On the strangest sea.
The inclusion of books in the Typepad list seems to be a signal for me to ignore them.
I’ll have to remember not to put anything on there that I really want to read.
At any time in my life up to about age 30 I would have described myself as a Reader with a capital R, illuminated. It was what I did, who I was, how I chose my college major and where the vast majority of my time went for many, many years. A non-discriminatory reader in some ways – I won’t read something I’m not enjoying, but my tastes range from trash to treasure and back again.
Some are surprised by my fondness for the lowbrow.
My house is littered with books, lined with them, books I’ve kept acquiring out of the habit of years, but am not getting through the way I used to. I purged a few months ago, boxes and boxes and boxes of them (and yet the same number still seem to be here), a thing I would literally have been unable to contemplate five years ago. It would have been a painful amputation.
Now it is a necessity for peace. I just don’t enjoy reading wholesale the way I used to.
I think part of the problem is that fiction doesn’t speak to me the way it once did, but I haven’t accepted it intellectually. At this point in my life, I am interested in how real people have experienced their lives, what kind of connection I can feel with the rest of humanity, how the events of the world, large & small, shape human life, how people experience love & grief, how these things enter them, saturate and transform them. Fiction, even old, old favorites, now frequently feels false to me.
Sunday afternoon was perfect, which is not a thing that happens very often.
I have this small jewel of a backyard, slightly overgrown and badly in need of an afternoon’s attention, attention that it is unlikely to get. I never go out there. Partly it is because I have to unlock the padlocked security gate to walk out easily, but partly I have some kind of primitive reluctance to be out there. Like many things I’ve been thinking about recently, it has something to do with my father. This was his house, although it doesn’t feel like it to me any more. It all feels like mine, except for the deck, which he built and where he spent most of his leisure time.
Sunday was a hot afternoon, but not brutal, the sky was mottled with clouds, but still summer blue, and the hum of insects had the specific tone of my memories of childhood’s August. I took MFK Fisher out with me, sat on the chaise and read this beautiful, beautiful book in this setting, a memoir of love, grief, identity. I had one of those rare moments where one just is, without urgency or doubt to plague you, the sound of the summer a precise harmony to fill you, the air against your skin not oppressive but tender.
I watched one of the fat local squirrels come quite close before he noticed me, and ran away scolding, the neighbor’s magnificent elderly Coon cat jumped down from his second floor onto my exterior stairs, then walked past me without acknowledgement to sit on my fence, his gray tabby tail curled against the weathered boards in a beautiful complement of colors.
I want to send this book to a far away friend, as if I could send him this day, this afternoon of existence without urgency, this moment of understanding, wrapped up in a gilt-ribbon package, full of hope that he would understand my meaning.
(This is for D. who wishes I would write about more than knitting, and for far away L.)
