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Dog is lovely
Doggerel.
Jewel Bako serves Nipponese delights -
The smell of the wooden spoon
Spooning broth of the highest order
To my mouth
Smells unexpectedly of wet dog
and I am removed in a transportation
of missing you
My dog
November 6, 2003
It is so long since I have read a book that the physicality of a book, the sighting of one, particularly in a public place with a body attached to the book and reading it, can cause an odd feverish, almost erotic excitement in me. The last one I read was by a friend, and it is an excellent book. I enjoyed it not only for the pleasure of reading it but also for the feeling of vindication that he had written a wonderful book. But I haven't read anything since. When I look at a page now I seem incapable of reading down the lines of print, from left to right, of making sense of the accumulating sentences, of slipping into someone's intention. I am beginning to wonder if I have late onset ADD. Even magazines and newspapers prove problematic, though the former can delight with their visuals. And this inability to read is unnerving because for me, as I suppose for many of those with writerly pretensions, the act of reading and writing are symbiotic. I passed the window of St. Mark's Books last week and in the window was Lydia Davis' translation of Swann's Way, a book I have never read, but I had heard that this writer that I greatly admire was in the process of translating it and I have long promised myself that when the book became available I would read it. So it sits to the right of my head when I sleep, the last in a pile of unread books. (I still occasionally haunt a bookshop, make a purchase, to satisfy that part of reading that is linked to the physical aspect of books and to that great anticipatory delight that the prospect of an unread book can provide.) The not reading of books, for me, has the quality of what I imagine people view as a sinful act. Yesterday I remembered a younger self escaping some office job to sit in a sun drenched Central Park to read a book I had purchased in the late Books and Co. on Madison Avenue. Perhaps it was youth, the sun, the temporary escape from copy editing foul prose, but I suspect it was simply the act of being closely involved with a book that made me so happy.
September 20, 2003
The red hand of Ulster and the Yeti are on our every corner. Have you noticed. I find it comforting, always looking for comfort; our new walk/don't walk signs are new and bold. I am proud to be a pedestrian; when frisky a cyclist. Dependent on these colored symbols. The boxes which contain the colours which make us stop, encourage us to walk, have grown quieter, they used to tick over, calibrate our blocks, our stops, our goes. However, I like the quiet pixilated red hand and the white yeti, am happy with their presence at our junctions.
September 18, 2003
My mother phones to tell me she is depressed and with flu. Reading Balzac. To cheer herself up? After a stint of manic gardening she is paralysed in a slump of misery. How familiar the pattern.
To the dry cleaners early. (And this is not tax a deductible luxury. How to be an old hostess and look even moderately fresh?) A man is milling around pursued by the tailor in a jacket that is pinned up both sides, a lizard in cheap wool. A pile of his clothes lies at the tailor’s station, jackets and pants to be shrunk to his newly diminished proportions. Not a successful diet. He picks up another batch of altered and cleaned clothes, exits, hails a taxi. He is having his whole wardrobe altered. I recognise sickness in his sparse hair, fragile skin, large feet that speak of a frame that was once more robust. I feel so grateful, briefly, that once again I have to wedge my ass into my pants, that the morning's task is merely part of the day and not an outing that will weld me to my sofa until the following task that should be completed.
July 14, 2003
My father hacks at the hedges of his garden with a gusto not normally associated with a man of his age. There is no topiary and little finesse involved, it is a task he performs biannually and one that he feels steals time from his work of painting pictures of boats. The garden in question is one that lacks the prettiness of herbacious borders or the utility of a vegetable garden, but it is a green bowl that grows large about my parents and thanks to the foresight of some green thumbed ancient sports many colourful explosions, mainly of the shrub variety. There are two palm trees, a handful of somewhat unproductive cherry trees, two beautiful lilac bushes, a japonica, and my mother’s roses which smell and look splendid, perhaps due to the fact that she annually seeks out fertiliser from the dwindling farmer population or horse owners in the area. I have come to realise that the joy my parents derive from this garden is worth the physical work it requires of them. My mother injured a hand last year with the hedges; this year my father toppled from a ladder onto the road that passes their house and was carted away in an ambulance. He split open his head and injured his shoulder. After a night in hospital and extensive x-rays they released him to my mother, his house and his garden.
The odd romance of accidents not fatal or with consequences long endured.
I phone to hear of his progress and they are teenagers freshly met. Concussed and giggling. I remind him that ladders have evolved quite a lot in 60 years. He inherited this ladder from his father. My father has forgotten, until I remind him, that this very ladder was the one that his father met the beginning of his demise on. He retired from the world of car maintenance, climbed ladders to escape his wife, fell off, and subsequently lost his mind and was removed to the loony bin. Death followed soon afterwards.
They are having a summer in Ireland this year, not a season to be presumed upon in those latitudes. When my mother phoned on Sunday at 5.30 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time my father was drinking tea in the garden and doing well.