephone disrupted a nap. A reporter from the Financial Times wanted to quiz me about the president. Though I was dozy, I chatted with the reporter, saying that George Bush deserved to be spanked, or so I learned when the interview was published. My statement stirred little reaction, and I thought I had slipped the corrosion of politics, reputation untainted. I was wrong. A fortnight later the statement appeared on Spanking Central, an adult Web page that identified me as “America’s best-known teacher.” “Spare the rod,” Josh advised, “no matter how delectable and moonlike the hams, or the mind.” Of course life is dappled. Classrooms often flicker brightly. In describing a confrontation with the university constabulary, a student wrote: “The thought of not smoking any more bugged me as I stood ripped off my ass talking to the cops. I knew I would miss blunt rides with the boys, towers of bong smoke, and the stinky baking of brownies. No more rolling the Garcia Green, no more putting ice in the bong to cool the hits, no more stoner bakery.” Even though I was linguistically out of date, the boy’s prose intoxicated the eye. “Not in the beginning but in the end,” I said to Vicki, “will be the word.” Another student described building a sweat hut. “We started the task at hand,” he wrote, “and I asked each rock if he or she would like to participate in the cer-

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emony. I tried my best to hear each response. Having lived so exclusively in the deafening western culture for the past few years, I am no longer able to hear the whispers of my brother rocks and trees. I know they try to make me hear, and so I try to understand. I made sure not to take any rocks that seemed to prefer not to go. Their collective wisdom is billions of years more advanced than mine, and I am nobody to question it.” “Yes,” I thought, “yes, indeed.” Suddenly a forgotten statement popped into mind: “If the inanimate could weep, they would weep for man.” “You don’t advise students to talk to rocks and trees?” Vicki asked after I showed her the boy’s statement. “Of course I do. I’m a responsible teacher,” I said. “But the kids don’t pay attention. Hormones, not professors, shape their lives.” This spring I taught the short story to a small class. Enrolled in the course were two members of the girls’ basketball team. At season’s end one of the girls won an award for being the best player in the nation. When the team won the national championship, I told the lunch crowd that my inspirational instruction had so influenced the girls that they raised, as athletic cognoscenti put it, “their game to a new level.” If the girls had not taken my course, the team would have lost more games than it won, or so I said until the final examination. Students wrote their names and the names of their teachers on the fronts of the examination booklets. The best player in the nation knew her name. Alas, I was Mr. Peckerington. “Perhaps,” Vicki said at dinner, “your teaching did not determine the outcome of the game against Tennessee.” “Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “Influence is difficult to quantify.” The following afternoon Vicki and I walked along the Fenton River, and basketball dribbled out of mind. Spring azures clung to the cuticle of the path like blue hangnails. A spotted salamander lay curled under a board. Black racers lingered near their den. I counted eleven, ten of them twined in a jubilee of mating. The next morning an indigo bunting landed on the bird feeder outside the kitchen window. For three days the bird drifted around the backyard. The second day the bunting and a male cardinal fed together on the feeder, their colors extravagant and ferociously optimistic. As Time erases family and friends, I spend days in the company of imaginary characters. Last week the Reverend Pleasant McConnico visited Slubey Garts, preaching on Sunday and Thursday in the Tabernacle of Love. Pleasant was a cat whipper, an itinerant minister traveling a

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circuit that wound through middle Tennessee, Kentucky, and southern Illinois and Indiana. In the distant past cat whippers were wandering tailors. Living with farm families, they sewed new clothes and repaired old, for their labor receiving room and board and modest wages. Over time itinerant preachers also became known as cat whippers. As tailors repaired the outer man, so preachers patched the inner. Pleasant was bandy-legged, had a squint, and looked garlic-flavored. In the pulpit, though, he stood straight and his voice sang like a flute. He liked animals. A spotted dog named Presbyterian accompanied him on his travels, and the right hip pocket of his jacket was home to a fence lizard with two tails. At the beginning of a sermon, Pleasant set the lizard astride the pulpit. Country churches are hot, and once holiness dampened Pleasant’s brow, the lizard climbed atop Pleasant’s head. Perched above Pleasant’s forehead, the lizard fed on flies drawn to the perspiration around Pleasant’s eyes. After the lizard had eaten its fill, it scurried back to the pocket, and Pleasant wiped his face with handkerchiefs. Embroidered on the handkerchiefs were biblical scenes, Peter fishing and Paul making a tent, for example. Unlike Pentecostals who slathered the ramparts of hell with good intentions gone astray and who described choirs of stillborn children standing by heaven’s gate, Pleasant was gentle. “Sugar,” he told Slubey, “seasons sermons better than salt.” He told people to wear their dancing faces to church and, once singing, began “to get a wiggle on.” “Be happy when you are alive,” he said, “because you are going to be dead a long time.” “When Pleasant preaches,” Loppie Groat said, “I smell burley, not brimstone.” Large crowds attended Pleasant’s sermons, arousing the jealousy of Malachi Ramus, Slubey’s rival and minister at the Church of the Chastening Rod. “Pleasant ain’t nothing,” Malachi said, “but a capering drone who plays peekaboo with the devil.” Malachi underestimated Pleasant’s skill with words. “No prayer, no cure. That’s for sure,” Pleasant said, and he implored congregations to embrace Jesus as “Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King.” “When you are dying,” he said, “you don’t want to feel heat on the soles of your feet.” “Everybody enters life through the Abel door, but you don’t want to creep out through the Cain transom, hands dripping sin.” “The wages of sin must be paid,” he declared. “Even the invisible man leaves tracks.” He pleaded with people to avoid the Unholy Trinity of Deadism, Formalism, and Wildfireism, all of which could lead to a “disastro-

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phe,” a portmanteau word bundling disaster and catastrophe together. “If your virtues have grown ‘cubbardy,’” he said, “take them outside, air them, beat them in the sunlight so neighbors can see them. Now is always the season for soul cleaning.” Pleasant urged people to treat animals kindly. When Herod searched for the baby Jesus, a spider wove a web around him, hiding him from sight. The spider wasn’t special, Pleasant recounted. “She was just an everyday manger spider.” According to Pleasant the present was more complex than the past. “The dilemma is extinct,” he said. “Today everything is a trilemma, a quadrilemma, or even an octolemma.” Because Satan had grown more intelligent through the ages, people had to be smarter. “The time has long passed,” he explained, “when Smoky apprenticed himself to a blacksmith and everybody recognized him. Satan has become sophisticated. A plastic surgeon lopped off his tail. A dermatologist cured his rosacea, and a podiatrist carved his hoof into toes. “Satan has taken to education like a tumblebug to a pasture,” Pleasant continued. “He attended junior college and a big state university, some say the University of Alabama where he played football for the Crimson Tide. He has even gone east and become an alumnus of Wall Street and a poison ivy college. For a while he was a Freemason, then a Dixiecrat, but now he wears ties with regimental stripes, speaks harshly against sin, belongs to the Chamber of Commerce, and votes Republican. He knows the new math and can twist the square of the hypotenuse into a circle. Never does he confuse countries in Africa with the parts of speech.” To recognize Satan, Pleasant said, a Christian had to keep his eyes peeled. A sure way to identify him was to follow him to the stool. “His business,” Pleasant noted, “makes the water in a commode boil.” “Good Lord,” Vicki said, after I explained how to identify Satan, “if you put that into an essay, you will lose all your readers and really be alone.” “So be it,” I said, adding that Hollis Hunnewell’s new show had just arrived in Carthage. The main attraction was a boot so big that two midgets, Mr. and Mrs. Hezakiyah Thumb, slept in it, pulling the tongue down and tucking it over their shoulders like a blanket. “That’s enough,” Vicki said and walked out of the room. Vicki should not have left, at least not before I described Streetcar Tracks, a man with only two teeth, one running like a rail across his upper jaw, the other running the length of his lower jaw.

Maintenance

After spending forty-eight minutes poking and prodding me, Ken stood and said, “Sam, we just have to maintain you.” As a person ages, his world becomes more fleshly. In comparison to medical concerns which now storm through weeks like nor’easters, youthful lusts merely gusted, disrupting dress and ruffling only an hour or two. A fortnight after the physical, I bought a new seat for my bicycle, an Avenir, eight and a half inches wide, only 50 percent as broad as my bottom but the most expansive seat available in Willimantic. The pressure of years and pounds had bent my old seat swaybacked. Springs collapsed, and metallic needles jabbed through the Naugahyde cover, ripping trousers into mesh. “Now I can sit back and relax when I ride,” I told Vicki, “and my blood pressure will go down.” Blood pressure was on my mind. For seventy-five minutes two afternoons a week, I lectured three hundred students. Performance mattered as much as words. I strode boards in front of the class, waving and gesticulating, shouting so students in the back of the room could hear. To awaken those in whose stomachs lunch and book clumped soporific, I hammered the lectern, and like a Pentecostal preacher aroused by the Spirit, I barked and howled. At the end of class, I was weary. Although my stock of ideas was exhausted, fury still throbbed, raising my blood pressure. The day before buying the bicycle seat, I raced from class to give blood. “Good Lord!” the nurse exclaimed after measuring my blood pressure. “I can’t take your blood. You have to see a doctor right now.” My blood pressure was 186 over 102. To maintain a machine, one must know its innards. Instead of hurrying off to Ken, I went home. To purge class from my veins, I slumped into a chair in the 20

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study and ate a chocolate cupcake. An hour later my blood pressure was 143 over 79. Years ago I labored to be smooth and round, a person who could roll through change with equanimity. Time has transformed me into riprap. Instead of intriguing, change now threatens to sweep my way of life out of existence, and so in hopes of enduring, I’ve become angular. Gallons of snake oil gush into my house through the mail. Much purports to be medicinal. In February an advertising booklet entitled Popular Health Magazine arrived at the back door addressed to my Uncle Coleman. Published by Bentley Myers International in Vancouver, a cacographical but not scientific cousin of Bristol-Myers, Popular Health hawked the virtues of Achieve ES. Blazoned across the cover of the magazine was the headline “GREAT SEX OVER SIXTY.” Achieve, the magazine declared, could “help raise Men’s Testosterone 98% in 40 Minutes!” Brewed by Leonard Rapoport, Achieve could be purchased without a prescription and cost $101.95 for a one-hundred-and-twenty-day regimen. “With proper testosterone levels,” Stanley Harris, Men’s Health Correspondent, testified, “firm erections, strong orgasms and a youthful sex drive can return regardless of age!” Among the illustrations in the magazine were nine shots of smiling couples, all of whom, the magazine implied, tumbled days away in the hay. One afternoon after class in hopes of lowering my blood pressure, all cupcakes having been devoured, I wrote to “Messrs. International Bentley and Myers.” “I answer,” I began, “on behalf of my uncle Coleman Pickering, to whom you sent Popular Health, promising to reveal ‘the secret to great sex after sixty.’ Coleman Pickering died seven years ago at eighty-five. If Achieve ES can resurrect his intimate life, then the Big Fellow who raised Lazarus from the dead is a quack in comparison to Leonard Rapoport. In the mouths of your miracle workers, the old hymn ‘Up from the Grave He Rose’ assumes new medicinal significance. “I hope you have long pondered,” I continued, “the social implications of Achieve. All those vanished generations dozing peacefully in wooden suits and munching dandelion roots will urge heirs to dress their graves with Achieve. This will prove an intolerable burden after estates have been settled, especially since Medicare won’t pay for dosing the dead. Moreover, Achieve will make strolling in boneyards hazardous,

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except, of course, in those attached to nunneries. Once Achieve has awakened ‘Man’s Best Friend,’ as you so inspirationally phrase it, no mourner will escape from Stiffville without barking his shins. Falls will be common. Lawsuits will be filed by the bushel, and you, Messrs. Bentley and Myers, will end your days in the poorhouse, unable to purchase a smidgen of Achieve ES.” I hope Ken has more success with a big animal like me than we Pickerings have in maintaining small creatures. This fall I found a baby mouse on the upstairs landing. Eliza named the mouse Winny Lily. I lined a shoebox with lint from the dryer. In the box I built a nest of shredded paper. At one end of the box I put a mayonnaise-jar top filled with water. Around the top I scattered food: a thumbnail of natural crunchy peanut butter, soft hunks of apple, and assorted seeds—pumpkin and sunflower, among others. After putting Winny Lily in the nest, I placed the box under a radiator so the mouse would stay warm during the night. The next morning Winny Lily was dead. “Oh, dear,” Eliza said. Eliza’s reaction was temperate because she was used to the deaths of little animals. Two years ago Eliza’s biology class examined the tails of goldfish. At the end of the period when the teacher collected the fish, explaining she intended to feed them to her turtle, Bobby, Eliza asked to keep her fish. She named the fish Ovid and put it into a small bowl. The next day Eliza saved Virgil from Bobby. Four days later both fish died. That afternoon Eliza carried the bodies to Mirror Lake, burying Ovid at the south end of the lake and Virgil at the north. After covering each fish with mud, she said, “Ave atque vale” (hail and farewell) and “Isod meliorem locum” (you go to a better place). The following Saturday Vicki drove Eliza to Puppy Love in East Brook Mall, and Eliza returned home with an air pump and a plastic bag containing Claudia. Claudia fared better than her classical compatriots. She spent six months in Eliza’s room, after which we left for Australia and Eliza gave Claudia to her friend Bethany. A month before we returned to Storrs, Claudia died. Being rescued by a Pickering is not always a death knell. This spring I noticed Penny, one of our dogs, bustling through grass outside my study window. Nearby lay a thin young chipmunk, its spine snapped. A second chipmunk flattened itself against clapboard above Penny’s head. I plucked the chipmunk from the house and carrying it inside put it in

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an aquarium, once the home of Dusty, Eliza’s hamster, Dusty himself having long resided in the underground jungle. I stuffed crumpled paper into the aquarium and covered the top with a screen. Afterward I harvested dandelion leaves from the front yard and strewed them about the bottom of the aquarium. Amid them I scattered cracked corn, shreds of carrot, lettuce, and a ball of Skippy “Super Chunk” peanut butter. I filled the top from a jar of Stop & Shop Spanish olives with water and set it in the aquarium away from the paper. Chippy lived in the aquarium for a week. He grew fat and strong, and when Eliza freed him, he shook confinement off like rain and scurried under the brush pile in the backyard. No longer do I list things I’ve done that others haven’t done. To add to the list would increase my blood pressure. Still, I saw a snow goose amid Canada geese this fall, then a barnacle goose—this last, a man told me, “a once-in-a-lifetime sight in Connecticut. If,” he added, “the bird isn’t an escapee from an aviary.” I meander, not to do things but to see. Not all sights, though, lead to peace of mind. In December I roamed cornfields behind Unnamed Pond. Under brambles at the edge of a wood, I discovered a computer case. Inside was what appeared to be a stand for launching fireworks, rockets that flamed upward and burst into stars and bangs. The device was a piece of orange pipe ten inches tall and two and seven-eighths inches in diameter. Attached to a round base, the bottom of the pipe was wrapped in black masking tape. Only after I rummaged through the case did I realize the pipe was a bong. I had found, I told Vicki later, “the kit of a dope fiend.” Also in the case were two plastic lighters, each half filled; a crumpled wrapper from a Hershey’s Chocolate Kiss; two small empty plastic bags; three leaves, two beech and one black birch; and lastly a flat pipe, the “Tattoo” variety, six inches long, a narrow black mouthpiece expanding into a purple circle at the other end, a well set deep into the circle. I took the case home and showed it to Vicki. “What are you going to do with that stuff?” she asked. “Return it to the woods,” I said. “Well,” she said, “don’t speed. If the police stop you, they will arrest you for possession of drug paraphernalia.” My pulse leaped. That night I dumped the case into a grocery bag and after stapling the bag shut buried it in the garbage can. To maintain calm I think more about the past than the future, the latter seeming too closely bound to acronyms that don’t appeal to me, ES,

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FBI, or CIA, for example. My old friend Jim Axtell is updating the history of graduate studies at Princeton. I spent four happy years at Princeton living in the graduate college, and in January I sent Jim a sheaf of recollections. My paragraphs were quiet, seasoned by snippets of melancholy and sprigs of whimsy and sentiment. “I rode a bicycle to class, something that gave me sense of well-being,” I wrote. “I’m now sixty, and I still ride to class. My present bicycle is an old man’s bike with a basket on the front and a fat seat in the back. Someday, I tell people, this bicycle will be exhibited in the Mark Twain House. From the handlebars will hang a sign reading, ‘Sam Pickering rode this bicycle when he wrote Living to Prowl, The Blue Caterpillar, and A Little Fling. The worn brakes, broken gears, and bent frame influenced his prose. If one reads his books carefully, he will notice . . .’” During my years at Princeton, I wrote Jim, although graduate students were diverse, we shared a history of academic success. We were the boys and girls who made As in third grade, in sixth grade, in high school, and college. As competitive as many of us had been, we became friends, in class and out, early successes having made us confident enough to spurn rivalry. At ease with each other, we were comfortable with differences, viewing them not as barriers between people but as the stuff of humor and its consort love. One year Ashok was elected head of the Graduate Student Association. Ashok was from India and worked evenings in the porter’s lodge. One night not long after the election, I rang the lodge and, disguising my voice, pretended to be a member of a right-wing patriotic group called “America for Americans.” I informed Ashok that he had usurped his post from a deserving American and urged him in red, white, and blue language to resign. Fifteen minutes later I walked over to the lodge. Almost every student from India who lived in the college was in the lodge. “Hey, fellows,” I said, ambling into the room, nine small American flags taped to my shirt, “what’s going down?” In memory, academic doings seem gentle, even those smacking of the discreditable. In the English department if a student took two courses in a field, he could exclude that field from his doctoral examination. Thus, if a student wanted to avoid being examined on eighteenthcentury literature, he took two courses focusing on the eighteenth century. The result was that students studied areas that didn’t interest

Maintenance

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them. To avoid being examined on the Renaissance, I took a course in reading Elizabethan handwriting. Deciphering script was painful to mind and eye. After two class meetings, several members of the class formed a subgroup devoted to finding translations of assigned documents. Because members of the group were good scholars, we unearthed translations of every assignment. Moreover, because we were honorable, if not venially honest, we smudged our papers—that is, we intentionally made so many mistakes that our marks were never higher than those of students who actually puzzled out the assignments. From the perspective of now, Princeton was a wonderfully humane place in the 1960s. In the telling, I wrote Jim, “the following story makes me wince. Examinations had long bored me. In hopes of invigorating myself, once or twice during undergraduate years at Sewanee, I put my head down on my desk and dozed for the first half hour of an examination. After thirty minutes I sat up and, panicked, wrote lickety-split for the next two and a half hours. Before the general examinations at Princeton, I told a friend that I didn’t think the exams would excite me. ‘Take this and you will stay alert,’ he said, handing me a white pill. I don’t know what the pill was. Whatever it was, it blasted me beyond beyond. On the first day of the examination students were instructed to write essays on five topics out of forty. Instead I crafted two questions of my own and answered them. On the following two days I again dosed myself in order to stimulate interest. Ten days later when I went to my oral exam, nine professors who had not taught me were present. The oral lasted two and a half hours. Time raced by, and I enjoyed every minute. I’d read libraries, and with the pills out of my system could talk about everything on which I was quizzed. Following the oral, I sat in the hall. After some time, Lawrance Thompson, the biographer of Robert Frost, strode out of the room. ‘Mr. Pickering,’ he said, ‘that was finest oral I’ve ever attended. But I want you to know it had to be.’ Gee whiz,” I wrote Jim, “I’ve really liked teaching and writing, and when I remember how I almost put my future behind me before it began, I shudder.” Maintenance implies evanescence, and my recollections conveyed a sense of fragility. At night my dreams also smacked of fragility. After seeing Ken, I often dreamed about my parents. In one dream, Mother, Father, and I walked through a city. When we reached a tall building, Father and I bounded up stairs to the top, leaving Mother panting

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Indian Summer

behind. From atop the building the surrounding city seemed English, red pots sitting on chimneys like tarts, a sauce of pale yellow sunlight covering them. I got down on all fours, crawled to the lip of the roof, and looked down. Father walked over and, standing next to me, leaned outward. Suddenly, he toppled off the roof. I shrieked, and from the steps below Mother shouted, “What happened?” “Daddy fell,” I cried and, looking down, saw a square, a white fountain in the center and next to it a bundle of clothes. “Daddy fell,” I cried again, and woke up with tears running down my face. Because I ponder the past more than the future, sentiment appeals to me more than reason. Whereas sentiment lightens the dark past, reason blackens the future. Occasionally, however, I ponder neglecting maintenance. To die at sixty and sidestep a painful, debilitating good-bye, wearing not only on me but also on family, is alluring. Sentiment, however, binds me comfortably to the past, and I don’t parse the future often. Reflecting the attention I pay to the past, my reading has changed. When I first taught, I assigned the poems of Wallace Stevens. No longer does Stevens’s poetry make sense to me. Moreover, analyzing Stevens’s verse in hopes of extracting meaning appeals even less than deciphering Renaissance handwriting. The poems I enjoy now tell stories. The stories are easy to understand and create the illusion that years have not dulled mind. Sitting on my desk is What Can a Woman Do; Or, Her Position in the Business and Literary World. Mrs. M. L. Rayne, of whom I know nothing, compiled the book. Eagle published it in Albany, New York, in 1893. Last month I spent two afternoons perusing Chapter 30, “Women as Poets.” Ninetysix pages long, the chapter contained forty-six poems. The poets included in the chapter, women such as Lizzie York Case, Ella Wheeler, and Emma May Browne, have long vanished from anthologies. I especially liked the Civil War tearjerkers. Kate P. Osgood’s “Driving Home the Cows” told the story of a boy from Maine who abandoned father and cows in order to fight for the Union. Three years after being reported dead, the boy returned to the pasture, one of his sleeves fluttering, the arm sacrificed for the grand cause. The heroine of Constance F. Woolson’s “Kentucky Belle” had moved from Kentucky to Ohio. One day, she gave her husband’s best horse, Kentucky Belle, to a battered sixteen-year-old trooper with Morgan’s Raiders so the boy could escape war and the Michigan Cavalry.

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In the introduction to What Can a Woman Do, Mrs. Rayne sketched the career of Rosa Hartwick Thorpe, “the author of one poem which has made a world-wide and enduring fame for her, such as other writers have spent a lifetime in vainly trying to acquire.” When she was seventeen, Mrs. Thorpe wrote “Curfew Must Not Ring To-night,” a poem describing an incident in the English Civil War. “Curfew” first appeared in the Detroit Commercial Advertiser. Later the poem became so popular that “a magnificent tribute to Mrs. Thorpe has been contributed by the women of Michigan for the Michigan building at the World’s Fair. It is a large banner with her portrait, life-size, emblazoned on it.” In the poem, Basil Underwood, Bessie’s beau, was slated to hang at the ringing of curfew. To save Basil, Bessie begged the sexton not to ring the cathedral bell. When the old man brushed her aside, proclaiming allegiance to duty, Bessie staggered up the gloomy bell tower, climbed the “slimy ladder” to the bell, and, in a feat of endurance rivaled only by the athleticism of the famous cow who jumped over the moon, wrapped herself around the clapper. When the bell swung out from the tower, the city below appearing as “a speck of light,” Bessie prevented the clapper from striking the bell. Because the bell did not ring, Basil’s execution was delayed, and the next day when Cromwell rode into town, Bessie begged for Basil’s life. The girl’s bravery and devotion touched Cromwell’s heart. “‘Go! Your lover lives,’ cried Cromwell. ‘Curfew shall not ring tonight.’” To me, life in Mrs. Thorpe’s impossibly sentimental world seems real. Of course, despite being confined to a regimen of maintenance reading, not everything I peruse is sugary. Oddly, though, truth now seems as improbable as fiction. In Antiquities Then and Now, I recently read an article claiming that mistranslation distorted the story of Zeus and Leda. Instead of mating with Leda in the guise of a swan, Zeus actually visited Leda disguised as a chicken. Although the coupling produced Helen, a blue-ribbon egg, the love was a more earthy barnyard affair than devotees to matters Hellenic are accustomed to believing. “Thinking of Zeus as a chicken,” the author wrote in AT&N, “demystifies Paris’s infatuation with Helen and should spur critics to reexamine the Trojan conflict, the celebration of which has long been a keystone of classical education.” As one ages, the mind works by association, sliding smoothly from topic to topic, avoiding the rough-and-tumble of analysis. In other words,

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hen fever is contagious and, once on a page, spreads from paragraph to paragraph. Zeus’s feathers brought Carthage and the Reverend Shanks Cropple to mind. This past fall Shanks led a revival in a tobacco field near Horseshoe Bend. The reverend’s followers eschewed the limitations of denomination. “Shanks’s church,” Turlow Gutheridge wrote me, “resembles a beaver lodge. The entrance is underwater.” “His congregation believes in old-time religion and manners,” Loppie Groat said. “There’s not a man among them who won’t stand up when his wife totes in the wood.” Shanks realized churches were stages on which showmanship perked up the pace of healing and contribution. To lure crowds to Horseshoe Bend, he brought Lola, his cow, to the revival. Instead of hay, Lola ate chickens, and, as Shanks put it, “was carnivorous, too.” Every evening before loosening the flaps to the tent, Shanks fed Lola a trough of drumsticks, “baptized,” Shanks testified, “in thick holiness gravy sanctified with giblets, not some watery Episcopal gravy, pasteurized for the tennis court, thin and weak as a baby’s backhand.” At the end of sermons, Shanks sold gallon jugs of cod-liver oil, “one hundred per cent Christian Cod Liver Oil, squeezed from fish, not dogs or cats.” To the children of people who purchased oil, he presented small wooden hatchets. Burned into the left side of the handle was the word “TRUTH.” Emblazoned on the other side was a stump and, clinging to it by a splinter, a small bushy tree, circles dotting the branches. “Maybe George Washington didn’t write the Bible,” Shanks said when he distributed hatchets, “but he ought to have done.” Away from the pulpit, Shanks was unctuous and unappealing, “the sort of fellow,” Loppie said, “who makes a first-class stranger.” With a Bible in his left hand and words savory on his lips, however, Shanks grew in stature. “I’ve sucked the marrow out of all the disciples,” he declared, “including Judas, who gave me strictures of the bowel duct.” At the beginning of every meeting, he urged “afternoon Christians” and sinners who “indulged in multo-connubalis” to leave the tent. He warned people against “red-eye water brewed by backwoods pharmaceutists.” He urged worshippers to obey the Lord. “Be like the auctioneer and do as you are bid or else you’ll dance the gallopade in Hell.” Throughout his sermons, he sprinkled aphorisms: “The devil tempts the industrious man, but the lazy man tempts the devil”; “Chance can make a man great; being good

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takes work”; and “Nature makes the monkey ridiculous; study and art turn men into fools.” Carthage and religious doings are as effective in lowering blood pressure as cupcakes. In December, Slubey Garts began selling Prayer Puppets. Nineteen inches tall, the puppets were wood. Protruding from the lower back of each puppet like a coccyx was a cross painted red. Pressing the cross up and into the puppet’s body made the puppet fall to its knees and raise its hands in prayer. Among the first group of puppets for sale was Joseph wearing the coat of many colors, Daniel with a lion’s skin draped over his right shoulder, and Shadrach, his face sooty from the fiery furnace. Ruth held corn shucks in her hands, and when she knelt and her hands slapped together, the shucks formed a cross. Saul’s eyes were white, and he was blind. But when the cross was pressed and Saul collapsed on his knees, brown pupils rolled into his eyeballs. Popular among children was the Pharaoh puppet with a frog perched on his left shoulder and a grasshopper on his right. When a child pushed the cross and Pharaoh knelt, frog and grasshopper disappeared into the puppet’s shoulder blades. Jael was the only commercial failure. Jael held a hammer in her right hand and a nail in her left. Pressing the cross on Jael’s lower back brought her hands together not so much to pray as to hammer. “The kind of carpentry Jael did on Sisera makes parents queasy,” Turlow wrote me. Jael was a rare failure. Almost everything Slubey touched fell into the collection plate. Even more popular than the puppets were “Bible Boxes,” mailboxes adorned with the Ten Commandments instead of cardinals or bluebirds. “Only one Bible Box has been pole-axed by a teenager,” Proverbs Goforth said, “and the girl who done that was Catholic. But Slubey prayed over her, and she’s repented. Now she worships with Slubey at the Tabernacle of Love, and last week bought a Bible Box for her parents, a custom-made box depicting the Prodigal Daughter returning home carrying a fatted chicken under her right arm.” Until my physical, I’d thought about retiring. Retirement, however, disrupts routine, something teaching rarely does. Because students are the same age year after year, their antics remain soothingly the same. “I don’t care what courses I take in the English department,” Karen, my advisee, said, “as long as they don’t contain smut.” Against my recommendation, Karen took my course on eighteenth-century literature. After

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the first class, we reached a working accommodation. Just before I strayed into bawdry, I looked at Karen and said, “Smut.” She then cupped her hands over her ears. When the subject wandered back to the pure and narrow, I lifted my left arm, showing her the palm of my hand as if we were at a prayer meeting, and she removed her hands from her ears. In January a good student asked for a recommendation, writing me a note saying she was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Happily, she omitted the i in tailed, punning in order to flatter me, I said in class, obliquely revealing that she’d read my books and applauded my fondness for shaggy-dog stories. Two days later another student requested a recommendation so she could spend her junior year in Britain. The girl majored in special education. “I feel as though by going on this excursion I will become a better teacher and person,” she wrote, and I dozed, only to be awakened by her last two sentences: “Also I wish to join a parrot club in London since I have a great passion for birds. At home we have thirty-five parrots.” “Tell me about the parrots,” I said to the girl after the next class. “They imitate each other. Mom and Dad argue a lot, and sometimes all the parrots shout, ‘Fuck you.’ Other times they make farting sounds. When police cars pass outside the house, they shriek like sirens.” “May flights of parrots sing thee to England,” I thought, and began planning Slubey’s next venture, aviaries of Bible Birds. Not everything done by students elevates me into flighty fiction. Early this April in a poll conducted by the campus newspaper, students voted me “Best Professor.” Neither deathbed repentance nor posthumous recognition having much attraction, I prefer to slip quietly through my remaining moments far from corroding attention. Recognition in the paper did not make me gleeful. I was part of a mixed flock of bests: Best Hairdresser, Best Coffee, Best Wings, Best Music Store, and Best Tanning Salon, these being, in order, Designers’ Loft, Dunkin’ Donuts, Bidwell Tavern, Strawberries, and Forever Tan, where, as the paper put it, “Wayne is the tan man.” “You must be pleased,” Eliza said on seeing the article. “You bet,” I said. Occasionally academic duty breathes life into irritation. Early in March I gave the keynote talk at a one-day conference sponsored by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth. My audience consisted of three hundred people: seventh and eighth graders and

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their parents. “That’s a moneymaker for Hopkins,” my friend Josh said. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, book companies sold encyclopedias to lower middle-class parents. Most of the parents had not attended college, and salesmen claimed the books would boost their children to the head of their classes, ultimately enabling them to enroll in college. Because of growing affluence, not encyclopedias, the children attended college. Solidly middle class, they themselves had now become parents. To these people, Johns Hopkins marketed programs for “talented youth,” appealing to hopes similar to those to which book companies made their pitch fifty years ago. Instead of imagining their babies going to their alma maters, scrub colleges down the road, parents now imagined them attending an Ivy League school or at least a distinguished state university. “Adults who’d never purchase Achieve ES,” Josh said, “will spend bundles on programs that assure them that their little darlings are gifted. All children are talented, and ordinary,” Josh concluded. “What does it matter that a seventh grader can do his math homework five minutes quicker than his best friend?” Josh is more outspoken than me. Still, there is some truth in his remarks. At the conference several parents requested certificates that would testify to their child’s participation and that could be included in applications to college. Although dreams disrupt the tenor of my life, dreaming probably enhances the lives of thirty- and forty-year-old parents. Consequently, I think better of programs offered by Johns Hopkins than does Josh. What irked me was not the idea of a conference for kids but the contents of a folder. When I entered the auditorium to give my talk, a woman said, “We have a folder for you.” On my responding that I didn’t need the folder, she said, “There is a present for you inside.” My present was a “Pocket Pal Diary” entitled 2002: A Look Back. The diary was not paginated and measured six and seven-eighths by three and a quarter inches. Besides a calendar, the diary contained, among other things, pages devoted to Web sites, toll-free numbers, a sketch of time zones in the United States, and weights and measures, this last listing useful facts such as three feet’s being a yard, one square centimeter’s being the equivalent of 0.1550 square inches, and 2,150.42 cubic inches equaling “1 standard bu.” Near the end of the diary appeared two pages of cartoons illustrating “First Aid for Choking.” Also at the back of the

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diary were sixteen pages of maps depicting the interstate highway system in the United States. Although the maps divided the country into districts such as Northeastern States and North Central States, I couldn’t trace roads without a magnifying glass. Below each weekday on the calendar stretched six lines on which students could write notes. I assumed the diary was produced for students who recorded assignments, because only two lines appeared under Saturday and Sunday. Printed above each week was an aphorism. In two aphorisms, the word trust was used. While Barbara Walters advised students to “Trust your gut” for the week of August 19–25, Ella Wilcox urged them during the week of September 9–15 to “Trust in your own untried capacity.” “Some present,” Vicki said that afternoon, handing me a cupcake. What maintains me better than anything else is walking. Wandering Storrs lodges me in place and season. The ides of April have passed, and yesterday I went for a long walk. The reckless streams of spring pounded down ridges, the movable clamor of blue jays jangled from oak and pine, and the ground swayed and coughed when I approached the beaver pond. Catkins glowed green and honeyed on silky willows. A goldfinch spiraled through a red maple, and a comma butterfly puddled on a split of sand beside the Fenton River. Under a slab of plywood, a milk snake tied itself into a knot. The snake bit me when I picked it up, its teeth breaking the skin between the thumb and index finger of my right hand, drawing drops of red spring blood. Toads mated in a vernal pool, and strings of dark eggs wound through the water in a fringe. Fairy shrimp threaded the pool, mosquito larvae sidestroked through loose wiggles, and a black scavenger beetle the size of my thumbnail dove under a rotten leaf. Daffodils bloomed atop a mound at the abandoned landfill. I counted one hundred and two blossoms. Below the mound, grape hyacinths thrust through grit, and bluets flowered in miniature bouquets. Like grout, pine needles filled a crack in a boulder. Amid the needles, Canada mayflower sprouted, its leaves pale spoons. In a low wood, the nest of a red-tailed hawk sagged in a white oak, looking like a broken wicker basket. A palm warbler pumped its tail in damp scrub below a cornfield. I squatted next to a row of old cornstalks and insects spun about my head, their shadows spotting my shirt. Suddenly, graduate school popped into mind. For three years at Princeton I lived in the North Court. Oc-

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casionally friends and I had parties, all fun but none smacking of any side of paradise. One bright Kentucky Derby day, we dressed in coats and ties. In the North Court we set up grills and celebrated the horses’ and our runnings with steaks and beer. “Such, such was the sunshine,” I thought.

June

In Mansfield the census occurs on Memorial Day. Townsfolk attend the ceremonies to see who is alive. “Not many stones slipped the wall this winter,” my friend Peter said after the parade, “though from people’s appearances, I suspect that by end of summer grass will cover a rock pile.” In Carthage, Gideon Palmer read the Declaration of Independence. “Gideon read well,” Cerumen Hooberry said later in Ankerrow’s Café, “but I’ll be darned if I believe he wrote that declaration. Gideon didn’t finish seventh grade. He couldn’t get the hang of fractions, much less of whys and wherefores.” The silly tale signaled the beginning of June and the end of a bleak semester. Along the shoulders of Route 195, antimacassars of flowers hung from black cherries. Soon the dry canes of multiflora rose would burst into bouquets watery with bees, and flowers would dangle from locusts in grapy fermenting bunches. After the parade I planted sunflowers by the front stoop. My hollyhocks had not reseeded, erased, I mused, by mood, not time. “A start,” I thought, patting the dirt. “Watch out, slugs, I’m on guard.” Protecting seedlings from slugs was a gesture toward managing life. During the last months my patch of days had grown weedy. After making good grades for two years, Francis failed out of Princeton. Returning home, he slept until afternoon, then ate breakfast in pajamas. Apart from saying, “Papers piled up,” he didn’t explain the failure. Three times I telephoned the deanery. Each time the switchboard pushed me onto a dead telephone tree. Never were my calls answered. “So much for all that palaver about caring,” Vicki said. “You shouldn’t have discouraged Francis from attending the University of Chicago.” Advice always comes home to roost and invariably lays rotten eggs. 34

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Francis’s grandfather attended Princeton, and I spent four years in the graduate college. When Princeton admitted Francis, I celebrated, imagining the ties between generations as umbilical, not shackling. Until the first of April Francis sprawled about the house. Then he flew to Germany to study Dutch at the University of Stuttgart. Francis is fluent in Italian and German. “By summer’s end,” he said, “I’ll speak Dutch.” “Then what?” I asked. “Will you return to Princeton, transfer to Connecticut, or stay in Stuttgart?” “I don’t know,” Francis said. Those twenty-three words began and ended discussion of his academic plans. I said no more. Concern for Edward had shoved Francis almost out of mind. Edward, Eliza, Vicki, and I had spent the previous year in Australia. While snorkeling in Exmouth, Edward had gotten sunburned. On returning to Perth, he haunted Cottesloe Beach. Despite Vicki’s and my urgings, he refused to cover himself with sunscreen. By the end of the year the skin over his cheekbones had become photosensitive. After two minutes in the sun his skin swelled into red mounds. The mounds lasted six days and then, oozing, subsided into hard crusts. At Middlebury College Edward ran between buildings. He couldn’t watch a football game or throw a Frisbee. When he lifted weights, he stood in the middle of the room, away from windows. A ten-minute car trip made his face swell, no matter the tint of the windshield. Because I lugged the family to Australia, Edward blamed me and wrote bitter e-mails. Some days I refused to switch on the computer, dreading that Edward had sent me another e-mail. During semester break he stripped his presence from the house, shredding scrapbooks and pictures, slicing commemorative shirts into rags, and throwing away books he’d once treasured. He removed his college address from under a magnet on the refrigerator. He erased files from the computer and chopped a clock he’d made for Vicki when he was nine into kindling. In 1993 during a previous trip to Australia, he carved a wall-hanging depicting a koala bear climbing a gum tree. Not until after he returned to school did Vicki notice that he’d decapitated the bear. I spent anxious days and sleepless nights. At times I hoped Edward would vanish. “Relief would accompany grief,” I told Vicki, adding, “I’m tired, so very tired.” I talked to school counselors. Edward saw a fistful of doctors, and Vicki and I discussed lupus and porphyria. To reduce swelling, doctors prescribed prednisone, a

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powerful steroid. Each time Edward saw a doctor, he obtained a prescription for prednisone. After I found a deck of prescriptions on his desk, I telephoned the doctors and ordered them to cancel refills. The academic calendar at Middlebury consisted of two semesters and a short January term. At the end of the January term, Edward underwent five days of light testing at Massachusetts General Hospital. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, days on which my classes didn’t meet, I drove Edward to Boston. Vicki drove on Tuesday and Thursday. Edward could have driven, but his e-mails had frightened me and I didn’t want him to go alone. In hopes of raising his spirits, I sent him to London during spring vacation. In theaters and art galleries, I hoped, he’d rediscover delight. In order to get Edward to Logan Airport, one Tuesday in April after class I drove to Rutland, Vermont, and spent the night in a motel. Early the next morning I fetched Edward at Middlebury. I then drove over Killingly Mountain, across New Hampshire, and into Massachusetts. I dropped Edward at Woburn, where he caught the shuttle bus to Logan Airport. Next I turned west and drove back to Storrs, most of the way on the Massachusetts Turnpike. I got home at 5:02. I had been on the road since 7:20. The day tired me, and that night at dinner my hands shook. Snow had begun falling at ten that morning. Ice covered Killingly Mountain, and by the time I left Edward at Woburn, six inches of snow blanketed the turnpike. “You could have been killed driving in this weather,” Vicki said when I got home. “Yes,” I said. Rarely this past spring did I muster enthusiasm for word or season. Instead of writing or roaming, I sat inside. Turning on the computer, I searched out acquaintances who’d slipped from my life, classmates from high school, college, or graduate school. When I discovered the addresses of friends, I wrote them e-mails—in retrospect, almost goodbye letters. Some days after class I forced myself outside. Instead of feeling at ease in the natural world, I seemed a tourist. Worried about the boys, I lost my life. Eliza turned seventeen in April, and for moments her doings cheered me. But then gloom returned. Eventually Eliza avoided me. One afternoon I noticed a blue dictionary in the study. Inside was an inscription. Eliza had won the Williams College Award for ranking first in the junior class. She hadn’t told me. I’m a popular teacher. In the past when family doings made me bilious, teaching was a tonic. In January I was slated to teach two courses,

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one of them Children’s Literature, scheduled for an enrollment of 124. The class filled overnight. During the past three years the number of students at the University of Connecticut has increased greatly. Size of the faculty, in contrast, has remained constant, resulting in some students having trouble registering for classes necessary for graduation. To accommodate students looking for an English class, I switched Children’s Literature to a room which held three hundred. “Let the enrollment rise,” I told Rose, the secretary. “It will peak at two hundred.” A day later all seats were filled. Twice a week I lectured from 2:00 to 3:15 in the afternoon. Teaching assistants graded the midterm and final examinations. For extra credit students wrote fairy tales, all of which I marked. Being my assistant was easy. I composed the tests—several, as handfuls of students invariably missed scheduled exams. On the day of the final, for example, the women’s crew team rowed in Pennsylvania. Two members of the first eight took my course, and three nights before the scheduled test, I gave them and six other students a special examination. I graded all special exams as well as those taken by students with individual needs, physical or intellectual. I handled controversies that arose from grades. All I asked my assistants to do was blanket the midterm with comment and explanation. “For three days you will bleed ink,” I said, “but the rest of the term belongs to you and your studies.” This spring an assistant broke down. Instead of explanatory comment, he put only checks on midterms, usually three but sometimes one check to a book. When I saw what the assistant had done, I told the class I would read their papers myself. I said I’d footnote every sentence. I assured students that I would not lower grades. “If I think you made a higher mark, I’ll raise your grade. At a university, students deserve explanation and suggestion. You will get that from me without risking the grades you have.” Unmarked papers became magnets pulling exams from students whose answers had received close commentary from my other assistants. For the sake of fairness, I couldn’t refuse to read some exams while reading handfuls of others. Consequently I marked 186 midterms and read 78 fairy tales. I enjoyed lecturing. Students whom I’d taught before filled the first three rows of seats. Rarely did they miss class, and they smiled at my jokes. Unfortunately the size of the class gave other students freedom to misbehave. I asked students to turn in two rough drafts with the final

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drafts of their fairy tales. The first draft of one girl’s story was excellent. Not a word was misspelled. Not a thought went astray. By the second draft the tale had deteriorated, none of the girl’s revisions helping the paper. Blighting the final copy were viruses of misspellings, punctuation mistakes, sentence fragments, garbled thoughts, and errors of sundry grammatical sorts. “Ah,” Josh said, “the danger of purloining.” Such dangers are various. For two paragraphs the heroine of another student’s tale was named Rosara. In the third paragraph she became Fatima, Rosara returning only for a cameo appearance in the final sentence of the story. “I’ll bet the tale is accomplished,” Josh said. “Very accomplished,” I said. I assigned nine books in the course. One night a week before the final exam, a girl telephoned me at home. “I’ve only read two books,” she said. “What can I do to pass the course?” The day before the exam a boy came to my office. “You said we had to write about four books in detail. I’ve read three,” he said. “What should I read for the fourth book?” I did not waste time with the boy, much as I didn’t bandy words with a girl who retrieved her midterm after classes ended. Commentary covered the blue book. She did not read the remarks. Instead she flipped to the final page, looked at the grade, and said, “This is unacceptable. You have to raise the grade.” Students took the midterm the day before spring vacation. The day after vacation, March 26, I returned the midterms. Those I reread, I handed back on the class period following the one in which students gave them to me. Every class until May 9, the last day of the term, I carried midterms to class. “Leave the office,” I said to the girl. “You took the place of someone who needed the course. More than two hundred other students tried to enroll. On the first day I urged people who didn’t plan to work to drop the class. You should be ashamed.” She wasn’t. Two days later she complained to the head of the English department, saying, “Professor Pickering refused to discuss my midterm with me. I pay tuition, and when I want him to talk to me, he should talk.” “That girl was a piece of work,” the head said later. “Miss Hound would not have barked if the course had been small,” I said. “Never again will I teach a large course, no matter students’ needs.” In fact, lecturing for seventy-five minutes wore me out, so much so that at the end of the term I pondered retiring. “Don’t smash the lectern,” Vicki advised, “until after Memorial Day.

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See what summer brings.” The Tuesday after Memorial Day brought a letter from Francis. He said nothing about college. Instead he described translating a paper from English into German. “Well,” he began, “I finally finished the translation of my paper, and it weighs in at 8190 words in German and 8789 words in English. But here’s something interesting: although there are almost 7% fewer words in German, the number of characters, excluding spaces, for the two versions are 56,102 and 49,436, respectively. That means that there are over 13% more letters and other such characters for the German version. In short, the average German word I used (I expect the difference would be even more pronounced for a German native) was 6.85 letters long; the average English, 5.62. If I had a Dutch version, I imagine the average would be under five since words in Dutch are short.” “He’s in good shape,” Vicki said, after reading the description. “Yes,” I said. “If you count numbers as words, he used 117 words in the paragraph.” Counting was a sign that my mood was yeasty and rising. The Russian Language School at Middlebury accepted Eliza for its nine-week summer term, this despite a policy of not admitting high school students. Even better, a doctor at the University of Connecticut Medical School examined Edward. After consulting a dermatologist in New York, she prescribed an autoimmune medicine, one used to treat a lazar house of ailments: lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and malaria. At 5:45 one cloudy evening Edward went running. The next morning his face was not burned. “All I want,” he said, “is to walk from one class to another.” I even bought a new television. I’d purchased the old one two days after Edward’s birth nineteen years ago. The old machine had aged dyspeptic, transforming whey-faced newscasters into purple alcoholics. Vicki set the old machine by the mailbox at the end of the driveway. “A graduate student will take it,” she said. “Oh, God,” Eliza exclaimed, “we are turning into those people who put mattresses in their front yards.” A cousin drove to Philadelphia and fetched a sister suffering from ALS. She took the sister home to Ohio and nursed her until she died. “How difficult and how decent,” I thought. Suddenly days shined like strings on a harp. The time had come for a trip to Carthage. Elbow grease soothes the blistered heart. From Carthage I usually pluck chords of sentences, most melodious with good cheer. Because I wrote little this past spring, doings in Carthage

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smacked of the literary. The afternoon I arrived in town, Turlow Gutheridge visited me in the Walton Hotel and described the poetic career of Tupling Button, once known as “the Cumberland Caroler.” “Tup” was a successful farmer, owning two farms, Little Berries and Great Goldens. His burley was the bushiest in Smith County, and half-and-half, not milk, gushed from his cows. When not busy in tobacco and dairy barns, Tup wrote occasional verse. When Hink Ruunt’s coon dog Bellman died, Hink sawed off Bellman’s head. He boiled the head until the flesh melted from the skull. After pulling Bellman’s brains out with a crochet hook, he soaked the skull in Clorox. Eventually he set the skull on the mantle in the parlor beside trophies Bellman won at shows sponsored by the Cookville and Lebanon Kennel Clubs. Hink’s putting the skull in the parlor provided Tup with matter for a couplet. “Within this hollow cavern hung,” Tup hymned, inspired by the graveyard scene in Hamlet, “The ready, swift, and tuneful tongue.” Although the rhymes in Tup’s first poems were occasionally strained, the poems provided “hints of genius to come,” Levi Crowell wrote in the Carthage Courier. Typical of Tup’s brown, or plowing, period was “Eden”: “Oh, how I wants to roam green Eden, / Where golden birds and beasts is feedin’. / And the turnips and the peaches, / Them all within our reach is.” Tup’s most anthologized piece was “Nostrildameus.” First appearing in an issue of Poetry devoted to southern poets, the poem was sandwiched between contributions by Allen Tate and Walter Sullivan. “Encased in this man’s head,” Levi Crowell wrote, celebrating the appearance of “Nostrildameus,” “is Shakespeare’s prolific brain.” Don’t you cry, my sweet Mary, Don’t you let sickness grieve you. You’ll be better. Wait and see; Nature will relieve you. What I predicted came to pass, With neither squills nor henbane. For with one cough my lovely lass Relieved her mucous membrane.

Tup celebrated events with commemorative verse and would, Carthaginians proclaimed, have made Tennessee a fine poet laureate. Just

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eleven hours after Medora Boultbee was struck by lightning while playing kick the can, Tup produced polished verse: Cease weeping, parents. It was my Maker’s will That I should fry by lightning in the field. At God’s command, the bolt struck and then I fell, Before I had the time to bid my friends farewell. My Daddy ran though he could scarcely stand When he saw me cooking on the land, Then with his hands he put the fire out, Saying, “Dear Lord, my gal is dead, no doubt.”

Although Hink urged him to read the poem at Medora’s grave, Tup demurred, explaining that he didn’t want to outshine Slubey Garts’s funeral sermon. Medora was four years old when she died. In his sermon Slubey noted that the lease on her little plot of clay expired before her foundation set. “Only a playroom was built, but lying on a doll’s tea table was Medora’s favorite book, the Bible. Although the dear angelette couldn’t read, she loved the pictures: Goliath felled like an oak, a stone big as a turkey egg sunk in his forehead, and David, that blessed lamb, lying down with lions—baptized lions, circumcised lions, pulling the white chariot of the King.” Despite remaining mute at the funeral, Tup composed a quatrain for Medora’s tombstone: The window was open; The curtain was drawn. An Angel flew in, And our Darling was gone.

Talent complicates life. A slip of the poetic foot cost Tup the hand of Andelinda Craw. On Valentine’s Day, Tup gave his fiancée a box of macaroons. Unfortunately, the coconut in the cookies was spoiled, and the sweets upset Andelinda’s stomach. All life being grist for the grinding of a poet’s wheel, Andelinda’s indisposition provided ingredients for a quatrain: “That box, why did you give it me? You should have kept me from it.” So saying, she rushed behind a tree, And there my love did vomit.

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As a treat for Andelinda, Tup sent the poem to the Courier. The poem surprised Andelinda. After reading the paper, she broke her engagement, saying Tup must have been drunk as David’s sow when he wrote the poem. Andelinda’s reaction so upset Tup that he stopped writing. Instead he dug ponds on his farms, one pond a year for seven years. Moreover, because Tup rarely left home, Carthaginians spun rumors around him. Loppie Groat said that he’d heard Tup was breeding red mice and selling them to pet stores in Baltimore. Hoben Donkin opined that he understood Tup spent weeks working on a better, kinder electric chair, one shaped like a chaise lounge, “to be called either a Voltacuss or Thanatelectizer.” On the first day of the eighth year of his rustication, however, Tup sent a poetic note to his cousin Flea Friskett proposing marriage. The verse was succinct: “The love is true / That I.O.U.” Flea accepted, answering Tup with a couplet, “In thy breast / My heart doth rest.” In truth poetry had saved Tup from heartache. Andelinda was a crosspatch. Not long after breaking her engagement to Tup, she married Zenephon Pepper. For years she seasoned Zenephon’s days with gall. “And whereas to my wife Andelinda,” Zenephon later dictated in his will, “who to my unutterable grief has for more than two decades conducted herself toward me in a far different manner than what I deserve in respect to my justice and uprightness, friendly conversation and kind dealing, both to herself and to her relations who I solemnly swear are the damnedest pack of mongrelly freeloaders and rascally pickpockets in the State of Tennessee, I, nevertheless, hereby give and bequeath . . .” “Clearly the path to Carthage and the rarified realm of poetry is through the library,” Josh said, after savoring Tup’s verse. “Yes,” I said, “the way winds through nineteenth-century periodicals, and the magic word is diligence.” Tup was not Carthage’s only sweet singer. In March, Malachi Ramus published a collection of sermons entitled Spiritual Physic for Leprous Souls. When not acting as an emetic for the woebegone, Malachi’s language was fastidious. Instead of naked, for example, he wrote stark naught. “Atop Peetly Hill,” he wrote in the introduction, “where apple trees never bear More Fruit, where Methodists rent secondhand wives, where Baptists swill Magnetic Rock Water of Jerash, where Jews peddle used glass eyes, and stockbrokers hawk charms de-

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picting women giving birth to silver dollars, Minimum Christians dance stark naught to Satan’s red banjo.” In the Physic Malachi flayed the denominational: “You might as well kiss the mouth of a cannon as sip from a communion cup.” “Episcopalians,” he wrote, “hide wormy cobs under the shucks of titles and degrees: Bachelor of Tropology, Master Decalogist, and Doctor Who Didn’t of Theology.” Like rabbits fighting over a blade of grass, Catholics quarreled over nothing, such as “whether or not a drop of blood squeezed from the big toe of the Virgin Mary formed the body of Jesus.” “In Italy,” he asserted, “when the Pope’s housekeeper gave birth to twins, a little boy and a little girl, the College of Cardinals forced the children to marry each other.” Helianthosebeians, he said, devoted more time to gardening than to God, worshipping the sun, not the Son. Of Ubiquarians who maintained that Christ was everywhere, he asked, “Is what I step in when I climb Cow Hill Christ’s Body? Am I sinning when I scrub my boots before walking on the rug in the parlor?” In ladling out criticism, Malachi spread an olio of the unappetizing. At Assembly of God picnics, he continued, “congregations eat cat pie and don’t even belch.” “On feast days, Quakers in Kansas City,” he said, “serve roast Bible cooked with Irish potatoes, carrots, Vidalia onions, and savories of stinking sin.” In the sermons Malachi lanced conventional weakness. “The wineglass,” he wrote, “kills more than the sword. It causes deafness, catarrh, apoplexy, and pumple foot. It fills eyes with fire, legs with water, and turns the body into a hospital.” Gambling poisoned society. At the Belle Meade Country Club in Nashville, “blue bloods” wagered whether sick neighbors would die or recover. “Last Christmas Eve,” Malachi declared, “a banker collapsed on the putting green. Immediately golfers abandoned tee and driving range and rushed to the man’s side. What did those Argyle stockings do?” he asked. “Did a duffer go for a doctor? No, those foursomes bet whether their friend would pick up or putt out. When a waiter ran to call an ambulance, a lawyer with a fourstroke handicap knocked him into a sand trap, saying that fetching a doctor ‘would be unfair to those who backed a fatal result.’” “Now is not a perhapsy time,” Malachi stated. “God hears with His ears. He sees with His eyes. He smells the wages of sin with His nose.” “Oh, you shag-eared,” Malachi wrote, “dehibernate. Forsake voluntary

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catalepsy.” He urged readers to stay away from movies and plays. While Hell’s master of ceremonies, Kobal, chose actors, Verdelet, Satan’s theatrical manager, directed. Because he ridiculed Bible Christians, Nybas the Fool was especially dangerous. “Smiles,” Malachi wrote, “cut channels for tears.” To the sanctified, Malachi’s sentences were ambrosia. Only once did a sermon give believers la grippe. When Remillion Smith read, “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” he asked his uncle Peleg Smith, “Is that true or is it only preaching?” “Preaching,” Peleg said. “Malachi’s father was a ratcatcher and lived in a dog run. Old Reu Ramus never sat on an indoor commode in his life.” In the longest sermon Malachi prescribed remedies for soul sickness. “Belle Meade doctors claim microscopic animals cause diseases,” he began. “But can you hunt microscopic animals? Can you skin them? Can you sugar-cure their rumps? Can you fry them in Crisco or dust them with flour? Can you serve them on Sunday with cornbread and greens? If you take a shotgun, a fine twenty-gauge with a blue-gum barrel bored by Garth Fort himself in Chattanooga, and shoot a microscopic animal, where will you find the body? Don’t listen to sky doctors. The Bible is the navel of the earth, and its words flow from the womb of the King. Horse chestnuts may help you when your piles itch, but the Bible shows that sin causes disease. If you smoke a cigar with Asmodeus and swill moonshine with Dagon and say, ‘The best of everything is good enough for the likes of me,’ maggots will chew your shroud into tablecloths for pismires.” Only a regimen of right religion produced good health. “Feed Indian kohl to hogs,” Malachi urged. “Dose chickens with Madame Parodi’s Cologne. Then wash your eyes with Humility purified by the Fear of God. Lay the Chamomile of Heavenly Conversation hard against your nose. Anoint your hands with the Oil of Good Works so that your fingers may be quick to minister to the poor. Serve the Broth of Sanctification for dinner. Spoon-feed babies medications marinated in God’s Holy Word. Newspapers describe miracle cures and praise the march of intellect. But I say, ‘To what tune do Belle Meaders march with their false calves and two left feet?’ Don’t you Creatures of Christ even tap your toes. Be heavenly wallflowers and hold fast to the Rock of Ages. When the Fever of This World lays you by the heels and the school doctor throws up his hands and advises honest Sally to order a coffin

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parcel post from Sears Roebuck, raise your hands in prayer. God will scrub you in the Fountain of Job, and before you can say ‘clean potato,’ you’ll be kneeling in the strawberry patch, mouth sweet with breath, lips wet with juice. “When Satan turns you on a spit and sears the marrow of your bones, pull a quart of Repentance up from the well of your heart. Into the quart stir a pint of Fervent Faith seasoned by Christ’s blood and as much Hope and Charity as you can get at God’s Corner Store and not at some supermarket called Chizzell’s or Great Wicks. No siree,” Malachi wrote, waxing enthusiastic. “Old farms and old ways—hallelujah! Cook the mixture in the Blaze of Adoration until the Black Bile of This World rises stinking from your entrails. Then rest on the Bed of Christ’s Pure Innocence. Cover yourself with the Eiderdown of Amended Life and sweat out the Poisons of Covetousness, Idolatry, Whoredom, Extortion, Wrath, Envy, Sloth, Gluttony, Dancing, and Bowling. As soon as the Venom of Beggarly Pride oozes from your bowels, drink four glasses of Do Good Daily and bathe in the Soothing Waters of Heavenly Conversation.” Malachi ended the Physic with a colophon: “Peace on earth. Good will toward believers. You glorious Lovers of Christ who read these sermons, pardon me, I beseech you, if I have ended a sentence with a preposition, committed a comma blunder, or left a modifier dangling over the Fires of Hell. Fleshly fingers tremble and err. Only the Ten Commandments are perfect. May God spare us all. Amen.” Before publishing the book, Malachi tested the sermons on the congregation at the Church of the Chastening Rod. The only sermon not printed in Physic attacked smoking in church. In the sermon Malachi concentrated on cigarettes. Local gentry saved cigars for lodge meetings: Elks, Eagles, and Serugs. As far as pipes were concerned, Carthaginians didn’t tolerate them, bow ties, or graduates of Harvard. “We’re broad-minded in Smith County,” Hoben Donkin explained, “and don’t have nothing personal against people who wear bow ties, smoke pipes, or who attended the University of Harvard. But we are old-fashioned and hold fast to family values, reckoning such people would be more comfortable elsewhere, over yonder in Greece or Turkey, or Paris, France.” In the sermon Malachi ignored snuff. Only women dipped snuff in church, the rappee variety, in order to fortify themselves for cooking

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Sunday lunch. Always a gentleman, Malachi refrained from criticizing ladies. For their part children didn’t smoke or dip. They chewed navy plug made from burley and soaked in licorice—just the thing to soothe teething pains, Reynolds Tobacco assured sleepless parents. “How can a man have heavenly thoughts,” Malachi asked, “when his lungs thump like a bellows and his breath stinks like a sewer? I’ve seen most all the pictures of Jesus,” he continued, “floating on his back in the Dead Sea; standing next to Moses atop a thundercloud, his right arm wrapped like a scarf around the neck of the old Hebrew; frying catfish to feed the multitude; and camping at Petra, hunkered down beside a dying fire, in its ashes a coffeepot, the spout thick and curved like the beak of a turkey buzzard. In only one picture was Jesus smoking. In that picture he sat barebacked astride a camel, the pyramids behind him, in his right hand an ivory cigarette holder, smoke rising from the tip like the Holy Ghost. Nowhere does the Bible describe Jesus taking camel-riding lessons, and I’m practically certain the picture was not authentic but was a forgery, an advertisement paid for by Philip Morris or one of his buddies in Virginia or North Carolina.” Patriotism follows the dollar. Within a fortnight of delivering the sermon, Malachi received a wheelbarrow of sinister mail, including, among others, letters from the Daughters of the Confederacy, the Raleigh Chamber of Commerce, the Alumni Association of the University of Utah, the Attorney General’s Office, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The last two letters urged Malachi to recant, hinting that the sermon smacked of communism. “If not a fellow traveler, the man who damns smoking in church has never heard of freedom and the Alamo and Valley Forge and is probably a Mohammedan or maybe a Buddhist,” the letter from the attorney general declared. “Certainly, such a person is not an American—a free-spending, backslapping white man, red in the face, blue veins in his nose pulsing to the tune of ‘The StarSpangled Banner.’” Not until Turlow explained the implications of the sermon did Malachi understand the ruckus. “The government thinks you are an economic terrorist. Robbing Fort Knox would be nothing in comparison to convincing believers to stop smoking in church. You’ve threatened capitalism and the Constitution. If you want to avoid a sabbatical in prison, don’t publish the sermon.” Turlow had studied accounting at Millsaps, and in a Blue Horse tablet he sketched the ramifications of the

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sermon. In Smith County, eighty-one churches held services on Sunday. Congregations averaged three hundred and fifty people, seventy-five of whom were males. During a service lasting two and a half hours, the typical male believer smoked approximately five cigarettes. Thus the total number of cigarettes smoked in a single church on a Sunday was 375. For all the churches in Smith County the smoking amounted to 30,375 cigarettes. Of course, men came to church on days other than Sunday, for funerals, healings, baptisms, marriages, choir practice, snake training, political and prayer meetings, poker, and bingo, this last especially popular in Holiness churches of the whooping and hollering species. At a conservative estimate, the seventy-five smokers in each congregation spent six additional hours a week in church, in the process smoking six cigarettes apiece, or 450 cigarettes in each church and 36,450 for the county. The total number of cigarettes smoked in church during a single week thus amounted to 66,825. “One thousand cigarettes,” Turlow pointed out, “contain 2.1 pounds of moisture-free tobacco or 2.4 pounds of tobacco when the moisture content is 12.5 percent.” To keep his facts acceptable to teetotalers, Turlow figured on the basis of 2.1 pounds. “A week of church smoking,” Turlow continued, “consumes 140.3 pounds of tobacco. For a year the figure is 7,295 pounds or 3.65 tons. Ninety-five counties compose Tennessee, Smith County being among the least populated. “If Tennesseans stopped smoking in church, consumption of tobacco would decrease by at least a thousand tons. If the cessation of smoking in church spread from Tennessee and like the cholera morbus infected the South then the whole nation, the economy would fail. Farmers, paper manufacturers, trucking companies, railways, newspapers, hospitals, and nursing homes would go bankrupt. Medical schools would fold. Fire insurance companies would collapse. What would educators and social workers talk about? Who would pay for the girlfriends of congressmen and senators? No longer would lawyers feed on lung cancer and, swelling fat, donate dormitories to colleges. Ashtray designers would vanish. Furniture repairers would close their doors as the cessation of smoking swept the country like the plague, raising buboes on free enterprise and the American Way of Life. Within a year the United States would be as barren as the Ukraine, inhabited by wild pigs and coveted only by Poles.” “So, despite not belonging to the Klan, the National Rifle Association,

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or the Republican Party,” Josh summed up, “Malachi behaved patriotically and sliced the sermon from the book.” “Hold on,” I said. “My great-great-grandfather, my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my Daddy were Republicans.” “Are you a Republican?” Josh said. “No,” I answered. “Well, then,” Josh said. Before I could unravel a flag of patriotic words, he continued, “Last night I found a tick on Carol’s bottom. I won’t tell you how I got the tick off. He’d darn near excavated a mine. All I can say is, ‘Praise the Lord and dental floss.’” With that, Josh snapped his fingers and left the office. I shook my head, then opened my e-mail. “Sam,” Alice wrote, “I can’t interview you tomorrow. I forgot that I have breast-feeding class.” Drawing upon fatherly and culinary experiences, I answered Alice immediately. “For the first week after the baby pops out,” I wrote, “your teats will feel like burning towers, and you’ll be tempted to shift to a bottle. Don’t. The brightest days of motherhood lie ahead.” The next morning I awoke feeling at home in the world. After breakfast I roamed the wood and cornfield behind Unnamed Pond. Highbush cranberry was fat with blossoms. Caterpillars of red admiral butterflies rolled nettles into rugs. Killdeer darted between wispy rows of corn, and wrens chattered in the splintery scrub. A song sparrow perched on a broken reed, and tree swallows mated atop a bluebird house. In low spots barn swallows dipped through the air, spilling purple and orange. A turkey stood on a dung heap, and cowbirds milled nervously, jumping and blowing like chaff. Behind the graveyard rye swept the ground, its scales green and white, fringes toothed, flowers yellow and purple. Carpets of blossoms unrolled along the shoulders of an unfinished road: golden Alexanders, ox-eyed daisies, bird’s-eye speedwell, one-flower cancer root, cranesbill, ragged robin, and stars of lesser stitchwort. In the wood a female scarlet tanager foraged the ground, yellow splashing over her neck and spotting her tail. Suddenly I noticed a male in a pignut hickory. Only once in twenty years had I seen a tanager. The next day I returned to the wood and saw another tanager. During the first week of June, I saw tanagers every day, so often I dreaded the bird would become an item on the list of common things. One afternoon Alice interviewed me. Her questions were straightforward, but while she asked them, she twisted and turned. The baby had dropped and was resting on her cervix. “Oh, Lord,” she moaned. That evening I stood

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deep in a wood, mosquitoes ticking around my head. In the distance thrushes sang reels. A mustard sallow clung to the underside of witch hazel. The head of the caterpillar was white as mold, and its skin soft lemon. The next morning I stood at the edge of a cornfield and studied an elm. Near my feet a spicebush butterfly puddled, green sifting iridescent through its wings like new leaves trembling into growth. I wore the same clothes every day: gray sweatpants; a yellow sweatshirt; an orange lineman’s vest which I bought fourteen years ago; Rocky boots; and a sailor cap, on the front of which appeared an evergreen, beneath it the word STANFORD, firm as roots. As my clothes got dirtier, I felt better about myself, as if grime separated me from possessions and man’s thirst for recognition. Vicki’s response to my attire lacked the philosophical. “You look like,” she said, “the kind of person whose bones policemen find in horrible motels, buried beneath linoleum floors.” The second week in June, fluff drifted from willows into Unnamed Pond, dappling the water. Beside a sandy road bedstraw toppled over in yellow bales. A goldfinch bent meadow fescue into a scythe, and from the stems of orchard grass, blossoms burst into clay brushes. Privet bloomed in clutches of white horns, and bulblets of wild onion gleamed green and purple. Brome grass surrounded a field, its anthers tuning forks, quivering and almost ringing. Vetch climbed rye in ladders, and the new leaves of pokeweed shined feverish. A white-tailed hornet molded a nest to the handle of a rusty door. Skimmers sunned on rocks, white eyelets along their sides and chocolate melting down their backs. While flowers on gray-stemmed dogwood aged crazed, blossoms on swamp dogwood unfolded into place settings. At the rocky corner of a field, I found six garter snakes. Under staghorn sumac a dead fox sank into gravel and weed. Early in the afternoon green light rolled through woods in beacons. An ovenbird rummaged through twigs, its tail popping like a fan. Hares bounced through brambles, and one night a skunk shuffled through grass, its back bobbing, its fur shaking like a breaking wave. I caught a meadow mouse, an eastern mole, and, beside Unnamed Pond, a star-nosed mole. At the end of the second week in June, Vicki and I drove Eliza to the Russian Language School at Middlebury. When we left, Eliza cried. “She’s still a little girl,” I said. “When is Alice having her baby?” Vicki

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asked. “Soon,” I said. The next day I received a letter from Turlow. He invited me to Carthage. “A slab of Tennessee wedding cake awaits you,” he wrote, “in plain terms, a pan of cornbread.” Malachi’s sermons had gone into a second printing. Because Malachi did not print the attack on smoking in church, the Freedom Foundation awarded him a gold medal. “Malachi has caught cacoethes scribendi, the scribbling craze, and is writing more sermons,” Turlow reported. “Cake and sermons will have to wait until summer’s end,” I said to Vicki. Four days later we left for Nova Scotia. We had not been there for three years. “Everything will be fresh,” I said.

In the Good Summertime

In 1947 Vicki’s parents bought a farmhouse in Beaver River, Nova Scotia. Since marrying Vicki, I’ve spent thirteen summers in Canada. This June, I planned to go to Australia and ride a camel through the Great Victoria Desert. I have ridden camels before, spending four days plodding across Wadi Rum in Jordan and a week meandering Rainbow Valley in Australia’s Red Centre. Publicized as a search for “the elusive night parrot,” the trip lasted thirty-two days. I wanted to go back to Australia not to net a bird, but to snare the past and band lost dreams. When I was a boy, I explored atlases. The latitudes and longitudes that penned days between rails of school and family vanished, and I imagined life at the antipodes. Age levels illusion, and duty smothers dream like asphalt. The companions of my boyhood have spent decades yoked to responsibility. In bringing contentment to others, they’ve led rich lives, but they, or at least I, haven’t followed the finger that once moved across pages and, after scaling the Talish Mountains, dipped into the Caspian Sea. The name Spickeringi is not pinned to a weevil or longtoed beetle, much less to the world’s most reclusive tapeworm, a worm experts dub the shadow, paying tribute to its ability to paste itself so closely to stomach and bowel that x-rays rarely reveal its presence. During February I teased myself with Australia, searching the Internet for plane fares to Adelaide and planning my kit: Akubra hat, R. M. Williams boots, and sweatpants with “UConn” scrolling blue down the left leg. I bought two four-by-six-inch notebooks. Atop the first page of one of the books, I wrote “Camels and Roses.” In April, I drew a black line through the words. Underneath the line, I wrote “Nova Scotia.” For three years the house in Beaver River had been empty. Vicki’s 51

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brothers are too successful to spend summers there. Usually Geoff and Barbara, his wife, spend vacations sailing the New England coast or hiking from meal to meal in France or Italy. For their part, Alex and Roberta buy art in Italy and Germany. For seven years the ashes of Vicki’s father had sat in a file cabinet in our basement in Connecticut. Last year Vicki placed the ashes of her mother in the cabinet. In April, Vicki told me that Geoff and Alex, along with Barbara and Roberta, had agreed to come to Nova Scotia in July in order to scatter the ashes. “Daddy,” Eliza said, “you can go to Victoria next year.” At my age next years are chancy. Just yesterday I posed a question to my friend Raymond: “If given a choice between a swift death at sixty-five or five wonderful years of life from sixty-five to seventy followed by ten years of dementia, which would you choose?” Raymond is my age. He chose death at sixty-five. On June 18, Vicki and I sailed from Portland to Yarmouth on the Scotia Prince. The next morning I explored yard and season. Late spring rains had slowed summer. Yellow tassels slipped from the golden chain tree through a hawthorn, catching on lockets of ruby blossoms. Blue flag and forget-me-not glittered like sapphires along the damp edge of the side meadow, while buttercups and cat’s ears spread yellow and soft as icing over the low green of George’s Field. Chokeberry and wild raisin leaned into the lane leading to the bluff overlooking the Gulf of Maine. Here and there rhodora still bloomed, tops of the flowers purple, bases hoses of white. Along the dip in the lane, whitewash lichens turned bark ghostly, and bunchberry blossomed in placemats. Behind the bunchberry, fertile leaves sprayed from hummocks of cinnamon fern. In a shady spot, spruce needles covered a flat granite rock. Above the rock floated a pink haze of twin flowers, droplets sticky with almond. At the end of the lane, maritime sunburst lichens bloomed big as sunflowers on Lazy Days, the Perrys’ stone cottage. Like planks rotting on the kitchen porch, time turned memory soggy. A few splinters of association remained sharp, however. As I pondered repairs to the porch, suddenly I saw the Edward and Eliza of ten years ago. In the red chest in Vicki’s room they found bustles, a slinky black dress, knit sweaters, tweed trousers, and a grey hat with an ostrich feather sweeping out of the band. They put on the clothes and, standing on the porch, sang pop songs, dubbing themselves Spuds

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Bucket and Mr. Hands Rock and Roll. The memory saddened me, and instead of longing for new experiences in a desert, I hankered for the familiar past. No child accompanied us to Nova Scotia. While Francis studied Dutch in Germany, Eliza attended the Russian Language School at Middlebury College in Vermont. For his part, Edward was in Storrs. Because sunburn had made his skin so photosensitive that he could not spend days outside, he began the summer working the night shift from three to eight at the Federal Express depot on Ruby Road. Just before we left Connecticut, a doctor prescribed a drug which enabled Edward to tolerate daylight. Shortly after we arrived in Beaver River, Edward changed jobs, becoming a janitor at the Tolland High School. Instead of children, dogs accompanied Vicki and me to Nova Scotia. Penny and George had spent several summers in Beaver River and are good company. Worry vanished when I sat in the kitchen, a dog in my lap. “Age has turned me into a cartoon,” I said one afternoon while I scratched George. “So what,” Vicki said. Rubbing the dogs did not sooth all worry away, however. In past summers we’d spent days at the vet’s office in Yarmouth. One June Penny jabbed a thorn into her right eye; another June the dogs attacked porcupines. Moreover, despite accompanying me to the beach and scampering about while I cavorted naked in the surf, not something I would have done had the children been present, George was in poor health. For six weeks he’d experienced difficulty defecating. Often during a walk he strained mightily, with the result that the right side of his bottom pouched into a sack. The weekend before we left Connecticut, I took George to East Brook Animal Hospital. Dr. Mitterling diagnosed a swollen prostate and, because of the prostate, a perineal hernia. “If I castrate him, the prostate will shrink, and George won’t strain. Still, eventually he’ll need an operation to repair the hernia.” Dr. Mitterling is a devotee of castration, and not simply for the four-legged. “If doctors chopped the balls off men when they reached fifty,” he added, “prostate cancer would disappear.” Our departure was a week away, and there not being time to operate, Dr. Mitterling suggested that Vicki mix a tablespoon of Metamucil into George’s dinner. “That might help,” he said. It didn’t. By August, George’s back was a drumlin bony with till, from the end of which his tail rose, dipped, then rose again, forming an S. Windows in the house were so old they transformed the outside into

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mist. Similarly, chores floated across my first days in Nova Scotia creating such a fog of doing that dreams of Australia faded. Work and the contentment work creates undermine hankerings for other places. When one’s now is full, now is enough. I scraped moss off the roof of the house. I trimmed the Scotch broom by the bay window in the front parlor, then the bridal veil by the bay window facing the side meadow. I pruned golden elder and lilac, sawed limbs from hawthorns, and cut mock orange back from the barn. From rhododendron I pulled bales of Virginia creeper. I chopped down spruce that had grown high along the lane, blocking the sunset and ocean from sight. From the bank above Route 1, I removed alder and poplar. From the drainage ditch below telephone and power lines, I lifted cartloads of fallen spruce. Cleaning inside the house took days. A paddy of mouse droppings thick as wild rice covered furniture and floors. Floors beneath windows resembled diminutive battlefields, battalions of wood lice reduced to shieldlike exoskeletons. Under the bay window in the front parlor lay 386 lice, all sucked dry by spiders. Droppings of spiders stained floors, turning wood into salt pans. Time changes place, and June was the season of insects. During Vicki’s childhood in the 1950s and ’60s, there were no ticks in Beaver River. In the 1980s when I started coming to Nova Scotia, I plucked two or three ticks off my clothes each summer. Because ticks thrive in high grass, three summers ago I had the blueberry field behind the house bushwhacked. “That’ll stop the ticks,” I told Vicki. I was wrong. The second day in Nova Scotia, the dogs and I walked across the hayfield west of the house. By walk’s end, I had pulled thirty-six ticks off the three of us. That night I poured a quarter inch of rubbing alcohol into a glass jar. “The Jar of Death,” Vicki dubbed it. After strolls Vicki and I curried ourselves and the dogs in the kitchen. By summer’s end the jar contained 302 ticks, most pulled off me, many with skin clasped in their mouths. During walks we watched for ticks and when outside probably removed six times as many ticks as we found after returning home. To discover ticks at home, Vicki and I peeled off our clothes. Often neighbors cut through our property, walking past the kitchen window in order to reach the ocean. Seeing us naked in the kitchen three or four times a day, neighbors must have thought us lively. “My word, don’t appearances deceive?” Vicki said, imagining conversations—Who’d have thought people their age capable of such gai-

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ety? “Maybe,” I said, “neighbors just think our dining habits odd. I doubt any would accept an invitation to lunch.” Ticks were not the only nuisance. Constellations of black flies orbited across days. By the second night Penny’s belly was measly with bites. Dried blood streaked the sides of Vicki’s head, from a distance looking like earrings. Throughout June, I doused myself with Avon’s Skin-So-Soft whenever I went for a ramble. One morning I searched the bog behind Black Point for grass pinks. A net of flies shook around my head, and from my sweatpants I removed forty-eight ticks. Until the middle of July, when ticks and black flies decreased in number, Vicki and I spent free moments scratching, our conversations litanies of weary resignation, interrogatives such as “Ain’t they biting hard this evening” followed by “Yes, and don’t they just itch something terrible.” Black flies were responsible for only some of the welts that raised my skin into geology. Shortly before leaving Storrs, George followed a chipmunk into a hillock of poison ivy. That evening when I held George, his chest rubbed my left forearm. By the time I arrived in Nova Scotia, poison ivy had spread from my forearm across the top of my right hand and around my wrist, from which it migrated to my left bosom, both ankles, backside, and the badlands inside both thighs. From my skin mountain ranges erupted, then eroded into red crusts. Along my left arm stretched the Monitors, eight and three-quarter inches by three and a quarter inches. Across my right leg rose the Shoshones, eleven and nine-sixteenths by seven and one-sixteenth inches, Carson Sink, I imagined, visible to the west, the Columbus Salt Marsh to the south. Once we cleaned the house, I arranged the outside. Near the edge of the drumlin overlooking the gulf, I laid plywood squares. The next day four red-bellied snakes dozed under the wood. From the roof above the kitchen porch I hung the hummingbird feeder. That afternoon hummingbirds appeared. Next I cleared a path to my outdoor lavatory. Aside from some seepage in the tub, I have not used the bathroom in the house since 1991. I prefer outdoor doings to indoor, an eccentricity that at first intrigued and repulsed the children but now only embarrasses them. This summer, my lavatory was ninety-six steps from the kitchen porch, the path to a spruce clearing curving like a scythe, first across the side meadow through a hedge of asters and meadowsweet, then weaving between alders and blackberry canes.

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I enjoyed sauntering to the clearing. Hares stood still as stone. Grouse clucked and spread their tails. In June domestic cats hunted the underbrush, and one morning I found two dead short-tailed shrews. Near the flanks of male short-tailed shrews are scent glands. When frightened, shrews release an odor, causing predators to discard them. I rolled the shrews under my nose, but I couldn’t discover an odor. Yellow warblers foraged alders around the clearing, flashing so brightly that I ignored the mosquitoes and black flies circling my head. Northern parulas flickered high in maples, and yellowthroats called from the tops of spruce, their voices brittle and jerky. In past summers I haunted birding spots. This year I let birds come to me: great blue herons; turkey buzzards; kestrels hovering the air, wings waggling, tips bent into scoops; woodcock; chickadees; and along the edges of boggy woods black-throated green warblers. Once sight of a chestnut-sided warbler made my heart leap; now birds seemed the familiar furnishings of place. Sometimes I thought about night parrots, in truth dumpy boats of green and yellow, distance, however, making them bob high in imagination. Sitting in the rocking chair in the kitchen, the sweet tang of birch seeping from the stove, I fretted that I was too content. Spontaneity and the uncomfortable provoke observation. A northern harrier’s sweeping under a fog bank or a loon’s riding the silver lip of the sea seemed matters of postage stamps, my vision lazy, determined by commercial elsewheres. At dusk sunsets dyed the shakes siding the barn pink and gold, the colors framed, the sight the stuff of calendars. One night I stood on the bluff and watched a thunderstorm over the Gulf of Maine. Bolts cracked into the sea and light flashed along the water, opening the horizon like a venetian blind, things I’d seen in a score of photographs. In August when season whipped woodbine frothy through the night air, the fragrance smacked of advertisements stapled inside magazines. One afternoon in Yarmouth I talked to a woman in an art gallery. At the end of the conversation, the woman turned to Vicki and said, “You must have fun all the time.” For a moment I suspected the woman of peeking into our kitchen. “Great fun,” Vicki said, under her breath mumbling, “The lies one lives for strangers.” Despite the occasional fretting, Vicki and I settled easily into Nova Scotia. In June we picked wild strawberries along an abandoned road. In a ditch beside the road,

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lupine bloomed, the flowers swollen and veined, spikes flaring like blue flame. In a Swedish movie, picking strawberries would have been prelude to a tempestuous frolicking. For us strawberries led to ticks. When Vicki brushed a clump of grass no larger than a teapot, six ticks hooked her ankle. The children would have thought our pleasures small—remnants of diminished vitality. Age is more flexible than youth. Because dreams don’t shackle days to ambition and artificial schedule, the middle-aged relax and adapt to circumstance. One morning in early July, Vicki said, “I wonder what you’d be doing if you were in Australia.” “Who knows?” I said. Some days we drove into Yarmouth for lunch, eating sandwiches at the Tearoom, falafel and baba ghanoush at Little Lebanon, and hamburgers at Rudder’s. At the Quick and Tasty, a waitress remembered the children. “Where is Francis?” she asked. Six times during the summer we watched “explosion” movies, films such as Triple X and The Bourne Identity. Before the movies we drove to Starrs Road and ate dinner at Pizza Delight. We each drank a bottle of Keith’s Pale Ale and ordered the $6.79 special, a Caesar salad and a six-inch pizza topped with three ingredients—in my case, mushroom, anchovies, and pepperoni. The meal always cost $24.24. If service was fast, I walked next door to Tim Hortons and for $1.96 bought a medium cup of coffee and a chocolate doughnut. One Friday when Vicki shopped at Sobey’s, I darted across Starrs Road to Tim Hortons. I ordered coffee in a ceramic cup, explaining that I never let my mouth touch paper. Lumbermen sprayed woodlots with pesticides. I explained that I knew several people whose lips had shriveled after drinking coffee from cups tainted by chemicals. “Shrank like slugs dipped in salt,” I said. Because the sweet trays were bare and I’d risked not only limbs but also trunk and heartwood to cross Starrs Road, I asked the waitress if any surprises lurked in the kitchen. “For you,” she said, “I have a warm Dutchie,” a glazed rectangle of dough and raisins. Sitting in a booth, I sipped, munched, and read Stephen Leacock, occasionally laughing recklessly. Afterward I returned to Sobey’s and discussed clementines with Helena. She sliced one for me, and on my noting it tasted bitter, she removed the fruit from the bin. On George’s birthday, we drove to Cape St. Mary and at the Kwik Way bought him and Penny vanilla ice cream cones. Vicki and I also ate

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cones, Vicki a scoop of butterscotch ripple topped by a scoop of ginger and I chocko’berry and spuds in mud, the former measly with nuts and strawberries, the latter raisins wrapped in yogurt and the whole submerged in chocolate. One afternoon while Vicki searched Smitty’s, a used clothing store, for afghans with which to line the dogs’ beds, I rummaged through a cardboard box crammed with baseball caps, all priced at ten cents. Across the crowns streamed tapes of advertisements: AT&T, Coles River Club, Weebok, GranDaddy’s, Rocky Mountain Magazine, Exxon Aviation, Tampa Bay Lighting, Eagle Electronic Supply, St. Francis Care Medical Staff, Crown Royal, The Reefs, Coors Racing, Sully’s Sports Bar, and Oshkosh, the name of this last lounging under a tent of red and white stripes. “Gee, there are a lot of caps in that box,” Vicki said, after picking out three afghans. “Yep,” I said. Twice Vicki and I made halfday trips, driving to Digby one morning and Annapolis Royal another. At Digby I watched a crew slap blue paint on the Stephanie & Darrell, a dragger in dry dock. On the way back to Beaver River, I stopped at Fort Point and watched wood pulp being loaded into a yellow skip owned by Irving Oil. A long conveyer belt shaped like a praying mantis sucked pulp from a huge mound and spat it into the skip. At the Admiral Digby Museum, I coveted a crockery hot-water bottle, its top a brown knob shaped like a corkscrew. In the gardens in Annapolis Royal I longed to dig a bottlebush buckeye ripe with blooms. We attended the Seafest Festival in Yarmouth, Friday night sitting at harbor’s edge and watching fireworks. On Saturday we ate mussels, fish cakes, and shark steak at Alma Square and listened to two groups, the Shantymen and 340 South, the former singing sea shanties, the latter country music. In past years we never missed the Seafest parade. This year we left town before the parade ended. The bands shrill with bagpipes, massive workhorses, and shoals of small children who once composed the parade had vanished, their places taken by fire engines and cars and trucks honking and blaring, advertising radio stations, automobile dealerships, and local businesses such as Sudz & Budz Hot Tub Rentals. Most nights after dinner, I rubbed Vicki’s shoulders with a backscratcher I bought in 1986. At nine o’clock Vicki washed dishes, after which I dried them and put them away. Before dinner we listened to the

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radio. Occasionally a preacher disturbed the round of pop music, announcing that “filthy sex habits” caused “the root canal of atheism.” Religious doings are often colorful. At The Truth and The Life Christian Family store on Main Street in Yarmouth, T-shirts sold for $16.95. I almost bought a shirt, print on the front commanding, “JUST SAY NO TO HELL.” The store, alas, had only a single size of the shirt I really wanted. On the back of the shirt Moses, looking hip with a long beard and sporting shades, dozed beneath an umbrella at “The Red Sea Beach Club.” Printed on the umbrella was “Exodus,” the name of the cabana from which Moses rented holiday equipment. Moses’s arms spread wide, his hands draping over two surfboards. Engraved on the boards were the Ten Commandments. While land behind the umbrella was dry, ideal for ambling to the Promised Land, to the far side of each board waves curled frothy, just right for surfing. Time has transformed my faith into bemusement. Only rarely does religion provoke me to intolerance. One afternoon Vicki and I took a picnic lunch to Cape St. Mary. We walked west to the end of the beach where rocks broke the shore into a muffin pan of tidal pools. Above the pools loomed a bluff, its front creased by slides and shadowy with fallen trees. The bluff always raised my thoughts into ponderings. This summer sight of the bluff awakened resentment. Christians had reduced it to a tract by painting silver crosses across its face. Atop a flat rock high above the tide line, they erected a wooden cross. I studied the rock, then scrambled up it. Stones and plastic ropes secured the cross. I set to work and within eight minutes reduced the cross to a woodpile. “Should you have done that?” Vicki said when I slid back down to the beach. “Yes,” I said, adding, “Their brutish certainty damns them.” Rarely did event move me to passion. Sometimes, though, the sad lots of others made me gulp. In July a memorial poem in the Halifax newspaper lamented the death of a girl twenty years old. The girl died three years earlier. A picture accompanied the verse. The girl’s eyes shined; her smile was broad, and dark hair hung down over her shoulders like a shawl. “We wonder what you would be doing now, / If you hadn’t left. / Would you be a wife, a mother, have a career or be carefree. / We ask why you had to leave so soon. / Yet give thanks for the time we had. / We now share your spirit with God and you continue to be part of our daily lives. / Three years has passed so quickly, yet seems

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so long.” “Vicki,” I said, putting the paper down, “I wonder what the children are doing.” Most things I stumbled over were not emotional, however, and could be held in my hand, a Bennington ware bowl or a packet that once held ten Sweet Caporal cigarettes. Printed on the box was the warning, “Carelessness can cause fires. BE CAREFUL.” I have aged into caution albeit I sometimes stray. A ten-kilometer road race was part of Seafest. Fifteen years ago I ran the race. This summer I decided to run again. For the month before the race, I jogged around our property twice a week. On some outings I circled the farm twice; once I circled it four times. Vicki urged me not to run, warning, “You’ll die.” Young men listen to wives. Old men lose their hearing. Early on the 22nd of July, I drove to Yarmouth and pinned the number 1453 to my T-shirt. The race started by the harbor and, winding out of town along the highway, twisted over heart-stopping hills, then turned back toward the water. After three kilometers my lungs ached like tired balloons. Four kilometers from the end, a girl from Saskatchewan slogged past. “I am used to flat lands,” she gasped. Tiger paws adorned the back of her shorts, a paw on each haunch. As she ran, the paws jiggled. The sight invigorated me, and I stayed close behind her until the final three hundred yards. Then the paws dug in, and the girl scampered away. One hundred and twenty people ran the race. I finished ahead of two men and four women. “I finished 114th,” I told Edward on the telephone. “That’s astonishing,” Edward exclaimed, assuming the race had attracted thousands of runners like the Manchester Road Race held in Connecticut on Thanksgiving morning. “You must be in good shape,” Edward continued. “Tip-top,” I said. Despite flying after dark, moths are not as elusive as the night parrot. The entry to the front of the house is neoclassical, and the door is recessed. During the day moths pasted themselves to woodwork surrounding the door. Some mornings, I carried a chair to the front entry. Standing on the seat, I caught moths in a homemade trap, a palm-sized clear plastic container, the sort hawked by Tupperware salesmen and used to store sugar or salt. I pressed the container over moths, imprisoning them. Then I slid a piece of paper between moths and the entry, forcing the insects to lose their grip and tumble into the trap. Rarely does a wife think a husband adventuresome. Vicki did not treat my expeditions to the front door seriously. On seeing me start down the hall carrying a chair, she once said, “Setting off to the outfront, are you?

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Beware palp and proboscis. Ten of the world’s most poisonous moths live in Nova Scotia.” Then she laughed long and loudly, sounding like a kitchen drain. In truth, if I did not risk life and limb, I risked twigs. The chair was palsied, and whenever I climbed atop the seat, its legs quivered. Instead of elusive, my catches were commonplace—lorikeets of the moth world: honest pero, armyworm, yellow slant line, gray spruce looper, snaky arches, horrid zale, blinded sphinx, and Radcliffe’s dagger. One morning six false crocus geometers basted the entry red and yellow. Another day eleven pale beauties clung to the wood filigreeing the door. Only rarely did I answer the call of adventure. I spent more mornings inside the house sanding, caulking, priming, and painting. The house doesn’t have storm windows. For years, rain seeped through sashes and, picking at caulk and paint, turned the edges of frames into hangnails. Fungus sprouted around panes and grew into low hedges. Mullions became arbors green with lichens. For two summers Francis repaired and painted windows. This summer I worked on four windows Francis missed, two of them bays—one in the study, the other in the front parlor. Each bay consisted of twenty-eight panes: each side four panes over four panes, the center, six over six. Each of the other two windows was composed of twelve panes, six over six. For the four windows, the number of panes was eighty. The windows were large. From the top of the cap to the decoration below the sill, the side windows measured six feet, nine and a half inches, cap and head alone measuring ten inches in height. Jambs were broad, eight inches wide, and each window measured five feet across. I bought supplies at Kent Hardware: a caulking gun, sandpaper, two brushes with metal tines, two putty knives, caulk, primer, and paint. I used four tubes of acrylic caulk, “20 Year Durability Weathershield Caulking.” Each tube contained 300 mL of caulk. I used two cans of Beauti-Tone Latex and Acrylic Primer Sealer Undercoat, each can containing 3.64 L of liquid. I also used two similar-sized cans of Latex and Acrylic Semi-Gloss Enamel paint, advertised as “Finishing White” for kitchens. With the putty knives I dug out loose caulking and sliced away slivers of moldy wood. The wood absorbed primer and paint. I put two coats of primer on each window and three coats of paint. To work, I wore a pair of gray shorts and a long-sleeved running shirt given to me for running a race

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in 1983. Because the old paint contained lead, I covered my face with a particulate respirator, using three during the work. I did not wear underpants or shoes, and I covered the floor with newspapers, all dated 1999, our last summer in Nova Scotia. I spent two days scraping, sanding, and caulking, working nine hours a day. Priming took two days, the sealer drying faster than paint. Painting itself took three days. Because we don’t open the windows, I did not worry about sashes sticking, and I slathered paint on thickly. I liked the order working on the panes imposed on days, each pane fifteen and a half inches tall and eleven and a quarter wide. When I finished, the windows gleamed. Restoration satisfied me, creating the illusion that effort could neaten life. Next I planned to restore two windows in the kitchen and another two in the back pantry. Vicki objected, saying dust would make cooking and living difficult. Covering shelves and sealing cabinets beforehand then cleaning afterward would take days. “Some other summer,” she said. Ritual orders existence. People have difficulty coping with meaninglessness, so they impose pattern on life. Societies establish religions, social contracts, and educational institutions. Individuals become their habits. Once established, patterns become sources of meaning, imposing importance on otherwise insignificant doings. People are more susceptible to patterns than to colds. In less than a week, a pattern can so determine activity that straying from its dictates determines mood. After repairing windows, wandering the farm seemed indulgent. Restoring had burrowed into my bloodstream, and after putting away brush and putty knife, I cleaned pantries. Instead of brushing paint on wood, I stripped paint away, carting fifty-eight cans to the recycle depot on Water Street in Yarmouth. For decades cans cluttered shelves, some since the 1950s when Vicki was a child. In the past I ignored the cans. This summer the windows brought paint to mind and eye. Cans ranged in size, containing, among others, 1.13, 1.14, 3.68, 3.78, 4.26, 4.55, and 4.67 liters; a quarter pint, half pint, pint, and a gallon; and 32, 371⁄ 4, and 39 ounces. Several companies manufactured the paints: Islander, Pratt and Lambert, Cilux, Lakko, Tremclad, Utilac, Sheffield, Martin Senour, Benjamin Moore, and Brandram-Henderson. Most of the paint was white, but I found a rainbow of colors: apricot, gray, brown, black, chrome, orange, blue, “Rich Blue,” “Sunkist Yellow,” “Paddy Green,”

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“Chinese Rouge,” and “Raw Turkey Umber.” From shelves I removed shellac, turpentine, shingle finish, linseed oil, plastic wood, water putty, paint remover, varnish, and wood stain, this last in light oak, fruitwood, and colonial maple. In many cans paint had dried into crust. The bottoms of several cans had rusted into holes, and liquid had percolated over the shelves, forming hard brown pools. Because Yarmouth’s hazardous waste dump opened for a single day in spring, not everything I removed from the house could be recycled. These I placed on trays in the barn, on a shelf I called “The Shelf of Death.” Among the poisons were a fluid ounce of concentrated flower spray manufactured by Green Cross and containing malathion and DDT; two tin cans, each holding thirty-two ounces of Black Flag spray, containing 5 percent DDT; a little bottle of colorless creosote sold by Samuel Cabot, Inc., located at 141 Milk Street in Boston; a sixteenounce can of CAPO Surface Spray, PCP Registration Number 2220, also containing 5 percent DDT; a liter of Green Cross Creepy Crawly, PCP Registration Number 10865; a liter of Mastercraft Green Liquid Preservative containing 2 percent copper from copper naphthenate; a rusty can of Sect-A-Kill, “Sold to Graduate Veterinarians Only” for use on dogs and cats; and a small bottle containing enough Black Leaf 40 concentrate for two gallons of spray. Two teaspoons of the flower spray mixed in a gallon of water would, instructions declared, “give excellent control of Aphids, Red Spiders, Clover Mites, Scale Insects, Mealy Bugs, Tent Caterpillars, Cabbage Worms, Thrips, White Flies, Leafhoppers, Flea Beetles, etc.” Black Leaf 40, the label suggested, “may be used to control poultry lice infesting mature chickens by applying a small quantity to clean roost poles. Make application by using a small paint brush and ‘paint’ the undiluted product on top of the roost in a thin film about 1⁄ 2 inches wide.” Spraying Black Leaf 40 on shrubs in the garden would also “Detour Dogs.” I dropped some things into the garbage, mostly boxes that had burst— for example, a box containing two pounds eight ounces of Ortho’s BugGeta, Snail and Slug Pellets. “Keep Pellets Away From Children, Dogs & Other Pets,” instructions warned. Cleaning is addictive. Besides paint, the clutter of summers past crammed shelves in the hall pantry: three fishing reels, four badminton and three tennis rackets, a quiver prickly with thirteen arrows, and a

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box of balls—four golf, two softball, two baseball, two tennis, and one hard rubber ball. Because two generations of children had fished, shot arrows, and thrown and swatted balls, I only dusted and rearranged the shelves. Periwinkle shells filled a cigar box that originally held fifty Antonio y Cleopatra Panatelas. A decade ago Eliza drilled holes in the shells and made necklaces. “Save those,” Vicki said. “Someday Eliza’s children will make necklaces.” I didn’t save a broken bicycle pump; a jar of “French Shore Relish” canned by Vicki’s mother in 1984; two Styrofoam cups, one filled with dirt from Prince Edward Island, the other with sand; twelve paintbrushes; six toothbrushes; a jar wormy with rotten rubber bands; two jars of bone meal thick as cement; and eight round cans, four and a half inches in diameter, two and a quarter deep, tops removed. Once the cans had contained between eleven and twelve ounces of frozen lobster from Cheticamp, Packer’s Pride, Downeast, and Best O’ Place. I also cleared away one hundred and four wooden strawberry containers, seventeen pint-sized, the other eighty-seven quart-sized. Three summers ago Francis and I cleaned the barn. The floor was rotten and boards moved up and down like keys on a piano, playing ankle-spraining tunes. To save the building and our legs, we replaced floor and sills with concrete. This summer after straightening pantries, I worked on the backhouse. Not only was the floor rotten, but faucets of rain poured through the roof. For Vicki’s mother, the backhouse had been a storeroom. Unlike goods in the pantry, some items in the backhouse were valuable. I have reached the divesting stage of life, that time when possession smacks of excess and arouses chagrin in addition to delight. Eight years ago Edward found a parchment deed in the basement of Vicki’s mother’s house in Princeton. The deed dated from 1767 and lay folded in a small flat cardboard box that once held a sweater. Sides of the box had broken, and mildew speckled the outside. “What shall we do with this?” Edward asked. “Give it to me,” I said. The deed was signed by Lord William Campbell, “Captain General and Governor in Chief in and over His Majesty’s Province of Nova Scotia or Accadie.” Made out to Nehemiah Porter, the deed divided the 28,971 acres of Yarmouth Township into shares. Each share consisted of 666 acres, and Porter received two shares. Vicki’s grandmother and her second husband, Jack

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Porter, owned an inn outside Yarmouth, and the deed entered Vicki’s family through marriage. Soon after settling into Beaver River, Vicki and I donated the deed to the Yarmouth County Museum. The deed bound grantees to plant two acres of hemp within ten years and “to keep up the same of a like Quantity of Acres planted during successive Years.” Donating the deed bound us to the museum. When we cleared the backhouse, we gave discoveries to the museum: from a nineteenth-century store, a candy case, six feet long and three feet high, glass rolling over the front in a waterfall, each end of the case topped by a square tower, its walls glass, its roof mahogany; five Victorian bell jars of different sizes and heights; and then as an afterthought two Adirondack chairs for the yard next to the museum. For the wall of an addition to the museum, we donated a stained-glass window. The window had once been part of a Gothic Revival house and rose into an arch, the top a wooden fan. We also donated two iron stoves. Burrell Johnson manufactured one of the stoves in Yarmouth in 1888. Three pairs of ceramic medallions adorned the stove, three on each side of the grate. The first pair was green and depicted a young girl in a cap looking down demurely. The second pair was also green; on them a young man studied the future, a crown of vine leaves wrapping his forehead. The last medallions were yellow. A mature Roman matron stared outward from them, a band binding her hair and common sense marking her expression. At my age, accumulating causes worry. Giving brings relief. Sixty feet of heavy wooden fence leaned against the wall of the backhouse. The chairman of the museum board carted our donations to Yarmouth. While helping load his truck, I asked if he could use the fence. On his saying he could fashion a playpen for his grandchildren out of the wood, Vicki told him to pile the fence onto the truck. After the donations left, I wanted to strip the backhouse. Vicki did not. Stacked in a corner was driftwood. One piece looked like a dragon lizard, splinters jutting from its neck in a frill. When we cleared the barn, Francis dumped 141 pounds of rocks at the outlet at Beaver River. Every summer when he was little, Francis carted rocks up from the beach. Inside the backhouse were three buckets brimming with rocks, the best of Francis’s collection. On a shelf sat two birdhouses, covered with lichens. Mice had crammed paper into the houses. Because their tops couldn’t be removed for cleaning, I wanted to throw

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the houses away. “No,” Vicki said. “When I was little, they were nailed to the barn.” Things children once treasured filled the backhouse: four plastic sand buckets (red, green, orange, and yellow) brimming with shells—scallop, mussel, and razor clam; a washtub of bones, including the skulls of a cow, porcupine, and flying squirrel; the right front leg of a deer; the spine of a stingray; and in a plastic box four skeletons of mice. Stuffed into a wooden box that once held six quarts of peaches were eighteen bait bags, all woven from plastic string. Crab shells spilled from eight plastic bags. Vicki collected the shells. “When you find a perfect shell,” Vicki said, “how can you leave it on the beach even if you have thirteen the same color?” Vicki forbade my cleaning the backhouse, saying, “I’m not ready to pitch things that recall summers when the children were young.” Restoring and cleaning have momentum stronger than words, at least for the human male. When Vicki was away from the house, I dumped one of Francis’s buckets of rocks on the beach. I crushed three bags of crab shells and scattered the pieces under bay surrounding the blueberry field. I tossed the leg of the deer and the skulls of the cow and porcupine deep into blackberry canes, and I buried driftwood under kindling in the stove. I also rid the backhouse of things Vicki didn’t notice, four inner tubes and three glass jars, each capable of holding 128 ounces of liquid. Years of accumulating provoked the compulsion to strip the house. Children imbibe acquisitiveness as soon as society begins to feed them. Almost never can habit be broken. Early in the summer when I was not cleaning, Vicki and I attended auctions: one on Chegoggin Road outside Yarmouth and the other at the Port Maitland Hall. Although we didn’t intend to purchase anything, I obtained bidding numbers, 160 and 55, respectively. Goods for sale in Port Maitland were ordinary: a Royal Doulton Happy Anniversary figurine dated 1986, pictures of British royalty from 1935, jelly molds, pine dressers, and wicker Victorian chairs. “For the sake of experience,” I bid on a 1930s slate decorated with a sketch of Aunt Jemima. The slate sold for $65; I stopped bidding at $50. Vicki bid $12.50 for a carton of teacups. The cups brought $17.50. At Chegoggin, the auction was outside. The auctioneer stood on a red pickup truck and bidders sat in folding chairs. Most bidders were dealers. I coveted an ironstone crock. “What will you do with it?” Vicki said. “Stuff peacock feathers in it,” I said. Bidding on the crock started at $70, fifty dollars beyond my top price. One Friday Vicki took

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a box of knickknacks to the county museum sale: antlers, a green glass candy dish, an iron used as a doorstop, an assortment of coffee cups, and a glass ashtray, “Seven-Up” printed on it in white. On Saturday, we went to the sale. While the candy dish was priced at twenty-five cents, the antlers were $10 and the ashtray $12. At the sale I bought four books for a dollar: Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban, Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader, Elmore Leonard’s Maximum Bob, and Black Betty by Walter Mosley—a novel, I realized later, I’d already read. Buying is hard to resist. From the museum we drove to a “double estate sale” in Arcadia. Vicki spent $22.50 on things certain to appear in the next museum sale: two small cream pitchers, one clear glass, the other decorated with holly and pinecones; nine glass candies; four cups, grapes on one, horses on another; an eggbeater; a whisk; a vegetable peeler priced at fifty cents; two wooden pepper mills; and nine minute ceramic teapots, “prizes” once found in boxes of Tetley Tea. For years we have searched for replacement lids for our kitchen stove, a Findlay Condor dating from the 1950s. No store in Yarmouth carried lids that fit the stove, and salesmen suggested we order lids from a foundry in Lunenburg. Battered tools filled a room at the sale. “If I can’t find something here,” a Frenchman said, “I go to Graff Brothers Salvage in St. Bernard. They have everything.” The following Thursday Vicki and I drove to St. Bernard, and in the basement I found two lids suitable for our stove. Both lids were red with rust. They cost seven dollars, two dollars for one, five for the other. Affection clutters houses. At the Lucky Rabbit, a pottery shop in Annapolis Royal, I bought Vicki a cookie jar. The jar was sentimental, the sweet stuff of a present. Majolica flowers climbed blue and green up the sides of the jar. On the top of the jar perched a mouse. Near the end of the summer, Vicki stopped at a tag sale in Port Maitland. On a table sat a wooden ox pulling a two-wheeled cart. From the tip of the ox’s nose to the lip of the cart was twenty-three inches. The ox itself was eight inches high, and cart and animal looked as if they dated from the 1920s. “It would look super on the grate in the parlor,” Vicki said. The carving was priced at $95, but the woman said she would give it to Vicki for $85. Four days before we left Nova Scotia, I stopped at the sale. I spread $65 on a table, three twenties and a five. “I’ll pay this for the ox,” I said. “What can I say?” the woman replied, and took the money.

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Disposing of Vicki’s parents was another sort of cleaning. They traveled to Nova Scotia in black plastic boxes, eight and a half inches tall, four and a quarter deep, and six and a half broad. During the summer Vicki shifted the boxes from room to room. They started on a chest in the front parlor, vases of wildflowers between them. One morning her father moved to a table beside the study window. Another morning her mother sat atop the sewing machine she used for years. Their presence weighed on Vicki. “I’ve got to get my parents off my hands,” she said. Before her brothers arrived, Vicki sifted the ashes and removed bony bits. “To spare the boys,” she said. The day the ashes were spread was sunny. In the side meadow, Alex read one of his father’s favorite poems, Keats’s “On the Grasshopper and Cricket,” which begins, “The poetry of earth is never dead.” Afterward the family roamed the property, scattering ashes and awakening kindly memory. No matter how much a person paints or scrubs, death is always present. A mouse trapped himself in a bud vase in the pantry, only aroma revealing his presence. One morning Vicki found a harbor seal and a deer floating in the Beaver River inlet. The deer had been in the water a long time. The animal was hairless, and its skin gleamed like fat. Death transformed the deer into a wineskin, its neck and head twisted back and to the side. An intestine dangled from a flank, looking like gray salamander. A puffy white tongue thrust out between the animal’s teeth. Two days later as I jogged past the inlet, a truck from Natural Resources arrived to fetch the deer. A fat man drove the truck; next to him sat a skinny man. “Well,” I said, “you fellows are in luck. You’ll save lunch money today.” When the skinny man smiled, I continued. “On the other hand, why don’t you sell the venison to Rudder’s. Soaked in Sauce Robert, the meat would be dandy.” On the skinny man’s taking a rope from the back of the truck and walking into the water to throw a loop over the deer’s neck, the big man strode toward the beach. When the skinny man pulled the deer out of the water and hoisted it into the truck, the body slipped gelatinous through the skin. The deer was rank, but the skinny man didn’t seem to notice. “Perfume for a country debutante party,” I said, and started running up the Beaver River Road. Halfway up the road I heard the truck behind me. I stepped onto the shoulder of the road and turned around. Just as I looked back, the truck stopped. The fat man leapt from the driver’s seat and, bending

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over, vomited into the gravel. The skinny man looked at me and laughed. When the truck eventually passed me, the fat man was leaning into the steering wheel, his right hand pressing his shirt over his nose. The men did not remove the dead seal because, as I learned later, Fisheries was responsible for seals. The deer and seal were hors d’oeuvres. Whales constituted Death’s main course. The third day in Nova Scotia, I walked east past Bartlett’s Beach to Black Point. Just west of the point three whales lay above the waterline, two on sand and one on rocks. Two whales were comparatively small pilot whales; the third was a fin whale measuring sixteen paces from head to flukes. One of the pilots had been beached for a long time. Its skin collapsed over ribs, and from a distance the animal resembled a tent covered by a black tarpaulin. The fin whale looked like a heap of box springs and mattresses, stuffing exploding in thick orange clumps. The pilot on rocks was red and black and wondrously bloated. I wanted to stand on it, and I pushed my boot against its hide. The side sunk, then ballooned back when I removed my foot, almost thumping. Worried that the skin would split and I’d sink waist-deep into rotten blubber, I decided not to stand on the body. The teeth of pilot whales are small. I knelt at the head and tried to wedge one loose. The next day I took Vicki to see the whales. I carried pliers in hopes of extracting a necklace of teeth. Unfortunately the animal’s teeth were solidly attached to its jawbone, and although I pulled and yanked, I was unsuccessful. However, Vicki took pictures of me clamped to a tooth. “You should have been a dentist,” she said. During the summer I visited the whales seven times. A hole big as a fist opened in the side of the fin whale, and clots of maggots swept out and wriggled over the beach like pale kelp. Whenever a hole opened in a whale’s body, I could reach in and scoop out a heap of maggots. The fragrance was strong, but the smell did not bother me. A whiff of the whales turned Barbara and Roberta away. When I suggested a maggot fight to Geoff, he, too, decamped. As one ages, property becomes a burden. Closing the house in August opened an attic of worries. At auctions junk sold for high prices. Suddenly, our country furnishings were valuable. During the past two years, break-ins had occurred along the highway, most attributed to a neighbor. In blueberry season, the man roamed our property. Never did

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he ask permission to pick berries, and some mornings I found him in the field behind the house. Burglary insurance was expensive, and I pondered taking small items back to Connecticut: a nineteenth-century Canadian painting, twenty-five by eighteen inches, depicting a silver stream falling from a gray bluff into a quiet river, on the riverbank a broken tree looking like a lizard dancing on its tail, in the background a lemon sky flat over a long plain; and two wine bottles blown from green glass, bubbles glowing like sparklers in the glass. The bottles were large, both twenty inches high, one fourteen inches at its broadest, the other twelve. While one of the bottles was shaped like a teardrop, the other looked like a green heart. “Where would you put them? Our house is already a storage shed,” Vicki said, adding, “and suppose beetles lurk in the picture frame?” For years, beetles had infested floorboards in the study. Vicki’s mother had purchased the poisons I found in the pantry in hopes of killing the insects. Each summer she loaded a syringe with DDT and injected the poison into holes in the floor and furniture. For years the insects had been only a minor nuisance. This summer, however, we found holes and frass, droppings which looked like sawdust, not only in the study but in newel posts on the stairway, in a chest in the front parlor, and upstairs in the spool bed in Geoff’s room. A side table in the study was so infested I burned it. During the past three years beetles colonized the desk at which I wrote. One night I left a sheet of yellow paper on a corner of the desk. The next morning six small holes pierced the paper. Beetles had pupated and, boring out of the desk, chewed through the paper. I examined the desk and saw two beetles pulling themselves out of the wood. The beetles were small, a sixteenth to a quarter of an inch long. During the next two days, I caught fourteen beetles, some flying but most digging out of the desk. I put them into my moth trap, and immediately they mated tail to tail. I examined the beetles with a hand lens. The insects were furniture beetles from the deathwatch or Anobiid family, some members of which remain in wood for ten years. Antique dealers told me to spray infested furniture with poison, then seal the furniture in plastic. Aside from fumigating the house, which “was expensive and wouldn’t work because the walls are old and drafty,” no one knew what to do. “I’ve never seen these beetles before,” an exterminator said, “and I have been killing bugs for thirty

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years. They could be cigarette beetles.” “They are furniture beetles,” I said. “Cigarette beetles belong to the same family.” The exterminator sent my collection to an expert in Montreal. “Once the beetles are identified, I’ll be back in touch.” I didn’t hear from him. “Why bother with anything?” Vicki said. “What thieves don’t take, beetles will eat.” At Graff Brothers, a man said powderpost beetles infested his barn. To discourage them he tied Vapona strips to rafters. Just before we locked the house to drive to the ferry, I hung ten Vapona strips in the house. By the time I locked the door, I was sneezing. “The fumes won’t reach larvae in wood,” Vicki said. “Maybe they will,” I said. Beetles were only one concern undermining contentment. Not only did the woodstove in the kitchen provide our heat, but we also cooked all meals on it. From the stove a pipe curved into a chimney. The chimney was old, and we asked a sweep to line the chimney with a fireretardant pipe. After studying the kitchen, the sweep told us the stove was “out of code.” Not only was the stove too close to the wall, but it sat on the floor. The pipe leading from the stove to the wall was dated and had to be replaced. According to law, the sweep was liable if he did not correct the problems when he inserted the pipe into the chimney. Since the stove was fifty years old, moving might damage it. “You should be prepared to replace the stove,” he said. To raise everything to contemporary regulation, the sweep said, would cost $1,200, replacing the stove being another matter. For years codes have bedeviled us. When we vacate the house each summer, we turn the electricity off in the basement. A decade ago the power company switched the electricity off at the pole beside the road. Now we must leave the electricity on at the pole and pay a monthly fee. If the electricity were turned off at the pole and remained off for twelve months, an electrician would have to examine the house and certify that the wiring was “up to code” before the company switched the electricity back on. Not much having been done to the wiring since the 1950s, raising wiring to the new standard would be, an electrician estimated, “wildly expensive.” Money so nagged me that sometimes when I studied house and property I didn’t see beauty. Two days before we left for Connecticut, the refrigerator died. The refrigerator was forty-four years old. The last day in Nova Scotia, Vicki called Nelson’s in Yarmouth and arranged to

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have a new refrigerator delivered the day we arrived next summer. In August repair was rarely out of mind or conversation. We arranged to have the back field bushwhacked and for a cherry picker to trim the maples in front of the house. We decided to renew roofs over the bays and replace the rotten boards underneath. We also decided to shingle the front of the house, renew flashing around the chimneys, caulk and paint the outside of windows, rebuild the kitchen porch, and patch the backhouse. In June, I planned to tear down the backhouse and construct a new building. The Little Brown Store disrupted the plan. For a dollar in 1960, Vicki’s mother bought a sliver of land at the corner of Route 1 and the Beaver River Road. On the property stood a small two-story building, each story the size of a suburban kitchen. Built in the nineteenth century, the building had been a smithy, then a general store. In 1961 Vicki’s mother reopened the store. During winter, she entrusted management to a local woman. Unfortunately, the woman extended unlimited credit to friends and relatives, and on returning to Beaver River the following summer, Vicki’s mother shut the store. Since then, the store had been closed, doors sealed and plywood hammered over windows. In July a man contacted Vicki and asked if he could buy or lease the building as a present for his wife. She had long imagined selling flowers and crafts. My cleaning mood infected Vicki, and she wanted to sell the store for a dollar. Geoff and Alex demurred and suggested leasing the store for a dollar a year, the lease running ten years. I examined the building. Boys had removed the boards sealing the back door and had turned the building into a clubhouse. Geoff is a lawyer. “If an accident occurs, we are liable,” he said. The roof had pulled away from the chimney and thinking that repairing the building might prove costly, I asked Fred Leblanc, the contractor who takes care of the house, to look at the building. Not only did the roof need to be replaced, but the building had shifted and sunk akimbo into the ground. Restoration would cost, Fred reported, between $20,000 and $25,000. “Too big an investment for a dollar a year,” I said. Families don’t reach decisions easily. Vicki and her brothers associated the store with childhood, and they hesitated to let it go. “Old buildings should be preserved,” Vicki said, “and not knocked down because people haven’t been responsible enough to maintain them.” Fred told Vicki he wouldn’t just flatten the

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building. After he explained that portions would be recycled, the family agreed to take the store down. Land is a burden. Vicki and her brothers own thirty-five acres of field, wood, and bog. The land runs along the Gulf of Maine. Although the house sits beside Route 1, the property has been relatively isolated. Recently, however, Americans have bought land in Port Maitland. Some have refurbished Victorian houses, but most have built summer homes cluttering marsh and shore. West of the house is Ma’s property, a triangular-shaped field bordered by a wood. The base of the triangle is broad and, running along Route 1, almost touches the Beaver River Road. From Route 1, however, the triangle narrows, cutting through the wood to a drumlin above the beach. This summer the land between the Beaver River Road and our property went on sale, twenty-one acres priced at $150,000 American. I thought the price outlandish. On a lake six miles inland was a farm, sixty acres including a Victorian house, barn, outbuildings, and boat shed, all in good repair and for sale for $149,000 Canadian. For years we had roamed the land next door, walking along the bluff happy with the illusion of being alone. I knew where animals denned and birds nested. At dinner we discussed buying the land. “We can’t do that with the stock market falling and having three children in college,” Vicki said. “Why would we want more land when we talk about escaping encumbrance and responsibility?” Four times I telephoned the real estate dealer. He did not return the calls. Twice I visited his office. Both times he was out. I left messages for him to telephone. Because he didn’t contact us, we imagined shenanigans. Strangers stopped us and after asking about the land said they’d heard the property was going to be divided into four five-acre lots. “Rich Americans are buying it,” a man said. “Only Americans can afford to build a road through the marsh.” One day orange stakes appeared. A week later surveyors cut a boundary following a stone wall through woods west of us. After the surveyors finished I walked the line and then, pacing along the bluff, measured our property. We owned 1,100 feet of shoreline. “That’s enough,” I said. In the bustle of leaving, the land slipped from conversation. Then three days before we left, a woman said, “I heard that the property line disappointed the real estate dealer. He wants more shoreline. After you go, he is going to have the land resurveyed.” The next day I called the dealer. He did not return the call.

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“What are we going to do?” Vicki said. “Order a new refrigerator and go home,” I said. The morning after we returned to Storrs, I went to the English department. “Back from Nova Scotia, are you?” Tom said. “I envy your being able to escape the whirl of things and just sit on the porch and smell flowers.” “Yes,” I said. “Summer was paradise.” Words shape reality. That night as I planned assignments for my courses, butterflies suddenly rose into sight: azures wobbling low over the damp lane, orange crescents hatching along the bluff in July, and on meadowsweet a question mark, forewings exclamations of orange and black, silver beveled around the hind wings turning night into day.

Changing

Five years ago when he was in eleventh grade, Edward did well on the PSATs. Shortly afterward college brochures began arriving in the mail. At first I ignored the advertisements, but then at dinner one night Edward turned a broadside from West Point through his hands and said, “I think I’ll apply to West Point.” Pickerings are not comfortable in military twill. We are farmers, florists, editors, mailmen, and college professors, not army officers. In sixty years of living, I have known one graduate of West Point, and I met him only after he retired from the Army and was promoted into English literature. “That’s splendid,” I said to Edward. “The Academy is first-rate.” “Was Edward serious?” Vicki asked later. “That’s beside the point,” I said. “He won’t attend West Point.” Two years earlier Francis had received a brochure from the Army. If Francis were interested in a military career, the mailing stated, during summer vacation he could spend a week at West Point as guest of the Army. I realized that such an invitation would appeal to Edward. The next morning I telephoned the admissions office at West Point. I wanted to ferret out the dates when prospective students would be invited to campus. My call shuffled along a telephone tree until it fell into the nest of the major in charge of “recruitment in the Northeast.” A recording instructed me to leave a message and my telephone number. After assuring me that my call would be returned, the recording concluded with the major’s exclaiming, “Go Army! Beat Navy!” For a moment I sat motionless, cradling the receiver in my right hand. “Holy cow,” I said. Three years earlier the sons of a college classmate, Don Griffis, spent a summer working on a cattle station in Queensland. “Boy, I’d like to do 75

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that,” Edward said at the time. After listening to the major’s exhortation, I called Don in Texas. Four nights later Don telephoned. Bevan Doyle had agreed to take Edward for the summer. One hundred and eight thousand acres, Bevan’s station was near Jericho, in the “Deep North,” as Australians dub Queensland and about as far away from West Point as a person can go and still be on Earth. The next morning I bought Edward an airplane ticket, and on June 21, the day after classes ended at the local high school, Edward flew out of Hartford, headed for Queensland. “Good-bye Army,” I said to Vicki as we stood in the airport waving at Edward’s plane. “Pickerings don’t make good regular soldiers, but in guerrilla tactics we are five-star generals.” Rarely can unfolding events be controlled. Plans go astray, no matter the number of high-caliber words at a person’s disposal. This September when Eliza enters college, I will be paying fees and tuitions for three children. In December I submitted a financial balance sheet and a copy of last year’s income tax statement to universities in hopes that Eliza might receive a smidgen of aid. She didn’t. Last month I sent this year’s tax statement. With the statement I included a letter. “Enclosed,” I began, “are the year’s tax doings. It is flattering to know that insofar as college aid is concerned, I am in the Mellon-Vanderbilt-Gates league. I am the first Pickering ever to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Would that my mother were alive. She’d be awfully proud of my highfalutin status. “Anyway,” I continued, “my daughter Eliza is looking forward to next year with great eagerness. Of course, if you found a couple of thousand for her, that would be dandy. Know that when my biography is written much will be said about college fees. The last chapter will begin something like this: ‘Just as Pickering strode into his mid-sixties, after seventeen books and the very year that The Best of Pickering appeared, college tuition forced him into becoming a hack writer, scribbling for encyclopedias, for travel magazines featuring holidays in Topeka and Muncie, and, dare I mention it, for magazines tinged with the untoward. What is especially heartrending is that the wisdom harvested from all his decades of teaching and writing never saw publication. The great losers of this were, ironically, universities themselves—those institutions that most could have benefited from Pickering’s insights. How poignant life is! For a handful of silver, Harvard deprived itself and the entire educational establishment of priceless thought.”

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“Nicely put,” my friend Josh said, then asked, “Did the letter change minds in the financial aid office?” “No,” I said. The gap between word and deed is great. Although well-turned phrases entertain, almost never do they knock events into new orbits. Age, however, brings change, particularly in the use of words. Unlike the decades of middle life during which civility and ambition bind tongues, adolescence and old age eschew linguistic propriety, the former because of hormonal hot flashes, the latter because of the absence of hormones, a condition that erupts, spewing the antisocial and barbaric truthfulness. My friend Harry’s son Phil turned fifteen in January. For years Harry has been a devoted father, carting Phil across New England to countless athletic events. Together they cooked dinner, specializing in pastas and cheesecakes. Phil’s every wish was Harry’s command. Near the end of January I met Harry on the sidewalk outside the gymnasium. He looked glum. “What’s the matter, old fellow?” I said, adding, “How’s Phil?” “Phil,” Harry said dolefully, “is different. Last night I wanted to talk to him about school. I went upstairs to his room and sat next to him on the edge of his bed. Before I could open my mouth, Phil glared at me and said, ‘Do you practice being an asshole?’” The next six years will civilize Phil, teaching him craft and stratagem. He will become an amiable hypocrite, and his language will wax smooth and acceptable. Now in his mid-sixties, my friend Josh has aged beyond playing roles or shaping words for an audience. Last month he spoke at the annual dinner of Joshua’s Trust, a society dedicated to saving land from asphalt and bulldozer. For some time prior to the talk, the secretary of the Trust pestered Josh, requesting the title of his talk. Finally, one evening he sent the secretary a two-sentence e-mail. “Call the talk ‘Gnawing Weedy Words,’” he wrote. “I am not sure what that means but think it preferable to ‘Why I like to butter my potatoes with cow shit.’” The secretary was from Minnesota, that heartland through which blood rarely pulses bacterial and cynical. Three days later he answered Josh, opining that the first title was better and adding that many members of the Trust were stodgy. Next he wrote a nervous paragraph about an old friend who at eighty-four wrote a book on weeds. Finally came the obligatory optimistic conclusion: “We are so looking forward to the evening, the highlight of which will be your talk.” “Sure,” Josh said. Age has not turned Josh into a head-petting grandfather. Two weeks

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ago he attended a concert of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones held at Jorgensen Auditorium on the university campus, getting Fleck, I suspect, confused with Roberta Flack. In any case he decamped at “halftime after students began to throb and prance like footballers.” Before the show Josh bought a slice of chocolate mousse cake and a cup of coffee. On a table some feet away from the cash register sat containers of milk and cream. The cream container was empty. On Josh’s asking for cream, the student overseeing the food said, “We are out of cream, and we won’t be getting any more.” The student’s tone was abrasive, and when Josh returned to the table, he muttered about the lack of cream. Immediately, a strange woman said, “Shit happens. I work in a restaurant. Just ask the boy behind you over there for more cream, and he will give you some.” On Josh’s explaining that all the cream was gone, the woman’s tone changed from barking to wheedling and she said, “Oh, no, what will I put in my coffee?” “You can put shit in your coffee,” Josh said and walked away, leaving silence curdling behind him. “You probably hurt that woman’s feelings,” I said on Monday, reprimanding Josh. “Rubbish,” he said. “People capable of feeling avoided the concert. Both cream and the crème de la crème were noticeably absent.” The language of aging women does not smack so much of compost as does that of men. Still, in middle age “domestic snugglies,” as Josh labels them, who once tripped demurely through days begin to whirl like tops, words spinning dizzily about them. No longer does the turtledove coo in my kitchen. One day last month I came home unexpectedly at noon. Vicki met me at the door. “What do you want for lunch?” she said. “You can have low-fat cottage cheese or hummus.” “I’ll eat hummus,” I said. “No, you won’t!” she exclaimed. “You are going to have cottage cheese. You just can’t barge in here in the middle of the day with an opinion of your own.” “What did you eat?” Josh asked me that afternoon. “Cottage cheese,” I said, “but I covered it with olives and cherry tomatoes.” “Good man,” Josh said, patting me on the back. In the past when Vicki began to twirl words like a reveler cranking a noisemaker, I slowed the merriment with a gummy question, something like, “Do you know the hen is the egg’s way of making another egg?” Nowadays when Vicki scrambles the once-over-easy, I drift away to Carthage. Although matters in Smith County are generally as confused as

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omelets, days are sunny-side up. Early in April conversation in Ankerrow’s Café ran to wives and the culinary. Jaster Samples’s wife, Matalie, was a master cook, and Jaster had swelled round and content on meals bulbous with candied yams, fried okra, barbecued pork shoulder, and snowball icebox cake. Unfortunately Matalie died while singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” last Fourth of July. Immediately thereafter Jaster began to lose weight. “The only cure for a shrinking belly,” Dr. Sollows told him, “is a wife.” Jasper took the prescription to stomach and joined every tabernacle in Carthage. Alas, despite attending two score church suppers, he did not find a wife. “Eating all that plain manna has worn me out,” he told the crowd at Ankerrow’s. “Tell you what,” W. E. Bayliss said, “I’ll trade you my wife, Hettie, for your red mule, Avo. Occasionally Hettie sprinkles too much pepper over conversation, but there’s not a cook in Smith County who can match her jam cake with caramel icing.” Scholars from the School for the Afflicted in Buffalo Valley were in town on an excursion. “Excuse me for interrupting,” a scholar said, having overheard the conversation and addressing Jaster, “but if I was you, I’d hold on to that mule. Women are a useful class, and I’ve had a heap to do with them over time. But they can be a passel of trouble, even the best of them.” Unlike transformations of language, some changes occur so suddenly they seem miraculous. “Who could have imagined,” Josh said recently, “that any human, even a president of the United States, could make the New Testament subversive—un-American and anti-Christian? Never again,” Josh continued, “will I underestimate the evil that motivates believers.” Pedestrian activities keep my gait steady. When words whip conversation into lather, I apply a drag, absenting myself and going home to pick up sticks or rake garbage from the backyard, this last tossed into bushes by students walking behind my property. Inevitably something distracts me from worry and the bad works of eminence. After Josh finished his harangue, I walked home and in the backyard found eleven small aerosol containers of Colgate “REGULAR” shaving cream. Four and a half inches tall and four and a half inches in circumference, each can held 2.25 ounces of shaving cream. The bottom third of the cans was orange, the top third gray and pebbly with drops of moisture. A red banner bound the middle, “Colgate” stamped on it in white letters. “How do you suppose so many cans got into the

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backyard?” I said to Vicki later. “They weren’t close together either.” “For heaven’s sake,” Vicki said, and stalked off. More often than irritation, words provoke vertigo. After Vicki vanished, I started grading papers. I did not grade long. After reading two papers I stretched out on the bed upstairs, arms wide, hands grasping the sides of the mattress in hopes of stabilizing thought. “A philosopher once wrote,” a student began, “that nature exists merely as a means to an end, in which he inferred that man was to be considered the end and nature was to be considered as his tools. To justify such an ideal one suggested that due to man’s capacity for reason, man becomes not only superior to the natural world but increasingly more civilized due to his understanding of what is right and wrong. Although quite possibly this may be only a defense mechanism created as an unconscious measure, protecting himself from a state of unfortunate balding, I am often left questioning whether individuals are truly unable to comprehend humans and nature as one and the same. When a man picks a fruit from a berry tree and places it upon his tongue, does he not swallow the essence of the berry, forever recycling it to be part of him? And whence the time comes for him to die a physical death, does his body not lie beneath the earth, inevitably to be picked by the roots of another berry tree?” Only occasionally do I suffer from the vapors. Life has made me adaptable, content to substitute cottage cheese for hummus. Moreover when doings tumble like clothes in a washer, I light out for Carthage. The older I get the more time I spend in Carthage. Instead of eating lunch at home last Monday, I strolled through Hollis Hunnewell’s new show. On a white tablecloth lay a rung from Jacob’s ladder, the saucer on which the Cup of Sorrow once rested, and the comb of the cock that crowed when Peter denied Christ. Because two of its tines were broken, Hollis almost didn’t exhibit the comb. “What a loss that would have been,” said Sam King, a barber. In better shape was the head of a rhinoceros. “First cousin to the unicorn and feeds on bamboo and missionaries,” explained a placard attached to the animal’s chaps. The star of the exhibition was a corpse once owned by Vanderbilt Medical School. The body was that of a man who drowned while fishing. Because the body was not discovered for several months, the man’s flesh had turned into grave wax. “Slick as owl grease,” Sam King said, running his hand over the man’s chin. “Not a hair anywhere.” In exhibi-

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tions dead people are as common as grasshoppers. To increase the corpse’s appeal, Hollis excavated the man’s stomach. He stuffed the cavity with sweet vernal grass, then bought a white mouse. After training the mouse to nest in the grass, he taught him to squeak patriotic tunes, among others “John Brown’s Body,” “The Lexington Quickstep,” and “You Are My Sunshine.” Travel shapes people. Because events in Carthage don’t go according to convention, I have become flexible. As a result when something I plan goes astray, I don’t lament. Instead I ponder something else. For the past few months I have dreamed of wandering the Great Sandy Desert on the eastern edge of Western Australia. In closed places ideas elude me. In the desert imagination bounds across the open. Moreover, the Great Sandy is home to more reptile species than any other desert in the world. A company runs camel treks in the Great Sandy. Travelers drive along Tanami Highway from Alice Springs to Lake Gregory. From there they walk some fifteen kilometers a day for two weeks, a string of camels carrying supplies. This past fall I studied travel brochures. I saw that I could link two trips and spend a month in the desert. For weeks I dreamed of the desert, but then Harvard accepted Eliza and I worried about money. Worries grow worries. I’m no youth. “Mr. Pickering, don’t you realize,” a student said early this semester, “that there is a generation gap between you and your students? A gap,” she continued, “of at least two generations.” “No,” I said, “I can’t believe that.” In truth, I celebrate the gap and can think of no worse punishment than to be dipped in the Fountain of Youth. Still, after long walks in the hills, my knees and hips ache. Even worse, my right heel splits. The skin pulls apart, exposing dry gullies that ooze red. In January I swept the desert from mind. That afternoon I applied for the Moondancer Fellowship at the Writers’ Colony in Dairy Hollow, an award that allows a nature writer to spend a month in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Come the middle of May, I thought, I will paint myself blue, glue a toupee to my backside, and dance naked under the yellow moon. During the day I will roam the Ozarks looking for copperheads and canebrake rattlers. At dusk I will watch Indiana bats flood out of their hibernaculum, Australia gone from desire. Not only do short walks make people comfortable with change, but they also make people look forward to change. Twice a week last summer I roamed the wood and cornfield behind the old police station.

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Ambling purges mind, and like balm steps soothe irritation. One afternoon I watched twenty-eight Japanese beetles chew a grape leaf into a delicate fan. Another afternoon I brought home a bouquet of eightythree black-eyed Susans. I saw a yellow swallowtail fall from the top of a tree, surfing the air like a leaf. Along the road through the cornfield, the yellow blossoms of black medic dried and turned white as ash. Ragweed glowed chartreuse, and the seeds of pennycress hardened and turned pink. While balls of wild morning glory unraveled amid rows of corn, jimsonweed threw clammy shadows across a corner of the field. Ellisia bloomed in the middle of a path; lamb’s-quarter and velvetleaf settled into furrows, and yellow bells hung from ground-cherry. As I roamed the field, corn shuffled quietly, and I slowed my pace. I rubbed the soft leaves of burdock and studied aphids wrapping nettles in purple rings. I squatted and watched a phantom crane fly drift like the seams of a glove through Indian poke. In August goldenrod spilled into yellow and oozed bees. A black and yellow argiope swayed in the grass like a fallen star. When I pushed through willows around Unnamed Pond, a double-crested cormorant beat into flight. A tree frog flattened itself against a leaf of milkweed, and a doe and two fawns grazed at the edge of a wood. Horseweed bloomed in loose brooms; splatters of mildew tarnished vervain, and mushrooms seeped through the ground in droplets, red, orange, white, and brown. Spongy yellow pats filled the middles of pinesaps, fibers curling around them like snips of angel hair. A spiny micrathena hung from a web like a seed. When I flicked the web, the spider slipped to the ground, invisible amid leaf and twig. When I returned home late one afternoon near the end of summer, Vicki handed me a telegram. The print looked like Vicki’s handwriting. Authenticity, however, doesn’t matter to people who visit Carthage. Hontas Bailey had fallen off a ledge and drowned in the Cumberland River. Hontas had been poorly for a long time. “Hontas’s health was so bad,” Loppie Groat wrote, “that if he hadn’t fallen into the Cumberland he would have died two days earlier.” “Vicki,” I began, but stopped. She had left the kitchen.

Wrong Number

“Hello,” I said. “May I speak to the Republican in the house?” a voice demanded. “You have the wrong number,” I said, and put down the receiver. Last Sunday, Vicki cooked eggplant pizza, and she and I and Eliza ate in the back study and watched the movie Spider-Man. Just as a spider bit the hero, the telephone rang. Markings on the remote control are so small I cannot read them, and while the phone clamored I put my dinner plate on the floor, then pressed rows of buttons in hopes of freezing the film. Eventually the film stopped, and I hurried across the room to the phone. “I am calling,” a young voice said, “for the Democratic Party to let you know that the election is on Tuesday.” “Do you think I’m an idiot and don’t know when the election takes place? Great God Almighty!” I exclaimed, and slammed the receiver down. “Wasn’t that a bit strong?” Vicki said. “No,” I said, scooping up another slice of pizza. Near the end of the film, when Spider-Man hung above a river, a cable car stuffed with children suspended from one hand and his sweetheart in the other, the telephone rang again. “Sammy,” a voice said, “this is Tommy. How are you this evening, and how is your septic tank?” I have aged into briskness. I tolerate only the conversation of people who collect Social Security. New experience holds no appeal, and flexibility seems weakness. Vicki calls me a curmudgeon. I told her that like the cicada I had dwelt underground for sixty years. Able to see little in the cloddish dark, I was not opinionated. Now that I have shed innocence and taken flight, my eyes bulge, and I screech. In truth Vicki herself is no nymph. She, too, has molted, and her language often buzzes. In September Eliza applied through the Council on International 83

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Educational Exchange to study at St. Petersburg State University. The Council does not accept applications from high school students. Nevertheless, Eliza was admitted. “I have to fly to Helsinki on January 13,” Eliza said ten days ago, announcing her acceptance. “From Helsinki I go to St. Petersburg. I am so happy,” she concluded. For a moment, Vicki was silent. Then she bellowed, “There will be no sexual intercourse in Russia.” Eliza sagged against the kitchen table, and I turned tail and crept out of the room. Even the opinionated occasionally know when to be silent. “What an opportunity! You should have spoken up,” my friend Josh advised later, “and said, ‘Who gives a damn about Russia? There’s not much of that sort of thing here in Connecticut.’” My impatience with words extends beyond the telephone. A month after a student missed the midterm examination, he sent me two e-mails in order to arrange a make-up test. Life is complex. A telephone call can disrupt my mood, yet I schedule make-up exams without a second thought. In his e-mails, however, not only did the student spell you as u, but he also eschewed the pettiness of punctuation and capitalization. “Your e-mails,” I told him on his appearing in my office, “presuppose a familiarity that does not exist.” In the event, the student was not familiar with any of the assignments, and he failed the test. The following morning one of my advisees registered for next semester’s classes. In past semesters, the girl’s grades fluctuated wildly, reflecting an erratic inner thermometer. On my asking about the fall’s academic performance, she said, “This semester I am kicking ass.” “Do you mean,” I said, “that you are doing well in your classes?” “You bet your ass it does,” the girl replied. Because many students are unable to adapt language to suit their surroundings, social and academic, I have developed a contraceptive ear. Even so, sometimes words force me to feet and action. One student made a C on her midterm. “I was extremely disappointed,” she e-mailed me. “When I saw the grade, I felt like committing suicide.” Suicide triggers a response, and immediately I contacted deans and counselors. Two days later I met the girl in the office of the director of Undergraduate Studies. “You shouldn’t have paid attention to the e-mail,” she said. “That’s just the way I talk.” “Not to faculty members,” I said. “You caused others great concern.” Age makes one allergic to shoddy prose. Every Saturday Vicki and I frequent the farmers’ market in Storrs. Vicki buys vegetables and I buy

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baked goods. At one stall, a woman sells pies. Her specialty is Fruits of the Forest pie, a batter of raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries. Twice I informed the woman that her ingredients grew in and around fields, not forests. I suggested that she label the pies “Berries of the Field.” The woman’s refusal to rename the pies has made me bilious, and I no longer purchase sweets from her. I have begun to avoid all words, now, for example, hanging up the telephone without speaking. The fewer words I use the fewer people I meet, decreasing my chances of experiencing the awkward or unpleasant. Recently Vicki and I had a dinner party. I invited a man who had served with me on university committees. I wrote him that I had long wanted to meet his wife. Unfortunately the man was slated to chair a panel in Washington the night of the party. “For your information,” he added in declining the invitation, “my ‘wife’ is male. We have been together for twenty-eight years.” “How am I supposed to know such things?” I said to Vicki. “Talk to people,” she said. “No,” I answered. The fewer words one uses the more straightforward and inexpensive life becomes. Last Saturday I drove Vicki and Eliza to Merrow, where they wandered a maze in a cornfield. Admission to the maze was five dollars, too much for my pocketbook. Instead of shucking money from my wallet and losing myself amid corn and conversation, I strolled silently along the banks of the Willimantic River. Roaming the maze animated Eliza and Vicki. When they left the field, their arms whirled like windmills and words circled about them in dizzying currents. In contrast I awaited them becalmed in an armchair. The older I get the more I value quiet. In the name of peace, I shuffle off financial coils. In April I gave the graduation address at the University of Pittsburgh in Bradford, Pennsylvania. A company named Program Corporation of America booked my appearance, contracting to pay me five thousand dollars. The company sent me an airplane ticket and, instructing me to track my expenses, said I would be reimbursed for expenditures. Because a storm closed down the Buffalo airport, I spent an extra night on the road, and my expenses amounted to $272.56. The day after returning to Storrs, I mailed my receipts to Program Corporation. Seven months have passed without my being paid. Letters, faxes, and e-mails have punctuated weeks. Vicki’s brother Geoff is a lawyer. In October he threatened to file a complaint against

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the owner of Program Corporation. Geoff’s legalese bit harder than horseradish and provoked a mouthful of promissory words. The distance between lip and wallet is great, however, and the payment has not arrived. Vicki is angry. Last Friday, she said, “A real man would do something about that money.” I followed Vicki’s advice. The next morning I wrote Geoff, telling him to drop the complaint. “Sickness, luck, extravagance, drink, gambling, and age loosen competence,” I wrote. “Instead of fulminating and turning days rabid, I’d rather forget the money. Out of e-mail, out of mind.” Wrong numbers forestall conversation and thus please me. Alas, I am not always strong enough to retreat from words. I’m a good speaker, and occasionally, paragraphs can be bought. In September a real estate center asked me to address a group of brokers, booking me for two thousand dollars. Two weeks ago the center cancelled the speech, explaining the brokers “no longer have the financial resources they once had.” Instead of loss, I felt relief. “I am tired of my sentences,” I told Vicki. “Maybe I’ll never speak again.” “But the money is good,” Vicki said. “Quiet is better,” I answered, and left the room. For the sake of calm, I have struggled to expel complaint from days. Three years ago, the university built a hotel in the field behind my house, in the process banishing night from my yard. This fall the university constructed a road between my property and the hotel. For four months, the air in my yard was diesel. Days rang metallic with the clamor of cranes, bulldozers, cement mixers, and dump trucks. “How have you endured the dirt and noise?” my friend Josh asked. “Easily,” I said. “At the end of the construction,” the university architect assured me, “we’ll raise a berm at the edge of your property. On it we’ll plant conifers twenty feet tall. They’ll block light and noise.” Construction finished last week. The berm was not built. Instead of stately conifers, the university planted six white pines, none taller than my hip, and a ragged hedge of thin bushes—highbush blueberry and “Lynwood Gold” forsythia. “Are you going to complain?” Josh asked. “No,” I said. As I have eschewed words, so I have withdrawn from the communal. Nowadays I read pages which don’t lend themselves to conversational placebo. Recently I perused an eight-page pamphlet I received in the mail, “Secrets of Robust Health,” the “monthly health newsletter for the thinking person,” containing “what you will probably never hear from

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your family doctor.” The newsletter examined “The Silent Killers,” or “The Secret World of Parasites.” According to “one of America’s foremost parasitic infection experts,” “the most single undiagnosed health challenge in the history of the human race is parasites.” “You,” another expert declared, “may be an unsuspecting victim of the parasite epidemic that is affecting millions of Americans.” According to recent medical studies, “85% of the North American adult population has at least one form of parasite living in their bodies.” Symptoms of infestation were various: gas and bloating, diarrhea, irritable bowel syndrome, allergies, “eating more than normal but still being hungry,” back pain, “itchy ears, nose or anus,” skin problems, tooth grinding or clenching, blurry or unclear vision, immune system problems, “chronic fatigue, lethargy, or apathy,” excess weight, forgetfulness, and constipation. Signs of this final symptom could be severe. “Organs can actually be blocked by the presence of worms,” the pamphlet observed, “particularly those of larger size.” On page 3 appeared “The World’s Most Disgusting Picture Gallery,” eight photographs of worms and their parts, among others a male pinworm, a liver fluke, the mouth of the hookworm, and a beef worm, this last looking like a lace torn from a high-topped basketball shoe. A well-fed female roundworm could, I read, reach eighteen inches in length and produce two hundred thousand eggs a day. Composed of three prominent mounds, the anterior end of the roundworm resembled the business end of an electric shaver, specifically a Norelco shaver. Often folks suffering from worms had problems sleeping. Itching “due to certain parasites exiting the body at night through the anus” frequently kept people awake. Most parasites resided in, the pamphlet explained, “THE NEGLECTED COLON.” “90% of all disease and discomfort is directly or indirectly related to an unclean colon,” the pamphlet stated. As a result “being internally clean is a lot more important than being ‘externally clean.’” A “well-known proponent of internal cleansing” declared that “we must clean the build-up of fecal matter out of our colon, in order to avoid self-poisoning.” “No wonder I have little patience for poor prose,” I told Vicki. “I am guilty of self-poisoning.” Not only that, I said, but parasites, not overmunching, were responsible for the thickening of my middle. “The average person over forty has between 5 and 25 pounds of buildup in his colon,” I informed Vicki at dinner. Because I was sixty,

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one-and-a-half times forty, vermiform matter in my backside probably weighed between 71⁄ 2 and 371⁄ 2 pounds. Inspirational stories spotted the pamphlet. When “Leon” took his bowels in hand and purged himself of parasites, he passed “worms for three straight weeks.” “When he got rid of the first one (it was in two pieces, one was about 15 inches and the other 20 inches long), he was in such a state of disbelief that he just stood over the toilet for 15 minutes and stared at his creation.” For folks who hankered for such sights, a POWERFUL ALLNATURAL CLEANSING KIT was available for $69.95 plus $7.95 postage and handling. The kit consisted of three “components.” The first contained a blend of herbs and fibers, more than thirty-seven herbs and both soluble and insoluble fiber. While the soluble fiber absorbed mucus in the intestines, the insoluble acted “like a broom to sweep from the colon the build-up which accumulated over time.” “Herbal antiparasite capsules” composed the kit’s second detergent. The capsules contained a mulch of nineteen herbs, among others “black walnut hulls, pumpkin seeds, wormwood, cloves, garlic, and fennel.” The last scourer was an herbal cleansing tea to be used after dinner and containing fourteen herbs. Natural Medicine Associates in Hollywood, Florida, sold the kit. The Center, as the Associates were called, had received many testimonials. “We are true believers in the idea,” a spokesman wrote, “that when you do good deeds for people it comes back to you 10 times over. Every single month our research center receives dozens of thankyou letters and even flowers from our clients, and some of the letters are so touching, I don’t know how they wouldn’t bring a tear to anyone’s eye.” The pamphlet flushed tears of glee from my eyes, this despite its inelegant prose. The “secrets of robust health” vary from age to age. Iridology might help youths suffering from impacted sentences. But as for me, the closer I approach the grave, the more wormy matters buck me up. On Friday Josh received a telephone call from the wife of his favorite undergraduate teacher. The man was dying in Pennsylvania. “He would love to hear from you,” the wife said. “I will write tonight,” Josh said, then asked, “How much longer does he have?” “At the most, two weeks,” the wife answered. “Oh,” Josh said, “then I will FedEx my letter.” That night Josh wrote the letter. The next morning he sent the letter to Pennsylvania by Federal Express. At four that afternoon, the wife

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called again. “I sent the letter by Express Mail this morning,” Josh said. “You should have faxed it,” the wife said. The morbid invigorates Josh. After voting on Tuesday, Josh asked the town clerk how long he had to wait before he could vote again, declaring, “I want to send a message to terrorists.” On the clerk’s informing him that he could vote only once, Josh feigned outrage. “Isn’t this America?” he exclaimed, “the land in which patriots are free to vote as often as they wish? Only totalitarian states limit the franchise. Something this un-American would not happen in the Lone Star State.” The newsletter so raised my spirits that I decided to vote for myself as governor. When I asked for a ballot on which I could write my name, the Registrar of Voters spoke to me. “You can write in anybody you want,” she said, “but the vote won’t count. The only write-in ballots that will be tabulated are those for candidates approved by the Secretary of State.” When the only votes counted are those cast for names on an approved list, democracy is in a sorry way and needs disruptive internal cleansing. “Earlier today,” the registrar continued, “a man wanted to vote no for all the candidates. I told him that the best way to accomplish that was to go home without voting.” After voting, I returned to the English department. That afternoon my friend Alice brought her new baby to the department. Alice entered through the side door. Students crowded the halls. “Alice,” I said enthusiastically when I saw her, “for a long time I’ve wanted to ask you what life is like for a single mother.” Students stared at Alice. She blushed and for the first time in the nine years I’ve known her was speechless. “I realize times are tough,” I continued, “but you have had this baby long enough to have ideas about being a single parent, so pull yourself together and answer me.” “Alice is married, isn’t she?” Eliza asked at dinner that night. Before I could reply, Vicki spoke, “Of course, she’s married. Age has made your daddy mean.” “Right,” I said and, taking my dessert into the study, turned on the television. The next morning I left the house before breakfast and wandered the hilly land above the Ogushwitz Meadow. Earlier in the week I roamed the ridge behind Barrow’s Pond. In the past I noticed everything. Now my observations are narrow. Chestnuts turned the scrub beyond Barrow’s into a hardware store, toothed leaves long as saws, yellow and green and measled with rust. Atop the ridge, beeches clumped together

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in groves resembling yellow temples. Beech leaves felt like fine paper, their surfaces slightly waxed, and for a moment I considered plucking a sheaf, taking them home, and trying to write letters on them. Here and there single pink leaves clung to mapleleaf viburnum. Across hickory leaves, brown spread in bruises while mold dyed black oak blue. The season reduced most maples to fans and turned their leaves into rugs bright with red and yellow. Around the pond, witch-hazel blossoms shredded into bran, and leaves on sweet pepperbush rolled inward, their green gerrymandered with yellow. When I walked through the wood above the meadow, my boots crushed leaves, and hickory rose in a smoky perfume from the ground. Generally, though, I noticed berries not leaves: clusters of black pokeweed dangling from broken, spidery stems; tangles of oriental bittersweet heavy with red and orange; barberry drizzling scarlet drops; red winterberry and cranberry glistening in a last burst of color before shriveling; privet blue around the lips of fields like decoration on country china; weary black haw; and then on the ground rollers of acorns and walnuts sagging into black. Unlike my tolerance of wobbly prose, my eye has grown inflexible. Buds and pods seemed berries: the small green flower buds on spicebush and umbels of fruits on mountain laurel. In the meadow itself ladybugs blew through the air, their wings peeled orange, raised like rinds. Over dogwood and apple, clematis hung in soft balls. I ran my hand over the clematis and listened to blue jays calling, their cries sharp as cracks snapping thin panes of ice. The next day Eliza and I watched the girls’ soccer team at the university play Villanova in the semifinals of the Big East tournament. The girls won, and two days later we returned for the finals and watched them defeat West Virginia, 1-0. Crowds were small, and both days we sat on the top row of the bleachers. We ate popcorn and didn’t say much. The second day was cloudy, but late in the first half the sun came out for ten minutes, and I put on sunglasses. “Did you have fun?” Vicki asked when we came home. “Yes,” I said.

What?

Most semesters I teach a course on the short story. For extra credit students write stories. This fall Jack described a boy’s friendship with Maryann, a sixteen-year-old girl in the boy’s high school physics class. Two days before the examination Maryann hanged herself on a pear tree in her backyard. After the exam the boy attended a memorial service at the local Catholic church. “Family members stood to speak, one after the other,” the boy recounted. “They described Maryann’s love for horses, her wit, her sensitivity. ‘When she was twelve and I was fifteen,’ her older sister said as she braced herself against the altar with her left hand, her right free to wipe the tears from her cheeks, ‘Maryann’s guinea pig, Jimmi, was attacked by a weasel. She was so sad. Jimmi had been a gift. Our great-aunt gave him to her two months before she died. Maryann was heartbroken but brave. She said she wished that she could find the weasel, so that she could feed it and it wouldn’t be hungry and wouldn’t attack any other guinea pigs.’” Jack skipped a line, giving the boy time to blink before exclaiming, “What?” Exclamations transformed into questions punctuate days. Although institutions struggle to foster illusions of order, whats rumple weeks, entertaining and startling. In December students disobeyed my instructions and appended notes to their examinations. “You didn’t teach us about short stories,” a boy wrote, “but about life and how to deal with the world once we get out of this institution.” As I read the comment, a maxim of La Rochefoucauld, the seventeenth-century wit, popped into mind: “Old age gives good advice, being no longer able to give bad example.” Whenever form seems confining, I jettison book and syllabus and serve slabs of advice, flabby paragraphs that naive 91

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youth interprets as red and muscular. “Oh, well,” I thought, writing A on the examination and thinking of another maxim, “We are often more agreeable through our faults than through our good qualities.” Whats sweep so rapidly through days that the thoughts of one moment rarely endure into the next. In October I asked Eliza to rub my back, saying pampering me served her interest. “I’m not feeling well, and if I die,” I said, “that’ll be the end of my salary and your traipsing off to college.” “Daddy,” Eliza said later, “I’ve been thinking. Your death won’t affect anything. You have bags of insurance, enough to bankroll college and graduate school.” The children have reached the age when familial devotion runs shallow. Still, as Vicki puts it when she feels glum, “they keep in touch so they can put on the touch.” The afternoon mail brought a letter from Edward. On Saturday night Edward attended a poetry reading at Middlebury honoring an aged poet only a line away from punching out his last quatrain. The poet, Edward wrote, was on a respirator and had not “cut his hair in six years.” The man’s wife read his poems, illuminating them with personal remarks. “Frederick wrote this before his suicide attempt in 1989. If you want the juicy details, read his biography. It’s for sale in the back of the room.” Later, she prefaced another poem, saying, “This was composed around the time Frederick was engaged in a serious affair.” “She might have been drunk,” Edward wrote. “I dunno. Frederick was almost dead. He didn’t say anything. He just scowled.” In November I read a story written by a man whom I had not heard from in twenty years. I found his telephone number on the Internet, and I called him. Later he wrote me, saying, “Someone said about Malcolm Lowry that just the sight of him makes you smile for three days, and, Sam, that is how people feel about you.” The compliment cheered me, and I decided to pay life insurance premiums for a while longer. For his part Lowry was an alcoholic, and booze kept his spirits high. Academic doings are so intoxicating that I don’t drink. Rarely does a day pass during which I don’t open a letter and exclaim, “What?” “You are my idol,” a teacher wrote last week. “If it would be okay, I’d like to e-mail you. I want to share the approaches to literature/learning that I use and see/hear what you think. And what do you think about love?” I have aged beyond romance, and I didn’t answer the letter. In part oral matters distracted me from written. That evening I flossed a filling out of a premolar. In the literary world, genres are loose.

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Short stories become essays, and prose drifts toward poetry. Beyond the classroom, boundaries vanish completely, and the oral and written blend. At the end of the week, a girl made anxious by crowds took the midterm examination in my office. That night she telephoned me at home. “I think I lost my crown in your office,” the girl said. The next morning I got up early and, hurrying to the English department before the cleaners arrived, searched my office. I found the crown under the desk. I set the crown in bubble wrap, put it into an envelope, and sent it to the girl through campus mail. Alas, the girl’s examination was unpalatable to all except folks raised on mixes, those of baked goods and metaphors. “No matter how you cut the cake,” she began her essay, “everyone is going to die.” Near the end of each semester my friend Josh visits. While the sight of Josh makes me smile, hearing him causes indigestion. The last week in November, Josh showed me an e-mail. “Good morning,” the e-mail began. “My name is Matt Rasmussen. I’m in your Tuesday and Thursday class, and I’m writing to say that I won’t be in class this week. On Saturday I was involved in a football accident, and I shattered my sinus cavity and the lower half of my orbital socket, so I will not be back at school until next week.” “In October,” Josh recounted, “I sent a photocopy of this e-mail to the surgeon general. I suggested that a warning be stamped on all athletic equipment—footballs, hockey sticks, badminton rackets, and jockey straps—reading ‘Caution: The surgeon general has determined that SPORTS may be hazardous to your health.’” Josh’s suggestion did not elicit a response, a matter that mystified him but not me. I suspect Josh is on a list of people whose words are too fiery for the wooden doings of cabinet members. After the attorney general ordered that the statue of the Spirit of Justice be clothed, Josh explained the reason to students. “The poor man,” he said, “suffers from an unruly member. Whenever he saw Justice’s bare bosom, he had an erection. Only drapery could shrink his Mr. Happy. Can you imagine a person with such an unbridled appetite holding a position in government?” Like many genial people, Josh occasionally pushes the guffaw too far. On my remonstrating with him about his indelicate handling of the attorney general’s problem, he shifted attention to me. Josh is an amateur mathematician. After noting that I had wandered universities for more than thirty years, he said, “Your classes are large. Each year you teach

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five hundred students. Since 70 percent of students studying English are female, over your career you have taught three hundred and fifty times thirty, for a product of 10,500 women. After making allowance for those whom circumstance has kept fallow and the wholesome few who find breeding distasteful,” Josh continued, “I estimate that each female you have taught has produced two children, the total for the 10,500 thus amounting to 21,000 offspring. A respectable harvest,” Josh concluded, “but not a single suckling named for you.” “What?” I said. Happily, Josh rarely pushes numbers into the second and third generation, all the way to grandchildren and great-grandchildren. After staring at me for a moment, he handed me a clipping from the New Haven Register. A veterinarian in Greenwich advertised prepaid euthanasia for pets. “A thoughtful Christmas gift,” the advertisement stated, “for that spouse whose busy lifestyle might inadvertently cause dear Muffi to linger in pain.” For gift giving, the veterinarian printed cards. On the front of one card a yellow cat dozed peacefully atop a bolster covered in red plaid. On another card a poodle bounded into the air, snapping at a golden cloud just beyond its nose. Binding the edges of both cards was a bunting of white lilies. When I was young, study promised keys to living. Now, like a sleigh sliding down a hill, association carries me through days. As the sleigh rumbles and twists, I have energy enough only to hold on. Instead of analyzing, I cope with what bounces up from life. On leaving my office and Josh, I returned home, not to aging pets but to a Carolina wren. The wren must have hopped through the kitchen door that morning when I emptied the garbage. After chasing the wren into the study, I smothered the bird under a green towel, pinning it against a windowpane. I wrapped the towel around the bird and carried it outside. After prying the bird’s talons loose from the nap of the towel, I set the bird on the edge of the bird feeder. For several minutes the wren clung to lip of the feeder, its bill wide as a caret. Because the temperature was 20 degrees, I worried that the wren would freeze. I considered rewrapping the bird and after confining it to a shoebox in the kitchen gradually reintroducing it to the out-of-doors. Suddenly, however, the wren gathered itself and flew away. The next morning it was busy drilling into suet hanging outside the garage.

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Animal matters marked November much like runners tracing the path of a sleigh. Vicki’s mother collected Staffordshire figures. Just before Christmas, Vicki and I drove to New York, where she and her brothers divided the collection. We returned to Storrs with a porcelain menagerie: a pair of zebras five inches tall; two blue Dalmatians, silver chains around their necks; a calico cat; several spaniels, one lounging on a pink rug, in front of it two puppies in a basket; chickens plucking worms from the ground; an orange horse; a yellow lion; geese; a white goat eight inches tall with a green snake wrapping its middle like a wreath; a red fox; and two elephants, one purple, black, and small, the other fleshly and pale green. Little Red Riding Hood sat astride the wolf. A small girl wearing an orange dress cradled a black and white rabbit. While three poodles surrounded a clock, one supporting each side of the clockface and the third standing atop it, three lambs surrounded another clock, their positions the same as those of the dogs, the hands on the faces of both clocks marking three o’clock. A dog pulled a drowning man from a dark pool. A mother bird dove into a nest in order to protect three fledglings from a fat snake. A cheetah ten inches tall loomed over scrub, guarding two kittens, her mouth spread in a threatening grin, her teeth bulging, in need of an orthodontist. For a week we exhibited the animals on the dining room table. Then we packed the creatures in boxes and closed the zoo in order to get ready for Christmas. Age turns a person into a cartoon of himself. The transformation doesn’t make one uncomfortable, though, because a person’s compatriots also become cartoons. Nowadays Christmas is more a time of oddity than eggnog. From New Canaan, Geoffrey and Christina sent a letter describing doings of the past year. “Other than our yearly ski trip to Arosa in Switzerland,” they recounted, “we spend vacations and most of our long holiday weekends in Sweden and England, as well as the odd weekend in San Francisco.” “What do you think?” Vicki said after reading the letter. “We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those we bore,” I said, quoting Rochefoucauld. “What does that Frenchman have to do with this letter?” Vicki said. “Nothing,” I said, pushing away from the kitchen table and standing up. “I’m going to the bookstore.” For two decades a friend has written me from Iowa, describing the

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antics of an asylum of characters. My correspondent writes as one of her creations, initially Neoscaletta Pemberton, founder of a charity to aid crippled dachshunds, then as Rusty Zwanger, head of RIO, Remain Intact ORGANization, a group opposed to male circumcision. Several years ago Neoscaletta and Rusty misbehaved in the Raphael Hotel in Kansas City. Afterward Neoscaletta vanished and Rusty transformed himself into the Reverend Zevs Galaxy, pastor of the Nudist Christian Church in Ames. Eventually, cavorting forced Rusty to decamp and head for Utah, where, after drifting far from all laws, heavenly and earthly, he was apprehended by a posse led by Merle T. Oderman, head operative of the Oderman Detective Agency, located in Sibley, Iowa, “91⁄ 2 S. East St. NW (behind laundry mat), Our Personalized Tomato Suckering Service Second to None.” After his arrest, Zwanger corresponded with me from jail using Merle as a go-between. A week before Christmas I received a box from Merle. “Had got call from Deputy Curdy Burdett Backey at county jail that Russell ‘Rusty’ Zwanger, what you know as the Rev. Zevs Galaxy, had materials for me they been holding since last Christmas, near the time when Rusty/Zevs was taken to Des Moines for kidney complaint of the bladderal area,” Merle wrote. “My operative in training, Tiny Marie Melvina Malvern, went and come back with the enclosed. Zwanger/Galaxy not allowed greeting cards on holiday so took this one from off of visitors room bulletin board. Wanted you to have it for all you done.” In the box lay a Christmas cookie. Iced with green surrounded by a white border, the cookie was three and three-quarter inches in diameter. Over the green in red cursive letters ran the words “Season’s Greetings LEDERMAN Bail Bonds.” Deputy Curdy, Oderman wrote, “told Tiny Marie Melvina to tell me to tell you not to eat cookie as pest spraying done same day as delivery of eats.” Also enclosed in the package was a key ring advertising the Iowa Kidney Stone Center. At the bottom of the box was a Christmas card. A drawing on the front of the card depicted a gray mouse sitting on its haunches, eyes shining like stars, on its head a red stocking cap topped by a white ball. Stamped in green above the mouse were the words “Holiday Greetings.” Below the mouse’s haunches, looking like a tabletop, was “From Your Pest Elimination Friends.” Inside the card, a representative of Ecolab Pest Elimination Services wrote, “I wish you the best during this holiday season. The opportunity to serve you means a great deal to me. Thank you.”

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At the conclusion of his letter, Merle described seasonal festivities in the Ames lockup. Deputy Backey related that Galaxy “has told prison congregation (converted) of Ames Nudist Christian Church that after he gets out of the pen he is going to take up serpents. At Good Friday he lifted a jar at services and said Lord Omighty bless this strychnine to the use of my body and my body to your service that I might rise in three days after drinking this and being subconscious or dead. Liquid confiscated and analyzed by county chemist Selassie Spivey and found to be watered down 2% milk from lunch. Also had word that Neoscaletta Pemberton is working at Dogpatch, U.S.A., at Bagnall Dam Lake of the Ozarks Missouri dressed in Daisy Mae outfit taking tickets at Mammy Yokum Outhouse Tilty-Whirl ride, although someone else said she was assistant director of L’il Britches Daycare close by. Will assess info.” The box and letter startled me, but they did not elicit a gasp as did the winter catalogue of White Flower Farm. On page 88, the farm advertised a new lady’s slipper, Cypripedium Hilda, “the first named cross between C. kentuckiense and C. x ventricosum.” When Hilda’s petals turned “rosy purple” and her pouch swelled “dappled pink and white,” she exuded “a slight rose-like fragrance.” Priced at six hundred dollars a “bareroot,” the Hildas were, the catalogue implied, sure “to go in a hurry.” “Buy a hundred and plant them in the dell,” Vicki said. “Imagine the spectacle in spring—cheap at any price but certainly modest at sixty thousand dollars.” Christmas loosens purse strings. Although I resisted purchasing Hildas, I did spend money. In 1959 I graduated from Montgomery Bell Academy, a country day school in Nashville. In October, Brad Gioia, the headmaster, telephoned and told me that I’d been selected as this year’s Distinguished Alumnus. On December 17, I flew to Nashville to say a few words at the alumni dinner. Brad instructed me to speak for five to eight minutes. “When I asked Brad how long I should talk,” I began, arranging a thick signature of papers on the lectern, “he said five minutes. Five minutes seemed dandy until I calculated the expense of the trip from Connecticut. Airfare, hotel room, rented car, adventure novel, chocolate chewies, etc., totaled six hundred dollars. That meant that each minute of this talk would cost me $120, or two dollars a second. I don’t play in that financial league. For a moment I considered canceling my appearance, but then Enron or Texas economics bailed me out and

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made everything bullish. Suddenly, I realized that if I talked for an hour and a half, that is, ninety minutes, each minute would cost me only $6.67, or 11 cents a second, a price I can afford. So kick off your wingtips, lean back, and order a second meal because you won’t be getting out of here until at least ten o’clock, maybe later if I get into a real balance-the-budget mood and decide to cut corporate subsidies and raise the income tax. “Nevertheless,” I continued, “aside from a select few who are aware of my financial acumen, I suspect that most people in this room assume I am here because of literary, not monetary, achievements. How insensitive it would be for me to disappoint these eager auditors. And so in the three minutes or $360 I have left in the till, I want to quote some highly motivational, inspirational verse. Far be it from your humble honoree to make excessive claims for the verse. Granted, my words may change your lives and at the end of this talk you may stand and shout, ‘Hosanna!’ Granted, Vesuvius may cease spouting flame and instead spew jeroboams of retsina to the heavens. Granted, this verse may raise the noble dead and bury the unpleasant living. Deserts may bloom green and sexual organs may spread across the human body like sweet tendrils of poison ivy—without, of course, the itch. Still, this verse cannot do everything. It will not bring back the elves or elect Albert Gore president.” Alas, not a single prediction came true. Acoustics in the building were terrible. Throughout the speech people cupped hands behind their ears and, turning to classmates, said, “What? What did he say?” Still, despite my best-plotted words echoing off wall and floor, I enjoyed the visit. I rented a Dodge Neon. When the clerk at Thrifty Car Rental offered to upgrade the car, I turned him down. The cheaper the vehicle, the more conventional the knobs and switches, and the less likely style and innovation are to obscure controls for locks, lights, wipers, and heater. I stayed in the Wyndham Airport Hotel, a place frequented by overweight middle-aged businessmen, all of whom seemed to wander terraces talking on cell phones while wearing garish neckties, white shirts, dark trousers and shoes, but no jackets. Breakfast in the hotel being pricey, I ate at a Shoney’s restaurant located at the intersection of Royal Parkway and Donaldson Pike. Kinko’s, McDonald’s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken occupied the other three corners of the

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intersection. One morning I sat in a booth by a window. Parked just beyond the curb outside my window were two pickup trucks. On the front of both trucks were vanity plates, one machine-made and declaring allegiance to the Tennessee Titans, a professional football team; the other crafted by hand and proclaiming fealty to “JESUS.” In the upper left corner of this last plate were the words “Never Expires.” The upper right evoked “John 3:16” (“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”). At the bottom of the plate was “CLAiBORNE,” the name of the county. All the letters in the name were capitals except the i. All stood straight except the N, which leaned to the right and looked like a runner straining to break from starting blocks. Soon after arriving in Nashville, I am afraid I used the word hammered in the center of the second plate, or at least a word similar to it. I drove to Belle Meade Tower in order to visit an elderly friend. When I asked the man at the desk if Mrs. Harriet Tyne was in, he looked puzzled and said, “I don’t know a Mrs. Tyne, and I have worked here for two years.” Suddenly a woman I recognized walked into the lobby. “Sammy,” she said, “Harriet’s been dead for three years. Didn’t you know?” Other excursions went better and didn’t provoke exclamations. On the second afternoon I drove to Carthage and visited Mother and Father in the mountain graveyard. I talked to them a long time. I described the children’s doings in great detail. Although Mother and Father didn’t say much—at least, I couldn’t hear them—the conversation made me feel both wonderfully happy and terribly sad. “One of those what moments, I suppose,” Vicki said after I described the trip to Carthage. “Yes,” I said, “one of those moments.” Other conversations were clearer. The second night in Nashville I ate dinner with my old friends Bill and Nicky Weaver. Before I left Storrs, Eliza asked me to find her a husband. “If you find me a husband in Nashville, you won’t have to send me to college, and you can retire. I’d like him to have some money and be tall, smart, kooky, nice, and liberal.” “Sam,” Nicky said, “I know a dozen boys who fit Eliza’s prescription, except for the liberal. There isn’t a liberal in the whole town.” “That’s not a what statement,” Vicki said. “No,” I said, “it isn’t.” Outside the kitchen window a sharp-shinned hawk perched on the bird feeder. That night snow fell, and I walked along the Fenton River. My shoes

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crunched the snow, sounding like they were chewing Grape Nuts. Ice hemmed the river, stitching out from banks in ledges. Like an eyelid clouds closed over the moon, and instead of blue the trunks of beeches were black. Snow bent hemlocks to the ground, turning lower branches into tent struts. I ducked under a tree and napped until my left hip began to ache with cold. “Oh, well,” I said and, crawling out from the tent, stood up and started home. In the distance snowplows growled. “Tomorrow,” I thought, “I’ll make eggnog.”

Toolless

Three weeks ago I read Scott Sanders’s The Force of Spirit, a collection of essays. Sanders is a tool-using man and throughout his life has nailed, plumbed, dug, mixed, and leveled. His paragraphs are sheds tight with routers, rasps, honing guides, cat’s-paws, clamps, and ratchet nuts. While only six kinds of swallows ever appear east of the Mississippi, at least seven species of pliers inhabit Sanders’s toolbox in Indiana: slip-joint, needle-nose, machinist, channel-lock, electrician, bent-nose, and locking. Although I can identify all six swallows in flight, I cannot attach names to pliers, not even a featherless pair nesting atop a workbench. The only tools I use are a screwdriver and a hammer, the former single-slotted, the latter curved claw. Once a year Vicki buys a coconut at Super Stop & Shop. That afternoon I take the coconut in my left hand and hold it over the kitchen sink. From a drawer under the sink I remove the hammer and, grasping it in my right hand, whack the nut until the shell cracks. Once the milk has drained away, I wedge the screwdriver between the shell and the meat and pry up slabs of flesh. Vicki does not approve of my technique and warns me that someday the screwdriver will slip and excavate the heel of my left hand. “Without the use of your hand,” she invariably says, “what you would do?” I would, of course, do as I normally do. In workaday matters I use my left hand only for picking up sticks and pushing the lawn mower. Until Ken Dardick removed the stitches from my palm, the yard might grow ratty, at least in summer. My incapacity would not, however, influence other activities. I am not a tool-using creature. I cannot repair a flat tire on a bicycle. I don’t know how to raise the hood of an automobile. Even 101

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if I could push a hood up into a flap of tinny skin, the entrails would mystify me. I am the descendant of generations of toolless people. Grandfather Pickering never learned to drive a car. Backing and turning caused Grandmother Ratcliffe so much anxiety that when she began to drive John Derrycote, a farm worker, accompanied her on outings. John was a huge man. He sat in the backseat, and whenever turning proved difficult for Grandmother, he got out of the car and, lifting the rear, changed the car’s direction. If I used tools, I suspect I would be overly precise. Last week I inserted 301 examinations into blue books. Afterward I packed the books into a box. The activity took 29 minutes and 38 seconds, or an average of 5.907 seconds per blue book. I was interrupted once, this by a student asking the date of the examination. I allowed the interruption to last eleven seconds, as I wanted to appear amenable. What increased my time were the blue books themselves. Each bundle of fifty books was tightly wrapped in plastic. Because the plastic was slippery, I could not tear the wrappers off with my hands and was forced to bite through them. Often the plastic slipped through my teeth like dental floss. I packed the books into a Weyerhaeuser box which had formerly contained five thousand sheets of Recycled Husky Xerocopy paper, each page measuring eight and a half by eleven inches. Parts are greater than wholes. Once I had a green thumb. Alas, the green has browned, and my nail has curled in dieback. After blossoming for eleven years, last summer the hollyhock by the front stoop did not reseed. This spring, blades of daffodils in the dell were thin as files. Smothered under leaves, only fingerlings of columbine appeared at the edge of the woods. Deer cropped my azaleas. Dutchman’s britches collapsed into nappies; dry rot raked rungs of flowers from Jacob’s ladder, and the silverbell by the road suddenly turned as spindly as a mahjong stick. Last fall I trimmed yews in front of the house, scissoring them into skeletons—illustrations, Vicki said, sliced from an anatomy textbook. “Spring,” I said, “will fatten them.” It did not. Last summer when we were in Australia, someone, probably Edward, mulched the Oregon holly I transplanted from the garden outside the School of Pharmacy four summers ago. Edward also ground up the New England asters and goldenrod I planted behind the mailbox. Fourteen years ago I dug the asters from the field behind Unnamed Pond. Every fall the patch was a

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skylight of yellow and blue stars. Now the patch is as brown as evening. Root rot has attacked one of the two rhododendrons I bought eight years ago. Leaves on the shrub have yellowed and, drying, have rolled in on themselves. In 1990 my father fell off the twig. The following spring George Core sent me a dwarf conifer in his memory. This winter the tree died. Two years ago in April, Mrs. Carter, our neighbor, died. After her funeral I dug six clumps of maidenhair fern from her backyard and for memory’s sake planted them in damp seams in rocks below the dell. None of the ferns appeared this spring. Despite knotting itself into a massive tangle, the clematis by the back door has never bloomed. This spring I decided to replace it with a different variety. Before I could chop the clematis down, however, cardinals built a nest in it. Twice before, cardinals have nested in the clematis. Never have a pair raised a brood. Comings and goings disturb them, and they abandon their eggs. In contrast to optimistic, budding youth, blotches don’t generally cause the middle-aged to wilt. In truth, amid the tar and cercospora spots, some plants thrived unblemished, their flowers petals enough for consolation. Blossoms quilted the lilacs behind the garage, and like minute sails white flowers filled the old tartarian honeysuckle by the property line. Most days I hardly noticed the cankering of the yard. Maybe if I had been a tool user adept with hoe and shovel, the blight might have gnawed at mood like carpenter ants chewing a beam into dust. At best I’m an afternoon gardener and writer. I build for the moment and don’t delude myself into believing that tendrils as fragile as sentences can withstand the harrow of time. From trash washed into consciousness by the flood of days, I knock together rickety paragraphs. I raise shacks without thematic plans. I clutter cabinets with Victorian gingerbread—stale, old-fashioned tidbits, not just nibbled but often chewed and spit out by other essayists. I toss sentences across the floor even though they cause readers to stumble, fracturing thought. “In affairs of this world,” Turlow Gutheridge said after church last Sunday, “a lack of faith saves men.” Later that day at Ankerrow’s Café, Loppie Groat announced he was a vegetarian, declaring that he would no longer turn his stomach into a tomb for dead animals. Rarely does brain rule body. When assaulted by the fragrance of fried ham, Loppie’s resolve collapsed into painful appetite satisfied only by the sugar-cured.

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My pages are outbuildings cluttered with dusty tales. In April at the Church of the Chastening Rod, Malachi Ramus preached a sermon against gluttony, two members of his congregation having recently died from heart attacks, arteries baked solid in a kiln stoked with barbecue; sweet potatoes, marshmallows crusting over them like oyster shells; custard pie; angel biscuits; and fried chicken in a mortar of bacon grease. Malachi entitled his sermon “Are You Dieting with Jesus?” Jesus, he told the congregation “won’t no fat baby.” At birth he weighed only four pounds. Afterward he lived a life of holy poverty. “When Mary offered Jesus a teat, he just sipped and didn’t chow down like some of these snout-nosed folks around Carthage would have done.” To help parishioners lose weight, Malachi advised people to say blessings after meals, thanking “the Lord for what you had the gumption not to eat as well as what you ate.” A diet of religion usually undermines health. In order to cure the creeping palsy, Eula Cowmeadow, a member of Malachi’s congregation, dosed herself with the Bible. For almost three years Eula ate a page of the Bible for lunch, buttering the pages and putting them between slices of Wonder Bread. She ate the standard King James Version, sandwich size, four and three-quarters by seven and a quarter inches, 1,048 pages in all including index and glossary. To make doctrine more palatable, Eula sometimes slapped kale or sliced parsnips on the bread. So that the meal would not make her bilious, she drank buttermilk with the acidic portions of the Old Testament. When eating saccharine parts of the New Testament, she basted pages with horseradish. Miracle cures don’t work. After chewing the last bit of the index, a mouthful that included Zacharias, Zebulun, Zedekiah, Zephaniah, Zerubbabel, and Zion, Eula still felt tingling under the big toe on her right foot. The sensation bothered her so much that she took the train to Nancy and visited Dr. Torquamado, a faith doctor. The doctor prescribed an emetic, and Eula threw up into a chamber pot the doctor kept under his desk. As soon as Eula could stand, Torquamado reached into the pot and pulled out a dead bullfrog. “You’ve been suffering from Rana catesbeiana,” the doctor explained. “The frog lived in your stomach, and every time it bellowed, the sound echoed through your intestines, radiated into your pelvis, then traveled down your right leg to your foot, making the big toe quiver like a tuning fork.” Eula took the

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frog home and, after stuffing it into a jar, stored it in the pantry at the end of a row of canned butter beans. For a month she was content, but then she worried that the frog had spawned, leaving a cloud of tadpoles in her stomach. Consequently she went to see Dr. Sollows in Carthage. “Fetch the frog, and I will make a diagnosis,” Dr. Sollows instructed. When Eula returned to the office, Dr. Sollows removed the bullfrog from the jar and examined it with a magnifying glass, rolling it this way and that, periodically saying “hum” and “my word.” Finally, he tossed the frog into a waste can, after which he turned to Eula and said, “Eula, you are lucky. You don’t have to worry. There are no tadpoles in your stomach. This frog was a gentleman bullfrog.” The person who uses tools well constructs sensible paragraphs and in the process distorts living. Life is disorderly. Unlike headers above doorways, people’s minds often tilt akimbo. Oddity cut like a drainage ditch through the Cowmeadow family. Occasionally eccentricity snagged on a root, and the ditch overflowed into insanity. Eula’s brother Moab was the blacksmith in Nancy. In February he became convinced that Dorcas, his wife, was stepping around. To prevent her from sneaking out of the house without his hearing her, he decided to shoe her. Happily, Dorcas screamed so loudly that neighbors rescued her before Moab shod her left foot. The next day Dr. Sollows extracted the nails from Dorcas’s right foot and signed an order committing Moab to Central State. Institutional life agreed with Moab. He forswore blacksmithing and became an author, in just two months writing a pamphlet entitled “The Art of Swimming in Smith County.” Chapters analyzed swimming techniques appropriate to rivers, creeks, ponds, lakes, wells, and bathtubs. Containing instructions on removing bull leeches and wrestling water moccasins, a homeopathic essay called “Remedies for the Ailment of Vomit,” and hints on safety—”Don’t,” for example, “go into the water until you learn to swim”—the pamphlet sold well at Read’s Drugstore, all proceeds going toward buying Dorcas an orthopedic shoe. Although my paragraphs masquerade as ramshackle, they are more tightly constructed than meets the galloping mind. Old-fashioned they may be, but many are solid post and beam. On innumerable shanties, particularly the newfangled, a veneer of well-made words disguises shoddy workmanship. Recently I have spent much time flying. Despite palaver about making boarding planes more rigorous, screening

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passengers is haphazard. Until my last flight, I had not slipped unexamined past a screener. Inspectors have opened my bags, asked me to take off my shoes, jabbed metal detectors down both the front and rear of my trousers, and have made me stand with arms out like a scarecrow while they dug for weapons buried in dimples in my hide. Inspectors chose me not because I resembled a hand grenade with a loose pin but because I am sweet. “I am sorry to inconvenience you, sir,” a screener apologized, “but we have to inspect some people.” Invariably the people inspected are not folks who look dangerous or ill-tempered but the amenable: middle-aged women with faces clear as daisies, old men who have just kissed grandchildren goodbye. Screening people is wearing, particularly if passengers resent being inspected, so inspectors stop people who will submit with a smile. On my last flight I put suspicion to the test. Instead of smiling, I hunched forward and scowled, appearing like a passenger the inspection of whom would raise the blood pressure of the screener. While I strode past screeners unhindered, the woman behind me, who looked like grandma’s apple dumpling, was stopped and subjected to a thorough search, which she endured, as the inspector knew she would, with sugary spirits. Tool users are believers. Because they are able to repair, they can imagine transformations and are often inspirational. Incapable of building, I am a man of little faith. Consequently I suspect the polished. Instead of raising rubble into structure, I disrupt. Last Wednesday I gave blood. Afterward I walked to the university bookstore. Near the door was a desk. Behind it hunkered a woman soliciting blood donors. “Do you want to save a life today?” she said stridently as I ambled into the store. The woman’s smug assurance irritated me. “No,” I shouted and strode away. “Why didn’t you just say you had already given blood?” Vicki asked later. “To hell with that,” I said. “Only rudeness can save a person from the sanctimonious.” Three days later I sat in the Atlanta airport waiting for a flight to Hartford. Because I was scowling in order to avoid being screened, seats on either side of me were as empty as a hornet’s nest in winter. When an elderly Mexican approached the waiting area, a woman four seats to my left jumped up and, squatting on the carpet, effusively insisted that the man take her seat. “She’s one of those demons who try

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to make the silly and the unnecessary seem virtuous. What a terrible mate she’d be,” I said to a woman sitting across the aisle from me. “I’ve a good mind to trip over her. The bruises she’d get and the suit I’d bring would teach her a lesson.” “What?” my neighbor said, glancing around nervously. My neighbor’s hair shook like pollen. Talk about narrow virtue was impossible, and I ended the conversation. “Meat in a sandwich,” I said, “is middle class because it is below the upper crust and above the underbred.” I then walked to another part of the waiting area and watched a large woman shovel down a bigamous meal: a hot dog round as my thigh, a pelt of sauerkraut sprouting around it like cellulite, a compost pile of French fried potatoes, and a cup big as an elephant’s bladder frothy with Coca Cola. In Atlanta I stayed in the Sheraton in Buckhead. Because television gives me colitis, I spent time in the lobby watching people check into the hotel. After jailbait festooned with tattoos and armed with Diners Cards received keys to rooms, I spoke to the clerk. “You should not allow such trash to check into the hotel,” I said. “I can’t help it,” the woman said. “I’m just a trainee.” The Sunday morning I flew out of Atlanta was stormy. After I buckled my seatbelt, the woman sitting next to me said, “A lot of people on this flight will be praying.” “You are wrong,” I said, “no one on this flight will pray.” “What?” the woman said. “No one will pray,” I repeated. “Everyone on this flight is an atheist. Only atheists fly on Sunday. True believers don’t fly on the Lord’s day. Right now real Christians are bouncing up and down on linoleum, foaming at the mouth, and fracturing syllables.” For a moment the woman glared at me. Then she turned away and sat primly in her seat. Once the plane was airborne, she opened a carryall and, taking out a book entitled Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential, began to read. “Did she say anything else to you, Daddy?” Eliza asked during dessert that evening. “Not a word,” I said. “You are very naughty, Daddy,” Eliza said. “Yes,” I said. “I’m naughty. To celebrate I’ll have a second slab of chocolate cake, this one with vanilla ice cream.” While in the Sheraton, I studied the concierge. A woman telephoned from the airport and asked how to get to the hotel. The concierge explained that there were three easy ways to reach the hotel. By taxi the fare was thirty-five dollars. The airport limousine cost twenty dollars. The cheapest and “perhaps most convenient way” was to take the

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MARTA train northbound to Lenox Square Station. “The hotel is two blocks from the station,” he said. Three times he repeated the choices. After the third time, he apologized and told the woman to hold the phone, explaining that a resident of the hotel was paging him. He replaced his receiver on a rack and strolled about the lobby, paying particular attention to a pastel print on the wall. After 122 seconds, he returned to his station and, picking up the phone, repeated the instructions twice. Then he again apologized and told the woman to stay on the line, explaining that another resident needed his attention. On this occasion he went outside and looked at clouds scudding across the sky. On his return he picked up the phone, beginning the conversation with “Do you have a pencil?” The concierge was patient, and from my point of view rational to the point of irrationality. I suspected he was a tool user. “I would have sent that nincompoop to Motel 6,” I said, adding, “Are you good with tools?” “Am I!” the concierge exclaimed. “Last year I built a family room on my son’s house.” Tool users insulate their attics against melancholy damp. To bar the door to cold depression, I weather-strip days with busy event. Late in March the Eastern Connecticut Draft Horse Association held its annual plow match in the fallow cornfield below the old police station. Sixteen teams of Belgians and Percherons competed in six categories: Team Sulky Plow, Team Walking Plow, Junior Plowing, Obstacle Course, Powder Puff for Ladies, and Multiple Hitch Plowing, teams of this last composed of three horses. Owners came from Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. From a small trailer in a parking lot, two round men sold hot dogs, coffee, doughnuts, and cotton candy. The owners of Black Iron Percherons in Andover, Connecticut, hitched Gunner and LT to a wooden farm wagon and took children for rides around the cornfield. Along with the sound of French, the rich fragrances of manure and hay slid through the wind. Tied to a van, a young Percheron whinnied and rumbled. “His stablemates are plowing,” the owner explained, “and this is the first time he has been separated from them.” Crows swirled like motes. Around the collar of the field, willows spooled into green, and yellow bubbled over forsythia. When they plowed, horses stepped high and their muscles shimmed like rocks pushed about by a high tide. For two hours Vicki and I watched plows roll dirt into low black curtains. Eliza wasn’t with us.

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She was rowing on Coventry Lake. “Dreaming of improving her erg score so Harvard or Yale will recruit her,” Vicki said. “She’d be better off watching horses.” In late spring I spoke at two commencements. The last week in April I flew to Buffalo and after renting a car drove to Bradford, Pennsylvania, only the sixth time I’ve rented a car. Like tacks, numbers help me order days. From the airport in Buffalo, I drove west on Highway 33 until the road met 90. I took 90 South until it joined 219, the highway numbers totaling 342. Driving to Bradford took ninety-eight minutes. Bradford clings to the lower lip of Allegheny National Forest. South of Springfield, New York, animals that had spilled from wood and field and had been crushed into crumbs cluttered the roadside. Trees in the National Forest were greening, dogwood blossoms spotting them like buttons. Bradford had once been wealthy with oil and lumber. From bare feet to bare feet, however, takes only three generations. The wealth had vanished, and red brick buildings hung over downtown, lids of plywood closing shop fronts like dementia. Still, I liked Bradford and longed to roam the town and wander the foothills of the forest. Although pockets of time swing open, commencement speakers rarely have opportunities to explore. Observations are patchwork. Eleven women, for example, wearing black shirts, yellow tigers stamped across the fronts, ate breakfast in Best Western the next morning. “I’m leaving,” I said, addressing one of the women. “Take my table. Push it against another one, and you will have enough seats for the team. Eat hearty, and you’ll bowl strikes.” “How did you know we were a bowling team?” the woman said. Forty minutes after checking into Best Western, I was seated at a graduation dinner. Two and a half hours later I was back in the motel. I don’t sleep easily away from home, and to sand minutes into dozing, I pondered a cord of narrative boards I’d recently unearthed. Termites infested the boards, making them just dandy for an outbuilding in Carthage. The success of Moab Cowmeadow’s pamphlet on swimming spurred several Carthaginians to saddle themselves to pen and pad, among them Solomon Eftweed. Solomon began “a dictionary of untitled works.” Unfortunately he broke down early, stumbling at the table of contents. Hollis Hunnewell brought another show to Carthage, this year’s sensation being Dolorosus, the Horned Woman. A plaque in front of Dolorosus’s cage informed viewers that she had once been a hermitess.

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She received the name Dolorosus because her mother died shortly after her daughter’s birth—from a putrid fever, not from a wound torn by the horn. In fact, the horn didn’t appear until Dolorosus reached puberty. “Almost never do horns sprout,” the plaque informed patrons, quoting the New England Journal of Medicine, “until the bearer reaches adolescence.” Dolorosus’s horn grew in the small of her back and resembled a horn on the head of a Boer goat. Instead of twisting in a semicircle like the goat’s horn, however, Dolorosus’s curled into four circles, the outer circle the largest, the inner the smallest. The horn was pink, and the tip of the innermost circle lapped the air like a tongue. Attached to the end of the tongue were a small Confederate flag and a piece of black bunting. Printed in white on the bunting was “Good Night to this World Is Good Morning to the Next.” The horn weighed, the plaque declared, seventy-one ounces and had reached maturity by Dolorosus’s twenty-first birthday. Despite the horn, Dolorosus married, becoming a hermitess only after the death of her husband. While married, Dolorosus gave birth to six children. “Not one of them blessed with a horn,” the plaque stated, “although one had red hair and another became a Catholic and a teetotaler.” At six thirty the next afternoon I returned to Buffalo. My flight took me to Washington, where I was slated to change planes for Hartford. Because of bad weather on the East Coast, my flight was cancelled, and I spent the night at the airport in a Radisson Hotel. Toolless people rarely have chores. Not screwed to schedule, they have the leisure to indulge inclination. The Radisson was hosting the International Aviation Snow Symposium. The symposium piqued my curiosity, and that evening I crashed the “Ice Breaker.” The Breaker was held in a conference room big as the hold of a tanker. A bar and a vegetable garden of snacks stood near the wheelhouse at the south end of the room. Three aisles of industrial exhibits filled the rest of the room. Salesmen, inventors, manufacturers’ representatives, presidents of companies, and experts in sundry arcane matters peopled the aisles, chatting about carrier engines and impellers, mentioning drag and vertical loads, and weighing the merits of active and passive surface sensors. Despite lacking standard intellectual hydraulics, I slipped easily along the aisles. Posters depicted loading docks of red, orange, and yellow machines. Plows waved like the wings of giant birds. Mysterious

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metallic devices resembled saplings, stripped of bark and phylum by chemicals. Knowing nothing about clutches and transmissions, I engaged and disengaged thought and words at whim. “Never do I miss this meeting or the one in Calgary,” a vice president told me. Salesmen represented companies from across the ice belt. Tenco traveled from St-Valérien de Milton, Quebec, to hawk its SMI Snow Blower. “Pioneer in snow removal and road maintenance since 1891,” Root Spring Scraper came from Kalamazoo. Sicard, a division of SMI-Snowblast, came from Watertown, New York, to advertise its 7000 Series Snow Blower. Patria Vammas traveled from Vammala, Finland, while ASFT flew in from Ystad, Sweden, trumpeting its Surface Friction Tester built into a Saab 95 automobile. Located in Paul, Idaho, Kodiak Northwest custom manufactured “all types of snow removal equipment”—in truck chassis, for example, giving buyers a choice of Rockwell, Eaton, or Funk axles. Viking-Cives in Harrisburg, New York, advertised its “Trip Edge Reversible Snow Plows,” noting, “You can always cast ‘Downwind.’” Both Tradewind Scientific and Trackless Vehicles came from Ontario, the latter towing a parking lot of machines, leaf loaders, flails, snowblowers, cold planers, rotary mowers, sweepers, and ploughs. Surface Systems, Inc., traveled up from St. Louis to advertise its Road and Runway Information Systems, known as RWIS. Dynatest came from Starke, Florida, the only company I saw with alligators and tsetse flies for neighbors. Some exhibits held my attention longer than others, not because the machines described were better than similar devices but because a fact or word slowed me like adhesive. Franklin Paint Company in Franklin, Massachusetts, advertised a hardware store of products—not simply paint, which the company declared was “as durable as the hills of old New England,” but also traffic cones, athletic-field markers, and line removers. On Franklin’s list were 172 stencils. While stencils for fourinch letters cost $4 a piece, those for 48-inch letters cost $40. The most expensive stencil product cost $700: a “Football Field Kit,” numbers and letters 72 inches tall and in Roman style. A kit with letters and numbers half as high cost $400. At $175 the next most expensive item on the list was a stencil for a hopscotch board, measuring 96 by 24 inches and including numbers. Trecan Combustion in Hubley, Nova Scotia, manufactured snow-

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melting equipment. For sale were stationary and portable melters, the former capable of melting 20, 40, or 60 tons of snow an hour “or multiples thereof.” Portables could melt 20 to 500 tons an hour. In particular, the 60-PD Melter could “handle” 180 cubic yards of snow an hour, about fifteen truckloads, and, Trecan asserted, “is often twice as economical as disposal methods that involve hauling and dumping.” To remove ice, Clearway advertised “6s,” “an environmentally friendly runway de-icer.” 6s had “Better Performance than Urea” and was “Harmless to Aquatic Life,” Clearway assured prospective purchasers. A “show special” all the way from Southampton, England, the NEW Tapley Braketronic Meter sold for $995. An electronic decelerometer, it worked “by comparing the deceleration of the vehicle under test with the local acceleration due to gravity.” I couldn’t understand the doings of the meter. I just liked the knobby language jutting from the advertisement. Consistency is a virtue necessary to tool users. If a builder eschewed method and combined mudsill, joists, soleplate, and studs arbitrarily, both house and business would collapse. In contrast the toolless can always enjoy inconsistency. At the exhibit staged by Margo Supplies not simply the uses of products but also the language describing them was immediately understandable. The “Wildlife Management Specialists” at Margo advertised, among other items, “Pyrotechnical Scare and Signal Cartridges.” Familiarly known as bangers, but also as bird bombs, bear bombs, noise bombs, and twin shot, a box of fifty 15mm cartridges cost $15. Launchers for the cartridges varied in price, the most expensive being the RG-300 Ten Shot Clip Magazine Launcher, costing $100 for the blue finish and $115 for the nickel finish. Bird Guard Repelling Units cost between $187 and $2,799. Accompanying the units were choices of “bird species recording combinations.” While the European starling, American robin, crow, Cooper’s hawk, house sparrow, blue jay, raven, and magpie appeared on the Margo Ag Combination, the Margo Marine Combination featured the laughing gull, ring-billed gull, herring gull, black-headed gull, glaucous-winged gull, double crested cormorant, and marsh hawk. Margo also sold Tru-Catch Traps. I read about the skunk trap, learning that “skunks in covered traps feel more secure and rarely spray.” Vicki and I will spend summer at her family’s house in Nova Scotia. The house has sat empty for three years, and a

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neighbor wrote me that porcupines are nesting under the backhouse. Margo is located in High River, Alberta, and shortly after we settle in Beaver River, I’ll order a Tru-Catch porcupine trap, priced at $74. Not only did I stumble across a useful catalogue at the symposium, but I also put academic skills to use. Marcel Boschung manufactured a “Speedbroom,” “the small one,” the company declared, “with the biggest volume.” A brochure depicted the broom’s sweeping New York, London, and Hong Kong. On the back of the brochure the address of the company was given as CH-3185 Schmitten. Schmitten was not a familiar country. Thirty years in universities have honed my research abilities, however. Printed on the brochure was the telephone number of the company, prefixed by the code number 41. I fetched a telephone directory from the television room and turned to page 14, “International Calling Codes and Instructions.” First glance puzzled me. Forty-one was the code for several cities: in Venezuela, Valencia; in Uganda, both Kampala and Kyambogo; Lucerne in Switzerland; Tabriz in Iran; Khulna in Bangladesh; Larissa in Greece; and in Rumania, Constantsa. Rarely do I tinker with a phone, either to dial or answer, and I was tempted to close the book on 41. Study habits, though, carried the day. I concentrated on the page and discovered that 41 was the country code for Switzerland. In the brochure appeared a picture of the “production plants” in Matran. In an atlas published by National Geographic, I discovered that Matran was located five miles southwest of Fribourg. Years have made me meticulous. I examined the photograph of the production plants. Twenty-five cars were parked beside the plants, five red, four white, and two silver. The rest of the cars were dark, the photograph not being clear enough to distinguish blue from black or dark green. Lastly I looked Marcel Boschung up on the Internet, unearthing the company’s plants and offices in Germany, France, Austria, and China as well as Schmitten. Castle Rock, Colorado, was home to a sales office, probably the source of the exhibit, I concluded. I carted more away from the symposium than pride in my sleuthing ability. To pens already in my pocket lifted from Best Western and Radisson, I added pens from Dynatest, United Brush Corporation, and Franklin Paint. While the first two pens were white with blue lettering, the pen from Franklin Paint was black with gold lettering. Moreover,

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instead of round, it was three-sided. From Black Cat Blades I took a notepad, five and a half inches wide, eight and half inches tall, sixteen lines to a page. Also from Black Cat I took a cardboard coaster. In the middle of the coaster, a dark tom kicked an orange cat in the bottom. Stamped above the illustration was “TOUGHEST S.O.B. In The Valley.” From Meyer Snow Plows I got a silver bumper sticker, blue letters outlined in white printed upon it, reading “let it SNOW.” From Hi-Lite, a “Pavement Marking” company in Adams Center, New York, I took a strip of plastic the size of a double coaster, four by eight and a half inches. Printed in yellow letters on a black background was “The Aviation Alphabet,” A, for example, standing for Alpha, H for Hotel, L for Lima, and W for Whiskey. I also picked up three plastic bags, a white one from Clariant, “where chemistry is special,” and two blue bags from Stewart & Stevenson Snow Removal Products. Stamped on the bags instead of an address was the company’s telephone number. The area code was 713, for Houston, not a city snow normally visits. Actually I might have taken a fourth bag from the symposium. On returning to Storrs, I found another plastic bag in my suitcase. Printed in blue on the bag was “epoke,” a name that smacked more of shopping than of aviation or snow removal. I suspect Vicki packed the bag in my suitcase, stuffing it with shirts or neckties. That aside, my catch so satisfied me that when I returned to my hotel room I ordered dinner from room service—a pot of coffee, the house cheeseburger, potato salad instead of French fries, and a piece of “sinful” chocolate cake—only the fourth time I’ve ever used room service. The commencement speeches, both that in Bradford and later in Georgia, resembled my takings, or better, beach shanties, hodgepodges bundled together by someone interested more in obscuring the sun for a day than building a durable edifice. I recited silly poetry and told funny stories. I celebrated curiosity and urged graduates to continue studying. I described snakes. No matter the talk or the season, I mention snakes. I am so fond of snakes my friend Josh accuses me of obiism. Since no one knows what an obiist is, I consider the accusation a compliment. “Serpents aside,” I said to students, “a marvelous world lies before you. Embrace life’s infinite variety. If you remain curious and continue to learn, you will develop the capacity to endure unhappiness,

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and happiness. You will make others smile. Seek. If you don’t find what you dreamed of finding, rummage about and seek something else.” “Did you mention patriotism?” Vicki asked. “Nope,” I said, “I refuse to plane thought out of life with words. In fact I never have and never will touch a plane—block, jack, jointer, or political.”

Writers’ Colony

In January I won a fellowship to attend the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. The fellowship paid for a month’s room and board. In March I ate lunch with a poet who had grown up in southwest Missouri, thirty miles from Eureka Springs. She spent her honeymoon at the Crescent Hotel in Eureka. “When I told mother where Jake and I were going, she burst into tears,” the poet recounted, “and said, ‘I had hoped for so much more for you.’” Twentyfive years had passed since the honeymoon. Jake morphed into Bill, and a couple from Connecticut bought and remodeled the Crescent, raising it to the standards of the National Register of Historic Places. While the economy of much of America has suffered from financial encephalitis, northwest Arkansas has raced along wide-eyed, the region home to Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods, and J. B. Hunt, the trucking company. “Northern Arkansas,” my friend Josh said, “is the Vermont of the South. If I were younger,” he added, “I’d move to Arkansas.” On reaching Eureka Springs, I discovered that almost everyone in town was from somewhere else. One morning, the man pumping gas into my car volunteered that he was from Illinois. “I came from Kansas,” a woman putting air into her tires said. “Before I retired I was a nurse. Here I volunteer in the schools.” An hour later I explored an art gallery. The owner had recently moved to town from New Mexico. That afternoon I bought a soda from a man who had spent most of his life in Ohio. In a nearby shop a clerk from Clifton, New Jersey, showed me a bracelet. Instead of being born in Eureka and sinking lethargic into the ground, roots growing moldy and spirits souring, the inhabitants of Eureka Springs chose to move to the town. “Kate and I spent two days 116

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here during a school vacation,” a retired high school teacher from Indiana told me. “I took early retirement so we could live here.” Content and busy, people did not meddle in the doings of others. “Judge not,” a man said, “just live and appreciate.” Like the townsfolk, I chose to go to Eureka Springs. I did not apply to writers’ colonies in New England because I wanted to change the appointments of my paragraphs, or at least dust sentences and wring thought through a summer’s cleaning. In New England I would have roamed a familiar landscape. Dame’s rocket and oxeye daisies would have made my heart leap but not pound. In damp evenings the songs of verries would have wound silver through spruce, making me sleepy. I wanted to be startled into insight. Moreover, political doings had made me bilious. In Washington the Bush administration was goose-stepping to Zion, reducing hope to a whisper. Eureka comes from Greek and means “I have found it.” I hoped that a month in the Ozarks would prove tonic for the spirits, purging bile and restoring good cheer, making dream effervesce. I’d never been to a writers’ colony. Responsibility for the well-being of others has long bound me to family. In past summers I carted the children around New England and Atlantic Canada. This summer, however, the children were almost self-sufficient. Two weeks after spring term ended at Middlebury College, Edward flew to an archaeological dig in the Peloponnese. When the dig ended in July, he returned to Boston and took a bus to Maine, where he spent the rest of the summer as a counselor in a boys’ camp. For her part Eliza had lived in St. Petersburg for five months studying Russian. When Eliza came back to Connecticut in June, she spent four weeks at home, after which she flew to northern Minnesota and taught Russian to schoolchildren. After examinations ended at Princeton, Francis returned to Storrs and worked in the university library. He arrived home the day after I left for Arkansas, and Vicki spent only thirty-two hours by herself. Fathers and husbands of my generation rarely drop the reins of duty, and I fretted about leaving Vicki alone for a day. I left Storrs on May 18, the day after graduation at the university. I planned to return home on June 22. Vicki and her brothers own a farmhouse and thirty-five acres of field and wood in Beaver River, Nova Scotia. One brother is a lawyer, the other a banker. Neither has the time nor

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the inclination to rusticate. Unoccupied houses deteriorate. Since marrying Vicki I have spent fourteen summers in Nova Scotia. When the children were small, days were idyllic. Rocks, flowers, bones, and driftwood proved as exciting as pieces of eight. In later summers when simple things lost their attraction, the children went to camp and I spent treasure chests of money on ferryboat tickets, sailing back and forth from Canada to the United States, fetching the children in hopes of stamping place into memory. Responsibility fosters habit. Although my joists have weakened and shouldering the house makes me stagger, I haven’t jettisoned the burden. I left Connecticut in mid-May so that Vicki and I could spend July and August in Nova Scotia. “We will leave on June 29,” I said. “That gives me a week at home to pay bills and organize classes for fall.” In planning the summer I neglected age, and, forgetting that I lacked the energy of a twenty-three-year-old, decided to drive to Arkansas. If years momentarily meant little to me, they meant much to my car, a Mazda van purchased in 1991. Having been driven only 64,294 miles, the Mazda was in fair shape. Nevertheless, tuning it for the road cost $568. “Your fellowship is expensive,” Vicki said, adding as I packed, “It’s going to cost more than shingles, gutters, a well cover, and porch railings for the house in Beaver River. You’d better write essays that sell.” “I am going to describe my experiences,” I said. “Well,” Vicki said, “if that’s the case, we are headed for the poorhouse. You have written enough literature. Write a mystery and make money.” “Horseshit,” I said, getting into the car. I did not leave immediately. George and Penny lay curled on the back seat. Dogs have selective but prodigious memories. To them, early summer and a car sagging over a rear axle smacks of Nova Scotia. In middle age a person does not leave home. He takes home with him. Vicki refuses to let people travel light. The night before I left she handed me an inventory of sixty-one items she packed. Not only did the list include two bathing suits, ten pairs of socks, a dozen “knock-around” shirts, four pairs of shorts with pockets deep enough for small books, nine pairs of underwear, and three sets of pajamas (“in case you lose one”), but also binoculars, spare reading glasses, a bicycle helmet (this despite my not taking a bicycle), three belts, and a Lumiscope for checking blood pressure. For years, perhaps ever since marriage, my blood pressure has been high, and it

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was 176/98 just after I packed the car. The morning I left Eureka to return to Storrs, my blood pressure was 132/74. Along with a suitcase almost too heavy to lift, I stuffed two boxes into the back of the car. Called the Moondancer Fellowship, my award was for nature writing. Into the first box I crammed eighteen field guides, books which identified not only birds and trees but also salamanders, butterflies, lichens, caterpillars, and long-horned beetles. In the second, smaller box were cans of loose tea—apricot, Earl Grey, and English Breakfast—along with a teapot and cup which Vicki bought two days earlier at the Dollar Store and a tray which she purchased for $1.50 from the Salvation Army. In the passenger seat sat a wicker basket containing three bananas, six oranges, six apples, a bag of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies, and four plastic bottles, each filled with twenty-four ounces of Cape Cod Sparkling Water. In another basket between the seats were my wallet, maps, three writing pads, five BIC pens, and a tube containing 175 mL of Extreme Sunscreen, this to slather over hands, arms, face, knees, and thighs as I drove. On the floor behind the front seat were three cloth carryalls, two bulging with slippers and shoes, each shoe wrapped in a plastic bag. The third carryall held vitamins, aspirins, blood-pressure tablets, and gels bulging with garlic and fish oil—all slotted into five pill dispensers, each running Sunday through Saturday. Also in the bag were items I needed in motels: shampoo, soap, toothbrush and toothpaste, razor, shaving cream, hairbrush, and dental floss. On the floor below the passenger seat was a white plastic tub. In the tub sat a glass jar, seven and a half inches tall and three and three-quarter inches in diameter. The jar once contained Kretschmer Wheat Germ. Necessity converted it into a “pee jar.” “Men are sloppy,” Vicki said, “so I stuck the jar in the tub in case you have an accident.” I first used the jar at 9:09 in the morning, sixty-three miles west of Storrs. Playing on the radio was a tape of birdsongs. At that moment a barred owl was calling, “Who cooks for you?” I left Storrs with a full tank of gas at 7:58. For breakfast I drank a pot of Earl Grey tea and dumped raspberries and a sliced banana over a mound of shredded wheat. At 8:06 I stopped for the first time, at Video Visions in the Holiday Mall in order to return Rabbit-Proof Fence, a movie that Vicki and I watched the previous night. I am a nervous traveler, and despite inventorying the contents of car and wallet four times

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before leaving home, I imagined items left behind. Six minutes beyond Video Visions, I stopped at the 7-Eleven in Tolland to make sure that I had brought the $400 I’d withdrawn from Fleet Bank on Monday. Driving, I thought, would season the month, shaking pinches of Americana over days. Traffic, however, drove observation almost out of mind. Just outside of Storrs, sprinklers sprayed water over Pumpkin Paul’s strawberries. Thirty-six miles into the trip, I passed my first car, a rickety Ford station wagon, its claret paint bleached pink. A youngish woman sat in the passenger seat, her right foot bare and resting on the dashboard, left hand plowing the back of her neck, turning up pimples. Crows blew over the road in motes. Yellow pools of winter cress soaked the median. On banks above shoulders of the road, cherry and autumn olive bloomed. Not until I had driven 103 miles did I speak. Then I said, “I had better slow down.” For the next forty-two miles I was silent. But when a red sports car raced past, stitching in and out of traffic, I said, “You dumb jackass,” adding “fucker” for good, weighty measure. Rarely did I speed. Usually I drove between sixty and sixty-five miles an hour. Hurry seemed silly. The trip was long, 1,445 miles. My route lay across western Connecticut and the low trowel-shaped end of New York to Scranton. At Scranton I turned south. When I reached Interstate 80, I headed west across Pennsylvania into northeast Ohio. At Akron I turned south again. At Columbus I headed west once more, crossing Indiana, bypassing Indianapolis. I drifted across Illinois, circled St. Louis, and pushed southwest to Springfield, Missouri, on 44. At Springfield I turned due south and, taking two-lane roads, arrived at Dairy Hollow at 11:58 on May 20. “You said you would be here at noon,” said Mike, the assistant director. “I knew you would be exact.” At 9:49 I stopped at my first rest stop, in the high country of southern New York. I poured the contents of the jar over a ledge. Boy Scouts were serving coffee. I drank a cup and donated fifty cents to the troop. I would have donated a dollar, but the coffee was instant and the Scouts did not provide milk, only Cremora, and I don’t drink chemicals. Above the rest stop buzzards looped through thermals. When I left the stop, I replaced the birdcalls with a tape of Ocarina, a group I first heard on a camping trip in the Kimberley ten years ago. I did not change the tape until I reached Akron. During the trip place stirred association: at 11:10 I reached Blooming Grove, Pennsylvania, where I once fished with boy-

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hood friends, and at 600 miles I passed the exit for the College of Wooster, where I spent half a week as a visiting scholar. For a driver long trips are fabrics of small observation. Instead of landscapes determining pattern, the personality of the driver imposes itself upon the trip. I stopped to buy gas for the first time at 11:50 in Scranton. I was tired and forgot to turn the motor off while I pumped. Throughout the trip I paid with a charge card, usually at the pump, transactions that took inordinate concentration. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to manage the intricacies of payment. From a single worry concern spread in runners. At stations I set the cap from the gas tank atop the car. While I pumped, I crossed the middle and index fingers of my left hand to remind myself to replace the cap. Even so, twice after leaving a station I pulled off the road and checked the tank to make sure I’d screwed the top back on. Along ridges in Pennsylvania field birch swayed out from banks, then pirouetted up and backwards. Steam rose in white funnels above Three Mile Island. At a rest stop 315 miles from Storrs, a heavy girl wearing a blue shirt and black trousers walked an old beagle. What I noticed most were dead animals, by journey’s end hundreds of mounds of bone and fur, so many that roads seemed slaughterhouses, rendering lots of broken opossums, raccoons, groundhogs, foxes, and rabbits. Many mounds resembled muffs, hands still in them, fingers smashed. I counted fourteen dead deer, ten in Pennsylvania. Beyond Columbus I saw only a single deer, its head bent backwards marking the shoulder of the road like a question mark. In Arkansas I counted eight dead armadillos. Postcards in Eureka labeled armadillos “Arkansas Speedbumps.” Black coffee doesn’t travel well, and at 10:58, in hopes of sweetening digestion, I ate my first fruit, a Royal Gala apple. At 1:30 I ate two Milano cookies. Long-distance travelers eat poorly. At four o’clock I combined lunch and dinner at an Arby’s in Clarion, Pennsylvania, for $4.34 buying a Pepsi Cola, roast beef on a bun, and curly French fries, these last something I had not eaten before. At 8:34 I stopped for the night, staying in a Motel 6 just west of Columbus. Faucets in the bathroom were loose, but the room only cost $38.19 including tax. I had driven 696 miles, spending $41.77 for gas. I telephoned Vicki. “I’m beyond Columbus,” I said. “I drove seven hundred miles.” “That was stupid,” she said, briskly adding, “I can’t talk. Masterpiece Theater is starting.”

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At 7:15 the next morning I was back on the road. At 9:50 Central Time, I ate an Egg McMuffin in a McDonald’s near Cloverdale, Indiana. In western Ohio then in Indiana and Illinois, trucks obeyed speed limits, something few did in Connecticut and Pennsylvania and later in Missouri. Along the interstate in Ohio billboards sprouted from fields in hedgerows. Beneath the signs scrub flourished. “Good for birds,” I thought. As I traveled through Indiana, Illinois, and then Missouri, my thoughts about advertising blackened. Just over the Indiana border heavy rectangles stood atop poles that looked like huge sewage pipes. Signs so soiled vision that I wanted to litter. “These yokels wouldn’t notice if I dumped a thousand beer cans on the road,” I muttered as an advertisement for Tom Raper RVs, “America’s #1 Dealer,” tilted over the shoulder of the road like the lid of a toilet, threatening to slam down and trap me in eastern Indiana. Along with signs for Burger King, Voss Truck Stop, Days Inn, Subway, Cracker Barrel, and Steak ’n Shake, religions plastered testimonials to the road. At first these advertisements were emblematic, stands of three wooden crosses, the cross in the center tall and gold, those on the sides short and white. Later JESUS appeared, capital letters black as decay pocking a white background. Both religion and advertising were disciples of technology. “U GOT JESUS,” a billboard proclaimed, WWW.UGOTJESUS.COM stamped across the bottom of the sign. Competing with signs directing drivers to Jesus, Taco Bell, Meramec Caverns, and the World’s Largest Barrel Maker were billboards pointing the way to adult superstores. Unlike antique malls housed in buildings big as bowling alleys, adult stores occupied small, shabby buildings, outsides yellow with prefabricated brick. Parking lots outside the stores were empty. A sign declaring PORN DESTROYS LIVES, the letters luminously pink, seemed fervor wasted, as travelers paid more attention to the racketing chains of trucks and the muffled thump of tires than to the itch of lust. On the radio preachers wandered far from the old rugged cross. Concentrating on the immediate in hopes of filching money from the naive, they bundled biblical quotation together with right-wing politics. “Get the UN out of the US and the US out of the UN,” a preacher snarled. The “eastern establishment” and its “socialistic paganism,” another asserted, planned the destruction of patriotism. “Satan’s Messiah,”

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a man declared, was assuming power. Before the preacher described the signs by which one could identify the dark messiah, I drove beyond the range of the station. “The Messiah probably votes Democratic and urges people to read the Sermon on the Mount,” I thought. By early afternoon on the second day, strident commercialism had worn me down. In St. James, Missouri, a man in a tourist center said Zeno’s Steakhouse and Motel in Rolla served good salads. Just beyond Zeno’s stood billboards advertising JESUS and one of the thieves: BIG LOUIE’S ADULT STORE. I reached Zeno’s at four o’clock; I had driven 509 miles. I drank coffee and ate a chicken Caesar salad. “Enough,” I thought. After the meal I checked into the motel. At 4:42, I climbed into bed and fell asleep. The next morning, I ate breakfast at Zeno’s. Also in the motel were some twenty motorcyclists, doing the Route 66 run from Willowbrook, outside Chicago, to Santa Monica, California. “You are either an anesthetist or a radiologist,” I said to the man staying in the room next to me. “An anesthetist,” he said. “How did you know?” “A Chinese American, aged fifty-two or so, on an old Indian motorcycle,” I said. “What else could you be?” The motorcyclists also ate breakfast in the motel. “I did something stupid,” a middle-aged man said. “I called the office.” “Where do you go to college?” I asked a young cyclist wearing a sweatshirt with “Mad Dog” printed on the chest. “McGill,” he said. “How did you know I was a student?” At 7:55 I was on the road, three hours before Big Louie’s “exotic dancers” hunkered down to work. The last miles of the trip, along twolane roads in northwest Arkansas, were relaxing. Big parking lots surrounded small country churches, hope eternally swelling congregations. I drove slowly. Red cattle grazed in green fields. Overhead the sky seemed a blue bowl. When a driver jumped up behind me, I turned into a church lot and let him race past. Outside the “Bible Chapel” a sign said, “Life’s Trials Should Make Us Better Not Bitter.” “Maybe,” I thought, then drifted through Blue Eye, Oak Grove, and Berryville into Eureka Springs. Twenty-three hundred people lived in Eureka Springs. Like a shawl pinned to bony shoulders, a commercial strip ran along Route 62 above the historic district. Here and there fibers had broken loose and twisted themselves into small shopping centers. Motels knotted the strip: Holiday Inn, Matterhorn Towers, Lazy Hog Lodge, Budget Host, and Land

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O Nod, among forty-five others. Each shopping center housed three or four stores, at Hart’s Family Center, for example, a grocery, pharmacy, and barbershop. Taped to the door of this last was a sign saying, “50¢ for removing ticks and leeches.” North of 62 sat Planer Hill, a rise on the ridge. North and to the right and left of Planer, two small mountains, named East and West Mountain, pushed together like rolls swelling in an oven. Most houses in Eureka perched on the mountains. Roads on East Mountain curved like rice paddies clinging to sharp slopes. On West Mountain roads shifted and switched, dipped and climbed. Off main roads, residential streets started straight as youthful promise but then reached drop-offs and came to nothing. Supposedly 238 streets wound through Eureka—not one, however, part of a four-way intersection. Clumped in the seam between the mountains was the tourist center of the town, among other buildings those housing the trolley station, auditorium, the courthouse for the Western District of Carroll County, and the Bank of Eureka Springs. In the middle of the seam Spring Street forked left off Main, or Route 23, and wound around West Mountain like embroidery. Along Main near the fork and from splinters snapping off Spring, shops and restaurants sank into limestone and brick buildings like cells, the scale human. From their commercial sides, no building hung over perception like a shadow. Backs of buildings were different. Dug into steep slopes, many buildings and houses resembled stairs, the fronts facing streets, stoops; the backs, lifts climbing through three or four stories. Spring Street coiled around West Mountain behind the shopping district, ending in Ellis Grade, which rose abruptly to the Crescent Hotel atop the mountain. From the Crescent the street stuttered along the mountaintop until it reached Route 62 a mile away, at curves assuming different names like syllables. The circle from 62 along Main and Spring, then around and up West Mountain back to 62, was the historic district. Many houses, including a goodly number of bed-and-breakfast inns, were Victorian, built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Architectures varied, including, among others, Gothic Revival, Queen Anne, and Folk Victorian. The houses attracted attention and converted power walkers into amblers. As walkers studied cupolas, hanging gables, porches transformed into ruffles by friezes between railings, finials, fanlights, cantilevered bay windows, and hipped and mansard roofs, pur-

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pose sifted from mind. People strolled and, looking at the past, enjoyed the present. The Writers’ Colony hung on the upper lip of Dairy Hollow, on Spring Street at the bottom of Ellis Grade. Above the colony, through woods bordering an abandoned trolley route, a wing of the Crescent jutted out in a thick limestone elbow. Founded in 1999, the colony had recently been a bed-and-breakfast. Painted pale yellow and trimmed with blue, the colony was a simple Victorian, the front a single story facing Spring, the back two stories abutting Polk Street and Harmon Park, this last a stamp of bushy green. The colony could host six writers at a time, three in a farmhouse a quarter of a mile away across Grand Street and, in the main house, two upstairs in flats at the front and one downstairs in a flat at the back. In addition to the flat, the downstairs consisted of an office and lavatory, a big kitchen ponderous with iron, a laundry room and pantries, and, running the length of the rear of the house, a combination dining and meeting room. An interior wall separated the kitchen and laundry from the dining room, a stone fireplace in the middle. A large sofa sat in front of the fireplace, fitting the space almost like a glove. Nine windows made the room less cavernous. Three windows faced east and six north. At the east end of the room stood a table. Every evening at six, residents gathered about the table, set with cloth and vases of flowers, for dinner. Behind the table a swinging door opened into the kitchen. Cindy managed the kitchen and kept shelves and refrigerator well stocked. On weekdays Cindy cooked dinner. Writers prepared their own breakfasts and lunches, and on weekends, their dinners. For breakfast I usually drank a glass of grapefruit juice and two cups of coffee. I piled banana slices atop grains, usually granola, shredded wheat, and a cereal called Fiber One. Often I skipped lunch, snacking in midafternoon on fruit or, woe is me, on cookies and potato chips. Cindy’s dinners were good. Typical menus included guacamole, cheese enchiladas, and refried beans, topped off by brownies and ice cream, or tossed salad, baked fish, sweet potatoes, corn, and then cherry cobbler, this, too, under a dollop of ice cream. Although restaurants peppered Eureka, I rarely ate outside the colony. Not only was the food tasty, but the writers were good company. At sixty-one I was twenty, often thirty years older than the other residents. Most were women unencumbered by family. Although they had

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published books, they still imagined fortune and celebrity. In contrast I was on the downward slope of reputation, this despite my career’s never having risen above level. Moreover, I’d aged past caring. During the month another man came to Dairy Hollow, but he stayed only three days. This was his second attempt to stay at the colony. Two years ago he had also come to Eureka. Shortly after he arrived, however, his father died, and the man left. This year his mother died. He got home just before her death. “I told Mom,” he e-mailed the colony, “that we wanted to hand her over to Dad.” “Good God!” my friend Josh said later. “If I’d been that woman, I’d have leaped out of bed and said, ‘I’ve got a good mind to recover and spend every penny in the bank. For fifty years I tied my behind in a knot trying to please your father, and now you ungrateful bastards want me to spend eternity with him.’” “Josh,” I said, “sometimes you are not nice.” “Nice!” he shouted. “Of course I’m not nice. I tell the truth.” Occasionally at dinner I thought I had emigrated to a distant planet. The women discussed matters which I had not pondered, using words I’d never said—“labia,” for example. My language differed greatly from that spoken by the women. Although anatomical Latinate terms were occasionally bantered across the table, not once did I hear a rough expression. When I pushed “horseshit” and “a big goddamn” into conversations, the women sat upright, the seasoning too old-fashioned for their palates. Most residents were vegetarian. I’m not picky, and their food became my food. I poured soy milk over cereal and into tea and coffee and liked the taste. On returning to Storrs, I asked Vicki to buy soy milk for me. “Go to hell,” she said, and I went back to drinking 2 percent milk. When Cindra, another resident, told a shopkeeper that she found working difficult, the woman blamed Cindra’s flat. “The last person to occupy your room left behind a bad atmosphere,” the woman said, and urged Cindra to burn a sage stick. “The sage will purge the air.” “Go for a run,” I said. “Bouncing around will get the creative juices flowing.” Cindra burned the stick. Running is not for everyone, perhaps not even me. One morning while jogging beside Prospect Street, I caught the toe of my right shoe on a lip of sidewalk and, flopping forward, banged my chest on the concrete. For days the right half of my chest ached. When I sneezed or laughed, pain crackled. Sleeping was difficult, and one

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evening Cindra handed me a bottle of Relax and Rebuild, a tonic sold by Motherlove Herbals. On the label, two hands held a pink heart; between the lobes of the heart sprouted a yellow daffodil. Relax and Rebuild contained distilled water, grain alcohol, and fresh extracts of milky oatseed, skullcap, raspberry leaf, chamomile, and nettle leaf. Instructions suggested taking two or three drops for each ten pounds of “body weight,” in my case somewhere between fifty and sixty drops. I took two drops and fell asleep. Having lived over half my life in New England, I’d forgotten about chiggers. After a week in Eureka, I decided that chiggers drove me from the South. Influenced by my dinner companions, I visited Fain’s Herbacy, owned by Jim Fain, Ph.D. “From the beautiful Ozarks the way nature made it,” Fain advertised his products. For $9.95 at the Herbacy I bought a bottle of Bug Bite and Anti-Itch Remedy, a blend of elder, green tea, mullein, natural tobacco, water, alcohol, and witch hazel. Before going to bed I anointed each chigger mound with a drop of Bug Bite. Shortly afterward the mounds stopped itching. “We should take Bug Bite rather than hydrocortisone cream to Nova Scotia,” I suggested to Vicki just before we left Storrs. “Sure,” she said. That night she poured the contents of the bottle down the bathroom sink. Scattered throughout the historic district were massage parlors: New Moon Spa, Serenity, and Gryphon’s Roost, among a towel rack of others. One night at dinner Linda suggested that residents all have massages. I nodded politely. Only on the page am I fleshly. I am the sort of person who wears socks and underpants in the bathtub. Lying naked under a towel while a stranger plucked the fat along my arms did not appeal to me. Linda, however, took my nod for yes and the next morning bought a book of coupons for massages at Healthworks Massage, Reflexology and Wellness Center on Mountain Street. Linda had spent ten months at the colony and knew Eureka well. “Donna at Healthworks,” she reported, “is super.” The coupons were a bargain, an hour’s massage costing $35 instead of $49. The following Thursday at eleven o’clock I walked up the old trolley route and along the top of West Mountain to Healthworks. Donna was from Maryland. Years ago she had followed love to Eureka. In Eureka the trail grew cold. Happily, Donna wandered onto another trail, and real affection blossomed into marriage, her husband also a masseur. For a while we talked about

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snakes. On the previous Saturday she had discovered a four-foot timber rattler in her garden. She caught the snake and, taking it to a deep gulch some distance from her house, turned it loose. Talk about snakes always relaxes me, and I soon shed nervousness. Donna rubbed grape-seed oil into my hide. Later she laid a beanbag across the bridge of my nose and doused it with lavender to relax me even further before she rubbed my feet. Before leaving Healthworks I booked a second massage. Indeed, if I lived in Eureka I would have bought a library of coupon books. “How was it?” Cindra asked at dinner, being scheduled for a massage the next afternoon. “Pretty good,” I said, “except for the scratches. Donna had,” I continued, seeing Cindra look puzzled, “the longest fingernails I’ve ever seen. The nails on her index fingers are at least eight inches from cuticle to tip. Her other nails are longer, except for the one on her left thumb. Last week she snapped it while massaging a woman’s ears. She caught the nail in the woman’s ponytail.” “What?” Cindra said. “A masseuse with long nails! I’ve never heard of such a thing.” “I expect you haven’t,” I said, getting up from the table and hurrying through the swinging door into the kitchen. Another night at dinner, the women discussed beads. The next morning they visited a bead shop. I’d never gone into a bead store, but that afternoon I went alone to the shop. I did not stay long. Although one tray contained religious beads, mostly different kinds of crosses, the shop seemed pagan. A ring, not a bead, pierced the right nostril of the girl behind the counter, and the atmosphere smacked of smoking ceremonies associated with Indian cults in the Southwest. I felt more comfortable in the fun shop next door where the items for sale were familiar: rubber boils and beetles, glasses that leaked, “Bar Bugs” encased in clear plastic rectangles that looked like ice cubes, and simulated spills from the fronts and backs of dogs. The shop brought childhood to mind, so much so I walked down North Main to Ice Cream Delights and drank a double chocolate soda. The soda was thick and brown, and finishing it took thirty-four sucks and twenty-six nibbles. I liked the soda so much that I returned to Ice Cream Delights twice during the month. Dairy Hollow is the only colony in the nation to award named fellowships to culinary writers. There being no cooking writer in residence, I occupied the Culinary Suite. The previous year, with support from Kitchen Aid and Renovation Style magazine among side dishes of

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others, my flat was remodeled. The front of my suite of rooms faced Spring Street, while the back opened onto a deck overlooking Harmon Park. I grew up on porches and terraces, and occasionally verandas, this last word used by the pretentious in an attempt to transform hardy yeoman ancestors into languid aristocrats. Such linguistic matters aside, however, I have stood on only three, or, at the outside, four decks in my life. I associate decks with cheeseburgers, Budweiser beer, and flat conversation about barbecue sauce. Consequently I went on the deck only to hang my running shorts and shirts on the backs of chairs to dry. Rooms affect their inhabitants. In summers I bathe sporadically and wear clothes until the fibers swell into gray cocoons. But at Dairy Hollow I showered before breakfast and changed clothes every other day. During the month I washed my clothes three times and even changed the sheets on my bed. The kitchen in the flat intimidated me, and I entered it only to boil water for tea. Yellow dishes stood like sunflowers on pale shelves, the wood sturdy and thick. Mosaics of glass tiles covered walls, the pieces blue, yellow, white, and gray. The top of the stove gleamed silver, not a drop of water soiling it. Fronts of washers were cobalt blue and clean as night. Linoleum squares blanketed the floor, their surfaces blue, white, yellow, and gray like the tiles, only softer and sandier. Although I admired the clean lines of the kitchen, I lived in the sitting room, filling it with possessions much as I clutter my prose with detail. Even so, the surroundings influenced me and I struggled to be neat, setting baskets and carryalls against walls and pruning the desk, keeping pens from tumbling like twigs. Books are wanderers, however, and almost as if imitating shards slipping down the limestone bluff across Spring Street, books slid across rug and board. The sitting room itself was eighteen by fourteen feet. On the north wall two gray wicker chairs and a footstool drifted out from a slate hearth, above which rose a simulated limestone fireplace, its rocks thin, from the side looking like boards, colors breaking through them like morning sunlight. Above the chairs the ceiling split into a skylight. Two-thirds the way up the fireplace a mantel jutted out in a ledge. On the mantel sat a painting of four onions, two red and two white, yellow streaks slicing them and roots dangling crinkled. Two prints hung on the west wall: Afternoon of the Cake Plate Reunion and The Long Night of Pie Dreaming. In Cake, a

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mortar of chocolate and raspberry, or perhaps strawberry, sealed layers together. In the second print, berries glittered like garnets in a lemoncolored pie. Opposite the fireplace across the room sat an off-white kneehole desk and another gray wicker chair. The room was airy, a beige space in which paper never grew heavy. Off the sitting room along the front of the house was a wallet-sized bedroom, eight by ten feet. Light gray walls and bright pillows prevented the room from becoming a cave. Away from home, I sleep fitfully, and many nights at two thirty or three I went outside, sat on the front porch, and watched moonlight scrub the sycamores growing beside Spring Street. Porches invite. The porch at Dairy Hollow was only twelve feet from Spring Street. Often I sat on the porch and chatted with passersby. At dusk horse-drawn carriage tours began, and I congratulated newlyweds. People walking dogs paused, and joggers waved. One afternoon a man knocked on my door and asked the way to the Crescent. Late another afternoon a woman asked how to get to The Great Passion Play, one of the town’s main tourist attractions. I gave her directions and a map. “I saw the porch light,” a stranger said, knocking at the door at nine thirty one night. “Could we talk?” Two hours and twelve minutes later the man left. He lived in Florida and, although twenty years my junior, had retired, having sold a computer software company. Originally from southern Arkansas, he was considering moving to Eureka Springs. But he did not get along well with his family and said he might move to Oregon instead. I learned a lot about him. He had lived in Alaska for five years. His hobby was diving into flooded caves; his high school senior class consisted of seventy-six people; he had been married twice, and his daughter from the first marriage attended Dobbs Ferry School in New York. He and his second wife wanted children, but she had experienced difficulty conceiving. The University of Arkansas had a good fertility clinic nearby in Fayetteville, he told me. Conception was a staple of porch chat. One afternoon a locksmith replaced the lock on my door. Her partner wanted a second child. The couple had ruled out local donors and were thinking about purchasing semen from a sperm bank. At the moment they were considering a donor who was artistic and a member of Mensa. “What do you think about Mensa?” the locksmith asked. “Really bright people don’t join self-congratulatory groups,” I said. “Bright people don’t give a hoot about their intelligence. They accomplish things.”

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Because my rooms faced the road and because Spring Street was part of the historic route, my flat was noisy. From eight in the morning traffic streamed through Dairy Hollow. Motorcycles coughed, and pickup trucks rumbled ill-tempered like male rhinoceroses in rutting season, gas oozing from their hides. At nine in the morning, the red trolley started grinding through the historic route, spewing diesel fumes. Five trolley routes wound through Eureka: Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, and Purple. A daily pass cost $3.50. Residents at the colony could purchase a monthly pass for $15, something I did an hour after arriving. I sampled all the routes. The only ones I rode often, though, were the Red and Green. The trolleys themselves were painted green and trimmed with red. Stamped on their sides were a number, “Eureka Springs Trolley Co.,” and “Little Switzerland,” the town’s nickname. Inside, the trolleys gleamed with brass rails, sliding glass windows, and wooden seats, golden with stain and shellac. From the outside the trolleys resembled boxes decorated with cowcatchers, bells, and raised skylights, the whole set atop the carriage and motor of a truck. Tourists rode the trolleys: tour groups—golden-agers from Memphis, for example—and visitors from small towns, many from eastern Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, and northeast Texas. A decade ago a cousin telephoned Storrs from Tennessee. Francis answered the phone. “I couldn’t understand her, Daddy,” he said later. “I thought she was Chinese.” When I first rode the trolleys, I had difficulty understanding tourists. Many spoke through their nostrils, and I no longer hear shrill sounds well. Still, I eavesdropped. When a woman said, “I love dogs. Lord, I love dogs,” another woman said, “Not so much as I love cats. I really love cats.” “I’ve been shot at a bunch of times,” a driver declared, trying to awe tourists by evoking the comic stereotype of the Arkansas mountaineer. “You must be from Texas,” a man answered, “not from around here.” “That’s the truth—from Texas,” a second man said. Country people repeat statements, almost as if they are in church. When a driver said, “Keep the sunny side up,” a man sitting on the front seat said, “That’s right. Keep the sunny side up.” “You said it,” another man chimed in. “Keep the sunny side up.” When people got off his trolley, a driver said, “I hope the good Lord gives you the best day you’ve ever had.” The first time I heard the remark I thought it pleasant. By the sixth time I longed for a New Yorker to spoil the sappy chatter. Still, moments lingered and provoked smiles. On the

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Red trolley’s stopping to let me off at Dairy Hollow, a passenger asked, “What’s this place?” “It’s a writers’ colony,” the driver said, then, pointing to me, added, “and that’s a writer getting off the trolley. Soon he’ll go into that door on the porch. That’s where the writer lives.” Pads and pencils provoked reaction, if not real interest. One noon as I sauntered along Spring, jotting down notes about blossoms slipping off deutzia, a mason sitting beside the street eating lunch noticed me. Beside him sat a thirty-five-year-old woman. The mason pointed at me and said to the woman, “That man’s putting down your name right now. He’s writing about this pretty girl sitting on the curb.” “Do you think routine makes people happier than religion?” I once asked Josh. “Of course,” Josh said. “Religion distances people from an honest love of the world—from beauty and truth. In doing so, religion sows dissatisfaction, at first with life, then with faith itself, in the process undermining decency.” Josh’s answer aside, I imposed routine upon my month. At six every morning I ran. For eight months I had not jogged, but before leaving Storrs I bought a pair of ASICS running shoes at the Eastbrook Mall, last year’s top-of-the-line model, the price slashed from $129 to $79. “A medical device to reduce blood pressure,” I explained to Vicki. I ran the historic route, beginning with the steep climb up to the Crescent Hotel. I jogged across West Mountain until I reached Route 62, where I circled southwest to Planer Hill. Then I ran downhill along Main through the shops to Spring. Almost every morning I spoke to a man who collected garbage and swept gutters. Occasionally a man drinking coffee on a white porch waved and said, “Good going.” Over four miles long, the run took fifty minutes. Soon I grew fit enough to covet, both while strolling and while running, covetousness not being a sin but an emblem of feeling so at home that one longs for possession. The morning I stumbled, not weariness but a house caused my fall. The Veranda Inn distracted me. A Colonial Revival building, a porch wrapping it and columns white as bone supporting the roof, the inn stood on Prospect Street across from the Crescent. The inn and its furnishings were for sale for $575,000. “I could get it for $450,000,” I thought, neglecting not merely the sidewalk but the depth of my wallet. “Then Vicki and I,” I began but got no further as I slammed onto the concrete. Immediately after running I showered and a little after seven went

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downstairs and made breakfast. Some mornings after breakfast, I read: among other books, eight of Tony Hillerman’s Jim Chee mysteries; The Made Thing, an anthology of poems by southerners; Ellen Gilchrist’s I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting with My Daddy, and Karen McElmurray’s Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven. I read a book every day; Strange Birds, a novel set in eastern Kentucky, was the most provocative, making me imagine a life less conventional, one peopled with odd relatives, a woman who upon getting up in the morning slipped a second nightgown over the one in which she slept. To shop at H. G. Hill she put on a third nightgown; on formal occasions she donned a fourth, one made in Taiwan and decorated with a flock of short-legged birds. Not once in Eureka did I listen to radio or watch television. Instead of a daily paper, I read advertising weeklies and monthlies. From racks outside shops I picked up the Ozark Mountain Trader and the 2003 Guide to Eureka Springs. On Thursdays the Lovely County Citizen appeared, Lovely being the name of the area before Arkansas became a state. Although a vehicle for advertisements, the Citizen was well written and sparkled wittily. Particularly enjoyable was the Police Beat. On Monday, May 19, “An officer found nothing worth reporting about a subject resting in the cemetery.” Two days later at 1:59 p.m., “Officers determined that a tree fell on a car near the library.” At 10:12 p.m. the same day, “A loud band on Peerless St. finished their performance as an officer arrived.” At 2:17 the next afternoon, “An officer was unable to run down a subject reportedly lying in Mountain St.” On the 24th at 11:22 p.m., “An officer investigated a report of suspicious persons touring the sewage plant.” Some mornings I studied field guides, laboring, for example, to distinguish one hickory from another. At nine I usually left the colony and explored Eureka. Practically every day I roamed town for four or five hours, three in the morning and two in the afternoon. Many houses along the historic route resembled dandies, their trim cravats and their fronts bright waistcoats. Some houses looked like aged roués, rouged here and there but necks untied, loosened to jowl and skin, and backsides flabby against hillsides or sunken inward, out of muscle. Others had faded to sepia like old photographs. Still others were tarty, gristles of plastic flowers turning through railings and foundations cracking, above them paint flaking. Prosperity had restored many houses. Like

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youth, however, prosperity is fleeting. Steps climbed out of gritty hollows and vanished into scrub and rubble. In moldy woods off Benton a bench hunched amid saplings. At each end of the bench lay brown bottles, paper sacks wrapping them, mouths protruding. Standing upright between the sacks was a Corona Beer bottle. Engraved on the bench was “Gus H. Lind, 1954.” From the bench, steps climbed a slope to a collapsed basement. Pods of toilet paper lay scattered about the basement, sinking into themselves like rotten fruit. Wandering byways, be they interior in the mind or exterior across landscapes, often provokes melancholy and spleen. For the most part I trod mapped paths. Away from musty hollows, Eureka was scrubbed. I saw almost no graffiti. Sprayed on the back of a bench on North Main in letters three-quarters of an inch high was the phrase “Skate and Destroy.” Parked outside the Crescent was a white pickup with Texas plates. Plastered to the bumper was a sticker saying, “Support Our President or Move to Another Country.” “Obviously,” Josh said, “the truck belonged to a preacher.” Laymen are more benign. Sticking out of loam in several gardens were stakes painted red, white, and blue, the colors wrapping them like barber poles. Printed in black letters down the street side of each stake was the word PEACE. Propped against a birdbath was a square slab of plywood. Sprayed on the slab in cursive letters was a quatrain: “Who plants a seed / Beneath the sod / And waits to see / Believes in God.” Nailed throughout the town were boards erected by the Good Shepherd Animal Shelter. On my wanderings I came across eight boards. Printed across the top of each board was, “I need a home.” Underneath were photographs of dogs and cats, seventyone snapshots on the board beside the Orleans Hotel on Spring and sixty-eight on the board outside the railway depot. Most animals were named, dogs, for example, being called Boogie, Bandit, Jethro, Nico, Zubin, Coal, and Shooter, and cats Rosebud, Sunny, Spooky, Cassie, Meadow, and Spiffy. Some mornings I stumbled over the detritus of paganism. One day a Jim Beam bottle leaned against steps leading into a loud house on Spring. Two mornings later outside the same house, a skimpy pair of women’s underpants lay atop a pot of marigolds. The underwear was purple and clashed with the orange flowers. “Probably not people,” I thought as I glanced at the house, “with whom I could discuss litera-

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ture.” One Sunday as I strolled along White Street, a drunk accosted me. “What’s the shit with the socks and the sandals?” he said. On my glaring, he said, “Tell me to shut up or hit me. That’s what my wife does.” “Obviously,” Vicki said, “the man had a sense of fashion. Only little boys in France or fat Russians on the Black Sea wear socks with sandals.” “What did you do, Daddy?” Eliza asked. I wanted to say, “I poleaxed the asshole and knocked his nose so far back in his skull that it became a derrick spouting geysers of blood.” Instead I told the dull truth. “Nothing. I just walked past him.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Eureka Springs thrived, its population double that of today. During summers visitors drank the waters and promenaded, pursuing health and love. In 1882 the Eureka Springs and North Arkansas Railway, a branch of the Frisco Railway, reached town. Shortly afterward during one twelve-month period some 23,500 passengers boarded “The Road to Health,” making the eighteen-and-a-half-mile journey from Seligman, Missouri. Although over sixty springs percolate through and near Eureka, the water is not drinkable today. On my walks I passed several springs: Grotto, Crescent, Harding, and Sweet on Spring Street, and on East Mountain, Cave, Little Eureka, Carry A. Nation, Laundry, and Soldier, among others. Above many springs granite chins thrust out prognathous. Moss slid off ridges, and tendrils of periwinkle, English ivy, Virginia creeper, and gill-cover-the-ground dangled in curtains, their leaves green beads. Hobblebush sprayed out of seams, and ferns protruded from small cracks like hangnails. Around many springs the town planted gardens. Twice a week a woman drove from Fayetteville to prune and plant. We chatted. My rootstock swelled considerably after she pointed to a sapling and said, “No one can identify this tree.” “Castor aralia,” I said immediately, jogging having scrubbed gunk from the spark plugs of memory. Decorations surrounding springs were formal; in addition to gardens, iron railings and gazebos adorned the springs. Only rarely did passersby plant oddities. At the end of the grotto through which Soldier Spring once ran, two plastic soldiers stood on a rock. As tall as ballpoint pens, the soldiers hugged each other, the one on the left a Union trooper wearing blue and carrying an American flag, on the right a Confederate in gray shouldering the Stars and Bars. In part I drove to Arkansas in order to be mobile and thus able to

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explore the Ozarks. Alas, no longer am I adventuresome. Once I dreamed of lively taxing experience. Like caterpillars, though, humans molt. Writing about the broken landscapes of Storrs and Beaver River is safe. Hiking the Ozarks alone seemed irresponsible, especially for someone paying college tuition for three children. I hoped to meet a hiking companion at the colony. I didn’t. Residents devoted their days to clearing brush from old manuscripts and breaking in new paragraphs. Plans not brought to fruition, though, provide opportunities for grafting. Instead of traipsing across mountain ridges, I ambled paved streets. In the sunken shade around springs, collections of hostas and ferns thrived, leaves of many of the former variegated and resembling tongues, veins in the centers spreading green, yellow, white, and even blue. Among ferns, Japanese glowed ghostly in half-light. Collars of flowers curled softly around stones. Most flowers were old-fashioned, and if not sentimental at least familiar to aging tourists: phlox, pansies, cosmos, Japanese spirea, impatiens, campanula, and golden yarrow; lamb’s ears, foxglove, sweet William, Shasta daisies, bugbane, the blossoms tapering gracefully; and lilies—day, oriental, trumpet, and butterfly. Along the upper, or hill, side of Spring, belts of limestone walls prevented yards from spilling into the street. Ivy and trumpet vine tumbled over the rocks, and stonecrop, creeping thyme, and Kenilworth ivy cinched cracks tight as buckles. Round bundles of hydrangea grew in front of houses, most oak leaf but some snow queen. Blue larkspur tottered leggy across yards. Hollyhocks were popular: single blooms like Wayside Gardens’ Old Barnyard Mix, not powder-puff doubles like Apple Blossom and Peaches and Cream. Outside the Crescent flowers floated across the grass in lily pads of color: butterfly bushes, pink, purple, and yellow honeycomb; red hibiscus; pink and white astilbe; iris and eryngium, both blue, but the iris soft and the eryngium sharp and cutting; scarlet bee balm; demure feverfew; extravagant foxglove; peonies innocently white; cool veronica; coneflowers purple with heat; and cleome, blossoms curling through the air. Before dusk I often leaned into magnolias, the creamy fragrance cleansing and relaxing—my favorite herb, I said one night. Favorites change with the hour. After dinner when traffic decreased, honeysuckle drifted into the air and, like dew, turned the porch silver with fragrance.

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Only when I roamed the edge of town did I notice wildflowers. Twice I walked along Grand behind the colony to North Main. In the broken ground by the road wild carrot, horse nettle, wood mint, everlasting pea, and false pimpernel bloomed. Fox grape clambered across elderberry and scrub oak. Grape blossoms opened in mid-June, and bees sawed across the flowers, sounding like musicians tuning violins. Just off the shoulder of the road, hemlock flourished in the blank sun. The odor repulsed me, awakening sleeping instinct, and after running my fingers through hemlock I bathed my hands in white sweet clover. Overhead eleven buzzards hunched atop telephone poles, from a distance looking like schoolchildren bored into dark mood. The birds were familiar. Species I had seen in Connecticut I saw in the Ozarks. Early in the morning wood thrushes sang from the damp slope opposite the colony. During hot afternoons red-eyed vireos clamored high in sycamores, sounding like barkers at a country show. Phoebes stapled burrs to their songs, and Carolina wrens chanted, “Cheery, cheery, cheery.” In Harmon Park indigo buntings foraged along the ground, and Carolina chickadees transformed twigs into trapezes. Blue jays fluted from hillsides; starlings humped greasy through grass, and English sparrows bounced about the entrance to the Crescent, their chatter nervous and nagging. Once a day I walked from the colony to the Crescent, following the old trolley route. Bottlebrush grass grew at the bottom of the ridge, the spikes flaring into stenciling. A grove of red maple saplings turned yellow in the sun, and spreading along the hill, pushed against mimosa and redbud, seedpods of this last dangling in racks like neckties. Beside the path, trees grew weedy: box elder, sassafras, and post and blackjack oak. Away from the path, trees rose in muscular columns: red oak, thick hackberries, and southern yellow pine, its bark plated like the Balkans. In Harmon Park walnut, slippery elm, and black gum flourished. Sycamores towered over Spring, their lower trunks shaggy and pagan, upper branches white and ascetic. Blue berries hung wrinkled off cedars in sheets, and catawba bloomed, yellow lumps adenoidal in the throats of flowers. The variety of trees and the land’s sudden tumblings and risings, sinking into damp hollows then razoring sharply upward, attracted woodpeckers. Pileated woodpeckers hid behind branches, their heads

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metronomes, swinging right, then left, to observe me. Flickers spread yellow tails into lightly varnished Chinese fans. Red-bellied woodpeckers nested in dead sycamores. Downies scooted along limbs, hurrying like water boys. Every day I scanned branches searching for redheaded woodpeckers. The woodpeckers bounded across the ridge, one moment black scooting to the top of a yellow pine, the next red and white plummeting to a broken log. A decade ago I claimed I saw a redheaded woodpecker in Storrs. Now I think I was wrong. Why, I wonder, is identifying birds accurately important when accuracy matters little in life, indeed when most pages, and governments, are raised not upon truth but upon lies? Beside the woodpecker, the only other bird I saw that I hadn’t seen before was a scissor-tailed flycatcher perched on a wire at the edge of a field bulbous with red cattle. On East Mountain, streets were narrower and houses fewer. Trees folded into each other above roads, confining and tightening. Instead of sifting upward and drying, rags of moisture clung to gullies, turning them moldy. Surroundings determine perspective. Instead of tables set with pawpaw, chinkapin oak, black hickory, and mulberries whipped purple with berries, I saw small ornamental vases—a goldfinch perched atop a nodding thistle; two great spangled fritillaries shaking like lace above swamp milkweed; and a bouquet of sunflowers, behind them a lattice of gooseberries. One morning I removed a dead opossum from Copper Street and tossed the body into brush. The opossum had not been dead long, but flies filled its mouth like tooth decay. The next morning a dead ring-necked snake lay in the same place. Later I plucked a live ring-neck off Copper and, in hopes of preventing his being run over, carried him away from the road and freed him in deep scrub. A school of green sunfish drifted through the light at the north end of Little Eureka Lake. In Arkansas, fish-watching ought to rival bird-watching in popularity. Plying the state’s waters are not only nine different sunfish, but also eleven chub, ten bass, six redhorse, thirty-seven darters, and a like number of shiners, these including bluehead, ghost, peppered, rosyface, bleeding, Sabine, and whitetail. On the gazebo on East Mountain, lovers carved initials—unlike brash graffiti, testimonials to optimism. “Susa,” DD declared, “I love you then, now, and forever.” TR loved Rachel; Paul Sarah; and Eric Lexy. The gazebo rested on a stone elbow facing West Mountain, trees threadbare

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around it. From the gazebo land stretched uncluttered, so clear that lovers could imagine benign futures. Although distant roads vanished under trees, lovers who raised their eyes could slip the maze of daily life and become part of a blue forever. Orange poppies and crown vetch bloomed beside the gazebo. Below, the land opened into a soft napkin. Beyond the napkin a yellow-breasted flycatcher foraged through an Ozark chestnut. A breeze plucked petals from flowers on a shining sumac and tossed them through the gazebo into my hair. “Good golly,” Vicki said when I described the gazebo, “sumac isn’t laurel, and you are not a poet, no matter how many flowers you identify.” Behind the gazebo a rusty path climbed a small knob. On the knob spooning teenagers parked and drank beer, tossing bottles into the brush: Keystone Light, Busch, St. Pauli Girl, Foster’s, Heileman’s Old Style, and a single can of Dr Pepper. “Consumed by a girl, a good student, three weeks before she left Eureka for Emory,” Eliza said. “She thought she didn’t want to lose contact with her classmates so she accompanied them to the hangout she’d heard people describe in the school cafeteria. This was her first and only visit, and the last time she felt close to any classmate.” “What happened to her?” I asked. “Atlanta happened,” Eliza said. “For her first two summers in college she worked in New York. Then she spent her junior year in New Zealand, studying Maori creation myths. After graduation she returned to New Zealand, and I suspect she’s still there.” “Don’t you know?” I said. “No,” Eliza answered, “I’ve lost contact with her. The last I heard was that she was working for a bank in Wellington and playing rugby on weekends.” On East Mountain foliage hemmed vision, except when I stood in the gazebo. Consequently mind did not sag across distance and slump into comfortable platitudinous thought. Sight turned inward and amid the folds of trees discovered oddity. Hanging in a grove of bamboo was an eight-foot-tall metal angel, the spiritual and mechanical descendant of Oz’s Tin Man. Pasted to the angel’s breastplate was a red heart. In his right hand the angel held a scepter, the tip bulbous and blue, a golden key painted on it. Above the angel’s head strips of wire fanned outward in a halo. At the other end of the angel’s body, irons served as feet, the sort of solid pitted irons used as doorstops in summer cottages. On a stump to the left of the angel lay a small plastic skeleton, a piece of hard candy, and eighty-five cents. I placed a penny on the stump, not simply

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increasing the money to eighty-six cents, but also, Josh said, “appropriating the stump for a paragraph.” Two-tenths of a mile from the angel, on a shuck of land off Copper, stood “Our Lady of Guadalupe.” The lady was twelve feet tall, and her face resembled a portrait on a Russian icon. A faded blue shawl sprinkled with silver stars fell over the lady’s head. In her hands she held red plastic roses, strings of plastic pearls winding through the stems. The lady stood in a wire oval resembling a scallop shell. At the tip of each wire was a blue bottle, one hundred thirteen in all. To the left of the lady squatted a small Buddha; to the right, a stone rabbit. Beside the rabbit stood a wooden buck, five unbroken blue bottles and the necks of five others adorning its antlers. Unlike yard art, animals in Eureka Springs were familiar. Every morning fallow deer picked through Dairy Hollow. Skinks shimmied over stones and slid into cracks. Chipmunks rummaged around logs, and gray squirrels bustled over limbs, several albino, corsets of white binding chests and wrapping backs, eventually breaking across hips in straps pale as whalebone. Every day I puttered about the colony, stalking, as I told Liliana, another resident, the wild butterfly, seeing red admirals, silvery blues, little wood satyrs, question marks, hackberries, tawny emperors, and Great Smokies fritillaries, females of this species, mimics of the pipevine swallowtail, their wings midnight blue, not orange. Labels glued to bottles of water shipped from Eureka once depicted the Ozarka Girl. If the girl dreamed of a stable marriage, she did well to bolt. Murmurs disrupt marriages in the heartland, leaving wives blue with babies. Sewed on a pillow in a knickknack shop on Spring was advice for the lovelorn: “Marriage is the garden gate. Along the path there will be flowers and weeds. Cherish the flowers and pull the weeds.” On ambles I talked to many women whose husbands behaved like walking ferns. When rootstocks of children tightened around them, husbands sent out arching leaves. On finding an empty crevice, the leaves dug in and sprouted. “He’s not with us anymore,” a woman said, describing a former mate. “He’s living with someone younger.” “He left me with three children, one crippled,” a woman in a shop said, adding, “I’m trying to make do.” “When he left,” another woman said, “the children got jobs, even my twelve-year-old, and we are just fine.” “Ten years ago I

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had a heart problem and was not as active as I once was,” a woman recounted. “Saying he needed a lively wife, my husband divorced me. Two years ago a heart attack killed him.” The woman paused, then smiled and said, “Ha.” “The bastard went off with his secretary. No one in the firm knew where he was,” a woman told a clerk in a bookstore as I waited to pay for a map. “My father lived to be eighty-three. I’m forty-three, and I decided that I wasn’t going to spend the next forty years of my life with this guy, and I’ve filed for divorce,” the woman continued, pulling a checkbook out of her purse to pay for a stack of books, one of which was The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk by Susan McDougal, the tough gal who refused to buckle under outrageous bullying during the Whitewater investigation. “I need to do one more thing,” the woman said. Taking a pen from her purse, she scratched out her husband’s name printed in the upper left corner of the check, her hand moving as fast as a cardiogram. “Way to go, girl,” the clerk said. “I’d never marry a man,” she added, glaring at me when I paid for the map. The woman looked peeved, and I kept my mouth shut, deciding to leave matrimonial jousting to those still hankering to adorn their sleeves with complexity. Although men are inevitably weedy, some women had grown accustomed to clipping and hoeing. “I told my husband that if he died, I’d see him in the ground,” an optometrist said, “but afterward I’d leave Eureka. This is a gay town, and my kind of man is scarce.” In Eureka marriage was big business. Marriage was always online; even people whose domestic programs had crashed hoped for patches. “Las Vegas East,” a shop owner called Eureka. “Eight thousand five hundred marriages a year. Not bad for a town of two thousand.” A clerk at the town hall put the number of marriages at “only slightly more than five thousand.” For people over eighteen, marriage was simple, demanding neither a waiting period nor a blood test. Posted outside the clerk’s office were three requirements: first, a “Drivers License” or an original birth certificate; second, a Social Security number, not the card but, as the sign put it, “Just Know” the number; and third, $45 per couple in cash, the exact amount, change not being available. I pointed out the grammatical error on the sign, the lack of an apostrophe between the r and s in “Drivers.” “The sign has been up for weeks, and you are

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the first person to notice,” a clerk said. “I’m not in a hurry,” I said, just as a man burst into the courthouse, marriage license in hand. Only ordained ministers were allowed to marry people. Ordination did not necessitate a stint at divinity school. Most ministers, the clerk said, obtained credentials on the Internet, usually from the Universal Life Church. “My girlfriend sent off for her credentials after seeing an advertisement in a magazine,” a waitress told me. After purchasing credentials, ministers obtained licenses from the town, paying five dollars for a license good for a lifetime, no renewal fees being necessary. “All the owners of bed-and-breakfasts are ministers,” an antique dealer said. On weekends the carpenter at the Crescent devoted his “awl” to marriage, conducting “a nice service,” the owner of the hotel said. Marriages at the Crescent were usually more ornate than marriages elsewhere. Often staff arranged white plastic chairs around a fountain in the garden. Late one Saturday, I helped clean the garden, picking small bouquets of dianthus, bachelor’s button, and fern off the grass. Tied together with white ribbons, the bouquets blossomed from the mouths of cones formed by two sheets of white paper. Out of sight on the inside of the papers were the lyrics of “Wedding Song” by Bob Dylan, the detritus of an earlier ceremony. Printed beneath the song was “Thank you, dear family and friends, for sharing our special day. Tyler and Veronica.” In the historic district love was more lucrative than religion. Olden Days Carriages promoted weddings held in their “Customized Marriage Carriage.” At Judge Roy Bean’s, tourists could have their pictures taken posed as gangsters and molls, dudes, gamblers, gunslingers, and dancehall floozies. Occasionally tourists posed in disarray, dresses slipping off shoulders and breasts tumbling out, looking like grapefruit sliced in half. By dialing 888-ROY-WED-U tourists could book weddings from the interstate, choosing between the Garden Room or the Victorian Wedding Parlor. The “Simple Ceremony” cost $60, bride and groom appearing in their own clothes. The “Unique Ceremony” cost $95, the package including period costumes, an eight-by-ten-inch sepia photograph, a poster, and an “Antique Frame” for the photograph. For an additional five dollars, the photograph was in color. Popular among newlyweds, a clerk said, was posing in an old-fashioned bathtub, a wooden sign hanging on the side reading “Just Hitched.” While the

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groom lounged in one end of the tub, a bottle of Jack Daniels in his left hand, cards in his right, his right leg extended along the top of the tub, a prison ball chained to his ankle, the bride squatted in the other end, an ostrich feather on her head, her hands grasping a hangman’s rope, the noose around her new husband’s neck. Several people assured me that ministers married homosexual couples. “Only the marriages can’t be registered at town hall,” a man said, adding he thought the prohibition silly. “I don’t carry if ministers marry gays,” an older woman said, “but I don’t think they should marry lesbians.” East Leatherwood Creek ran parallel to North Main. To contain runoff, the town dug a channel and lined it with stone. Blotched water snakes lived in cavities between stones. Snags of brush and trash formed islands in the creek, and on sunny days snakes dozed on the islands. One morning as I peered into the channel, a couple walked past. “What are you doing?” the man asked, pausing to look into the creek. “Hunting snakes,” I said. “They are difficult to spot. Where are you going?” “We are going to get married,” the woman said. “Can I come, too?” I asked. “I’d love to come.” “Sure,” they answered in unison. Ron and Trudy were from southwest Ohio and had known each other for a year. They both worked in nursing homes and were wonderfully gentle and nice. Trudy had been a nurse and was now an administrator, and Ron supervised nurse’s aides, often traveling out of state to give motivational talks. “I want aides to realize what they do is important,” he said. While attending a meeting in St. Louis, they decided to marry and had driven through the night to Eureka. Each had been married before and had grown children. Although fifteen years my junior, Trudy was a new grandmother. For the ceremony she wore her traveling clothes: a red blouse, jeans, and sandals. Ron wore a green shirt, khaki trousers, and work boots. As “friend and witness,” I wore green shorts, sandals, and white socks. I also wore a white T-shirt, a hand-me-down from my son Francis. An oval decorated the front of the shirt. In the middle of the oval grew a grove of trees, the trunks light yellow, green splashing around them. Circling the oval were the words Western Australia and Karri Forest. On my head sat a floppy hat with a broad brim, sweat staining the band. I carried a soiled backpack, and binoculars hung from my neck. Angels Among Us wedding chapel occupied the living room of a

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small white cottage trimmed in yellow. My appearance surprised Judy, the minister. “Who are you?” she said. When I replied that I’d just met the bride and groom, she asked if I were drunk. The previous week, she recounted, a stranger wandered into a wedding. “He was drunk and muttered the whole time.” Judy was short and thin and in her seventies. Her hair was wrapped in a bun, a black bow spreading like the wings of a butterfly across the back of her head. She wore reading glasses with half lenses, a knee-length purple dress, black stockings, and Mary Janes. She conducted the marriage in front of a fireplace in the living room. The walls of the room were white, tinged with pink. Above the mantle hung a picture of a boyish angel, wings wide, hands pressed together in prayer. On the hearth sat a silver tape recorder. Judy flicked a switch, and it played Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” To the left of the fireplace stood a tall doll, a prepubescent girl in white. Beds of fluffy pillows lay atop chairs and sofas, bouquets of red plastic roses blooming on them. A picket fence of five candles extended into the room from each side of the hearth. Vines of plastic roses hung from the candles. I sat in a white armchair; sewed across the top of a pillow beside me was “All Things Grow with Love.” A white Persian cat lounged under a footrest. Midway through the ceremony a gray cat sprang into the room and began to maul my backpack. “Just kick him off,” Judy said, turning away from Ron and Trudy. Shortly thereafter the telephone rang, and Judy interrupted the ceremony in order to arrange a carriage ride for newlyweds. “Next Wednesday at five o’clock,” she said twice. At the end of the ceremony, she handed Ron and Trudy flutes halffilled with champagne. Then she took a roll of pictures using a disposable camera, posing the couple on the stairs, arm in arm in front of the mantle, kissing beside the candles, sitting on the sofa smiling at each other, and then standing with me between them. Judy did not offer me champagne, but when she produced a white cake the size of my palm and sliced two fingers off for Ron and Trudy, I said, “Aren’t you going to give me a slice?” She handed me a piece as big as the end of my thumb. I wasn’t able to read the label on the champagne, so the next morning I drove to Booze Brothers, a liquor store on 62. “All the chapels buy J. Roger Spumante,” the clerk said. “At $5.25 a bottle, it isn’t a bargain.” The clerk and a salesman sitting beside the register talked knowledgeably about weddings. Both were Internet ministers.

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After the ceremony Ron and Trudy hurried to the courthouse to register their marriage. “We have to work tomorrow,” Ron said. I liked Ron and Trudy, and the marriage made me sentimental. In Eureka I met many fetching women. If I lived in a more progressive nation, I thought, say Iraq or Saudi Arabia, countries that did not promote divorce by limiting males to one spouse at a time, I would have married a couple of the women I met. “Illustrating the high truth,” Josh said, “that not all men are louses.” “Tallyho,” I said. Josh is an entrepreneur. On my remarking that matrimony fattened the town’s coffers, he scoffed. “Divorce coins bigger bucks,” he said. On awakening on Sunday and finding themselves in bed with strangers, he explained, tourists would rush to divorce chapels. Instead of $50 or $75, an Internet lawyer could charge $500 for a quickie Sunday divorce. Fees for divorces during the week would be less, but charges for costumes and photographs could plump up takings. Terrible-tempered former husbands could masquerade as Mr. Hyde; ex-wives could wear scarlet gowns cut on the bias. Couples could pose in front of hearts ripped in half, the husband holding a real bottle of Jack Daniels, bought at a chapel for high alcoholic dollar. They could hire carriages and, facing in opposite directions, toss paper flowers at onlookers. Printed on the petals could be “Freedom Now” and “For Better, Not Worse.” The effect of the wedding lasted past dinner. That night, for the first time, I telephoned home. “Do you miss me?” I asked. “Not really,” Vicki said. Because I did not want Vicki to feel lonely, I had written her every day. I have arthritis and no longer can shape letters well. As a result my handwriting is difficult to read. “And,” Vicki said, “don’t send me any more letters. Only an archaeologist could decipher your writing.” I was irked when I put down the phone. For a moment I considered following Vicki’s instructions. The ways of husbands with long-time wives differ from those of grooms with brides. Instead of blunting the point of my pencil, I decided to write Vicki every day, some days twice. “Yes,” I exclaimed, and smiled. The Mud Street Café was located on North Main opposite the entrance to Spring Street. Most mornings I bought a cappuccino in the café, some days before wandering the town, other days after walking for two hours. The café occupied the basement of a brick building constructed in 1880. Stairs descended to an entrance thirty feet below the

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sidewalk. A spring was the source of the café’s name. In the nineteenth century the spring often overflowed, turning the street into batter. Walls of the café were limestone. A long rectangular mirror hung on one wall. In front of the mirror stretched a wooden bar polished dark red. Suspended on other walls were fake windows, some of the panes milky, others stained. Eight ceiling fans revolved slowly, looking like black daisies. I always sat on a swaybacked sofa opposite the bar. On my right a bookcase sagged, laden with National Geographic magazines. Occasionally books appeared, one morning Chicken Soup for the Mother’s Soul. The next morning the Soup was gone. The ceiling of the café crinkled soothingly as tourists explored the store on the ground floor above— Romancing the Stone, a shop hawking knickknacks, most prominently stalks of Lucky Bamboo. According to feng shui, a placard declared, the bamboo attracted positive chi energy. A twelve-inch curly stalk cost $6 while a twenty-inch curly stalk or a fourteen-inch spiral stalk cost $8 apiece. I chatted with people in the café. The tumble I took while jogging affected my appearance. “You don’t look well,” a waitress said that morning. “Are you all right?” On my saying I fell, she patted me on the shoulder and said, “Well, bless your heart.” Another day a high school girl, also a waitress, practiced her developing wiles upon me. “You are too cute to be alone. I’m going to sit by you,” she said, winking and stretching you into a yodel. One day I appeared at noon. A seventyyear-old man sat in a chair next to the sofa. On a plate in front of him a sandwich lay untouched. “Food here is good,” the man volunteered, “but my tooth hurts, and I can’t chew. I wish I could pull the darn thing out.” On my suggesting he go to a dentist, the man described the first time a dentist pulled one of his teeth. The man was a student at Emporia State College in Kansas. He did not have much money, and when his molar began to ache his roommate took him to the cheapest dentist in town. The dentist agreed to pull the tooth for five dollars. The dentist was old and, proving too feeble to extract the tooth, handed the pliers to the roommate. Instead of pulling down, however, the roommate squeezed the pliers and the tooth shattered. “For a year,” the man said, rubbing his cheek, “I dug pieces of that tooth out of my jaw.” I arrived in Eureka at the end of Arts Week. A back room of the café served as a temporary photograph gallery. Most of the pictures were

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sentimental. In “Together Forever,” a middle-aged couple spooned along a country lane, holding hands. The woman wore a blue blouse and trousers; the man, cowboy boots, a work shirt, and jeans, a silver buckle gleaming at his waist. While a full moon rose behind the couple, the landscape billowed purple about them, cradling them like a hand. More interesting to me was a painting nine feet square and hung on the wall next to the bar, opposite my seat on the sofa. In the left foreground Eve knelt naked beside a stream, the water tumbling from a ridge and roiling past her through the middle of the painting. A leopard stood beside Eve while across the stream crouched a young monkey and its mother. Behind them stood a doe and her fawn. In the upper right corner of the painting Adam appeared, pulling greenery apart and staring at Eve. Directly behind Eve a peacock spread its tail, eyes in the feathers rising like bubbles blown out of a Bubble Pro Party Machine. An apple tree grew up the left side of the painting, a serpent winding like a malicious argument through its foliage and an upper limb heavy with apples stretching across the top of the painting. Eve’s hair was blond and hung over her shoulders in ringlets that looked like Slinkies. Her lips were pursed, and she was blowing air over a moth that she’d rescued from the stream, this to help the insect back into flight. The moth looked like a sweetbay silkmoth, an insect of lowlands, rare west of the Mississippi River and not found in the Ozarks. Of course, leopards and monkeys are not indigenous either. Of nudists, I know little. On warm days, however, if Arkansans behave like inhabitants of the Nutmeg State, then some of the more energetic among the local gentry must occasionally scamper about in the buff. Clothes aside, Eve did not appeal to me. Her thighs were skinny, making her appear tarty and worn rather than apple-ripe. During the past decade dress has deteriorated into numbing informality. Tourists in Eureka resembled clothes donkeys, sporting shorts and blue jeans, the attire of relaxed but not of high-stepping big spenders. Although 17 percent of guests at the Crescent booked rooms through the Internet, few traveled much distance to the hotel. Most cars in the hotel’s parking lot were from Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas. Many tourists arrived on motorcycles. Wrapped in leather, they looked like pupae aged beyond the possibility of wings. “Saddlebags don’t hold much,” I said to a shopkeeper. “Yes,” he said, “but we ship.

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You’d be surprised how much motorcyclists spend.” Many tourists looked like yams, people to whom eating appealed more than shopping and who must have found lumbering the switchback streets of downtown exhausting. Almost everyone in Eureka, tourists and townspeople, smoked, and escaping the sooty sound of graveyard coughs was impossible. By afternoon cigarette butts speckled sidewalks. In contrast few people used cell phones, probably because ridges snagged signals, breaking conversations into stutters. Many visitors were elderly and not likely to buy much, their attics so crammed that they’d inserted shunts into them in hopes of draining clutter into tag sales and church bazaars. Although I belonged to this group, I coveted a dinner plate in the window of Crystal Gardens Antiques. The plate was not old, dating from the 1890s. My favorite writer, Charles Dickens, stared up from the bowl, a green band circling him. Characters from his novels spun about the edge of the plate: thin Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep rubbing his hands together, saintly Little Nell, and Mr. Pickwick, as jovial as a red wagon. I did not buy the plate, knowing that at home it would vanish into a drawer. Despite not buying, I roamed shops, in part simply to be active. To sit on the porch at Dairy Hollow and let days spin past while my blood pressure sagged was tempting. Alas, the first Pickering in my line settled in Salem in 1630, and a remnant of Puritan prevents me from living naturally. Whenever ease tempts, I stir. To keep active I searched for an ear trumpet. I imagined taking it to the first day of class in August. I planned to set it on the desk and not comment until a student asked a question. Then I would seize the trumpet, jab it into my left ear, tilt forward, and ask the student to repeat the question. As the student did so, I’d scowl. At the end of the question, I would stand quietly for a moment, then I’d jerk the trumpet from my ear and, slamming it down on the table, exclaim, “Good God! I’ve never heard such rubbish. That is the last question I will listen to this semester.” Although I scoured antique shops and malls around Eureka—Yesteryears, Castle Antiques, Gingerbread House, Old Sale Barn, and Mitchell’s Folly—I didn’t find a trumpet. I did, however, talk to pleasant people, one of whom asked if I were married. Downtown Eureka resembled a souk, hived with small hotels, restaurants, shops, and cafés. Shops peddled tourist goods: fresh antiques,

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jewelry, candy, leather, glassware, pottery, quilts, and crafts, this last a catchall word. The day before leaving Arkansas I tried to purchase earrings for Vicki. The pair I selected was marked $54. I offered $45. The proprietor had owned the shop for only a year, and he refused to bargain. Consequently, I hurried on to Kaleidokites and bought a kite. A mellowing purchase, Steve Rogers, the owner, said, sure to help the nervous achieve “nonpharmaceutical tranquility.” Earlier in June water seeped into my binoculars and spotted the lenses. Sandy, the director of the colony, suggested I visit Steve, explaining that because he repaired kaleidoscopes he might be able to clean the binoculars. He couldn’t. “But why don’t you borrow mine and use them during the remainder of your stay,” he said. I never borrow. I decided, though, to buy a kite from Steve before I left Eureka. Would that I could have afforded a kaleidoscope. I coveted a wooden kaleidoscope made in Missouri in 1994 by a man named Purdy. The barrel of the kaleidoscope perched atop a stand ten inches high and looked like it belonged on the bridge of a yacht. The kaleidoscope cost $700, but Steve said he would lower the price. Alas, although the toys of childhood attract me, my house in Storrs needs a new roof. Nestled among shops along Spring were art galleries, most of their pieces visual dessert. Instead of provoking thought, the art titillated and stirred warm feeling. Many pieces attempted to awe. Usually the awe elicited rose from mystification, caused ostensibly by complexity but actually by confusion, a hodgepodge of matter incoherent on a canvas. Lithographs in one gallery looked like they had been produced by Maxfield Parrish and Aubrey Beardsley after they skinny-dipped in a pool of Neapolitan ice cream. Women’s bottoms bulged like oversized golf balls, so tough that no hacker could slice their hides. “Give me gals,” Josh once said, “from whose backsides cellulite hangs in straps, trophies of good lives lived warmly.” In many paintings wild animals frolicked tamely across domesticated landscapes. “Maybe America is brutal,” Josh said, “because people don’t tell the truth. Teasing silver linings from blood, Americans distort history. Instead of staring at the consequences of actions, Americans avert their eyes and, gazing far from shattered bone, envision realities soft with uplift, buttressed by moral certitude.” Another gallery sold bronzes. Posed on shelves were busts of men,

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stalwart and ox-jawed, “leaders,” a clerk said, people like Robert E. Lee and Bear Bryant, this last a football coach. “One of those people so damned,” Josh said, “that if a dozen men urinated on him for a week they couldn’t put out the flames. As for Lee, if he’d had brains enough to think beyond Virginia and imagine the horrors for which he would be responsible, he would have thrown himself into the James River before supporting the Confederacy.” The shop also sold large bronzes. Many illustrated the doings of a country boy, a saccharine Huck Finn scrubbed out of natural impropriety and humor. In “Mudbuddy” the boy crouched barefoot by a stream. His arms were extended, a bullfrog springing from his hands, the pose resembling that of Eve freeing the moth on the canvas in the Mud Street Café. The bronze, a clerk told me, cost $12,000, adding that the shop had sold twenty-six. The following day another clerk said the store had sold thirty-four, each for $13,000. The best paintings for sale in Eureka were on the third floor of the Woodward Gallery. On the second floor near the entrance, however, hung reproductions of the work of Dale TerBush and Jesse Barnes, “The Light Painter.” On their canvases, light scraped from Albert Bierstadt’s leavings oozed like frosting through updated versions of Ansel Adams’s photographs. TerBush’s To Live in the Light Eternal cost $895 and depicted the sun setting behind a desert, saguaro cacti standing forked, the colors Pentecostal, that is, glossolalian, the brush a tongue splattering blues, yellows, oranges, and pinks in syllables. “The art work of Dale TerBush,” a card explained, “is a combination of spirituality and color, of energy and light. He is an artist that seeks to go beyond the representational to bring the viewer into his vision of paradise.” On the third floor hung better paintings, these by local artists Richard Harper, Dell Ann Smith, and my favorite, Ernie Kilman. Kilman painted streams, waters oozing through rocky channels, not sizzling carbonated into soda pop. Along the historic route, galleries occupied the ground floors of houses. On White, the Zentu Gallery opened shortly before I arrived, selling pillows, photographs, jewelry, and “Asian Antiquities.” The owner was forthright, admitting that he did not know the ages of pieces in his shop. “I buy what I like,” he said, “and hope the seller is honest.” I liked a small six-by-nine-inch painting on paper. From South India and

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priced at $150, the painting depicted a lion, the trunk of his body opened almost as if by x-ray and cluttered not with ribs and lites but animals: five birds, two dogs, and ten blue and yellow fish. The dogs frolicked above each other. The upper dog was green and faced the head of the lion. The dog’s mouth was open, and fish swam through cavities normally occupied by heart and lungs. The lower dog was white, and faced the lion’s tail. His mouth was also open. While fish swam through the space normally occupied by a spine, birds fluttered up and down the dog’s legs, beaks spread. The painting was a conversation piece, a knickknack for kitchen or pantry. I did not buy the painting. Two days earlier on a dirt road, I had smashed the rocker panel and almost collapsed the right front door of the Mazda. I hadn’t seen a boulder bulging from a flowery shoulder. “At least $1,500 of damage,” Josh said, “more than the car is worth.” To attract tourists Eureka sponsored festivals. On the last Saturday night of the Arts Festival, Little Jack Melody and His Young Turks, a band from Denton, Texas, played on the oval raised above Basin Park. Flyers encouraged people to dress as their favorite superheroes. Most of the people who danced and almost all the people who wore costumes were women. Costumes were slapdash. Women dubbed themselves Green Lantern, Miss Underdog, Mayan Wonder Woman, and Miss Minnie Mouse. As the dancers shook and laughed, I longed to join them. I should, I thought, have stuffed pillows around my middle and called myself Turnip Man. Everyone in a costume received a trophy. “I made the trophies while watching Martha Stewart,” a woman announced, “and I was really grumpy.” Near the end of the evening I noticed a woman wearing a blinking pin. Thinking Eliza would like the pin, I asked the woman where she got it. “In a bar in Texas,” she said. “What will you give me for it? I’ve raised four kids alone, and everything I’ve got, including me, is for sale.” The woman smiled. Unlike Eve she had aged in ripeness, bruised and confident. As usual I was in an observing, penurious mood and did not buy the pin. The next weekend hundreds of bikers belched through Eureka, in town for the Blues Festival. Dumpy, many looked as if they would have been more comfortable, and happier, in Buicks. Clinging to the backs of scores of cyclists, and occasionally hunched in sidecars, were wives and girlfriends. “What sort of woman lets herself be treated like a backpack?”

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Josh asked me. Most bikers rode Harley-Davidsons. Scattered amid the Harleys was a handful of BMWs, Indians, Hondas, Suzukis, and Kawasakis. While people on Harleys usually wore leather skullcaps or tied checkered handkerchiefs over their heads, more often than not riders on other brands of cycles wore helmets. American flags waved from saddlebags attached to bikes ridden by blacks. “Sensible contraception,” Josh said. “In a country in which a high percentage of the citizenry, even blood royals, are only two generations removed from thinking white hoods fashionable, the slide from a baseball cap is steep and quick.” Like many fictional characters, Josh is strident and outspoken. Nevertheless, I avoided downtown during the Blues Festival. On Saturday every teenager in southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas who would either get pregnant or make someone pregnant before graduating from secondary school appeared in Eureka. At seven one Wednesday morning I ate breakfast with Rotarians at Myrtie Mae’s restaurant in the Best Western Inn, scooping up a frying pan of grits and patty sausage. Academics join guild associations, typically the Doris Lessing Society or the John Steinbeck Circle. Moreover, professors confuse service clubs with self-serving political organizations such as the Cattleman’s Association or the Southern Baptist Convention. In Eureka Rotarians raised money to support a women’s center and to combat cancer and the long-term effects of polio. Thirty-four members attended the breakfast. To awaken appetite they sang “Good Night, Ladies.” Afterward three members introduced their daughters, one visiting from Sacramento. Later, the chairman of the chamber of commerce spoke. He noted that last Christmas retail sales had been low. In hopes of jump-starting buying, the town planned to switch on Christmas lights on November 7. To help keep summer sales lively, the town was promoting “Santa in July,” the old boy appearing in Bermuda shorts. What Eureka needed, I suddenly thought, were not festivals and unseasonable celebrations but a visit from one of Hollis Hunnewell’s sideshows. On the page the distance from Carthage, Tennessee, to Eureka, Arkansas, wasn’t longer than an introductory sentence, and after breakfast the next morning I didn’t leave the colony. Instead I helped Hollis piece together a show. Hollis has long wandered my books. Because his shows have perked up many arid chapters, I thought a

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show in Eureka would elicit more attention than Santa riding the trolley, bearded and barrel-chested, sweating heavily, and looking like an aged, out-of-shape tourist. Curiosities are part of Hollis’s shows. Among the attractions Hollis planned for Eureka were a Baptist cathedral built from chicken bones, “southern-fried chicken baptized in Crisco and slathered with flour,” and feather crowns from the Holy Family of Tennessee, the McMullocks: the father, Malone McMullock; the mother, April Sun; the daughter, Eulalia; and the little boy, Nicea. “When sanctified folk die slowly, the Lord in His wisdom wants neighbors to witness the Spirit rising above ruined flesh,” Hollis explained. As a result feathers in such people’s pillows sometimes formed circles or crowns. The McMullocks lived in Fentress County, where Malone owned a Christian hardware store. He gave away a Bible with every tool he sold, and with every sack of nails, a copy of the Lord’s Prayer. April made fruit pies which she sold at church picnics, donating the proceeds to a fund supporting Campbellite missionaries in Africa. On the top of each pie she set a Bible animal: on rhubarb and strawberry, a camel; on blackberry, a donkey or sometimes a goat; and on peach, a rooster crowing, beside him St. Peter, kneeling, hands over his ears. While Nicea always let other children borrow his roller skates, even bad boys, who skated on the road and knocking into curbs loosened wheels, Eulalia spoke in tongues, having been blessed with a lisp. In medicinal terms, a putrid fever killed the McMullocks. Hollis put matters better: “The family was too good for this world, and the King and Lawgiver in Zion plucked their borrowed plumage and, setting them beside the Great White Throne, dressed them in Robes of Glory.” Malone and April Sun slept with a Bible in the bed between them. “Miracle of Miracles,” Hollis wrote, “the Bible also had a feather crown.” The crown was rectangular, as befitted a book. “If you look into the crown closely,” Hollis declared, “you can see the face of Jesus.” Housed in a small tent, the major religious exhibit was a screen on which appeared a three-dimensional representation of the Last Supper. When patrons entered the tent and put on special glasses, the apostles stood and raised wineglasses. “Filled,” Hollis assured the teetotaling faithful, “with grape juice.” As patrons walked closer to the screen, the apostles sat, the wineglasses vanished, a mouse scooted across the right front corner of the table, and angels flew weeping into a sheaf of curtains

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hanging behind Judas. The artist who made the exhibit was born in Peru and did not speak English. As a result the menu featured a Peruvian delicacy, guinea pig. On plates before each apostle guinea pigs sat upright on their haunches, their bodies blackened by soot, their heads furry and unskinned, the flesh around their mouths dried by heat and pulled back into a rictus of white teeth. Other parts of the show were ordinary, exhibits and people already seen in Tennessee. A juggler balanced vegetables on his head, fourteen ears of corn at once. For an extra five cents people could watch the juggler run fifty yards with a cantaloupe on his head. Once Hollis collected the money, the juggler sliced the cantaloupe in two, pushed half the melon down over his skull, and trotted fifty yards. To ensure that dupes didn’t become angry, Hollis sold tomatoes which the crowd could throw at the juggler, cherry tomatoes at a penny apiece, beefsteaks at four cents. Also on exhibit was a beagle with a glass eye. The eye was black and the pupil turned inward toward the dog’s muzzle, making the animal cross-eyed. Hollis informed crowds that John Brown had worn the eye when he was young. “Although Brown outgrew the eye,” a placard explained, “psychiatrists maintain the eye determined his character, skewing his vision during childhood’s influential years.” Lending credence to the eye’s importance was the fact that Harper Brothers in Philadelphia manufactured the eye. “Cannot those of us who look straight down our noses,” Hollis asked, “see smoke rising from Harper’s Ferry?” A sampling of different-sized eyes lay on velour in a case once used to carry a flute. “Twenty-five cents to try one on,” a sign above the case said. Hollis’s most popular exhibit was neither Christian nor historical but pagan: a fortune-telling device. A table stood at one end of a narrow tent, eighteen feet away from the entrance. A black cloth decorated with signs of the zodiac covered the top of the table then fell to the ground in thick folds. Twelve feet in front of the table sat a tall, straight chair. Painted on flaps leading into the tent were two white circles. Purple skulls stared at customers from the centers of the circles. Attached to the bottom of each circle were two hairy feet, one foot slewed to the left, the other to the right. Attached to the sides and tops of each circle were three long wrists ending in brown hands, each with six fingers and resembling a catcher’s mitt. Inside the tent three wooden

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hands rose from forearms attached to the top of the table. Minute scarlet lights pulsed through the forearms like blood. When the flaps of the tent closed behind a customer, a blue eye sprang from the center of the middle hand and stared until the customer sat in the chair. “Ask,” a deep voice then commanded, a red tongue in the right hand suddenly coiling into a tight knot. While the customer asked a question, an ear in the left hand shuttered back and forth like French doors. At the end of the question, the tongue lashed out like a snake, and as the deep voice responded, rolled up and then struck again, much like a noisemaker at a child’s birthday party. Three questions cost twenty-five cents. After the final question, smoke billowed over the table and the voice shouted, “Be gone!” In Tennessee, some patrons who paid for three questions did not ask them all. In Carthage, Sally Huddleston fainted when the tongue struck at her, while after two questions concerning “a feminine problem” Clover Bloom bolted weeping from the tent. Shows are exciting, and to keep blood pressure low I plan but don’t attend exhibitions. Of course, oddity clings to all doings. The first Sunday in Eureka I drove to Cosmic Cavern beyond Berryville near Oak Grove. People have toured the cave for seventy-six years. Sheets of stalactites hung from ceilings, looking like teeth seining krill from the air, and lakes glowed milky and green, rainwater having seeped through the limestone. Before entering the cave, I explored an exhibition on the floor above the ticket booth. Among the items displayed were a poster covered with photographs of bats native to Arkansas; from Morocco, fossilized orthoceras looking like spear tips; and the front page of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, the “1st Extra” printed on Sunday, December 7, 1941, the headline proclaiming, “WAR! OAHU BOMBED BY JAPANESE PLANES.” The man who led me and a group of six other people through the cave was a substitute schoolteacher. At night he acted in The Great Passion Play. On Saturday he’d played Judas. He had also written a manuscript containing three thousand provocative statements, a sample being, “Punching holes in your earlobes won’t make you hear better.” After the tour he asked me to suggest potential publishers. I did so. In the cave he’d entertained me mightily. Flyers for the cavern celebrated cave fish. In the cave, the guide switched on a light above a lake, after which he extracted a handful of grain from a can and tossed it into the water. “The fish are trout,” the man said. “The owner

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of the cavern buys them at a fish farm and dumps them in the water.” Later he asked the group if any of us was musical. Earlier he’d inquired about people’s occupations. On my saying “English teacher,” a boy said, “Studying English is stupid. I already know English.” When the boy replied that he was musical, the guide instructed him to put his head against the wall of the cavern and listen carefully. “What did you hear?” the guide said when the boy stood up. “I didn’t hear nothing,” the boy said. “What!” the guide exclaimed. “And you claim to be musical! Didn’t you hear hard rock?” Before returning to the colony, I ate the lunch special at Dowd’s: catfish, hush puppies, a baked potato, and, in separate plastic dishes, beans, slaw, and pickled green tomatoes. “Lord-a-mercy,” a woman at a nearby table exclaimed, just what I thought on sampling the tomatoes. “People who like them,” the owner told me, “usually mix them with the beans.” Only rarely did I eat outside the colony. At Sonny’s I ate a small pesto pizza containing “homemade basin pesto,” garlic, olive oil, artichoke hearts, and roma tomatoes. Twice I bought takeout at Bubba’s Barbecue, on both occasions the pork-shoulder plate, costing $8.95 and containing enough barbecue for three meals. “The food here is good,” said a man standing behind me the second time I bought takeout. “The barbecue is as good as Memphis barbecue. I live here, and I know.” “I know you live here, and you played golf this morning,” I said. “What?” the man said. “Did you see me on the course?” The man wore an after-golf uniform: shorts, a short-sleeved shirt with a loose round collar, and the giveaway, loafers without socks. The shoes were expensive and for a time had been worn only on relatively dressy occasions. They had aged, though, into loose informality, becoming the sort of comfortable shoes into which golfers slipped tired, swollen feet. Three days after touring the cavern I attended The Great Passion Play, paying $23.25 for a ticket. The play was staged in an amphitheater dug into Magnetic Mountain, the mountain itself a spur of East Mountain, stretching to the east then curving back to the north like the arm of someone dozing on his side. The play was “the number one attended outdoor drama in America,” advertisements stated, almost seven million people having attended in thirty-five years. The amphitheater was the centerpiece of an entrepreneurial complex, including the Bible Museum, Sacred Arts Center, and the New Holy Land Bookstore. The

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parking lot contained pods of vans and buses: white vans from Calvary Baptist Church in Valley Falls, Kansas, and the Union Baptist Church in Tylertown, Mississippi, and from Milwaukee a massive gray bus owned by Providence Baptist Church on West Hampton Avenue, “The Reverend Joe A. Games Sr. Pastor.” Scrolling down the side of the bus was the prayer, “Lord Give Us Traveling Grace.” The Pine Grove Church of God in Edinburg, Mississippi, sent a van of high school students to the play. Sprayed on the window of the left rear door was “One Wild Week,” on the right, “Youth 4 Jesus!” Two shops stood in the middle of the complex. In the New Holy Land Bookstore a plastic crown of thorns four inches in diameter sold for $7.99. “Lordy!” a woman exclaimed on noticing the price. For sale at the Great Passion Play Gift Shop were trays of Scripture Stones, ovals of translucent synthetic glass, variously colored and priced at $1.99. Stamped in gold letters into each stone was an uplifting word: Acceptance, Serenity, and Compassion, among others. Choirs of roly-poly angels congregated on shelves. The angels were white; in contrast, the people in figurines depicting church activities were black. The figurines were made in China. Priced at $6.99, three small girls wearing red surplices sang hymns. In a scene costing $12.99, three people sat in a pew. In the middle of the pew a woman wearing a pot-shaped hat and a yellow dress opened a white purse. On her right a woman in a blue dress, a white band around her forehead, held a collection plate. On her left sat an old man wearing a black suit. Tacked above a rack of wind chimes was a sign reading, “The Wind is God’s Whisper. Listen to His Message.” “What sort of message is a tornado?” I asked a clerk. “Don’t tell me,” I continued, “that God creates tornadoes out of love in order to reach the hard of heart and hearing. Maybe God had a coughing fit over Pierce City in May.” Bags of popcorn cost two dollars at the entrance to the amphitheater. “Can I can munch popcorn while Christ is crucified?” I asked. “Yes,” a teenager collecting tickets said, “the people who run this place will do anything for a buck.” The theater held 4,100 people, all seats having backs. On the night I attended, the theater was half full, religion like everything except professional football having been affected by the poor economy. A small valley was the stage, 550 feet wide. My seat was near the front of the theater in the middle of row 14. Printed on the

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back of a jacket worn by a man sitting two rows below me was “Festus Fire Department.” “Where is Festus?” I asked the woman sitting on my right. “I think Missouri,” she said. Erected in the valley was a model of Jerusalem consisting of shops, gates, palaces, and narrow streets. Behind the city rose a ball of land, trees bushy at the top, the near slope mowed. On the slope, the tomb in which Christ would be buried gapped like a mouth. On a bare spot above the tomb, Christ and the thieves were crucified. To the left of the city stood Gethsemane, the garden in which Judas betrayed Christ. The play depicted events beginning on Palm Sunday and ending with the Ascension. A recording opened the performance. “It is imperative,” a man intoned, “that mankind come to a true understanding of who Jesus Christ really is.” As soon as the man stopped speaking, a ram’s horn blew, after which a woman sang the Lord’s Prayer. Then the play began. Christ raised a girl from the dead and restored sight to a beggar. For a moment I felt melancholy. Although I loved hearing the old story, I no longer believed it. As nettles flourished on barn sweepings, I thought, so religion nourished self-interest. For a while the play entertained. Five soldiers cantered through Jerusalem, mounted on white chargers. Two brown horses pulled a chariot. Christ rode a donkey. The disciples bustled around two camels. A flock of sheep scampered in one gate and out the other, eyes rolling. I counted 118 people on stage. Eventually, though, boredom set in. The play lacked the fleshly good humor of medieval religious drama. Absent was the cheerfulness of spirit that sweeps a person beyond self, enabling him to love his neighbor and the world. In rushing higgledy-piggledy in front of the audience, the sheep seemed more human than the actors on stage. I dozed until Christ overturned the tables of the money changers, in the process freeing a flock of homing pigeons. Most of the birds flew swiftly to their roost on a housetop and disappeared. Two, however, lost their way and, after circling the city, settled into a tree above Calvary, much to the concern of the audience. “Will they be all right?” the woman next to me asked. “Yes,” I said. After the show I did not hurry back to the colony. Instead I walked to the edge of Magnetic Mountain. Atop a knuckle of land stood the “largest Christ memorial statue in the United States,” Christ of the Ozarks. Sixty-seven feet high and weighing over two million pounds,

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Christ stared over Eureka. At night lights bathed the white surface, and from a distance the statue looked like a giant bat pulling itself out of the ground. Christ’s face was fifteen feet long. His arm spread was sixty-five feet, two less than his height, creating a kneecapped appearance. According to story, if the statue had been taller, regulations required setting a blinking red light on Christ’s head, a decoration that would have provoked untoward jocularity. Although hair dangled off Christ’s head to his shoulders in thick locks that tapered into ends resembling toes, I liked the statue. The light attracted all sorts of life, not just me but also insects and bats, the latter chattering and flinging themselves around Christ’s head like lariats. In Eureka testimonials to Christian doings appeared on clothes as well as charge cards. One morning on Spring, I met a gaggle of high school girls. Down the left side of the girls’ blouses ran a line of letters proclaiming “Jesus Hero.” Throughout the month I noticed tourists wearing yellow sweatshirts, blue letters stamped on the chests saying “J.C. State.” People bought the sweatshirts at the Christian Outlet Store at the entrance of Passion Play Road. One rainy morning I took the Purple trolley to Thorncrown Chapel. Built out of glass and wood, the chapel sat on a skirt of land billowing out from under a ridge before sinking sharply into runoff. A collar of maples wrapped the chapel in green. Hill and stone seemed part of the chapel, creating the feeling that religion was natural. Twenty-four crosses topped by lights marked the center aisle, twelve crosses to a side. The light ricocheted off the glass windows, and reflections of the crosses rose above each other in gold rows. I talked to the widow of the man who built the chapel. I said I’d return in June and attend a sunrise service. Wayfaring strangers are not reliable. By June I jogged religiously. I decided to run a ten-kilometer race in Nova Scotia. Last July I ran and finished 114 out of 120 starters. This summer I determined to do better. Attending chapel would have forced me to miss a jog, so I did not return to Thorncrown. The day after attending the play, I walked along Grand to the railway depot at the northeast edge of the historic district. When I was a child, Father and I used to watch trains pull through Nashville, crossing West End Avenue at Fairfax. Before I became a teenager, steam engines vanished into wrecking yards, and instead of lingering in sight until they became ordinary, trains were shunted to the periphery of towns and

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consciousness. As a result I sentimentalize trains, associating them with happy childhood. Trips on the Eureka Springs and North Arkansas Railway had also shrunk into nostalgia, engines steaming north from the station for a mile and an eighth before reversing and returning. I bought a dollar bag of popcorn and roamed the switching yard. A stream of water curved out of a water tower, in the light breaking into rainbows. The yard looked as if someone had picked up a hardware store and, turning it upside down, had shaken the contents over the ground—black wrenches, hunks of metal big as thighs, plastic buckets, and gauges looking like eyes. I ran my hands along the sides of engines, sentiment softening rods and wheels—a Baldwin 2-8-2 Mikado, manufactured in 1927, was used to haul logs, and number 201 was one of three engines left from the construction of the Panama Canal. I walked through a passenger car, number 2585. An iron stove sat in the middle of the car while five fans hung from the roof, around them remnants of the cloth ceiling looking like the detritus of last summer’s hornets’ nests. A track inspector’s car sat on rails, a 1951 Chevrolet, its wheels iron, not rubber. Two men oiled a turntable used from 1908 to 1954 by the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway. A heavy snake lay in reeds under the table, only its tail visible. On spotting the snake, one of the men grabbed a shovel. “Don’t kill it,” I said. “It’s harmless.” “I kill every snake I see,” the man said. “In Vietnam two-steps were all over the place. I hate snakes.” While the man spoke, a frog yelped and jumped, and the snake shivered and disappeared into a pool syrupy with oil. An excursion to the end of the line cost nine dollars, but after showing me where water snakes denned, the owner of the railway gave me a pass. Both the conductor and brakeman had moved to Eureka after retiring. In 1994, the brakeman recounted, Frank and Jesse James robbed the train fourteen times for a scene in a movie. On seeing me take out my notebook, a boy left his friends and sat across the aisle from me. “Are you a newspaperman?” the boy asked. The boy was from Edinburg, Mississippi, and the previous night had seen the passion play, traveling in the white van with “One Wild Week” and “Youth 4 Jesus!” on the back windows. Last year, he told me, Bible students visited Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The boy was sixteen and wrote poetry. Five hundred fifty students attended his high school. After he graduated, he planned to enroll in junior college in hopes of becoming a highway

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patrolman. After talking to me for a while, he wanted to return to his group but didn’t know how to escape my presence gracefully. “Do you mind,” he asked apologetically, “if I go back to my friends?” The boy was naive. Taking advantage of him would have been easy. He needed less religion and more learning. Classes with me, I thought, would purge trust, replacing it with canny worldliness. “Nuts,” I muttered, then jotted down a note describing brush bristling against trestles. One night I went to the Pine Mountain Jamboree, a musical show featuring a miscellany of music: bluegrass, pop, Cajun, big band, rock, gospel, and “family tunes” like “El Paso,” “Blue Moon over Kentucky,” and “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” I sat in the middle of the front row. Next to me was a Baptist preacher, “Parson Emeritus,” his card explained, of a church in Little Rock. For sixteen years his wife suffered from Alzheimer’s. “In the beginning nursing was easy,” he said. His wife had recently died, and he’d married a family friend. She sat on his right. Before the singing started, an announcer asked members of the audience to cheer when he mentioned the states in which they lived. “Have I missed anyplace?” the man asked after calling a roll of states. “Pennsylvania,” a man shouted. “Connecticut,” I said. We were the only people in the auditorium not from the Southwest or states bordering Arkansas. On hearing me say “Connecticut,” the preacher said, “I’m more conservative than you. No one in Connecticut is as conservative as I am. Bob Jones University once gave me an award.” “Yes,” I said, “many people in Connecticut think the state should secede and form a new country composed of Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and the maritime provinces of Canada.” “Those people must be communists,” the man said. “Patriots,” I said, “old-fashioned people who believe in family and liberty.” Between nine and eleven people performed at a time, two women singing, the rest men singing and playing instruments, all the music electrified and, from my seat in the front, too loud. During the first half of the show, the women wore cowboy boots and suede skirts and jackets, beads scrolling over the latter. The men wore boots, dark trousers, and suede jackets, all except the drummer, who didn’t wear a jacket. The men also wore string ties with oval turquoise clips at the neck. Although the musicians and singers were energetic, a clown stole the show. He danced, sang, and told jokes, most appealingly corny. Once,

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he recounted, while a farmer was milking Button, his cow, a horsefly flew into Button’s ear. Shortly afterward the fly tumbled into the milk bucket. “All I can say,” the farmer muttered, rubbing his chin, “is in one ear and out the udder.” The clown wore a porkpie hat, a long-sleeved red and white shirt, a necktie that dangled below his waist, loose overalls, and floppy high-topped Converse basketball shoes colored red, white, and blue. The shoes were huge. The shoes, the clown explained, cost $29.95 a pair, no matter the size, “so I decided to get more for my money and bought size 18.” Until this past year when he retired, the clown spent days as a policeman. His wife owned Scarletts Lingerie & Curiosities, Ltd., on South Main. Before opening the store, she had taught school in Hot Springs, first in a public school then in a Christian academy. She must have been a good teacher, for she was an enthusiastic seller, complimenting customers and convincing women who needed rebuilding that skimpy foundation garments could shore up sprung frames and restore appeal long since smothered by overeating. I am a boxer-shorts guy, not a habitué of lingerie shops. “There will be nothing here for me,” I said. “Don’t be too sure,” the woman said, taking a pair of black thongs from a drawer. Glued to the front of the thongs were two large plastic eyes; between them dangled a long black snout. Cans of flavored whipped cream stood on a carousel. “A Body Dessert Topping,” labels said, “For Lovers Only.” An eight-ounce aerosol can cost $8. Flavors resembled those of ice cream: caramel, strawberry, banana, marshmallow, piña colada, cherries jubilee, and peaches and cream. Time has chipped my sweet tooth. “Do you sell much of this stuff?” I said. “Grocery carts,” the woman answered. “This is a honeymoon town.” At intermission performers came down from the stage and chatted with the audience. High school students from the Central Baptist Youth in Daisetta, Texas, wore yellow T-shirts. Stamped in black on the fronts of the shirts was “Today Christ Alive In My Life.” The students formed a line and asked performers to sign the backs of their shirts with marking pens. “Don’t I know you?” a young blond singer said to me. “You look like one of Daddy’s friends.” The girl was from Springdale, Arkansas. She had taken off her suede skirt and put on blue jeans, silver and gold thread curving scalloped down the outside of each leg. “No, I look like a lot of people,” I said, adding, “Where do you go to

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school?” “In the fall I’m going to start the University of Arkansas.” “You’ll love it,” I said. “Do you really think so?” she said. “Oh, yes,” I said. “Goodness,” she said, “that makes me so happy.” A medley of patriotic songs closed the performance: “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” “America the Beautiful,” and “God Bless America,” during which the audience stood and a large American flag unfurled down the wall behind the stage. Later, outside, I watched nighthawks sweep out of dark into light, chasing insects. I started to buy an ice cream at Pine Mountain Village, a group of shops with period-piece facades, but I changed my mind and drove back to Dairy Hollow. Only by being alone can a person escape himself. Other people provoke habitual behavior. No matter how a person wiggles, in the company of others he cannot slip the leash of identity. Talking to strangers at jamborees and nice people who asked how long I planned to stay in Eureka suddenly made me tired of me. One morning I drove to the Kings River and rented a canoe from Ernie Kilman. “Kings River Outfitters supports me now,” he said. “Painting underwrites my retirement.” I wore sandals, sunglasses, a floppy hat, a long-sleeved shirt, a bathing suit, and an orange workman’s vest seamed with pockets. In pockets of the vest I stored my driving glasses and driver’s license. Binoculars hung from my neck. On the floor of the canoe I laid a backpack. In the pack I stuffed pad and pens, car keys, a guidebook to reptiles, two oranges, an apple, a tube of Banana Boat sunscreen, and a plastic bottle containing water drawn from the faucet in the kitchen of my flat at the colony. In April Vicki paid $7.99 for my bathing suit at the Wal-Mart in Willimantic. Scarlet hibiscus, orange orchids, gray philodendron leaves, and assorted blue and yellow flowers made the suit look like a shower curtain. I took it to class and modeled it over khakis. “Beware males wearing bathing suits like this,” I warned students. “Only males sure of their masculinity wrap themselves in curtains. In contrast, lads in Speedos are harmless, so unsure of their hormones that they feel compelled to advertise their little nasties.” “I realize this suit is dangerous,” I said to Ernie. “If a woman sees it, word will spread, and shortly thereafter herds of females, all overcome by passion, with gather along the banks of the Kings.” “I’m not worried about women seeing the suit,” Ernie said. “Men are another matter.” I followed Ernie along a dirt road to Rock House Creek, where I left my

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car. He then drove me to Rimkis, where I launched the canoe. When I was young, I steered straight lines. Now I lack both the strength and the inclination to do so. I kept the paddle in the water too long, and the bow of the canoe slipped into half-circles. I have aged beyond point to point. Still, as lives drift, so a canoe should meander. Prose that depicts life as a straight line distorts living and harms the naive who measure their lives by accounts in books. Finding they cannot live up to the falsehoods on the page, they think themselves weak or deprived. Far more responsible is prose that wanders erratically, mirroring life as it is and thus reassuring. The Kings River flowed north and I paddled with the current, covering nine miles in four hours. Silver maples, sycamores, and hackberries hung like umbrellas over shelves pebbly with dolomite. A map turtle basked on a snag. A rubyspot landed on the handle of my paddle, midveins in the damselfly’s wings pulsing with red. Small water snakes whisked across the river. A Louisiana water thrush probed the roots of a tree, searching for insects and crustaceans. Little and great blue herons broke cover and flew up the river ahead of me. A weasel wrinkled along a bank, and schools of long-nosed gars spawned in shallows. Butterflies puddled the shore, their wings opening and shutting, designs shifting like glass in kaleidoscopes, the insects mostly coppers and swallowtails—black and white zebras, American yellow and black, and possibly giants, brevets of yellow triangular on wings. Occasionally limestone bluffs loomed above the river, heavy as sleep. Every hundred or so yards, small rapids churned the water. Between rapids the river was still, and I drifted tranquilly, thought disturbing me no more than the rim of water trailing the stern of the canoe. No one as uncoordinated and as slow to react as I am should relax. Two trees blocked a curve, forming a snag shaped like a bookend. To slip between the trees I paddled along the left bank of the Kings. Near the snag the loose stream narrowed, rolled over, and tightened into sinew. As soon as my bow came alongside the base of the bookend stretching across the river, I had to spin the canoe on its stern and make a right-angle turn. If I reacted too slowly, the boat would crash into the trunk and roots of the tree lying parallel to the bank, upper branches brushing the shore. Almost as soon as I spun right, I had to zag left to avoid slipping broadside into a clot of roots. I failed. Before I could

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swing the bow to the left, the water swept me into the roots. I capsized, and the canoe dove under the trunk, roots grasping it like fingers. The upper open side of the canoe caught the current, which hammered the bottom deeper into the roots, in the process shoveling buckets of sand and pebble into the canoe, anchoring it. Because the current thrust straight into the canoe rather than sliding obliquely through and washing out to the side, it locked my backpack against the hull, and I lost only the apple, an orange, the tube of sunscreen, and the bottle of water. Water soaked the guide to reptiles, the binding swelling as if suffering from dropsy. Water also turned my notebook into a slab of pressed wood, gluing pages together. In my overnight bag, Vicki put a small sewing kit. In 1979 Vicki and I spent a week at the Cloister in Sea Island, Georgia, and the kit was one of the amenities supplied by the resort. At Dairy Hollow I teased apart pages of my notebook with the sewing needle. Once pages were separated I placed hackberry leaves between them, both to quicken drying and to keep them from sticking back together. Water also drizzled into my binoculars, forming reflecting pools on the lenses. After the pools dried, they left behind blue crusts. The current swept sand through my wallet, coating charge cards. I worried that the sand ruined the identity strips on the cards, and late that afternoon I walked downtown and for a twodollar fee tested a card at an ATM, withdrawing $100. After piling paddle, vest, backpack, hat, sunglasses, and binoculars on a sandbar, I tried to free the canoe. I lifted and pushed. Once my muscles bulged like melons. In the early 1960s I was a counselor at a boys’ camp. On lazy afternoons another counselor and I used to balance wooden Old Town canoes on our shoulders and race uphill. We ran until our legs gave way, and we collapsed, laughing in exhaustion, the canoes covering us like shells. In the Kings River I almost cried. I dug into the sand and after breathing deeply dropped on my hands and knees and arched my back against the gunnels in hopes of dislodging the canoe. Stones sliced my arms and legs, but the canoe did not move. Only luck worked. A local couple, Mick and Lena Wilson, drifted into sight. Mick quickly freed the canoe. Afterward I sat on a bank, muscles trembling. The rest of the trip passed without a ripple. Because I was exhausted, I drove carelessly. On the way back to Eureka I did not notice a rock jutting into the road near Rock House

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Creek and smashed the rocker panel. “A costly day,” I muttered that evening. Before expense soiled the evening, however, I recalled a remark I’d heard in Connecticut. “Winter was so cold,” a man said, “that words froze.” What sounds, I wondered, did words make when they thawed? Did some syllables thaw before others? Did big words, sesquipedalians, freeze slower than small words? How did cold affect slang and vulgarity? Did religious words freeze, or did they remain warm, no matter the temperature? Almost every afternoon I sat on a bench outside the Crescent and studied tourists. Occasionally I sat in the lobby, and some days I climbed the stairs to the observation deck on the fourth floor. “To make a small fortune in Eureka,” several people told me, “you have to bring a big fortune to town and spend it.” Eureka seduced travelers, and many returned, if not to spend big fortunes, at least to invest in new lives, restoring old homes and buying bed-and-breakfasts. The owners of the Crescent had invested heavily in Eureka, brightening the town’s future and their own lives, if not necessarily swelling their bank accounts. In 1995, Elise and Marty Roenigk bought and renovated Eureka’s two massive limestone hotels, on the busiest part of Spring: the Basin Park, appealing to lively, bouncy visitors, and thus not to me, then the Crescent, an I-shaped building, calm atop West Mountain, the location a platform from which eye and mind could range. While the Basin Park seemed to cultivate “the I,” directing vision inward to pleasures of the moment, the Crescent faced outward, toward landscapes that dwarfed the individual. I stood on the front porch and, looking at ridges blue in the clear air, thought about the environment, not that of the Ozarks but that of Connecticut, asthmatic with chemicals. The Crescent appealed to older travelers, people who had lived the stories of their lives and were prone to melancholy and sentiment. Engraved in marble above a fireplace in the lobby was verse. For me the verse described not simply fire in a grate but also the course of marriage, affection warming as couples aged into depending on each other. Although upon a summer’s day, You’ll lightly turn from me away, When autumn leaves are scattered wide, You’ll often linger by my side.

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But when the snow the earth doth cover, Then you will be my ardent lover.

The Roenigks bought land in Newton County, south of Eureka— 1,250 acres along Smith Creek in Boxley Valley and 360 acres of watershed, high grazing land bulging like a disk between the Buffalo and White Rivers. After purchasing additional plots in order to protect an underground river, the Roenigks planned to donate their property to nature trusts. At 9:30 one Saturday in June, they picked me up at Dairy Hollow and took me to see their holdings. Elise drove a Rubicon, the toughest Jeep made, a necessity because the way into their property in Boxley Valley followed a logging road long washed into gully, rocks as big as heads butting the tires at every revolution. Over my protest, perhaps not as strong as it should have been, Marty folded himself into the rear seat, pushing Anna, a young Irish setter, in before him. Beyond Kingston an elk strode across bottomland reedy with grass, a calf bobbing behind her. Smith Creek ran through a sharp gully. Like a tired jogger, water stopped and started, gathering in silvery green pools before sprinting away gasping. Curbs of boulders, some big as barns, pushed the creek into stalls. Land fell steeply down to the water like slick roofs. Sinkholes potted slopes, and trees broke and sank akimbo into the damp, limbs sticking up in rails. The soil was thin and lay atop rocks like throws that bunched and slid underfoot. Walking was difficult, and I grabbed saplings, using them like canes to steady myself. Small beeches grew beside the creek, their bark green with moss, not blue as in Connecticut. From cracks in boulders hobblebush fanned outward, then curved upward into the sun, clawing back toward the stone. A snake slipped through roots, but I saw few creatures, the hard walking confining sight to the immediate—boot and ground. We ate lunch at the Valley Café in Kingston, the town itself a white square with a gazebo in the middle. I held the door of the café for an old woman. “I move slowly because I am eighty-seven,” she said. “I’m ninety-nine,” I said. She looked at me, then said, “You can’t be ninetynine. You are too young.” “You can’t be eighty-seven,” I said, and she smiled. I ate barbecued brisket. Eggs would have been better. Cooking in small-town cafés often rankles, like an irascible relative who won’t die. On the Roenigks’ second property, hayfields bristled around a farmhouse.

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A line of red oaks shimmied down a hill. A forest curved blue above the distance like a rolltop desk. Elise drove through a pasture and followed a track to Moose Creek and two waterfalls, Rainbow and Hole in the Rock, both of which Ernie Kilman had agreed to paint. A meadowlark sprang from the field and flew to a fence post. Vetch, oxeye daisies, black-eyed Susans, and rough-fruited cinquefoil sparkled like colored glass. Beside the track waved wands of yellow sweet clover. Platters of spiderwort grew in thick place settings beside the creek. In a clearing I saw a flower I hadn’t seen before, Sampson’s snakeroot. At four o’clock the Roenigks dropped me at Dairy Hollow. They had been generous. In fact, they had underwritten the Moondancer Fellowship. Before the outing I wondered whether my presence in Eureka worth the cost. “Surely, you know the answer to that,” Vicki said later. During the day I labored to be enthusiastic. Enthusiasm, however, clouds vision like a cataract. In attempting to be amenable, I neglected the world outside the Jeep. Of course a person always sees more when alone. In company observations are shaped not by landscape but by notion, habitual and preconceived. Such thoughts aside, however, the day and sight of the elk made me hanker for a creaturely world. Seven miles south of Eureka was Turpentine Creek, a wildlife refuge that provided homes for neglected or unwanted big cats, some 125 cats, and a smattering of other animals, including a badger, bears, a rhesus monkey, a fawn, a parrot, and a potbellied pig. The refuge consisted of 450 acres. Most of the animals, however, lived in modest wire enclosures sunk into concrete. Larger habitats were being fenced, and a few animals had begun to spend time in them, becoming almost invisible amid high grass. Eighty-five percent of what the animals ate was donated by Tyson. Still, maintaining the cats was costly, and the refuge advertised “Weddings on the Wild Side.” In pictures, brides and grooms knelt beside tigers, a keeper always the third person in the photograph. Tourists could also spend nights in a pair of rooms bordering a big enclosure. Two porches extended into the enclosure. A skin of heavy wire surrounded the porches, making them look like face guards jutting out of football helmets. Most cats in the refuge came from four states: Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma, “the problem states for animals in this country,” an intern said. During the summer ten students worked at the refuge,

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for their labor receiving credentials, room and board, and a modest allowance. Nine students studied biology, the tenth anthropology. Jeff, who escorted me, had majored in biology at Western Illinois State University. He hoped to work in a zoo or for the Park Service. For the most part the cats had led grim lives. Many had been rescued from safari parks, a euphemism for cat farms, feline equivalents of puppy mills. I learned that cougars were the cats of choice of drug dealers, although Luna had been plucked out of a fraternity house at the University of Missouri. Only four and a half months old, she was dehydrated and sick. Unlike the abused animals, Kizi, a bobcat, had been loved. She slept with her owner’s eighty-three-year-old mother. She lived in the house and had access to a garage. When her owner could not housebreak her after trying for two and a half years, she decided Kizi would be “happier with others of her kind” and brought her to the refuge. The owner did not abandon Kizi. She stayed in contact by e-mail and visited from Oklahoma. A veteran had owned Sampson, a Bengal tiger. The man had lost both his legs below the knee in Vietnam. Employees of the refuge drove to Texas and fetched Sampson and four other tigers when the cats became too difficult for the man to control. Sherkera was born in Harrison, Arkansas. Her mother was part of a menagerie owned by a small circus. Three cubs in Sherkera’s litter were stillborn, Jeff said, and becoming “lodged in the birth canal,” Sherkera suffered from “a variety of congenital birth defects,” among others, “dwarfism, foreshortened limbs, deformities of pelvis and joints.” Jade was a “liger,” her father a lion, her mother a tiger. A zoo in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, exhibited her until she developed the “bad habit of spraying customers.” “Cat farms,” I said aloud while driving back to Eureka, “the land of the freely abusive.” The Citizen appeared that afternoon, and I walked uptown and took a copy from a rack outside the Palace Hotel. On Spring, a man hoed his garden. “Your garden looks nice,” I said. “It’s getting there,” he said, “slowly, but it’s getting there.” “How long have you been working on the garden?” I asked. “Since 1984,” he said. “It’s getting there.” I read the Police Beat. Before noon on Friday, “Two officers agreed with adjacent shop workers that, even though they had water and open windows, some dogs in a van parked across from Basin Spring Park were worth keeping an eye on, in case they started acting

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funny.” A couple knocked on my door and asked the way to the passion play. I drew a map for them. “The Lord bless you,” the man said. “Thank you,” I said. Gaps between words and thoughts are often deep. “You can kiss my bottom,” I thought as I shut the door. I was growing restless. The time had come for me to return to Connecticut. I didn’t greet Eliza at the airport when she returned from Russia. I missed seeing her dressed for the senior prom. I didn’t attend her high school graduation. Molly and Kate, two of Eliza’s friends, had invited classmates and parents to a party at their grandfather’s house on June 22. “So I can make the party,” I wrote Vicki, “I’m going to leave on the 19th instead of the 20th.” At six o’clock on the 19th I jogged. After breakfast I packed the car. I told people good-bye, and at 8:20, I left. At 8:21, I stopped at the Crescent. One evening at dinner Karen wore a loose blouse. That night a visitor ate at the colony. On being introduced to Karen, she said, “I see you have brought a little friend with you.” “She thought I was pregnant,” Karen said later. The next morning Karen began working out at the Blue Moon Spa in the basement of the Crescent. “Good-bye, Karen,” I said, sticking my head into the workout room. “The memoir will be a best-seller.” “’Bye, Sam,” Karen said, waving two small barbells. At 8:23 I was back in the Mazda. Sixteen minutes later, in Berryville, I topped up the gas tank. From then on miles blurred the day. At eleven I stopped in Cuba, Missouri, and at McDonald’s ate a chicken Caesar salad. Without my asking, the waitress charged me the senior citizen rate for coffee, 35 cents. That night at 10:08, I ate dinner in a Waffle House outside Brookville, Ohio. Kendra, the waitress, was a high school student, and she was breaking in a crew of younger students. As a result my food appeared erratically, eggs and potatoes followed by a waffle and finally the sausage I ordered. A woman sat opposite me in the next booth. Her name was Mary, but she instructed me to call her Julie. She had lived in thirteen different houses, all on farms, but now she lived in an apartment in town. “Thank God,” she said. She asked where I was coming from and how far I planned to travel. “To Columbus,” I said, “but if I’m alert, maybe a little farther.” She urged me to stay in Brookville. “There’s a motel just down the street, and you look tired,” she said. When I said I was going to push on, she said her spirit would accompany me and poke me in

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the ribs if I became sleepy. The interstate was empty when I reached Columbus, so instead of sheering onto a bypass, I stayed on 70 until I reached 71 in the middle of the city. Suddenly it was 2:55 a.m. and I was east of Akron in Brimfield, Ohio, eating a chocolate doughnut in a Speedway Convenience Store. I had driven beyond sleep. In western Pennsylvania my hands began to shake, and twice I pulled into rest stops and dozed in the car, the longer nap lasting eighteen minutes. I worried about hitting an animal, and until the sun rose I scanned shoulders and hillsides. I wasn’t hungry, and I stopped only for gas. At 1:04 that afternoon, 12:04 Eureka time, I turned into my driveway in Storrs. I had been on the road for twenty-seven hours and forty-four minutes. I’d driven 1,413 miles, the distance shorter than the trip out because I drove through rather than around some cities. Moreover, I didn’t stray from the interstate searching for motels or restaurants. The kitchen door was open. “Hello,” I shouted, “is anybody home?” The house was silent, so I shouted a second then a third and a fourth time. I started upstairs, but then Francis walked out of the study. He had been surfing the Internet. “Oh, it’s you,” he said. Neither Vicki nor Eliza was home. Eliza appeared first. “At dinner I want you to tell me about Russia,” I said. “I can’t wait to hear.” “Not tonight, Daddy,” Eliza said. “I’m eating at Eleanor’s house. She’s burning CDs for me.” “What are you doing home?” Vicki said when she saw me. “You are not supposed to be here for two days.” The next morning I got up at five and jogged around Horsebarn Hill. Afterward I ate breakfast, my usual banana on granola. Then I paid bills, the last a check to Harvard for four years of tuition, $108,857. “Do we have any money left in the bank?” Vicki said. “Not much,” I said. “Why did you pay everything at once?” she asked, walking out of the study without waiting for an answer. “So,” I said to myself, “I won’t spend four years worrying about the economy. Maybe I’ll live longer.” Then I thought, “What will I do now?” Suddenly Dairy Hollow popped into mind. All the other residents had spent time at various writers’ colonies. I opened a notebook and looked at addresses. Written atop a page was “Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Edinburgh.” “From Arkansas to Scotland,” I thought, “oh, boy. My heart and pencils belong in the highlands, porridge for breakfast, haggis for dinner.” I opened a drawer and, taking out a sheet of paper and pen, wrote, “Dear Director.”

Dog Days

An aging man should not own an old dog. George turned thirteen in July. His dog days foreshadowed the doldrums into which I am slowly nodding. In past summers George loped down the lane behind the barn, air currents spinning salty fragrances around him, pulling his nose right and left. This summer George wallowed through troughs of grass, his hull slipping warped, no longer scudding in the bright sun. His head hung down, and the skin under his jaw looked like a flying jib stripped of wings. During days he wandered without purpose, one moment hunching by the steps leading to the backhouse, appearing to want to go outside, the next scratching the screen door on the porch, asking to come in. Time had swept his helmsman overboard, and his tiller swung directionless. When not pitching and yawing, he clung to me, seeming to need assurance and affection. Occasionally I became exasperated and shouted, “Go to your bed.” Immediately thereafter I imagined myself tottering toward the kitchen in slippers and bathrobe, weary children saying, “Go back to bed, Dad.” At nine every night I carried George upstairs. I set him atop a pillow on the floor next to my bed, then I covered him with a blanket. At 11:15 I lugged him back downstairs and took him outside so he could pump himself dry for the voyage through the night. Afterward I carted him back upstairs. Shortly before six in the morning, he stood and flapped his ears to awaken me. I took him back outside, after which I built a fire in the kitchen stove and he fell asleep on a pad beside my rocking chair. “You live a dog’s life,” Vicki said one night. “Not yet,” I answered, “not quite yet.” In the past George resembled a trim bark. This summer he became a 172

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lugger. Heavily laden and lumbering, he bolted meals and lived, Vicki said, to eat. “Like me,” I thought. Once a week I went to Tim Hortons, a doughnut shop in Yarmouth. I drank a medium-sized cup of coffee, always in a ceramic cup, and ate a Dutchie, a rectangular wad of glazed dough spotted with raisins and fat. Trips to Tim Hortons were the high points of weeks in Nova Scotia, and I looked forward to them eagerly. One Wednesday an old man sat across the aisle from me, a worn version of myself, I thought. The man’s back curled like the upper half of a question mark. He wore a green and white checkered shirt, a red baseball cap, Canadian Tire sewed above the bill, boots, and dark khaki trousers held up by red suspenders. Time had shrunk the man’s hips into coat hangers, and the trousers hung loosely from his waist, wrinkled like laundry bags. His two middle-aged daughters accompanied him, one sitting on his right, the other on his left. That morning they signed him out of “the home” for an outing, and for a treat brought him to Tim Hortons. The man was deaf, and while he ate a sugar doughnut, the women leaned toward each other and talked over his shoulders. The man paid no attention to them and concentrated on eating. He held the doughnut tightly in both hands, head pushed up, looking like that of a turtle sticking out of its shell. His eyes gleamed alertly, as if he thought someone might snatch the treat away. “No more Dutchies for me,” I resolved. The resolution lasted only until the following week. July was flush with beginnings. Four newly hatched red-bellied snakes lay under a slab of plywood near the bluff overlooking the Gulf of Maine. Tadpoles, big as thumbs, roiled the cow pond. A young muskrat swirled through rushes growing beside the bridge that spanned the Beaver River outlet. Seventy yards above the bridge, six ermine bundled across the gravel road. A robin lured a fledgling from its nest in the golden elder behind the backhouse. Hares no bigger than fists crouched under canes of rugosa roses. Some mornings I got up at three thirty and after brewing a pot of tea wrote in the study, sitting at the desk in the bay window. One morning I watched a young hare thrust through periwinkle under the window. On reaching the front entrance to the house, he tried to hop up the steps. The hare was so young that he moved awkwardly. Instead of propelling him forward his feet pushed his body sideways, and the hare tumbled over four times before he reached the top step.

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Often while the green extravagance of summer colored vision, my thoughts drifted to endings. Two days before watching the hare climb steps, I’d found tufts of brown fur on the headland, sweepings from the meal of a marsh hawk. I chased the hare off the porch into roses bearded with ferns. “Stay there,” I said, “and maybe the hawk won’t get you.” Life, alas, is beaked. That morning I received a letter informing me that two days before his retirement party, a friend died in a car wreck. That night cirrus clouds curled fruity overhead—orange, then pink and purple. Instead of imagining fair seedtimes, I thought about sad old women, dyeing and baking thin locks in hopes of disguising age, hiding not so much from others but from the people who stared at them from mirrors. “More than two score years and ten have come and gone since that day when I, Benjamin Lathrop, put out from Salem harbor, a green hand on the ship Island Princess,” Charles Boardman Hawes wrote at the beginning of The Mutineers (1920). Almost as much time has passed since I read such books. Late in life, though, a man returns to childhood reading, tales of butchery and cowardice on the high seas, of bravery and the improbable survival of virtue, appealing more than great books in which meaning gapes like a bog, pages scratchy with leatherleaf. After dinner and between journeying up and downstairs with George, I read three of Hawes’s books: The Mutineers, The Great Quest, and The Dark Frigate. I didn’t notice the guttural cough of the foghorn at Port Maitland, and I steered a straight course under blue skies to enjoyment. “What do those books make you think about?” Vicki asked. “Nothing,” I said, “just the subject people my age should think about.” Returning to Nova Scotia every summer contributes to the illusion of smooth continuance, each summer not the first thread in a new fabric but another button on a cardigan, perhaps looser than buttons below but still familiar and comfortable. Every summer the songs of whitethroated sparrows bounce from scrub like novelty tunes from the fifties. Early in the morning ravens grind woodenly. In the evening verries perch in damp ruffs of spruce, their songs refracting and piercing the fog in beams of color, blue, green, and pale pink. Every summer I scythe Japanese knotweed growing at the edge of the side meadow. In the barn I split firewood. Early in July Vicki buys beet greens and strawberries at roadside stands. After a flick of time she buys potatoes, peas, raspberries, and Swiss chard. No matter how slowly I jog, on the

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headland butterflies spring from my feet in clumps, first azures and orange crescents, then wood nymphs, and finally, over the lowlands near the Beaver River outlet, cabbage whites spiraling, dizzy with mating. Although the children now spend summers far from Canada and the arms that carried them down the sharp headland to the beach, occasionally a child telephones and memory lifts me. Late in July Eliza called from Minnesota, where she was teaching Russian. She was weeping. Francis sent her an e-mail from Storrs. He said Harvard had written her. Because of an unanticipated high rate of acceptance, some freshmen, including Eliza, would have to live off-campus. “The university,” Francis wrote, “will help you find an apartment.” “Daddy,” Eliza sobbed, “I want to meet other freshmen. I have been so lonely in high school. I want to make friends and be part of college.” Francis’s e-mail was a joke. “I must have forgotten to write ‘ha, ha’ at the end,” he said. I explained that good jokes did not upset or create anxiety. Instead they provoked warm laughter, making people appreciate life. Vicki and I do not agree on humor, the disagreement long-standing. This summer we didn’t watch television. Instead we listened to the radio, on Saturday nights tuning in the CBC and Finkleman’s 45s. For two hours Danny Finkleman played pop songs from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, lining each record with quirky commentary—suggesting, for example, that the CBC construct a bowling alley in the basement of its building in Toronto. One Saturday while Vicki was outside emptying the slop dish, Finkleman told a joke. Normally I don’t like jokes, but I enjoyed this one so much I was gasping for breath when Vicki returned from the compost pile. Golf provided the frame for the joke, any discussion of which makes me dream of holing out, in part because the pesticides and weed killers slathered over courses have turned fairways into toxic dumps. “The poisons pit even steel-plated shoes,” my friend Josh told me, stepping forward to address an idea. “The only safe way to play golf is on stilts. Even so, eighteen holes can reduce a pair of sixteen-foot titanium stilts to six inches.” “If sprays shrink stilts that much,” I said, swinging my niblick at the idea, “a real sportsman would need several bags of clubs for a single round, the lengths of the clubs in one bag different from those in another. Caddy fees would be enormous. The game is doomed.” “No,” Josh said, always up for the short game, “all a duffer

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needs is a set of clubs with adjustable shafts, the length of a driver at the top end, say, twenty-one feet. Of course, bags would be expensive, and giants could charge monstrous fees for caddying.” Finkleman’s joke hooked less than Josh’s musings. At the bar on the nineteenth hole, a man described his new golf ball to a friend. “If topped into water, the ball floats,” he said. “If sliced out of sight into deep rough, it beeps, and at dusk a light beneath the gutta-percha blinks automatically.” “Good-bye double bogies,” the friend exclaimed. “That’s fabulous. Where did you get the ball?” “I found it,” the man said. I laughed uncontrollably after telling the story, belly rising like a bunker, then sinking into a divot. Vicki looked, as scratch narrators put it, teed off, her expression grittier than a sand wedge. I expected silence, that being par for a 7,200-yard course of marriage. Often I don’t respond to Vicki’s remarks, and if I answer, frequently I chip only a word or two her way. Unlike Vicki I eschew fashionable discussions on the radio, particularly boutique programs that pander to the salacious. One chilly July afternoon Vicki sat in the rocking chair by the stove, sipping Earl Grey tea, feet raised, resting on the seat of a kitchen chair. From the radio atop the table to her right, a feline voice purred. “Do you think,” Vicki said as I strolled into the room, “our marriage could survive a sex change?” “Yes,” I said, and, striding into the barn, began to split wood. Next spring Michigan will publish two books I wrote. “I wonder if I will make a half-million on the books,” I said in the kitchen that night. “I want to win the lottery,” Vicki replied. “I’m talking about the sales of my books,” I said. “I prefer to talk about something more realistic,” Vicki said, “like winning the lottery.” Years ago, Vicki would have allowed me a handicap and not responded to my musings. The most any of my books has earned is four thousand dollars, the half-million simply the dream of a buccaneering reader. Not all summer’s doings dragged like anchors, stirring silt. I thought of titles for two essays, both from songs, the first, “Precious Memories,” susceptible, I am afraid, to waterlogged melancholy. The second song, “Give My Love to Nell,” told a story. Two close friends, Jack and Bill, left home arm in arm and sailed across the ocean, seeking to better their lot in life. Besides home and family, Bill left his girlfriend, Nell. Jack made his fortune first. “Give my love to Nell,” Bill requested before Jack returned home. Jack obeyed his friend, and later, when Bill arrived home,

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he discovered that Nell and Jack had married. Instead of pining or behaving badly, as characters often do in sentimental songs, Bill wished the couple well and got on with living. Rather than mulling connections or opportunities missed, my essay would celebrate actual happenings. “In other words,” Vicki said, “whatever is is,” adding, “That’s a wallet stuffer.” Although the titles now look hackneyed, other summer doings seemed practically new. A boreal chickadee foraged alders around the cow pond, the second boreal chickadee I’ve seen. At my age, sights and sounds are suspect. Not until a second sighting confirms the first do I claim to have seen a bird. At the Beaver River outlet I found a dead loon. Salt had cured and sun dried the body. The loon died during winter, the feathers on top its head dark gray and a white patch under its bill. I snapped the loon’s spine at the base of the neck. The neck was long, resembling the butt of a pistol. When school starts in August, I’ll take the head to class and use it as a pointer. “Students will think you insane,” Vicki said. “Exactly,” I said, “a lunatic.” “Is everything a joke with you?” Vicki said. “Very little,” I said, lifting George into my lap and rubbing him behind the ears. Not every animal I held was dead or declining. “What’s that?” Vicki said one night, switching on the lamp that sat on her bedside table. A little brown bat whirled overhead, then, swooping low, flew out of the bedroom into the upstairs hall. The house resembles a barn. Ceilings are high, that of Vicki’s and my bedroom being the highest, beyond my fingertips even if I stand on a stool. I closed the bedroom door so the bat could not return and hang himself high above my reach. “I will find him in the morning,” I told Vicki. “I hope so,” she said. “I’d feel terrible if the bat starved to death.” Before breakfast the next morning I searched the house. I began upstairs, scouring the long hall and the other four bedrooms. I peered under beds and looked behind headboards. I pushed chests away from walls and shifted clothes in closets. Downstairs I searched the hall and the study. I lay on the floor trying to spot droppings. I almost gave up and told Vicki the bat must have flown into the chimney in the study and escaped. But then I found it behind the door to the front parlor. The bat looked like a furry Mars Bar. While Vicki peeled the bat’s legs off the top of the door, I held a butterfly net over the animal. The bat clicked, then slipped into the net. I carried the bat

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into the barn and set it atop the old sleigh, placing it on the rear seat, making sure it couldn’t slip off. Eight minutes later when I returned to the barn, the bat was gone. “We should have named it,” Vicki said. “Yes,” I said. “Still, that was our first house bat. What a thrill!” This summer I spent more time then ever before stirring about purposelessly. “Like George,” Vicki said. I wandered outside throughout the day, hoping to glimpse an unfamiliar insect. I had spent fourteen summers in Beaver River. The chances of my spotting a creature not seen before were small, and so, like those of George, my excursions were short, and I quickly returned to the kitchen and munched on cheese and crackers, prunes and peanut butter, muffins, and rhubarb flummery, in the middle of this last a mound of whipped cream as alluring as Treasure Island. To prevent myself from dozing the summer away, I did things I had not done before. The first Saturday in August, Vicki and I went to the Quilt Show and Tea sponsored by the Patchwork Pals Quilters Guild and held at Beacon United Church in Yarmouth. More than 150 quilts hung from railings or draped over the backs of chairs. The chairs stood in double rows on the tops of tables, eight, six, four, or two chairs to a table. For an hour and a half I roamed the hall, studying patterns: bow tie, double wedding ring, flying geese, Dresden plate, city streets, winning hand, postage stamp, Ohio rose, Lady of the Lake, and bargello rippling in waves. Color spilled from vases of trapunto flowers. From the center of a radiant star, eleven pink and red eight-pointed stars shimmered outward. My favorite quilts were old, in particular Grandmother’s Flower Garden, its bright bouquets washed into pale delicacy. The three-dollar ticket not only admitted me to the show but also let me drink tea or coffee and eat as many homemade confections as I wanted. I sampled six. Culinary memory deteriorating almost as fast as nominal, I recall only two, a devil’s food cake muddy with icing and a cheesecake, a creamy bush with blueberries spilling heavy over the top. Few men attended the exhibition. On entering the auditorium I counted six men and forty-four women; on leaving, seven men and seventy-four women. Pasted to a wall in the men’s lavatory was a yellow sign, black letters printed upon it: “Please wrap your gum in a piece of paper towel and throw it in the garbage not in the urinal.” Under the request, someone

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scribbled, “as it tastes bad then.” The impulse toward disorder runs deep in me, as in society itself, and I admired the person who wrote on the sign, in the act not marring cardboard but making it reflect human nature. In contrast the quilts fostered the pleasant falsehood that life radiated design or at least that order could be imposed upon living, transforming chaos into the beautiful and the functional. In the house at Beaver River clocks tick like balm, generating the illusion that time is regular. In the attempt to control living, man created time. Now man deludes himself into believing he controls time when the truth is that man never masters his creations. Instead they master him, binding him and his offspring like serfs to ways of living. Studying the quilts led me to ponder education. Instead of attending university for four years and coming to believe that learning prepares people for life, wouldn’t children fare better, I thought, if they mastered quilting? Although sewing might foster wrongheaded ideas about order and disorder, at least the children would belong to a community. Society has accepted the exaggerated claims of education for so long that place and family no longer provide identity. Instead schools furnish pedigrees, the bluer the educational lines the more admirable the person. Rarely do people mention family or birthplace when they introduce me. Instead they cite the schools I attended, almost never referring to Sewanee but not failing to mention Cambridge and Princeton. Such ponderings are not for young but old dogs who have ground teeth away chewing at life. That aside, one Sunday Vicki and I drove to Salmon River and watched the stock car races at Lake Doucette, a clay keyhole sunk into a hilltop and bound on three sides by spruce. Berms, buttressed curbs of tires, and wire fences surrounded the track. We sat at the base of the triangle just beyond the end of the straightaway below the starting line. Protection seemed flimsy. “That fence couldn’t restrain a sleepy cow, much less an automobile,” Vicki said after a car cartwheeled toward the grandstand, trunk over engine, at the start of the first race. “Right,” I said, brushing clods of dirt from shirt and trousers. Throughout the afternoon dirt rained upon us. When Vicki bit into a slice of pizza, she got “the works.” Gravel had drizzled over us and covered her pizza, resembling nubs of hamburger. The cars looked like boxes wrapped in crumpled foil. Trucks towed them into the infield: dump, pickup, tow, and a pink and white Firestone repair truck. Dur-

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ing races people sat in white plastic chairs on the roof of the Firestone truck. Throughout the afternoon tires smashed into berms, and the cars themselves whirled about like water beetles. I scanned the infield looking for an ambulance but did not discover one. “What happens if someone in the stands is hurt?” Vicki said. “I don’t know,” I said. “The best you can do is learn from that woman in front of us,” I said, pointing down to the right. Tattooed on the woman’s left shoulder were two hands, palms pressed together in prayer. Just after the start of the first race, three cars flipped. At the first turn following the restart, five cars spun out, smacking the berm beneath us. “Oh, shit!” Vicki said when a tire flew over the grandstand. Vicki said the word so many times during the first three races that I suggested she emend her exclamations. “Sugar would sound more like a lady.” “Fudge you,” she said. The cars raced in categories: those with four-cylinder engines, six cylinders, then eights, followed by cars whose eight-cylinder engines had been modified. To muffle the storm of noise we stuffed cotton balls into our ears. Still, by afternoon’s end, I recognized categories by the noises engines made: the heavy thrum of modifieds and the thin popping of four cylinders. Individual cars stood out, one with “Welcome to the Swamp” printed on a mud flap and a 1989 Volkswagen Fox painted white and black like a Holstein. Rubber udders hung beneath the rear doors on both sides of the car. Unfortunately the car needed freshening and did not finish a single race. Local businesses sponsored racers and their names appeared on doors and hoods, often sprayed on: Nightime Auto Salvage, Howard Andrews Electrical, S & H Newell Trucking & Bait, Bishara’s Garage, Waterview Machine Works, Andrew LeBlanc’s Excavating, and D. J.’s Corner Store, this last in Salmon River, where we bought newspapers and ice cream cones. Between races the Water Buffalo, an old tanker that once hauled milk, sprinkled water over the track. The announcer discussed cars and drivers. Sometimes he addressed the crowd, wishing Gerald and Christine a happy anniversary. At the entrance to the track, the Lions Club sold tickets for the half and half. Tickets cost a dollar, fifty cents going to the Lions, fifty cents to a winner-take-all pot. I bought three tickets, and we stayed until the draw. We arrived at the track at 11:20; the drawing took place at 3:15, the winner receiving $954. “We must go now,” I said to Vicki. “I have to

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let George out.” “I know. I know,” Vicki said. “But we are coming back next week. This is the real stuff.” “Perhaps,” I said, “but maybe you have been brainwashed.” “Washed!” Vicki exclaimed, brushing off her trousers. “I look like I have spent the day on my hands and knees in a garden.” “I read an article that accused the government of experimenting with mind control,” I continued, ignoring the interruption. “What proof did the article cite?” Vicki asked. “The number of yellow cars in New York City,” I said. “Mind control provides the only reasonable explanation for so many people driving yellow cars.” “Sugar,” Vicki said. On the way home Vicki didn’t talk. Instead she stared at the dunes behind Bartlett’s Beach. George moved so slowly when I let him out that I picked him up and carried him into the yard. “You’re a good old fellow, my good old fellow,” I said, suddenly unutterably sad.

A Brown Bird Sang in the Apple Tree

Last September I applied for a fellowship. The application asked several questions, one of which was, “What do you consider your most important achievement?” Rarely do I label or rank. Still, in order to win the fellowship, I had to answer the question. “Marrying me was your greatest achievement,” Vicki said at dinner. “But,” she continued, “people who judge applications do so in order to escape domesticity. If you describe your marriage, they will envy, maybe even despise you, so dish out something else. Whatever you do, don’t twist yourself into a knot writing what a committee wants to read. Keep your self-respect and tell the truth.” Marrying Vicki was an achievement; her advice is usually sensible. I told the truth. What I was most proud of, I wrote, was having strength enough to resist achievement. “When positions the big world thought important knocked on the front door, I scampered out the back. As a result I’ve had time to play and travel. Instead of shaping life and paragraphs in order to influence or impress, I’ve followed vagaries of thought and inclination.” I did not receive the fellowship. Instead of upsetting me, though, failure freed me from a project. Moreover, on the day I received the letter rejecting my proposal, I had read Richard Le Gallienne’s short poem “I Meant to Do My Work Today.” Once well-known, Le Gallienne is now forgotten. I stumbled across his verse in the basement of the university library while poking around in stacks containing books never checked out. Le Gallienne was born in Liverpool, England, in 1866. He died in the United States in 1947, having emigrated just before he was forty years old. In small part he vanished because critics couldn’t categorize him, some labeling him 182

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an English poet, others American. In large part he disappeared because much of his verse isn’t good. Bad poetry, however, often has healthy effects. A person can learn as much from bad verse as from good, maybe even more. Because bad verse is rarely obscure, it’s easily understood. “I meant to do my work today,” Le Gallienne’s poem began, But a brown bird sang in the apple tree, And a butterfly flitted across the field, And all the leaves were calling me.

The narrator of the poem must have been a slow learner, untouched by libraries of cautionary tales, thou-shalt-not stories warning children against wandering from folds of conventional thought, stories that transform luscious sirens into harpies. Instead of shuddering and turning his face toward the ground, away from temptation, the narrator laughed and, neglecting his chores, listened to the leaves and followed the brown bird. In contrast, society celebrates devotion and responsibility. Appealing to higher truths and abstractions like duty, society preaches sacrifice of whim, natural hankering, even of personality. Schools become abattoirs, butchering and tossing away parts that don’t appeal to the age’s social appetite: eyes, lungs, blood, sweetbreads, and rambunctious, challenging brightness. Actually people probably do less damage to the world, their neighbors, and themselves if they stray from corporate thought and instead of becoming productive members of society “drop out” and live lives of inconspicuous consumption. “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done,” said the Preacher. Buttressed by lies that promise sweet peace, wars come and go. Politicians prate. Monuments are erected. Men who have sucked marrow from their days wave words through the air like flags and glibly celebrate the lost youth of others. Even people traipsing after brown birds genuflect before the platitudinous. Societies so order life that people who answer the whispers of leaves and follow butterflies are forced into lying, something that ultimately produces guilt, transforming the wayward into conformists. To escape work and silly regulation, to live naturally and sensibly, one must not only lie but lie with gusto, lie so grandly that songs rise from apple

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trees, white and stainless as springtime. This summer, Eliza worked in Vergas, Minnesota, teaching Russian at a camp run by Concordia University. I bought Eliza a roundtrip ticket from Hartford to Fargo, North Dakota. Both going and coming, Eliza changed flights in Minneapolis. At summer’s end she spent two days in Minneapolis with the family of a friend she met at camp. When Eliza went to the airport in Minneapolis, the airline representative refused to let her board the plane. Since she had bought a roundtrip ticket to Fargo, the representative explained, she had to fly from Fargo and could not board at the next stop. “The rule was absurd,” Eliza said. “What did you do?” I asked. “I told the airline representative that I came to Minneapolis to visit my uncle. This morning he was supposed to drive me to Fargo. Unfortunately he left the house after breakfast in order to buy me a going-away present. While on the way to the store, he was in a car wreck. A man ran a stop sign and smashed into him. At this point,” Eliza continued, “I pinched the tip of my nose just under my eyes with my thumb and index finger, looking as if I were damming tears.” “Oh, my,” the representative said, “how is your uncle?” “He has a broken arm and leg,” Eliza said, “but he’s going to be all right. Thank goodness he was driving a Volvo.” “You poor dear,” the representative said, “don’t worry. I’ll make sure you get on the airplane. Now you just sit down and rest until your flight is called.” “Was what Eliza did right?” Vicki asked later. “Of course,” I said. “The rule was unreasonable. I paid for Eliza’s ticket. She didn’t use all of it. So what? People don’t finish meals in restaurants. People leave football games at halftime. Truth doesn’t win fellowships, and it wouldn’t have brought Eliza home on schedule.” The grate of petty regulation often drowns birdsong. Rules foment the illusion that small, and large, doings matter. Perhaps social man cannot inhabit disorder. Consequently, he creates institutions that interpret event and impose meaning and structure on life. In order to discover meaning, he must jettison most of a day, keeping only those moments that fit some scheme of things. In Nova Scotia I slipped the bit of educational and governmental bombast. I trailed after butterflies, and occurrences stretched through days in ropes, all the ends floating free, none knotted to significance. Because Canada does not shape global event, Canadians are freer than Americans. Awareness that the United States can maim the world darkens the lives of Americans, so bending

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them with worry they don’t notice apple trees. To avoid thinking, they work relentlessly, and leaves call them in vain. How nice to imagine oneself a Canadian and, standing straight, lightly follow winding birdsong, albeit if only for a summer. “And the wind went sighing over the land,” Le Gallienne continued, Tossing the grasses to and fro, And a rainbow held out its shining hand— So what could I do but laugh and go?

One morning in mid-August after a woman and I stepped off the curb near Alma Square in Yarmouth, a black pickup truck growled aggressively across the crosswalk, breaking the law by not yielding to pedestrians. “He thought the world wouldn’t miss us,” I said, pointing at the truck. The woman was in her seventies. She wore orange slacks. They were pressed, and the creases were sharp as carving knives. She had just left a beauty parlor, and not a string of hair was out of place. “Huh,” the woman grunted, then, twitching like someone a third her age, said, “I’ve got news for him.” I walked from Alma Square to Tim Hortons on Starrs Road. As I sat munching a Dutchie, the manager strode out of the kitchen. “Jane,” she said, addressing an employee, “put your hairnet on.” Just as the manager spoke, a man walked through the front door. He wore shorts, sandals without socks, and a wrinkled shortsleeved shirt. His legs were thin and hairy. The top of the man differed from the bottom. He was bald. No hairs curled around his ears, and his head shined, looking waxed. “If I worked here, would I have to wear a hairnet?” the man asked. “Certainly,” the manager said. Later that day Vicki and I bought ice cream at the Kwik-Way, a convenience store in Mavillette. The store rented movies, locking “adult films” in a separate room, the doorknob, I noticed, at eye, not hand, level. While driving through Salmon River, I saw an old man sitting sideways beside a picture window in a blue house. Cars schooled along Route 1 toward the window, then turned in a current before sweeping past the front door. The man had white hair and sharp features. He sat in a straight chair holding a book in his hands and smiling. I wondered what he was reading. Maybe, I thought as I drove past the post office and D. J.’s Corner Store, The Royal Road to Romance, Richard Halliburton’s

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account of wandering the globe, among other adventures visiting Angkor Wat, climbing the Matterhorn, and bathing naked in a pool outside the Taj Mahal. Maybe as he read, the man remembered doings of his youth, that time before eyes and inclination weakened and he could see rainbows. At dusk that night I sat on the steps of the kitchen porch. Across the meadow, wind shuffled maples like cards. In Port Maitland the foghorn exhaled, once a minute pushing air out like a lung. Despite the spreading dark, a hummingbird came to the feeder hanging from the roof. I tried to think, but I couldn’t shape a thought. Instead sunsets from days past flickered through my mind, a horizon raised into green eyebrows, a yellow crane slipping through seams of cloud, a silver saddle bouncing, and a blue monkey swinging above the gathering purple. Vicki stepped out of the kitchen. Fog soughed across the blueberry field in clots of wet down. “This has been a good day,” she said, watching the wind toss maple leaves. “The best,” I said. The next morning I jogged before breakfast, practicing slow motion, I told Vicki, explaining that anyone could lose control and run fast. “Only the civilized can master slow motion.” At lunch we discussed leeches. When I said I didn’t know uses for leeches aside from the medicinal, Francis said, “Children’s toys. They make wonderful stuffing for teddy bears and bindings for Pat-the-Bunny books.” After lunch we roamed the Beaver River Cemetery. I feel more at peace, indeed more attuned to life, in a graveyard than in any other place. A bird grasshopper flicked along a path, and an Elisa skimmer perched on a rock, its saddlebags glistening with red crosses. I read names I had not seen before: Abijah, Myrtis, and Guytha. I kneeled on the ground and deciphered engravings. Although carved in marble, the words softened the day. “Jesus Cares for Carrie / Mamma’s work is done. / On his loving bosom / Rests our little one.” A courting couple drove into the graveyard, but on seeing me, turned around and left. Beside the path eyebright, self-heal, and cat’s-ears bloomed. I sat under a copper beech. Shafts of sunlight rose silver from Churchill Lake. Privet blossomed in hedges, the flowers spraying out in white fountains, hundreds of red admirals sipping their nectar and wallpapering sight. Bumblebees thrummed comfortably, fat as cooks. The distance from graveyard to garden is short, and two days later we drove to Annapolis Royal in order to roam the Historic Gardens.

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Every summer we visit Annapolis Royal, ending the day at the gardens. On Saint George Street a man shared an ice cream cone with his dog, Max, alternating licks. The man wore brown shorts, a white hat and shirt, and sandals. Max was a Rhodesian Ridgeback. He was ten years old, and his hips were bony and jutted out like the bottom of a wooden clothespin. The ice cream was fudge royal, but the man said, “Max likes any kind of ice cream.” I explored Lucky Rabbit Pottery. Last summer in the Rabbit, I bought a jar, on the lid of which perched a mouse. “The piece was sentimental,” I said. “I really liked it,” the owner said, remembering the jar. “The mouse reminded me of my grandmother.” “Well, I can assure you that the genes were not passed on,” I said, purring. “So far as I can see you don’t resemble your grandmother, at least not much.” When the owner looked puzzled, I continued. “Your skin is not furry. I see no sign of a tail, and your ears don’t stick out.” Every year around the bog in Beaver River, spruce topple in fans, opening the woods. Wild mint, buttercups, jewelweed, and brambles soon fill the spaces. Hard on the canes of brambles spruce reappear, and that which was, to paraphrase the Preacher, will be. Time revolves, and what seems permanent is only the top of a spoke, one which will roll from sight. Change reassures the meanderer. Despite the truculence of the powerful, social truths also come and go. Narrow and bleak are the lives of people who do not learn from the woods and drop their shovels and reach for rainbows. In part gardens attract me because they change quickly. This year in Annapolis Royal zinnias were spindly, and the long locks of love-lies-bleeding had shrunk into pigtails. In a garden, attention skips from plot to plot. Castor bean and plume poppy bloomed. Blossoms on purple coneflower looked like sombreros, the petals rims wilting in heat. Above a pond white slipped upward, diced and honey-sweet from water lilies. Along a hedge of dwarf Alberta spruce, needles spun around each other in green stars. For the first time I saw Gunnera chilensis, its leaves crinkled and as big as chair bottoms, their tops rough sandpaper, spines running across the bottoms in ridges. Earlier in the day the tide was out, and I walked the shore of the Annapolis River below Fort Anne. Another person also roamed the shore. “Have you found any treasure?” I shouted. “Not yet,” he answered, approaching me, “have you?” Jeff was twenty-five and in September would begin work on a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at

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Dalhousie University. His girlfriend’s parents lived across the river in Granville Ferry. She studied religion in college but now was a plant scientist. Jeff wanted to travel and hoped that after he finished at Dalhousie, he and his girl could go abroad. “Go to Western Australia,” I said. “You’ll find treasures there.” “Maybe we will,” he said. In truth people who glance away from work discover treasures everywhere. At the bottom of a trunk upstairs in our storeroom lay a rectangular piece of cardboard fourteen inches wide and twelve inches high. Once yellow, the cardboard had faded into khaki. Stamped on the board in thick black letters was “Notice. DIPTHERIA In This House.” Stored in a dresser and wrapped in tissue paper and towels was a Currier & Ives print, Two Little Fraid Cats. The print was a foot tall and fifteen inches wide. Two furry white kittens crouched, one atop the other, their heads pushing against the left edge of the print, their eyes wide, staring back to the right at a little gray mouse standing on his hind legs, the long hairs on his nose wiggling in curiosity. To add color, sheaves of lilacs blossoms fell over the lower cat like a comforter. On a bookshelf I found a diary given to Vicki’s Aunt Sallie by her mother on June 18, 1924. Aunt Sallie had not written in the diary, but stuck between the pages was a school assignment, a thank-you letter written to “Mr. Johnie Brown” in Hollywood, California, on May 16, 1925. The letter received an A. In the letter Aunt Sallie described a summer’s fictional travels, momentarily making me long for lands over the sea. “I want to tell you,” she began, “what a lovely time I had last summer. My aunt and I sailed the first of July and landed in Paris in about two weeks. We stayed there for at least three weeks and had a wonderful time. Then our next place was Spain. We stayed there for about three days. And on our way to England we met your brother. He sailed to England with us and then left for Russia. We did a great deal of sight seeing in England, especially the things that I have been studying in English History. They were all very interesting and I wished you could have seen them. I hope some day you will go over with me. The next place we went was Scotland but it was not very interesting there, so we only stayed three days.” From Scotland Aunt Sallie traveled to Italy. She stayed with another aunt and for her niece bought a “lovely tablecloth and some baby clothes.” For her mother she bought a spread with “a large initial on it.” Then she was off to Greece. Greece was hot, so she

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returned to Paris and stayed with a friend for “three or four months,” having, it seems, forgotten that when she started her trip only two months remained in summer. Still, calendar aside, she sailed for California on August 5, the voyage taking “about one week” and thus setting a speed record. At the end of the letter, she thanked Johnie for a card he sent her, writing, “I was glad somebody remembered my birthday.” On the way back from Annapolis Royal, I stopped at Meteghan and bought a rhubarb pie at Comeau’s Market. That night we covered the pie with whipped cream and ate it for dessert. “One of the last sweets of the summer,” Vicki said. “But not of the year,” I said. A week later I taught my first class. That afternoon a boy wandered into the office of my friend Suzy in the university bookstore. The boy was lost and did not know where to find books for his course. “I’m looking for a book called The Art of the Personal Essay,” he said. “What’s the name of the course?” Suzy asked. “I don’t know,” the boy said. “What’s the teacher’s name?” Suzy said. “Pick-something,” the boy said. “Pickering?” Suzy asked. “Yes, that’s the name,” the boy said. “Oh, you are lucky,” Suzy said. “He is a wonderful teacher, and the class will be super.” “I don’t know,” the boy replied. “I didn’t understand a single word he said today.” “How does that make you feel?” Vicki asked that night at dinner. “Absolutely terrific! The boy is a treasure,” I answered. “No matter the assignment, the boy will see grasses tossing. I won’t be able to turn him into a drudge, and at the end of the semester guilt won’t weigh me down.”

Lasting

“Three men have done more than any others to inspire our generation with the love of nature,” John Coleman Adams wrote in 1901. “They are Henry D. Thoreau, John Burroughs, and William Hamilton Gibson.” Fame is a mayfly, swarming soft through the evening light for a moment before vanishing in the hard glare of time. Gibson was a popular artist and naturalist at the end of the nineteenth century. In books entitled Sharp Eyes, My Studio Neighbors, and Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine, he described the natural world surrounding his home in Washington, Connecticut. Gibson died in 1896, leaving behind casts of books sticking to libraries like the skins of flies to stones. Two decades after his death, Gibson was forgotten. Six years ago, while rummaging through the basement of the university library, I stumbled over Gibson’s books, not one of which had been checked out for ninety years. Not only did Gibson write well, but he also illustrated his books. As he subtitled Sharp Eyes “A Rambler’s Calendar of Fifty-two Weeks among Insects, Birds, and Flowers,” so I spent many evenings in bed, pillows behind me in a mound, reading Gibson, meandering seasons and learning about the plants and creatures of Connecticut. This September as I watched brown wasps shimmy over goldenrod, I remembered Gibson. If a person wanted to impress a companion, Gibson wrote, he could pluck nests of wasps from flowers. For dramatic effect, Gibson urged chanting mysteriously. For good medicinal results, he suggested touching only white-faced wasps, “as these are drones and have no sting.” Age has made me cautious. I did not seize any wasps. Later that afternoon, however, I decided to buy Gibson’s books. Reading a page or 190

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two each night would spread balm over days, soothing the pain of sharp remarks and stinging thoughts. None of Gibson’s books were in print, and I purchased used books. If new editions had been available, I might not have bought them, no matter my fondness for Gibson’s writings. Clean, pressed pages appear uninformed, smacking of youth and naïveté. Nowadays I prefer books worn and watermarked, tattered like me, margins beaten into seams by handling, liver spots spreading across pages. In scribblings lie the stuff of wonder. Inscribed on the inside cover of My Studio Neighbors, an 1898 edition, was a note. “Dear Cal and Gretchen,” Daddy and Mother wrote, “with all of our love” at Christmas in 1956: “This delightful book has long been out of print and is now a collector’s item. It goes well with reading aloud, and we hope that it may give you and your family some pleasant moments together,—at learning then exploring.” New books exist outside of history, maybe even outside life itself, and never do I write in them. On the other hand, if I discover markings in an old book, I add a line or two, in the process becoming part of a past and then perhaps a future. Below the inscription in My Studio Neighbors, I wrote my name and the date. Beside the date I wrote, “When Francis is in his fourth year at Princeton, Edward, his third year at Middlebury, and Eliza is starting Harvard.” Someday another purchaser of used books may notice the inscription and think, “I wonder what happened to those children.” For my part I hope I won’t know. I want to be shoveled out of the garden on a sunny day when my babies’ lives are still unfolding, promise spangling them like dew. Despite the pleasure old books bring, a wintry evanescence cloaks my doings. Even when snow melts and warm breezes jangle my bones, dieback blights mood. I have lived so long that little seems lasting. Instead of stories that blossom into bright endings, I enjoy the brown and the cankered. Two generations ago, life in northern Minnesota was grim. His great-uncle, Ray told me last month, had three sons. One winter diphtheria struck the family. The first two boys died on the same day. For a while the youngest boy remained healthy, but then he too became ill. When the boy weakened and hope dimmed, Ray’s uncle made his son’s coffin. Happily, however, the boy shook off the sickness and recovered. Poverty shapes frugal people. Instead of dismantling the coffin, Ray’s uncle divided the inside into boxes, and after boring holes in

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the outside and painting it white, set the coffin atop a pole in the yard, turning it into a house for martins. “What must it have been like,” Ray said, “to grow up seeing your coffin every day?” Every October Vicki has a tag sale. In stripping the unused from the house, she erases memory. This year she sold the leather jacket she was wearing twenty-four years ago in Willimantic when she told me she was going to have a baby. For $12 she sold a suit made for S. F. Pickering, Esq., in January 1965 by James Neal, Ltd., located at 71 and 72 Trumpington Street in Cambridge, England. For $7 she sold a wool overcoat that I bought at Aquascutum on Regent Street in London in 1964. The cap and gown Eliza wore in June at her high school graduation went for fifty cents. A green frog stuffed with beans that once sat on Eliza’s desk brought ten cents. A cut-glass decanter given to Mother as a wedding present sold for $2. Vicki gave away the globe that sat atop a desk in the television room. None of countries founded after the breakup of the Soviet Union appeared on the globe: Belarus, Georgia, Moldavia, and Kazakhstan, among others. Still, for me the globe was not out of date. Rolling around it were places lively in recollection, the Leningrad I roamed for weeks, not St. Petersburg. In Bukhara, not Bukhoro, I sucked clotted yogurt from milk bottles. In the past I didn’t pay much attention to the sale. Late in September, however, I stepped on a walnut while jogging. By afternoon my left ankle had swollen fruity, big as an orange and bruised into blood. For forty-four days I didn’t jog or roam field or wood. Earlier in September I’d noticed poplar leaf galls shining like pearls and fruits hanging from carrion flower and wild cucumber. Season had stretched open before me, distracting and invigorating. Because my curiosity was now housebound, October slipped by unobserved. Rather than being quickened by the lilt of a weary butterfly or a groundhog’s heavy bustle, I studied the sale and instead of appreciation felt loss. Only in the woods do I escape evanescence. Nowadays I can become intimate with a person one moment and forget him the next. People don’t interest me as they once did. Recently two acquaintances dined at the White House. Did they go to Washington in order to meet the president, I wondered, and if so, why? The only person in the world I’d like to meet is David Dickinson, the host of Bargain Hunt, a television show produced by the BBC. On the program Dickinson presents two hun-

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dred pounds to each of two teams. Two people compose a team, and they spend the money buying knickknacks at an antique fair. The following week, their purchases are sold at auction, the items usually bringing less than they cost. Dickinson is good-natured and enthusiastic. His hair billows about his neck, his shoes sparkle, and his suits are cut like jibs to catch the eye. He knows antiques and would be a marvelous dinner guest, chatting learnedly about the insignificant and the forgettable. In truth the ephemeral appeals more to me than matters purporting to lasting importance. “When people take their words seriously,” my friend Josh said recently, “more often than not they produce insignificant books.” Digging deep into any matter usually turns over ideas long gone to worms and boredom. Consequently I prefer hackwork, sliding quickly over the surface of thought. To raise funds, supporters of the Writers’ Colony in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, plan to sell fudge. The fudge will be sold in thick cubes, appropriately dubbed Writer’s Block Fudge. Purchasers of the fudge will also receive a booklet describing the symptoms of and cures for writer’s block. Last week the director of the colony asked me to write a paragraph for the booklet. I did so, declaring, “I have had red measles, German measles, and chicken pox. Ringworm has colonized my arms. Nits have dug egg shelters in my scalp. Goose, country ham, and crabmeat have turned me green and white. Love has twisted my bowels into knots, and anger has provoked conniption fits. I’ve had trouble mustering energy to mow grass and rake leaves. The selfish doings of adolescents have sent me to bed with cholera morbus. A wife has given me intellectual colitis. But never have I suffered from writer’s block. Real nonfiction writers may moan and pound their bosoms like Tarzan in the forest, but they do not suffer from writer’s block. Only vaporizing scribblers—poets and novelists whose literary systems have been compromised by sensitivity—succumb to writer’s block.” My ankle restricted both me and words. Actually, sentences pinched by wall and room rarely expand into grandiose abstraction. As a result they smack more of truth and life as it is lived than sentences expansive with profundity. Much as confinement led me to examine the contents of the tag sale, so I studied domestic doings. One Saturday I objected when Vicki sprinkled sugar into a pot of coffee. “You are so insufferable

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in the kitchen,” she said. “I have been doing this for years, and only now you notice. You are just like your father. Your poor mother! Now I understand. I can’t wait until you are out of the house.” Later that week as I stumped through the hall outside my office in the English department, trying to hide my limp, Dave, a graduate student, spoke to me. “Mr. Pickering,” he said cheerily, “you are looking mighty spry this morning.” Alas, the ankle hobbled me mentally as well as physically. Instead of responding as a healthy me would have done, attaching the word spry to two other words, the first being my, the second a synonym for donkey, and then inviting Dave to do something beyond the capacity of all except the anatomically gifted, I smiled weakly and said, “Thank you, Dave, you’re awfully nice to say that.” For a seminar that morning students read “Late Victorians,” an essay by Richard Rodriguez. In the essay Rodriguez said, “I do not believe an old man’s pessimism is necessarily truer than a young man’s optimism simply because it comes after.” As fall shrinks into winter, shadows come earlier, and examples of pessimism are as common as leaves in the yard, which, incidentally, my ankle has prevented me from raking. As a result the leaves will probably freeze so tightly to the ground that I won’t be able to lever them up in spring and all my grass will die. In class I couldn’t extract an example of optimism from my life. Later, though, I read a student’s essay. She wrote about cooking. “If you put me in a kitchen,” she wrote, “with a few bowls, measuring cups, teaspoons, some flour, sugar, eggs, margarine, oats, baking soda, baking powder, chocolate chips, and a recipe, in a few hours out will come a happy girl and some delicious cookies.” “Oh, yes,” I thought, Indian summer suddenly warming the moment. “I ought to introduce her to Edward.” I am old enough to toss marking pens into the waste basket and lock my office door. In part I haven’t retired because the doings of students lift gray mood, provoking guffaws as well as smiles chocolate-chipped and sugary. In his essay Tyler described an inspirational speaker, writing, “She directs from her breast a voice of spirited zeal that I marvel at.” “As well you should marvel,” I wrote in the margin beside the sentence. “Rarely do breasts speak. Most lack vocal cords.” “Don’t you think your comment a bit strong?” Vicki asked at dinner that night. “Certainly not,” I said. “Right-thinking people always try to be anatom-

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ically correct.” Later that evening the telephone rang. “Samuel,” a woman began, then asked me to give blood to the Red Cross. “I despise strangers addressing me by my first name,” I said. “I’m not going to donate blood, toenails, or purple nostril hairs.” “Good Lord, you’ve become peculiar,” Vicki said when I put down the telephone. “I’ll answer calls from now on. You shouldn’t talk to people.” I have not touched the telephone for two weeks. I’m not going to pick up the receiver until my ankle is completely healed. Then jogging and a regimen of William Hamilton Gibson should reduce biliousness. Of course age has influenced my behavior. As the White House holds no attraction for me, so talking on the telephone smacks more of duty than pleasure. When I was younger, I jumped at the ring of a telephone, always imagining things golden at the end of the line. In October Eliza got a cell phone. Her statement comes to our house, not to her room at Harvard. During the first month she owned the phone, Eliza made and received 423 calls, or 13.65 calls a day. “Oh, to be young,” Vicki said. While youth connects dreams to the future, the old recall the past, spending hours turning over recollection like the pages of used books, in the margins of memory discovering happiness. For years Vicki and I have eaten breakfast on Sunday at the Track 9 Diner in Willington. I always have the same meal: coffee, two eggs sunnyside up, rye toast, hash browns awash in ketchup, and patty sausage. Yesterday was cold and rainy, but as we drove back from Willington through the university, I noticed a sign outside the Ratcliffe Hicks Arena. “Bunny Show,” the sign said. When I was a child, I spent countless nights with Uncle Wiggily Longears’s family and friends: his niece and nephew, Susie and Sammie Littletail; Johnnie and Billie Bushytail, the squirrel boys; Dr. Possum; Old Percival, the retired circus dog, and, dearest of all, Nurse Jane Fuzzy-Wuzzy, the muskrat lady. Howard Garis’s accounts of Uncle Wiggily’s puttering about in his automobile, its steering wheel a turnip, were narrative bunny hops. On and on the stories bounced gently, far from the hilly landscape of growing and achieving, far from the parsing talons of owls and the long teeth of foxes ripping and choosing. Garis ended tales playfully. “And now I’ll say good-night,” he wrote in “Uncle Wiggily Goes Chestnutting,” “but in case the cow who jumped over the moon doesn’t kick our milk bottles off the back stoop, I’ll tell you, in the story after this one, about

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Uncle Wiggily and the pumpkin.” At night in a snug bed, Daddy sitting on the mattress beside me and Uncle Wiggily spinning through the woods taking care “not to run over any puppy-dogs’ tails or over any alligators’ noses,” I knew tomorrow would be bright and beautiful. I dropped Vicki at home and after putting on a long-sleeved shirt and a sweater heavy with the fragrance of mothballs, I went to the show. Cars from over the Northeast filled the lot behind the arena: Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey. Pasted to bumpers were stickers not often seen in university parking lots. While many stickers celebrated the drivers’ affection for Leporidae, typically urging “Let Somebunny Love You” and “Get Into The Rabbit Habit,” others were patriotic, declaring, “Remember Those Who Serve,” “United We Stand,” and “Proud To Be a Navy Family.” Inside the arena words scrolled over jackets proclaiming different loyalties, many to professional football teams—Raiders, Jets, Giants, and Dolphins. Printed on sweatshirts worn by teenagers were the names of colleges: Castleton State, Holy Cross, West Virginia, and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. College was not on the minds and sweatshirts of all teenagers, however. Stamped on the back of a tall boy’s shirt was “Orange County Hare Raiser.” A heavy woman wore a satiny green jacket, yellow letters dancing spindly across the back like a ballerina, spelling “The McInerney School of Dance.” Generally, though, words adorning clothes advertised the genus Commercial americanus: Westover’s Wabbits, Briarwood Bunny Barn, Iberia Rabbit Farm, Wally’s Lone Oak Rabbitry, and D & D’s Bunny Hutch. When I was a boy, cars and clothes did not resemble tablets. Bands of color, not letters, circled shirts, and scribbling did not mark the jackets I wore. In the Uncle Wiggily stories advertisements appeared on signs, beside a small house under a Christmas tree: “Dr. Monkey Doodle. Sick Dolls Made Well.” “Goodness,” I mused, “this is a wordy age, if not necessarily a thoughtful one.” In the arena cheer spread like goldenrod and choked out criticism before it rooted and rose into pondering. One hundred seventy-six exhibitors came to the show, bringing 1,626 rabbits to be judged. Sawdust blanketed the floor of the arena. Sinking warm into the sawdust were hundreds of metal cages fluffy with rabbits, the sight making me smile, then chuckle. Exhibitors sat in folding chairs amid the cages,

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many holding rabbits in their laps, stroking them, their expressions and those of the rabbits serene. Raising and showing rabbits were family hobbies, and children bustled about, many cradling rabbits. A collar of tables circled the arena. On one table stood a warren of trophies. Atop each trophy a metal rabbit crouched in “form,” that is, pressed flat as a slipper, ears back. Exhibited on other tables were raffle prizes. Clustered on three tables were eighty-five items, all with numbers attached. Tacked to the lips of the tables were ruffles of small brown paper sacks. Each sack was numbered, the numbers corresponding to the knickknacks on top of the tables. Printed twice on each ticket was also a number, 461311 appearing on one of the tickets I bought. Punters tore tickets in half, dropping half into the sack corresponding to the item they hoped to win, keeping the other half for themselves so that they could claim their prize if the number was drawn. Raffle tickets sold three for a dollar. I bought six tickets, taking chances on pot holders, trays, and a mug, a frieze of rabbits thumping around it, raising their hind legs like awkward boys waving cricket bats. Written on the front of another group of bags were the letters A through N, these for chances on rabbits. Worried that good luck might frown on me and I would win, I did not purchase chances on the bunnies. Scattered around the rim of the arena were tall tables, looking like hunks of rind. Judges stood behind the tables, facing the center of the arena. At arm’s length across the tables were square pigeonholes, tops open but sides and backs enclosed and raised lips low in front. Owners dropped rabbits into the pigeonholes so they could be judged. For their part, judges ran their hands along rabbits starting at the heads and ending at tails, their fingers curving over the animals’ backs. The motion resembled that of a teenager smoothing out his ducktail fifty years ago, running his hands back along his head from forehead to crown. Rabbits were grouped in categories: bucks and does, junior bucks and does, among others. The variety seemed infinite: Jersey Woolly, Lionhead, Polish, Holland Lop Ear, Mini Rex, Florida White, Dutch, Satin, Champagne, and Rhinelander. A woman cuddled two English Angoras, their hair rising downy, turning the woman into poetry, her arms full of birds. While yellow and gray splotched Harlequins, purple smoldered over Lilacs. Belgian Hares twitched out of pigeonholes and tiptoed about, exploring tables. Unlike

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hares scruffy about our farm in Nova Scotia, the hares were groomed, their fur thick, yellow highlights seaming the brown, not thorns or twigs. Black ears, tails, and feet stuck out of the white fur of Himalayans, looking like outcrops covered with dark lichens. Checkered Giants resembled cuts sliced from fatty Dalmatians. Flemish Giants had heads like anvils and weighed up to twenty pounds. They came in seven colors, a man told me: white, sandy, blue, fawn, black, and light and steel gray. Although the man and his wife owned sixty Giants, he never sold any. “I couldn’t bear to do that,” he said. Indeed, the exhibitors seemed wonderfully affectionate, wrapping their arms about not only rabbits, but also other people: friends and children, aging grandparents, and strangers like me. In one corner of the room judges rated guinea pigs, or cavies, as owners insisted they be called. The hair on many cavies swirled in rosettes, tighter than asters. A woman sitting in a lawn chair stroked a silky. The woman’s hair was blond and hanging off her shoulders slipped over the cavy, the cavy’s coat seeming a fall woven into the woman’s hair. At night the woman wrapped the cavy’s coat in cloths. Every other day she combed the animal’s coat. Cavy aficionados were not as friendly as rabbit folk, not only insistent on banishing guinea pig from conversation but also emphasizing that their animals were American, not Abyssinian. Moreover, as families raised rabbits, so single people seemed drawn to cavies. Maybe taking care of cavies frayed sensibilities. Certainly most exhibitors owned stables of them. “Somewhere over seventy, maybe over ninety,” a woman said. Another woman said, “I am too embarrassed to tell you how many I have.” When I pressed her, she said, “A garage full, a three-car garage full.” I roamed the show for two and a half hours. I left twenty minutes after the drawings for prizes. I didn’t win anything, something that surprised me because the show raised my spirits into expectation. “How was it?” Vicki said when I returned home. “Great,” I said, opening Sharp Eyes to “How Bunny Writes His Autograph” before adding, “and if the goldfish doesn’t bite a hole in his globe and let all the molasses run over the tablecloth, I will tell you about it at dinner.”

Raking

In Connecticut, November is raking month. In the middle of October rain hosed leaves from trees, and on a silvery afternoon early in November I spent two hours and eighteen minutes raking the dell, the first installment on a cart-away plan that I usually finish after Thanksgiving. Across the ground hickory leaves dried and curled into cinders while oaks slipped skinned across each other like thin leather. I’m not the hardwood I used to be, and after a few minutes I wilted, drooping over the rake, letting sap rise into spent limbs. While resting, I studied the yard. Scarlet berries hung from yews like cough drops. The seed heads of wood asters had shredded into clumps of dust. Trogia crispa mushrooms splattered the south side of a dead birch. Not all leaves had fallen. On sugar maple saplings leaves waved like yellow hands. Beech leaves looked like thin sugar candy, ochre cake decorations. While leaves on the panicled golden rain tree gleamed bronzed, season had rubbed those on burning bush so pale that they almost vanished, floating ghostly into sight then suddenly slipping out of being into background. Unlike plants which drift into senescence in November, Vicki and I stir. Instead of settling into couch and chair, we molt into old clothes and spend days in the yard. While I raked, Vicki raised the bird feeders, fixing a new house atop the gray pole near the oriental bittersweet and sawing a thick platform for the feeder under the kitchen window. Once the feeders were up, we planted squill, crocus, and grape hyacinth. I carted compost up from the woods behind the house and dumped it into clay tubs, after which Vicki stuffed tulips into the tubs, piling eiderdowns of dirt around the bulbs. By the time we stopped work, a 199

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downy woodpecker was jabbing suet by the garage, and on the feeder outside the kitchen juncos lunged at one another, quarreling over a ridge of cracked corn. Raking awoke dozing muscles, making sleep difficult. I got up at 3:23 the next morning and read. Just before six I bicycled along Bolton Road to town hall and voted. I was the fourth person in Mansfield to vote. A smoky mist seasoned the air, and after voting I rode about the campus until my class began at eight. Raking was on my mind, and I asked students what type of rake I should buy Vicki for Christmas. “A sporty model with red plastic teeth,” I said, “or perhaps an import with bamboo teeth. Of course,” I added, “I could buy a patriotic model with sharp metal teeth.” In order to finish the yard before December, I organize days. I don’t fritter hours away; I rake and cart. What I do outdoors influences my behavior indoors, and when the students didn’t respond immediately, I kicked the topic aside and talked about Anton Chekhov. In November leaves get into mind as well as hair and make me impatient. I begrudge hours spent away from raking. I worry that frost will seal leaves to the ground, forcing me to pry them free in the spring, wedging up every blade of grass in the yard. After class I attended the first meeting of a new university committee. When the chairman said that we would devote several afternoons to “brainstorming,” I excused myself, went home, and wrote an e-mail resigning from the committee. Afterward I raked for two hours and eleven minutes. “Storms blow leaves about,” I explained to Vicki, “and this is the gathering, compacting season.” The next morning I graded essays. I teach a course in essay writing. During the semester students write twelve essays. They hand in the essays on Tuesday. I get up early Wednesday morning and read the essays. On Thursday I return the essays. Raking through writing is tiresome, and occasionally I’ve pondered giving the class, and myself, a week off. Every Wednesday, however, one or two paragraphs startle me, making me long to read more. Last week students baked culinary alphabets, icing letters with anecdotes. “B,” a boy wrote. “Last summer I went on a road trip to New Hampshire with my three best friends. I lived off gas station food for a week. The breakfast, lunch, and dinner burrito filled me. Once we reached Hampton Beach, I never left the bungalow.” “D,”

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he continued. “When I was in fifth grade, my mother slept through Christmas. I remember eating Dunkaroos chocolate and cookies for breakfast while sitting under the massive plastic tree in my living room. . . . J: I ate in the car a lot as a child. Two weeks after my dad bought a new car I fell asleep in it with a Jell-O cup in my hand. It fell into the coin holder on the left door. I never told him it was there. Over the next year it hardened and became part of the car. I used to rest my hand in the coin holder. . . . L,” he recounted, making me feel so good that I went outside and raked for three-quarters of an hour, “Thanksgiving is the only occasion that appears on this list twice. It is interesting to have the entire family together. There is always great food, and horrible food. Lemon meringue is one of the good ones. By the time it is ready to eat usually a massive fight is going on. I leave with the pie.” People spend their lives raking—gathering and choosing, then dumping, turning one day’s experience into compost for the next. The last weekend in October, Vicki and I attended Freshman Parents Weekend at Harvard. Early in the semester when months stretched clean like a newly mown lawn, Eliza begged us to come to Cambridge. By October clutter blanketed Eliza’s hours. Doings with friends piled so high around her that Eliza couldn’t devote much time to us. As a result Vicki and I explored museums. I study the contents of galleries much as I rake. I hurry through rooms, vision sweeping over displays, singling out exhibits to which I will return—in the side yard at home, for example, four blackened red leaves clinging to a small Japanese maple. Blooming amid a greenhouse of glass flowers in the Museum of Natural History were five-spot and baby blue-eyes, both nemophilas, wildflowers common in California but which I’d never seen and which I wanted to pluck from the display case and transplant to the windowsill of my study in Storrs. The blossoms of the flowers looked like small cups, the petals of baby blue-eyes pale as bone, those of five-spot white, rising from the edge of each a dollop of whipped violet. Amid exhibits in galleries devoted to comparative zoology the shell of a freshwater turtle snagged my attention like a stick caught in a rake. Six million years ago the turtle flourished in South America. On a shelf in my study next to the skull of a fox sits the shell of a wood turtle, six and a half inches long and four and three-quarter inches wide. The shell of the turtle in the museum was six feet wide and seven feet ten

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inches long. Flat, at least in comparison to that of the wood turtle, which rises into a small drumlin, the shell resembled a huge crepe stuffed with seafood and served, I imagined, at a garden party, the host a mad herpetologist. Also hooking my interest was a glyptodont, a creature resembling a giant armadillo, high as my bosom and twelve or so feet in length, its head a heavy cudgel. “What a yard ornament that would make,” a burly man standing behind me said to his wife. “We could plant iris around it.” “Yes,” she answered wearily, bored by years of her mate’s enthusiasms, “and screw a flamingo into its back.” If I don’t pause over one or two objects, abscission begins. By the time I leave a gallery, attention will have broken away, and the museum itself will linger no more prominent in memory than a leaf scar. In art museums I always imagine lifting paintings and hanging them on walls at home. As the trees in my yard are mostly the oaks, maples, and hickories of sturdy New England, so the art I choose is heartwood—conventional landscapes that open walls like windows in country houses. Never do I select a cityscape or the inner world of a Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock. From the Fogg Art Museum I chose two paintings: George Inness’s Durham, Connecticut, painted in 1869, and William Morris Hunt’s Seascape, 1877. In the latter the ocean sloshed high and luminous against a dark brown shoreline, a rock in the water a brown bone and the night rolling forward black above the surf. While Seascape stretched wide as my arms, Durham, Connecticut was ten inches square, proffering a glimpse of bright order. In the middle of the painting two boys herded geese. Over them towered elms; to their left a wood spread in a dark patch. Above the wood the sun set yellow. To the boys’ right stood a farmhouse, light from the sun reflecting from two windows, creating soft optimism, an awareness that fireplace and candles would be lit at dusk and for as long as childhood lasted the herders would wander—as the title of one of Kenneth Grahame’s books calls it, “The Golden Age.” What I do outdoors follows me indoors. Each fall I clean the top drawers of my desk. I rake a ground prickly with staples, rubber bands, pencils, letter openers, checks, address books, old passports, and decks of postcards, one of these last depicting Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the garb of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a second a photograph of Wilpena Pound in South Australia, the Flinders Ranges

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rising ridged like the shell of a wood turtle. From this November’s clutter, I gathered a pile of leaves, pages and bits of pages torn from notebooks, each with something written on it. On a card appeared the description of a suitor whose “intentions were honorable but remote.” “I don’t forgive enemies,” a fictional character explained, “but I do my best to put them into positions where I can sympathize with them.” Written on several scraps were truths: “The cause, not the suffering, makes the martyr,” “Pity without help is like bread without meat,” and “Umbrellas do not come home to roost.” Not all the truths were as selfevident as this last, albeit many focused on stormy matters: “As long as women and sorrow exist, Christianity won’t die.” Advice appeared on some sheets, maxims popular in towns called Farther Edge, Aunts, Thick Broom, Dunch, Toot, and Gig Hill, the names unincorporated but also on a piece of paper. “Put the bird in hand in a cage” and “If you eat with the devil, use a long spoon.” Scribbled on many pages were oddments: “Memoirs of a Stomach”; “coffin flies, white, generated from the marrow of thighbones”; and “fairy cemetery,” followed by “where?” and the tentative answer, “maybe in a water lily.” On a page torn from a yellow tablet were five lines of poetry: “A cruel man a beetle caught, / And to the wall him pinned, Oh! / Then said the beetle to the crowd, / ‘though I’m stuck up, I am not proud,’ / And his soul went out at the window.” I don’t know where I found the verse. Indeed, I annotated only one of the scraps, an excerpt from “On Vagabonds,” an essay written by Alexander Smith and published in 1863 in his book Dreamthorp: “I am glad to know that the vagabond sleeps in our blood and awakens now and then. Overlay human nature as much as you please, here and there some bit of rock, or mound of aboriginal soil, will crop out with the wild flowers growing upon it, sweetening the air.” The veins of story appeared on only one scrap. Whenever Thelma Biggles spoke, words blew from her mouth, swirling about in eddies of confused thought, this despite her taking pride in being, as she put it, “a woman of few words, not simply of nouns and verbs and prepositions and conjunctions but of clauses and infinitives, too.” On the scrap I met Thelma in Perkins’s hardware. She told me she was looking for a screwdriver. “I’m headed for the back counter,” she explained. “I always asks for what I wants, and if they have it, and if it is suitable and I feel inclined to take it, and if it is cheap and it can’t be got for less at any

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other place, here in Carthage or over in Red Boiling Springs or maybe in Maggart on Saturday afternoon, I almost always takes it without chaffering about it as most folks do, letting their tongues run on and on through their pocketbooks and all the gossip on South Street and sometimes through lunch, even the special at Reid’s Drugstore.” I swept the pages into a pile, and, treating them differently from the leaves I dumped in the woods, pushed them into a manila envelope, the better, I told Vicki, to become humus for essays. Some distant spring, I explained, thought will run through these scraps like hyphae and absorb nourishment. “November cannot bear more emblematic mulching,” Vicki said. “In any case, wind, not words, has blown leaves from Miss Sochor’s property across the front of our yard, and you need to drop your pencil and grab a rake.”

Absurd

For nine months each year I preach clarity, engraving the short declarative sentence on blackboards. Beyond the classroom little is clear. Thoughts tumble into fragments that run one into another, and days trail off into ellipsis. Association, not topic sentences, introduces moments. Modifiers dangle, people blunder, and references are ambiguous. Stories don’t begin and end as they do in books. Instead they spin through chains of parentheses, drifting exhausted into colons, beyond which stretch blank pages. I damn plagiarism although I know nothing is original. All conversations are plagiarized. People simply repeat what they have read or heard others say. “That paragraph is almost all short sentences,” Vicki said, looking over my shoulder. “What does that tell you?” “Nothing,” I said. “That’s not good enough,” Vicki answered. “You must think something.” Nowadays I avoid thinking. Life’s complex sentences rarely reach conclusions, and thought often abandons me in the shadowy absurd world of the nonrestrictive clause. “After all,” Julius, a character in William Faulkner’s novel Mosquitoes, said, “it doesn’t make any difference what you believe. Man is not only nourished by convictions, he is nourished by any conviction. Whatever you believe, you’ll always annoy someone, but you yourself will follow and bleed and die for it in the face of law, hell, or high water. And those who die for causes will perish for any cause, the more tawdry it is, the quicker they flock to it. And be quite happy at it, too.” People belt down strychnine, drape snakes over themselves like bunting, and burn, impale, bomb, and decapitate, all under the banner of truth. “War criminals,” my friend Josh said, “are always people who 205

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lose wars. If the same people win wars, nations raise statues in their honor. Folks standing in muck up to their thighs declare themselves followers of the Water-Strider of Galilee. Self-righteousness oozes through their skin, stinking like skunk cabbage. Only the sweet and sour of Jesus can purge such people’s bowels, and they are too fond of Horn of the Devil ground into patties and cooked on backyard grills to change their diets.” Josh is a man of strong opinions and no beliefs. Consequently words occasionally sweep him beyond reason. Actually words are more tempting than chocolate, and once on the tongue, they arouse appetites for sound and tale. Last week I wrote a book review. In the review I said, “The South won’t leave a person alone.” As proof I cited two letters I’d recently received from Tennessee. The letters were fictional. In the first, I claimed, “an old friend asked if I’d ever tried Humphrey’s All-English Spaghetti Sauce, made from potatoes and peas and not containing a single Italian tomato.” In the other letter a man described a girl with a wolverine tattooed behind her thigh, writing, “Of course it might have been a gopher. I’m only on yard terms with raccoons and possums. Anyway, I crept up behind the girl and made sounds I thought a wolverine might make, a sort of heavy gobbledy-gobbling, and she didn’t turn around and snarl, so maybe the animal on her leg was a gopher.” I think I wrote the letters because they sounded true, at least truer than the mail I actually receive. In January a friend sent me a broadside he removed from a telephone pole outside Sylacauga, Alabama. The broadside advertised a new business, God’s Concrete. “Rocks for the Ages,” the sheet declared, “made from pure Coosa River water and Talladega County gravel, stronger than the stone with which David smote Goliath. Build your house on God’s Concrete, not sand,” the sheet urged. “How firm a foundation you will have!” Sidewalks made from God’s Concrete were as hardy and “as virtuous” as Joseph. None of the ten plagues could crack them: “flies, wheelbarrows, frogs, axles, lice, bumpers, bicycles, boils, roller skates, and old Mrs. Potiphar with that snake in her arms.” Often truth seems more contrived than fiction. Vicki was born in February. This year several people asked me how we celebrated the day. When I told them, they didn’t believe me. At ten in the morning we walked to the Husky Bean and drank decaffeinated coffee and munched

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day-old croissants that I bought, paying $1.50 for three. Afterward we walked upstairs to Storrs Drugs, and for a dollar I purchased Vicki’s present, a lottery ticket. The numbers on the ticket were 15, 25, 31, 33, 34, and 39. Vicki’s ticket did not win, despite the numbers averaging 29.5, something I thought a good omen. Only occasionally do I hear something I know is true. Last week I talked to my cousin Kathryn. Kathryn is ninety years old. “I came out of the grocery the other day with a sack in each arm,” she told me. “A young man saw me, and after saying, ‘Let me help you, ma’am,’ took the bags and put them in my car.” “You are mighty nice,” Kathryn said to the man, “to help a hundred-year-old woman.” “You are old, but you can’t be that old,” the young man answered, emphasis falling heavily on that. Even more rarely do I read something I know is true. Yesterday, though, I read a paper a student wrote about high school athletics. “I had a lot of friends on the football team,” he ended the paper, “but I don’t remember their numbers, or their positions, of if they were any good or not. All I remember is the converted ice cream truck that sold hot chocolate on cold autumn nights and trying to look up the skirts of the cheerleaders when they threw each other into the air.” Often foolishness passes for wisdom. “There is a tide in the affairs of men,” Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar, “Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shadows and in miseries.” I have heard the passage cited many times, almost always accompanied by nodding heads and solemn agreement. A flood takes people, not people a flood, banging them through its channel, no matter how they struggle. Only at ebb can a person master the moment. Only people fortunate enough to miss floods have the leisure to wander, perhaps to plan and control. During the Korean War a friend enlisted in the army. One day near the end of basic training he was summoned to a hearing before three officers. “You have been accused of making unpatriotic statements,” one of the officers explained. “What did I say?” my friend asked. “We are not at liberty to say,” the officer answered. “Well, then,” my friend said, “who accused me?” “We are not at liberty to say,” the officer repeated. “I never said anything unpatriotic,” my friend said, then asked, “How can I defend myself?” “I don’t know,” the officer said. As a result of the hearing my friend was pulled out of his unit and posted to the Aleutian Islands,

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a place he grew to love and about which he later wrote a book. The rest of his unit went to Korea, where the Chinese slaughtered them. “The person who accused me of being unpatriotic meant to hurt me,” my friend said, “but instead he saved my life.” For three years running, starting in seventh grade, Eliza was the best Latin student in the state at her level, initially in Beginning Latin then followed by first and second year Latin. In Eliza’s sophomore year I took the family to Western Australia. Schools in Perth did not teach Latin, and although I hired a tutor, Eliza slipped out of academic step. Moreover, on our return, requirements so clogged Eliza’s schedule that she couldn’t enroll in either third year or fourth year Latin. Because Eliza was a good student, she was admitted into fifth year Latin. Only seniors took the course, and because they were in their final year of high school, Mrs. Carmichael, the teacher, granted them privileges, allowing them to sit in rumpusy easy chairs and taking them across the street for coffee and doughnuts at a local café, the Sugar Shack. Since Eliza was a junior, Mrs. Carmichael made her sit at a desk. Moreover, Eliza was not allowed to accompany the rest of the class to the Sugar Shack. One afternoon I found Eliza crying in her room. “I feel so isolated in that class; it’s terrible,” she said. The next morning Eliza dropped Latin. That afternoon she signed up for Russian at the university. At the end of the year, she attended the Russian Language School at Middlebury College where she won the award for Best Beginning Russian Student. Next she spent the last half of her senior year in a college program in St. Petersburg. Just before she left for Russia, Harvard accepted her on early admission. “If Mrs. Carmichael had treated me like everybody else, I would have stayed in Latin, and I wouldn’t have gotten into Harvard,” Eliza said. “Yes,” I said, “you should thank Mrs. Carmichael for making you unhappy.” “How much do you weigh?” I asked. The boy was my height, slightly over six feet. He looked like a barrel, all staves warped, only a rickety fence of splinters holding him together. “Three hundred and fifteen pounds,” he said, pausing on the stairs to get his breath, “but I need to be bigger by next fall.” “Heart attack on the hoof,” Vicki said later. “The athletic strain of mad cow disease.” Most doings athletic are absurd. At the end of January I started jogging five miles a day. Although my heels never bounce more than a half inch off the ground and I shuffle rather

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than lope, people my age should avoid running shoes and confine their feet to carpet slippers. Still, I liked jogging through snow showers, flakes ticking against my forehead. Atop long stems wild carrot gathered snow, the umbels suddenly chalices frothy with season. Canada geese gleaned a distant hillside, aging the white glaze, looking like chips knocked from the slope by hard kitchen wear. A flock of starlings perched high in an ash. Still and dark against the gray sky, the birds resembled fruits on magnolias, feathers pulled tight, a few jutting sharp like broken follicles. One bright afternoon three bluebirds skipped along beside me, following a white fence. Twenty mergansers slid low over Unnamed Pond, the white sides of males blinking, their heads greenly iridescent with black, the heads of females crested and brown, rusty with red. Almost every day vultures circled overhead. “The vultures are eyeing you,” Vicki warned. “If you don’t take it easy, you’ll be dinner meat.” In New England old people begin to stir in February, the lengthening days breaking winter’s dark confinement and deceiving, making people optimistic enough to think about gardening. As buds open in peoples’ minds and spread into flowers and leaves, so businesses also awaken. Like girdler beetles, corporations sense the opportunity to lop off twigs sprouting with money, hoarded over winter. In February before birds return from the South, hearing aid companies send advertisements to the elderly, appealing to the seasonal delusion that life beckons like a garden plot thick with compost and that with the right tool, spring need not be silent but instead can ring with song brighter than phlox. The first advertisement I received came from Belltone. Because the brochure was addressed to “Pickering Family,” I tossed it unopened into the recycle bag. The address of the second advertisement made me pause, so much so that after dinner I fashioned a reply. “Today,” I wrote, “I received an advertisement for Miracle Ear addressed to my mother, Katherine Pickering, at 23 Hillside Circle, ‘Storrs Manfld CT 062682408.’ At the bottom of the ‘Special Invitation’ to meet your ‘visiting specialist’ was the phrase ‘Listen to Life.’ My mother has been dead for sixteen years. For her to listen to life, Miracle Ear would have to work a real miracle, one far more impressive than that of raising Lazarus from cold storage. I assume that an imbecile, not a necromaniac or a devotee to Abatur, manages your mailings. To send letters to folks cleaned and

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peeled and napping silently in Skeleton Park, thus turning families into grave dancers and worm counters, smacks of virulent, pustular taphophilia.” Miracle Ear did not respond. “What did you expect?” Vicki said. “They thought you insane.” “I should have sent the other letter,” I said. “It would have gotten a response, the one in which I mentioned ‘mental distress,’ ‘uncontrolled weeping,’ ‘heart palpitations,’ ‘medical fees,’ and ‘legal advice.’ After a video otoscopic inspection of that letter, the company’s behavior would not have been so impacted, in the ear or elsewhere. In fact, a couple of suits would have shat bricks.” “Oh, Lord,” Vicki said, “not bad language again.” Generally I prune language into propriety, though sometimes that seems absurd. In spring, however, naughty words sprout in rosettes like weeds. By summer I have hoed up inelegancies, and my sentences bloom through paragraphs in straight presentable lines. Gardens, like simple sentences, of course, distort. Flowers aside, the beds most creatures inhabit, particularly those rumpled by humans, are weedy. Yesterday Vicki and I walked to the Husky Bean. We drank decaffeinated coffee, and again I bought a bag of day-old croissants for $1.50. Afterward I purchased a lottery ticket at Storrs Drugs. The numbers on the ticket were 4, 8, 27, 28, 39, and 42. The average was 24.7, not, I thought, a good omen. After leaving the drugstore, we roamed the campus. A man stood on the bridge crossing the spillway at the end of Mirror Lake. At first I thought him a priest, as he wore black trousers, a black jacket, and a black clerical shirt. But then I noticed his shoes and collar. His collar was round and clerical, but instead of being white was scarlet. His shoes were also red. Made from patent leather, the toes spread like ping-pong paddles while the heels were four inches high, a strip of shiny zirconium dividing each heel into two bright layers. Under the man’s left arm was a book. The man was a wedding dress salesman, and the book contained illustrations of dresses. “For the modern bride,” the man said. Vicki and I perused the book. No dress was completely white. Two barred tiger salamanders curled gold and black like epaulettes over the shoulders of one dress, the head of each salamander pointing toward the bride’s neck, the tails twisting down the upper arms like falls. Insects decorated most of the dresses, most disappointingly familiar:

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among others, locust borers, leaf-footed bugs, and sharpshooter leafhoppers. Depicted on the left side of one dress was a beehive, oil beetles flaying the air blue around it. An oak grew up the right flank of another dress. At the base of the tree a cicada nymph dug out of the ground. On the trunk of the tree the shell of a nymph had split; from it emerged an adult cicada, damp and silvery green. Farther up the tree another cicada, its exoskeleton now hard and black, leapt into flight, “singing,” the man explained. He asked if Vicki and I had a daughter. When we said “yes,” he asked how old she was. On learning that Eliza was eighteen, he said, “I’ll bet she’d like a dress decorated with millipedes. They are swell.” Vicki glanced at me. Hanging on the wall above Eliza’s desk at home was a black box with a glass front. Inside the box was an ochre millipede six and three-quarters inches long, a present Edward brought Eliza from Malaysia. When I opined that Eliza was too young to marry, the man gave me his card and said, “Call me when she gets engaged.” A ribbon of hedge bindweed scrolled across the card, tortoise beetles golden on its leaves. I asked the man where he was going after he left Storrs. “Maybe Richmond,” he said. “Green June beetles will soon be out in Virginia. On the newest dress in my collection the beetles flutter across the bodice like a swarm of emeralds.” For a moment the man paused, then he continued: “If not Richmond, then Topeka. Life is slow in Kansas, and inchworm dresses are popular there.” “My, oh, my,” Vicki said.

Time for Black & Decker

“I’ve stood by you,” Vicki said, “but now it is time for Black & Decker.” The official publication date of my new books was six weeks off. Alas, copies the press had sent to reviewers were already for sale. Even the reviewer for the paper in Nashville, my hometown, had dumped his copies unread into a secondhand bookstore. “What’s the store charging?” Vicki asked. “Fifteen dollars,” I said. “Holy cow,” Vicki said, pausing for a moment, “the books have depreciated 42 percent, and they haven’t even been published—no more pens for you, just routers and table saws.” In the eighteenth century Samuel Johnson defined the essay as “a loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.” For thirty years I have written essays. Writing influences authors more than readers. Long ago I abandoned veneers and decorative edges. Instead of stretching linear and polished toward truth, my paragraphs wind about until thought collapses, leaving readers gritty and unsatisfied. “Like life,” I told Vicki, adding, “Sanders smooth rough perceptions into appealing lies. Anyway,” I said, “I can’t shed my liver spots.” “Forty percent today, 20 percent tomorrow,” she said, getting up from the table and walking toward the sink. My thoughts are unfinished, ball-and-claw feet but not complete chairs or lowboys. Small matters make me pause and wonder. Sometimes I even think, “That’s right.” To me, though, life does not seem regular, and never do I glue back and leg to seat in hopes of creating the comfortable illusion of order. Early in March while walking to class I plucked two business cards out of mud. The first was for East Lyme Psychological Associates, located at 29 Chesterfield Road in East Lyme, 212

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Connecticut. The second advertised Atlantis Therapeutics “Message and Sports Therapy” on 46 King Hill Road in Storrs. Decorating this last card was an ionic column, the capitals round as eyes and rolling black and white, looking bloodshot. “What is the significance of these cards?” I asked students in class ten minutes later. “I don’t know,” Roger answered, “but did you know every Mormon family owns a trampoline?” I did not answer the question because I knew Roger was right. Mormons have trampolines in their backyards just as Episcopalians stuff hall closets with old golf clubs, their new ones stored at “the club.” In part I neglected to answer because I was distracted. On my desk sat a small Wiener Whistle, two and a quarter inches long and an inch tall. The wiener was red and perched atop a diminutive skateboard. A yellow band surrounded the wiener’s middle; printed on it in red was “OSCAR MAYER.” Aside from me, no one in the room had noticed the whistle. I blew it. The sound was high and shrill, just right for calling a small dog. At the end of class, students handed in papers. A boy described his love for animals. “Raising dogs has an advantage over raising children,” he wrote, “because dogs usually die around thirteen years old which is when parenthood looses its appeal.” A girl recalled her first day at the university. During orientation she had received a catalogue of courses, a map, the student handbook, a highlighter, and a key chain. She studied the key chain. “The simple plastic fob was flat and white and slightly crimped around the edges,” she wrote. “On one side was a blue paw print surrounded by the words ‘Welcome to UConn—Best Years of Your Life.’ I thought that was a peculiar thing to say. I wondered what sort of person would think the years from 18–22 the best of her whole life. Pictures of burnt out, forty-year-old ex-sorority girls, lamenting their lost youth and the good times they had in college came to mind. I shuddered at the thought. I wanted college to be a bridge, a sort of necessary transition from high school to the rest of my life. I desperately hoped that the coming years were not going to be the best of my life.” At home an e-mail greeted me. After I sent Dan, a former student, a copy of one of my books, he mailed me a check for a dollar. He explained that he knew I needed all my royalties so I could pay tuition for my children at college. A buck, he thought, was about what I would

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receive if he had purchased the book in a store. I cashed the check, urging him to “instruct the bank to send you the cancelled check because someday the signature will be worth a fortune.” “I am indeed retrieving the cancelled check and plan to sell it on eBay,” Dan e-mailed. “My best hopes are that I can double my money.” The house was noisy, and I couldn’t think of a reply, so I didn’t answer Dan. When Eliza left this fall to join Francis and Edward at college, the house became quiet. Vicki endured silence for a week, then drove to Buckland Mall and bought three radios, these in addition to radios already in the kitchen and upstairs in our bedroom. She set one radio on a bench beside the washing machine in the basement, another in the boys’ room, and the third on the floor in the living room, though to be accurate this particular radio sometimes wanders into my study. In the morning as Vicki roams the house she turns on the radios, so that by ten o’clock all the radios are playing and the house is, as she puts it, “lively despite the absence of youth.” As writing has influenced my life, so the radios have shaped not simply my e-mails but also my evenings. Because I no longer read or chat with the children at night, I flick on the radio in the bedroom and listen to Good Evening, Good Music, classical music selected by Ivor Hugh and played on WJMJ, a station owned by St. Thomas Seminary in Bloomfield, Connecticut. Last week I began an essay on silence. I started by describing the noise the children once made, their Big Wheels rumbling along the driveway and the corners of the house in which echoes of their spontaneity lingered, shaking in the mind like curtains in a breeze, silent but always moving. I didn’t write much. My friend Josh interrupted me, and I left the essay “indigested.” A thought about the Pledge of Allegiance had stung Josh, and he wanted to jab it buzzing into my head. The end of winter raises Josh’s spirits, so much so that he occasionally imagines himself a healer. To end the controversy about the phrase “under God” in the Pledge and “bring Americans together,” Josh proposed a slight emendation, changing the capital G in God to a small letter and adding an s to the end of the word. “Such a word includes everything, not just a god folks say they worship but the gods they really worship: Dagon, Belial, the pancreas, Britney Spears, golf, Gabby Hayes, strawberry cheesecake, heterosexual adultery, land mines, Zeus, and the thong.” “What about enemas and the Fox Network?” I said. “Yes,” Josh answered,

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“those too, along with Baal, Ashtoreth, Captain Marvel, and manure from the male cow.” “Jesus,” I said, “what cherubim!” “Precisely,” Josh answered. I don’t like writing about religion, and that night I swatted the Pledge of Allegiance out of mind. For years I’ve shaped people on the page. Perhaps, I pondered, with a gift certificate from Black & Decker and with the right chisels and saws I could carve wooden statues. Because the ceiling in the basement is low, I couldn’t construct full-scale figures. Instead I’d have to reduce people to their oddities: the fashionable student who always matched her shoes and blouse with the covers of books she borrowed from the university library, or the man who, having been born six days after his due date, decided to set matters right and celebrate his birthday on the date he was due, not the day he “happened to appear.” The man intrigued me, and I decided he also collected figurines of animals giving birth, the pride of his collection being a Rockingham wildebeest, a sack shaped like a cigar bound in Saran Wrap dangling from its backside. Among his other “prizes” were a Derby Little Red Riding Hood squatting and pulling a wolf cub from under her cloak and a Royal Worcester princess giving suck to a small frog, so far as I could tell a spring peeper. Although this last figurine did not depict birth, it was rare, on the Parian scale and dating from 1873, the time of the Vienna Exhibition. Another man had snipped obituaries from country newspapers in Georgia for forty years. He kept them in his study, gluing them into scrapbooks bound in red leather. Over time knowledge of his hobby spread, and because small-town papers vanished soon after they were published, historians and sociologists had consulted the man’s holdings for the past decade. At first, cutting and pasting satisfied the man, but as people started to use his collection for research, his ambition grew, and he decided to shape history, if not that of the living at least that of the dead. He bought a small printing press, and after dinner he poured himself a glass of port and emended obituaries. Initially he made small alterations, moving a lying-in from Waycross, Georgia, to a barge sailing from Honduras to New Orleans; adding a forgotten first marriage or an out-of-wedlock child; observing that onefifth of the members of the Foxes, a family famous in the Big Satilla floodplains of south Georgia, were born with furry red nubs at the base

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of their spines; or noting that a well-known grocer had once written a novel, only one sentence of which remained extant: “Betty Lou was like roast lamb, tender and neatly dressed with just enough sauce to make even a vegetarian drool.” As years passed, the man stayed up later, shifted from port to brandy, and began to play a more active part in death. He listed the temptations the sanctimonious never faced. He called attention to neglected goodness and publicized unacknowledged sins. “There are two sides to every ham sandwich,” the daughter of a governor said, “and my father was rotten to the hock with skippers.” “Because he was deaf in one ear,” a law clerk said about a judge, “he never heard both sides of a case.” When a preacher who had declared himself King of Georgia died after being tossed by a mule, a rival clergyman declared, “I always said that an ass was the power behind the thrown.” I did not carve long. If the old saying is true that a man is what he thinks about, then the time had come for me to toss tapes and rasps. I climbed out of the mental basement and checked the mail. Neiman Marcus had sent a catalogue advertising “fine linens.” Thread counts and prices were high. Woven from “550-thread-count pure Egyptian cotton,” a queen-sized flat sheet of ascot bedding with a paisley border cost $330. Two standard pillowcases from Sferra Brothers’ Presidio Collection, crafted from 590-count cotton, cost $140. As one ages, life stitches itself tightly, imprisoning and binding a person like a sheet made from iron threads. Escaping the hardening fabric becomes difficult, so much so that people over fifty should avoid fine linens. Instead they should spend days amid low thread counts where slipping fibers is as easy as ambling through the loose cotton of a heavy spring snowstorm. Beyond Jacquard weaves and solid yarn-dyed sateen, paragraphs tear and tatter, topic sentences fray like old dust skirts, and moments rumple and lift the spirits like shams ripped into kites’ tails. The next morning I sallied outside. The Fenton River sizzled, and foam popped like grease. Willows fluffed, looking dumpy as chickens. A flock of red-winged blackbirds wrinkled across the cornfield behind the old police station. Snipe burst from the wet meadow end of the field, wings beating so fast they erased movement from sight. A woodcock broke cover and like a scythe cut a half circle through spicebushes before settling to the ground. Wood frogs clamored in vernal pools. A

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mourning cloak butterfly tottered through the gray scoops of dried milkweed pods while a golden anglewing preened on a damp sandy shelf. Spring and hopes of fortunate fallings through the summer don’t really arrive in Connecticut until snakes burst from rocks. Then mood softens, and I imagine Eden and apples, turnip greens, thorny roses, and mornings like pearl. I know where black racers den, garter snakes with them, on the first sunny days of season lying yellow atop the racers like lambs amid lions. Later, after appetite warms, the garters twist off to safety. Early in spring snakes are companionable, and I find bows tied with garters, racers, and thick, rough-scaled northern water snakes. Nothing cheers me more in spring than snakes. During a forty-sixminute period one afternoon in late March I counted thirty-one black racers, most between three and five feet long. Each year I have to relearn how to spot snakes, and until my eye sharpens I hear them slide through leaves before I see them, the sound warming mood like fire in a woodstove on a chilly morning. Penny, our small white Jack Russell, accompanies me on walks. When I don’t see snakes curled through falls of grass, she points them, leaning forward and extending her muzzle while raising and bending her right front leg. I like to feel snakes turn through my arms, so I catch many. I’m gentle and don’t harm them, and most snakes don’t become alarmed. Still, occasionally one strikes me, ripping sharp teeth across my hand or forearm, slicing skin into a diamond pattern. Sometimes a cut is long, one and a quarter inches, for example. I take an aspirin every two days in hopes of so thinning my blood that it will seep through a clot like water through a beaver dam and thwart a stroke. As a result the bites bleed profusely. One afternoon blood soaked my shirtsleeve and ran in rivulets down my fingers. “Good Lord,” Vicki said when I walked into the kitchen. “what did you do now?” “I was cutting a board with the ripsaw in the garage,” I said. “I got careless and somehow the saw jumped off the wood and sliced my arm.” “That’s it,” Vicki said. “Back to paragraphs and books that don’t sell. Disappointment has a sharp tooth, but it only slices feelings, not flesh.”

End Papers

Raymond’s birthday is in December. I bought him a bottle of Burgundy, and Vicki baked him a loaf of pumpkin bread. “Birthdays,” Raymond began his thank-you note, “were once a time of anticipation, then a time of indifference, and now a time of dread.” “How do you suppose being a December baby affected Raymond?” Vicki asked after reading the note. “If he had been born in a less confining time of the year, say May or June, when buds and life were opening, do you suppose he would be cheerier?” “No,” I said. “Age affects mood more than season. Ray and I are trudging through the winter of life. Every morning pain, cold, and vitamin pills bigger than dogsleds greet us.” What I said to Vicki was slightly inaccurate. The pills I swallow resemble inner tubes more than sleds, and wintry birthdays do influence life. Despite Christmas, December is associated more with conclusions than beginnings. December is the month of end papers. Friends mail each other newsy family letters, indices that distill the past year into lines. Most entries are unseasonable and describe blowsy doings of the young. In comparison deaths merit only perfunctory phrases, this in spite of snow’s wrapping the ground in a white pall. “In an adult, optimism reeks of galloping dementia,” I told Vicki after reading a letter, half of whose words were printed in green, the other half in red. “’Tis the season to be jolly,” Vicki said, adding, “You laughed when you saw the shirt Eliza wore home on the bus from Boston.” Stamped across the top of the shirt, at shoulder-blade level, was a question: “What’s the only thing Harvard and Yale students have in common?” Lower down, above the small of the back, appeared the answer: “They both got into Yale.” 218

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I smiled when I read the shirt, but I didn’t laugh. Eliza’s tuition was so high that it reduced my capacity for laughter. I did chuckle, however, one morning in the Husky Bean. When four women sitting behind me started listing friends dying from cancer, I shifted body and coffee to another part of the café, joining Bill at a table for two near the front window. “Sam,” Bill said, “good to see you. Merry Christmas. I’ve got something to show you,” he said, reaching into a folder on the table. “Do you get many Christmas letters?” he asked, sliding three pages toward me. Cantering across the tops of the pages were eight minute reindeer pulling a sleigh loaded with toys and a Santa fat as a bubble. At the bottoms stretched hedges of holly looking like wreaths that had been unwound and pressed. Six family photographs decorated the letter, the people in the pictures jovial and toothy with smiles. “Sam,” Bill said, “I don’t know these people. For fourteen years a woman has sent me her Christmas letter, and I don’t know who she is. About a decade ago I thought about writing and telling her she was sending letters to the wrong address. But then I got interested in her family.” “What?” I said. “Yes, interested,” Bill continued. “Her grandson entered Bowdoin this fall. Four years ago he almost dropped out of school. The turnaround is stunning. In tenth grade he started running cross-country. Maybe that has something to do with the change.” “Are you sure you don’t know the woman?” I said. “Well,” Bill said, pausing and looking thoughtful. “When I started receiving the letters I didn’t know her. But now we are almost cousins. After learning about her husband’s death four years ago, I sent her my condolences.” “Did she answer you?” I asked. “Of course,” Bill said. “She said she hoped to see me again before too many more years passed. And,” he added, shaking his head in disbelief, “maybe this summer I’ll pay her a visit, or if not her, her son William. In October he and his family bought a summer place near Brandon, Vermont. He went to Middlebury and had always dreamed of returning to the area.” Appendices often constitute the bulk of end papers. In them writers store matters that don’t fit into chapters but which like old clothes they cannot toss aside. In December dreams disturb me more than they do during any other month. During the first week in December my father rose from the grave to pay off the debts of a stranger,

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$36,384. Moreover, he gave away all the valuable possessions in my house. “But that is not the worst I’ve done,” he said, and I woke up. Two days later I woke just as a grizzly bear bit my head off. “His stomach was orange,” I told Vicki after shaking her. That weekend I took the college board examination. At the beginning of the test a section of questions fell out of my packet. When I stood to hand in my answers, I discovered the section on the floor beside my desk. The questions referred to a complicated paragraph analyzing the acidity of soil disturbed by coal mining in Pennsylvania. Since time was running out and I knew I couldn’t finish the test, I woke up. One morning shortly afterward a little boy slipped out of my closet and grabbed my right leg. Immediately I called the police. They said a squad car was on the way to my house, explaining that someone else had already telephoned and told them about the boy. I realized the boy had been planted in the closet in order to destroy my reputation. Before the police arrived and charged me with molestation, I woke. In another dream I was a camp counselor in Maine. After trying unsuccessfully for days to learn the names of campers in Hawks, my cabin, I gave up and left camp, waking up when I walked out the front gate of the camp. Other appendices disturbed daylight hours. Sewanee, my old college, sent me a “Financial Planner.” In urging me not to forget my adolescence when I wrote my will, the planner stated: “If you have children, consider not how much your children can receive, but how much they should receive, based on your value system. Would they be better off receiving the lion’s share of your estate or sharing your largess with a charitable institution like Sewanee that will perpetuate your personal values and commitments?” Few people live according to systems, value or otherwise. Life is too broad for the systematic. Most people just live. They cope with daily event, try to be helpful and decent, and hope for the best. Of course, people often become dissociated from contemporary doings as they age. Some become rancorous and confused and blame their dissociation on others, the times, or, more often, their children. If you are a Republican and your child insists upon voting Democratic, the planner seemed to suggest, disinherit. If you raise cattle and your daughter lives on tofu, disinherit. If your child is homosexual, liberal, or marries outside her race or religion, disinherit and donate the money you planned to leave her to your old school, a place forever as-

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sociated with simple youth, a place “that will perpetuate your personal values,” no matter how tainted they might be. “You have become rancorous yourself,” Vicki said. “Sewanee isn’t the enemy of family. The planner was poorly written. Sewanee is wonderful. You’ve said so many times. Come spring, you’ll want to visit the campus.” Spring was distant. At the end of the year, ends, not beginnings, were on my mind. Yet, as I and the year faded, e-mail delivered an increasing number of advertisements for untoward invigorators. One day I received nineteen, including a puff for an elk extract better suited for high plains, keratinous material, and the rutting season than for lowland Connecticut and sleep splintered by dreams. Like prints in snow, footnotes reveal meanderings. “It is well to go where the writers of books have been,” Charles Abbott wrote in 1900. Compare “your impressions” with those of authors, Abbott urged budding naturalists. “So much the better,” he wrote, if “your impressions” disagree with those of writers. Disagreement and study fostered growth. “No really great man ever blindly followed his teachers, or he could never have become great,” Abbott declared. “Ascribe infallibility to the professor, and you become at best his echo and condemn to slavery what should be free as the air, your own mind.” Abbott addressed youth. Older writers rarely explore new landscapes. The familiar reassures the aging and matters more than growth. Instead of striding into disagreement with others, older writers retrace their own footsteps and echo themselves. In December I wandered a comfortable world I had described before. Canada geese gleaned Horsebarn Hill, amid them two snow geese, blue as ice. One dark afternoon a bunting of silver light wrinkled through a hickory, momentarily wrapping a Carolina wren. The wren fluffed itself into a bell and swung into song. A flock of starlings rose from a pasture, then shuddered above the ground like a black veil beaten tempestuous by emotion. From a used book dealer in Columbus, Ohio, I bought a copy of Abbott’s Days Out of Doors, published in 1889. The book came with its own footnote, a scrap of paper tracing a wandering almost melted from recollection. “We enjoyed your presentation for Thurber House a few years back,” the owner of Books on High wrote. “Hope you enjoy the book.” At the end of many books are two or three blank pages—white silences tidying the cadences of print. Vicki and I spent New Year’s Eve

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alone. Edward was somewhere in Spain. Francis vanished early in the day without leaving a note. After saying that I was “more controlling than Rasputin,” Eliza took the midmorning bus to Boston to spend New Year’s Eve with Russian friends. Late in the afternoon Vicki and I spent three hours clearing trash from the Nipmuck Trail, the section running through the university forest along the Fenton River from the Gurleyville Road through the Ogushwitz Meadow. “Our personal end papers, all graffiti erased,” I said. We collected hundreds of beer cans and bottles and enough plastic to shrink-wrap our house five times. A friend jogged past and seeing me at work said, “You’re a good man, Sam.” A stranger asked what we were doing. I told him, and he said, “That’s really nice.” Then he paused and thought for a moment before adding, “You must be a socialist.” After dumping the trash, Vicki and I drove to Video Visions and rented a chase-and-explosion movie. On the way to the store George threw up on the backseat, but once we got home, I tidied the car up quickly. For dinner Vicki stuffed eggs and thawed cooked shrimp. We also munched cheese and bread, the cheeses a Christmas present from Vicki’s sister-in-law Barbara. We can’t get the cheeses in Storrs, and I don’t know their names. But they all had thick moldy rinds and were good. With the meal we drank a $9.99 bottle of champagne. “Life can’t get much better than this,” I said, sitting on the couch in the television room, drinking champagne, something blowing up on the screen across the room. We felt so good that after the movie we installed the new telephone Vicki bought in September. Attached to the phone was an answering machine, something we’d never owned. “This will perk up the New Year,” Vicki said. It hasn’t. Today we got our first message, 1,032 hours and 57 minutes after we plugged in the machine. “That was a letdown,” Vicki said after we listened to the recording, white wine in hand to celebrate the occasion. “I would have remembered to take the dogs to have their teeth cleaned. I don’t forget that kind of thing.”