Some kind of wonderful

I don't need a whole lots of money,

I don't need a big fine car.

What to say about golf

   Golf is for people who can’t play baseball or some other real sport, is what I used to say.  Now, having listened to many friends and acquaintances talk about their golfing, it seems to me that golf is almost entirely for people who can’t golf. 

Call me Ishmael

   All of the restaurants in all of the seaside towns around Boston have entryways with racks of brochures that are full of pamphlets advertising sturdy little ships that go out from the nearby harbor toward some rolling ocean meadow where the captain knows the whales will be.  The pamphlets of course have great pictures of whales – the great heads of whales breaching, the great backs of whales rolling and diving, the great flukes of whales that somehow make better, more iconic pictures than their faces.    

   And then we finally go – driving into P-town from our rental in Truro, cruising out of the harbor, thinking we will be happy if we see a whale or two.  The captain and the naturalist assure us that we’re in for much better than that.  

   Indeed.  Minke whales at first, so close to shore.  Terrific whales, which roll around us but – as is their habit – neither breach nor show their tales. 

   And then, farther out, at the edge of Stellwagen Bank, we encounter the tremendous humpback whales – sometimes alone, sometimes in groups, rising, rolling, spewing, diving and finally, as we are about to head back, breaching again and again. 

   The naturalist admits that the experts have no idea why whales do this.  It seems not to be a mating ritual, or display of aggression, or anything else that correlates.  So maybe, I’m thinking, it’s just fun.

Sofas, end tables and bowls

   My father, like a lot of fathers I suppose, had his particular place in the living room, on the right side of the sofa, next to an end table which had a good lamp for reading Time or the Rutland Herald, and which had room enough to put down the bowl from a late snack – ice cream or maybe cereal.  He was that sort of man, with that sort of life, who looked forward to something in the evening in a bowl, instead of a glass. 

A bit much

   I have said out loud once that this little bit of writing I do comes from a need to expend some creative energy, which is true.  I have not also said that sometimes, when there is an idea pushing itself around in your head, that it is rather like sexual energy, something that pushes forward like a wave, gaining ground, rising forward, until it finally breaks apart and seeps away, bringing just a little bit of peace.  That seems a bit much, no?

The house that everyone owns

   Take a ride through these New England towns.  On Main Street, just off the village green, you can find at least one great, commanding house with gables and porches that run the length of the house both west and south and seem to hold the sun all day.  It is the type of house the town takes pride in, for its cool white elegance in the green summer, for its rich warm glow on black winter nights.  It is the kind of house that dresses up for Christmas, with electric candles in each window, and delicate white lights on the evergreen shrubs in the yard.  It is the type of house the people in the village speak about as if they all own it together.  And so, in a sense, they do.

Slow dancing

   Rachel lacks the enzyme.  Turns bright red and warm when she has the least bit to drink.  Like her mother.

   It takes me back to college dances.  Slow-dancing with a woman who has had something to drink, whose body is flushed and damp from the alcohol and the not-so-slow-dancing.  A hot cheek pressed against yours.  You move your hand to another spot on her back.  And you think, among other things, play another slow song.

Bars with pool tables

      So Meg has just passed the mid-way point of her junior year of college.  So what was I doing then, thirty-some years ago?

   I remember going up to visit Bob, one of my roommates, who was at Middlebury for a semester that fall.  I got home to Vermont for one of our breaks a day or two before he got out for his.  I drove up to see him with my high school friend Kevin.  One of Bob's friends from Hotchkiss also was there, the infamous Henri LaBaum.

   We drank long-neck Budweisers at a little bar outside of town.  Bob wanted to go there because it had a pool table.  We put our quarters on the side of the table and drank two beers each while we waited our turn.  

   Bob and I played as a team.  We held the table for an hour.  Bob was pretty good.  I was occasionally lucky.  I made only the easiest shots, usually doing nothing more than whacking the balls around the table, or scratching, or both.  Except for the final shot of each game.  For three games in a row, after Bob had done all the work, I found myself in a position to sink the eight-ball for the win.  I made them all, including the final, impossible shot off two banks and into the side pocket.  Called and executed like I did it every day.  One of those moments when the buzz lifts, like a sudden pocket in the fog, and you see more clearly than you ever did when you were sober.  And you do the one, fine, perfectly elegant thing.  And smile casually as the fog settles in again.

   We sped back to town, cruised two of the college-crowd bars, drank more beer, pissed giddily into the gorge, and hit the Grand Union to buy a midnight feast of crusty bread and cheddar cheese and a box of chocolate chip cookies before collapsing back at Bob’s dorm.

   I have thought about that night from time to time.  I remember thinking that someday I would have kids who go off to college.  Kids who will find themselves in bars with pool tables and wake in the morning in the midst of empty bottles and the remnants of cookies and cheese.  

Just a few pieces of wood

   When I go walking in Manhattan I see the wealthy, older women out on the street in their fine, expensive clothes.  It is not their fault, really.  Still, they should leave their poodles at home and drive up into the hills for a bit.  Meet their sisters.  Move a few pieces of wood from the porch to the bin in the dining room, next to the wood stove.  Just a few.

Blue spacemen in parachutes

   I am not the kind to go knock on the door, say I used to live there, and hope I am invited to come in and take a look around.  I think that would be too much.

   If I did, the place I would like to sit is not in any room, but at the top of the stairs.  That's where my room was, if you could call it a room.  It was more an old hallway, of sorts.

   I used to tie my shoes at the top of the stairs.  It was a good place for it.  Sitting comfortably with my feet one step below, reaching down twice perform the little magic trick.

   I remember standing at the top of the stairs tossing a blue spaceman with a parachute, watching him shoot quickly to the floor below and land with a hard, plastic knock.  Wishing he had fallen more slowly.

   I remember, when I was older, climbing the stairs on game nights, slowly, tiredly, feeling the floor-burns on my knees sting against the inside of my jeans.

  I remember climbing the stairs slowly, stealthily, when I came home late, after everyone was asleep, staying to the side instead of stepping in the middle of the stair, where it would creak.

  The house is out of the family now.  But I've got my own staircase.  A good place to tie my shoes.   I'd like to think the blue spaceman is lying tangled in a shoebox somewhere, waiting patiently.  But I don't think so.  The house that I grew up in belongs to someone else.  People I don't know. 

A face for textbooks

   Riding the subway the other morning I saw an old woman whose face should be in textbooks.  The heavy brow.  The thrusting, mumbling lips.  She reaches into her big bag, looking with her hand for something.  A small stick, perhaps, with which to eat some ants.

Feral hogs and snowy owls

      We were driving on "the big island," through the great Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.  I was thinking about the wildlife on the islands and said out loud to the ladies, "Boy, I would really like to see a guinea hen or a feral hog."  As if on cue, a guinea hen promptly stepped out of the forest and ran across the road.  Everyone laughed.  I shouted, "Boy, I would now really like to see a feral hog.  I said, a FERAL HOG!"  Everyone laughed again.  There was no hog. But there was the next best thing -- a family joke to be rolled out from time to time. 

 

   On a cool, gray Sunday in early March, KC and I drive in to South Boston to take a walk along Pleasure Bay, out to Castle Island and Fort Independence, before driving back across the channel for lunch at the No Name.  One of the papers posted outside the fort notes that Snowy Owls like to frequent the grounds.  I say to KC, "Boy, I would really love to see a Snowy Owl," looking up into the nearest tree, at the top of which sits a big Snowy Owl.  I snap a couple of pictures, wishing it would stop napping and spread its wings, but happy indeed to see it.  As we walk around the corner of the fort, I just can't help myself.  "Boy, it would be great to see a feral hog!" 

   

All the things you can't take pictures of

   Walking around in the world, camera in my pocket, frustrated by all the things you can’t take pictures of.  The homeless man holding the sign that he made.  The pretty girl on the subway wearing a funky outfit.  The small construction worker who appears to be in his sixties, moving slowly under the weight of an iron bar on his shoulder.  It would be rude, or worse, to take their picture.  Wouldn't it? 

   I know what any photojournalist would say.  “What do you mean you can’t take their picture?  What could possibly be better to photograph?  Another cluster of Asian bittersweet?  Another band of geese?  Photos need people in them in order to tell a story."  

   And I know what I would say.  “I am not a journalist.  And I am not trying to tell a story.”  And then maybe they would say, “I wasn’t either, until I was.”

   Also not to be photographed, in this case by rule, are all of the fine wooden objects in a shop on the main street in Gloucester.  Tables, mirrors, bowls, models of ships and boats of all kinds, and innumerable carved fish.  

   A sign says no photographs are allowed out of respect for the artists’ work.  This seems odd to me.  I am not going to buy the carved fish, or anything else here.  But I might enjoy looking at a picture of something here from time to time.  The artist, if he were standing here, I think would agree that if I am not going to buy it, there is no harm in me enjoying a picture of it.  

   I suppose the prohibition is not about me.  It is about people who might take the photo in order to study it and recreate the artist’s work for themselves, or worse, for sale.  

   Yes, it must be about those people.  The ones who have to ruin things for everyone.
   In the meantime, here is a photo of hand-carved figures from a much less serious shop on the Cape. No artists, photographers or shopkeepers were harmed in the making of this picture.   

Explanation

   One thing to like about a blog is that you can just jump in anywhere and start to swim around, this way and that.  There's no beginning, middle and end -- not even a particular way you need to go.  And no need for an introduction, preface, foreword -- whatever one might do by way of explanation.  An explanation is not what a good blog needs.  An explanation is what it is.