| empty nests, full plates, and the ever present red brick |
[Sep. 17th, 2007|09:12 pm] |
Some weeks ago now I started an entry on the loneliness of ceilings. I was sitting in Brew'd Awakening reading Mary Gordon's Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity. There's a passage where she talks about wanting to write about "the loneliness of ceilings, the madness of mirrors" instead of about her father; kind of the writing equivalent of all those "arty photos with no people" my family complains about. I've since lost the scrap of paper I wrote it on and barely remember what exactly inspired me about that phrase. So it goes (to borrow a phrase from another great author). Anyway, a woman walked up to me and asked about the book -- what it was about, fiction or non-fiction, whether I liked it... -- and no, unlike that time long ago when I sat reading Henry Miller in The Coffee Connection, I did not form a lifelong (where lifelong means "until we move to Bath") friendship based on it. I recommended the book and never saw the woman again.
Much coffee and a couple more books later, I still haven't managed a blog entry. Except that it was really cold last night, I don't feel like it can possibly be mid-September. Shouldn't I be out on the beach worrying about invisible birds on Saturday mornings? Isn't there plenty of time before both the invisible birds and the nieces fly the coop? Nope. The piping plovers have migrated. I'm taking it on faith that all 8 of the offspring survived to leave town. Assuming they did, that's a great year, especially considering what a bad start their parents got off to with the flood of '07 and all. Are we going to have a hundred year flood every year now?
So much water, and coffee, over the dam. Nancy and I have been spending a lot of time in Manchester with her parents (they moved there from New Jersey in May). That hasn't left time for much else on the weekends, though we did manage to squeeze in the La Madre 80th birthday festivities (sleepover in Maine with marshmallow roast and Boggle tournament) under the equal time for my parent clause, and also through the miracle of tight planning and fast driving, we managed to do the Manchester thing and to attend the Bon Voyage festivities for Andrea on the same day. Oh, and owing to no family obligations on Labor Day for some reason, we took in the Bread and Roses Labor Day Heritage Festival. Check out the pictures of that one on Flickr.
Both of us managed to come down with some sort of bug last week that for me is still hanging on. Actually, I don't think we have the same thing -- just both have something at the same time -- 'cause mine sure feels like a sinus infection. Maybe it's from all this running around hither and yon.
So, with Elizabeth in college and Andrea studying in Spain for 6 months, not to mention the dynamic duo living on a whole 'nother continent (how many languages besides Hungarian will they grow up speaking?) things in La Familia Loca are well, loca I guess. See when La Madre says "so and so must be very lonely" it means, well, you can guess... Time to polish up my Boggle skills and break out the Scrabble set for the long, dark, cold, baseball-less, and lonely winter in the great city where I grew up. Incidentally, two nights ago I dreamed that the Ex-Pat and I and Empire (a guy I work with who's from the same Irish Catholic ghetto and used to follow the Ex-Pat around (obviously he was not expatriate then)) and Kevin and a bunch of the old gang were playing baseball in the street on Warwick Road with a handsome and very athletic guy from Lowell. Somehow Jack Kerouac made it into my dream! I woke up laughing. At the time we would have actually been playing baseball in the street On the Road had recently made Kerouac into a celebrity. Anyway, he was good at dream baseball.
Speaking of On the Road, I dragged my tired self to Olive That and More after work on the 5th of September to take in at least part of the marathon OTR reading celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication. I was way too tired to stay long but managed to catch one of my favorite passages about listening to jazz. One of the reasons that I like OTR is the rhythm of the words -- it sounds like jazz. Yes, it seems weird to say I like the way a book sounds, but if ever a book was meant to be read aloud, it's that one.
There are a million stories in the red brick city, and let us not forget that here in New England there's more than one of those red brick cities. A thousand mill lofts gray, indeed. |
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captain_peleg's journal
