I walk woodlands home in my shoes.

This line is the one that got stuck in my head the second time I came home today. Not the time I came home for lunch and breath-catching after an hour with my thrilled young ones, so happy to be returning to a book they read when they were small, and to find that they understand it now. The time I came home after office hours and an hour-long argument with a student over whether cultural criticism and aesthetic criticism are mutually exclusive and whether aesthetic ranking or valuing is desirable, or even possible. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I turn out to contradict myself and to contain multitudes on these questions. Very well.

But when I packed up and started out on the walk home, I found myself stalled in the parking lot, stopped by birdsong. All day long, I've been picking out birds, hearing them in trees and needing to stand still until I can make out where their improbably large sounds are originating. There's a terrific Virginia Woolf essay (now there's a redundancy for you) that begins with Woolf's imagining histories and literatures of the past as a kind of hedge, within which, if we listen closely enough, we can begin to hear all manner of rustlings and stirrings, the unruly jostling movements of life itself. Today I reappropriated the analogy and just looked about for the actual stirring things in the trees and shrubs around here.

In the fall, I was walking to class one afternoon and passed an enormous evergreen positively seething with birds, not a single one of which was visible to me.

In the winter, a friend told me that he'd bought a birdfeeder for his front porch so that his cats could watch the birds. "It's like cable for them," he said. "I prefer the finches, myself."

Today, the bird that arrested my steps in the parking lot was not quite so racy as the pileated woodpecker I watched and listened to from my back window during lunch (like cable, indeed!). It was a cardinal, perched at the very top of one of the trees outside my officehouse, singing away. (Except that, perversely, I'm still not sure it was a cardinal. The song sounded not quite right, and the body doesn't look quite right, either; to me the neck seems too slender, too articulated, for this bird to be a cardinal. What I know: the bird was red and lovely, poised in the branches' tracery against the blue-grey evening sky, and it was in song, full throat.) I stood and listened, fixing it with my eye and ear, until my excellent poet colleague joined me, and then we watched and listened to it together until it decided to fly away. We had turned our heads briefly to speak to one another, and when we looked up, the bird was gone.

At dinner, our visiting poet said that he tells his students to practice creative listening.

Thomas Hardy worried that sound was among the things that flee when present becomes past:

1897. January 27. To-day has length, breadth, thickness, colour, smell, voice. As soon as it becomes yesterday it is a thin layer among many layers, without substance, colour, or articulate sound.
The woodlands in my shoe are exactly what I won't remember about today, unless I write them: after the bird flew away from the parking lot, after my colleague drove away in her car, after another of my excellent friends met me and we strode toward home together and then he kept striding toward his house, I let myself into my house and realized that my shoes had been filling up with Gambier that whole time. A collection of small stones, a twig, another twig--this place and my rustling and jostling through it, underfoot.

Here's the transgression.


Someone has asked me, what is your compositional method? I write off the top of my head, I say. But I lie, a little. Most days, I write around the nub of something that plants itself early and picks up weight and shape, heft and features, as the day goes on. It's always a chance; some of the things that implant don't come to fruition, and others are gestating still.

This evening, the office is deepening, darkening; I haven't been here so late in weeks. There, where it has escaped my notice for hours, is the piece of cake left over from my afternoon class, when some students brought food for us, and I know what I am going to do, and it even has a title.

Here's the transgression:

Turn back from the coat and the door and the car and the trip home for more work, the work that will be there, the work that won't leave. Sit by the window where the light is blueing and eat your strange cake and read poems, the poems by the visiting writer with whom you'll dine tomorrow. Side-stepping responsibility for poetry is too delicious to do without full preparation: head to the bathroom, get yourself ready. In the bathroom, discover what you've known for several days, what you always know, as one does, through one means or another: that your body has been getting ready to drop another hint and has now dropped it, that that lifetime supply with which you were born has just diminished by one or two, that now would be the time to be careful were any care to be needed. Here's the transgression: no one will know, no one will want or need to know, it will be no more matter than the fact that it is, it will come to nothing, full stop. But your body can't keep itself quiet, can't accept what is not happening, must let you know in no uncertain terms, each and every month, that this fruitlessness has two weeks to live.

Back in the office, another transgression, an incursion into a space about which no one is supposed to know, about which you have not even known until just now: the first poem is "Deliverance" and begins with a birthing of death, a grappling with the still-to-be-stillborn. Livestock, not humans, you remind yourself helplessly; this poem is about cows and horses and pigs. But first it begins with a line that is perfect: "Then I realized I had read too many poems." And though you have not read too many poems, though you have never had as much patience for poems as you've wanted, though what you're about to read will complicate and qualify that line, you know what his nine words mean, in ways that even he may not know. The thing that's to come will come even without words, without "the human urgency, greasy hands / reaching deep into unimaginable places." The poem rails mutely, beholds, becomes, beats out "only the dumb rhythm of begetting," leaves us "shivering for no reason, no reason at all, / fresh from that hard dream of safety." The words and the writing are beside the point, really, except that nothing is beside the point of the real. (When the students brought in the cake, you think as you throw out your plate, it had a sign on it that warned readers not to eat: "This is a SCIENCE EXPERIMENT. You will be sorry!" You glimpsed blue and green under the paper and assumed mold, because you've been growing mold for years. You are terribly accomplished at mold-growing, at the cold creeping birth of new organisms.)

The poetry is over for you for now; it has, as so many things have lately, cut too close to the bone, spoken too resonantly to the body, been responded to too vigorously by the flesh. Put this paper away, button up for the slippery walk through spring snow, stop in the village to retrieve the movie that's come in the mail, the movie you're afraid to watch because of where the identifications will fall, seventeen years since you last saw it, since you said, that's the life I want, that one. Remember reading in Rolling Stone, back in seventh grade--not so long after the lunch recess when one girl screamed at another, "You tell that bitch I ain't pregnant and I'll show her a bloody rag if she don't believe me!" and you couldn't believe that anyone could shout such a thing and live--about how Jane panics at a security point because she's carrying condoms in her purse, and how the inclusion of such a thing in a major movie was penetrating to some new frank frontier. Remember being titillated by the very thought, even though you had no idea, just none at all--even though, of course, child of the 80s, you knew what condoms were and why they mattered. Remember when being twenty-nine and carefully eager, eagerly careful, seemed impossibly distant, did not even seem.

Here's the transgression:

Snow fell on the flowers this afternoon, the seasons crossing and clashing as they do most years, though everyone forgets and everyone frets and fusses. These are the things that would happen, as the poet says, "with or without us."

After the post office, the evening gone bluer, stop at the bookstore. Defy your own rules. Pick out more poetry, knowing how your patience has been growing all winter, knowing there's no more possible protection, no more care needed, only the filling and the fullness, the swelling into song, the urgent gripping and grappling into life.

I never liked these statues much.

Until, that is, I took a walk with my brother the photographer.

We have this group of five musical angels, sculptures by Carl Milles, perched atop pillars outside our campus auditorium. My brother and I went out for a stroll this afternoon, and when he stopped walking and started shooting the angels, I was suddenly able to see them differently, and to shoot them, too:


It's no surprise to me, after this many years, that my brother can help me see things differently; seeing things differently is, after all, his vocation. Now, I'm not saying that I like these statues better than the other, actually flying things I saw today--a male cardinal, a tufted titmouse, a house finch, and (less savory) two enormous turkey vultures perched atop a chimney. (Of all those things, I think I liked the titmouse best; it was tiny and grey, hopping about in the holly bushes outside my house, and its crest, fine and crazy like my own hair, made me love it.) But somehow I feel grateful that I've been able to see them in an appreciative way, at long last.

Trees I have loved.

Mnemonic devices have never seemed to be of much use to me; I've never been the person who could chant the planets by using some kind of acronym, or who could remember the color spectrum by knowing Roy G. Biv (though, of course, I've just revealed that I do remember that particular mnemonic--probably because I was embarrassed at some point in the past when I was outed for not knowing it) (the "i" is for "indigo," in case you're now trying to suss those colors out).

But I was reminded this afternoon, as I shivered my way home from the bookstore, of a great mnemonic from my childhood. The sun was starting its slide into lowering gold, and so the sky in the east was a stunning blue, all the better to set off the enormous sycamore tree on a corner across the street from downtown Gambier. When they're not in leaf, sycamores are really able to show off the white brilliance of their upper branches, where their bark is either still forming or has already fallen off. Sycamores, see, have this funny bark that peels off in sheets on a more or less regular basis. And one way to interpret their appearance is to view them as being sick, though they're far from it; in fact, I've heard it argued that plane trees (of which the American sycamore is a variety) make the ideal urban tree because they're constantly shedding old bark, and because their leaves are large and glossy and thus easily washed by even a small amount of rain. But I suppose that when one is teaching elementary school children about trees, one does whatever one can to help them learn, and so, when I was little, I learned to remember "sycamore" because its name included "sick" and its skin seemed "sick" as well.

As I walked the half-mile home this afternoon, the Brooklyn Street sycamore branched its white fingers through my brain, trying to wrest some companion trees for itself. And sure enough, they started to appear, in all their exfoliating glory:

My best, my first, sycamore trees grew along the side of the ditch at the bottom of my family's six acres in the first town we lived in in Indiana. My brother and I called this ditch the stream, because it rambled its own way along the east edge of our property, a good quarter-mile from the house, and thus felt as wild, as unpredictable and natural, as the Muscatatuck River, which flowed through the county and gave its name to our local state park and wildlife refuge. It had stony rapids, sandy shoals, pebbly shallows. It had minnows and, in the spring and summer, crayfish. It had narrows we could cross without getting wet, and it had wider passages where we needed to improvise bridges and steps. At one of these widenings, an enormous sycamore had put its roots down in the stream's sandy bank and grown to a prodigious height. Because there wasn't much bank on its side of the stream, I generally observed it from the other side, but occasionally the weather would change the stream's complexion just enough to allow me to get closer to the sycamore, even to balance on one of its roots, for a different (though not better) view of its variegated bark, patchworked of browns and drab greens and greys and bright whites. What I remember--and what I probably couldn't check, even if I were in southern Indiana right now, because as far as I know that tree is long gone, and the stream certainly is--is that the tree had somehow stretched its trunk, or perhaps the uppermost, hardest-barked part of its root system, along the bank, so that a substantial length of itself grew horizontal before making the turn skyward.

When we were about to move to Indiana (not India, as I initially thought, when my mother first delivered the news to my six-year-old self), my parents bought me the green vinyl covered Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds (Eastern Region), for use in our new home. A couple years later, they supplemented it with the Field Guide to North American Trees (Eastern Region). (I thought I had gotten those books closer together, but the brown tree guide is copyrighted 1985, so my memory is proven wrong.) The tree guide got a lot less use than the bird guide, whose spine lost much of its white-printed title over the years. But both books have been close to hand for a couple of decades now. The tree guide tells me that in fact my memory is right on: the habitat of the "American sycamore," aka the "American Planetree," aka Platanus occidentalis, is "wet soils of stream banks, flood plains, and edges of lakes and swamps." It also characterizes this tree in a way I quite like: "Sycamore pioneers on exposed upland sites such as old fields and strip mines.... The present champion's trunk is about 11' (3.4 m) in diameter; an earlier giant's was nearly 15' (4.6 m). The hollow trunks of old, giant trees were homes for chimney swifts in earlier times." It's true, by the way, about the champion trees: go off and google image search for sycamore, and you'll rapidly reach sites like Champion Trees, where the largest trees of their species are catalogued for your edification. (This paragraph's image is the New York Champion sycamore, in Pine Plains. It is 26.2 feet in circumference. If I'm remembering my basic geometry correctly, that means it's about 8.4 feet in diameter. After the first two or three hundred years of their lives, these trees hollow out altogether--creating a space perfect for chimney swifts, in other words. Or, according to another site, for Ohioan men on horseback--as many as fifteen, apparently, though forty men without their horses could get into some of the largest trees.)

Now, "American sycamores" are not alone in the platanaceae family; that family also includes the "London Planetree," or platanus xacerifolia. You urban friends of mine (yes, I'm talking to you New Yorkers) probably pass these trees all the time. I am not enough of a botanist to trace out all the differences you'd need to be able to observe if you wanted to decide whether you were looking at an American sycamore or a London planetree, though. Were it not the beginning of the last day of my vacation, I'd do the legwork for you. As it is, I've gotten you to the beginning of the legwork. Now you know that you want to know more, and sometimes that's all I can accomplish.

My second favorite memory of trees like sycamores, then, is actually of the London planetrees under which I ate my lunch every day while I was doing dissertation research at the London Library five years ago. The London Library squeezes unassumingly into a corner of St. James's Square in London, and there's a lovely gated park in the square's center. Though it's a private park, it's open to the public in the mornings and afternoons, and during the weeks I worked at the library, it was always pleasantly full of people throughout the lunch hour. The grass was curiously short and carpety, and the park was shady and cool because of its enormous, canopying planetrees. Some days, I could barely wait for lunch, just so that I could sit on that lawn and watch people coming and going, eating and posing, lounging and strolling, sleeping and reading. St. James's Square is only steps away from Piccadilly Circus, which is beastly hot and crowded during the summer, but St. James's Square is just enough off the tourist track to stay quiet and calm, and I loved it with a large heart, all through June and July. On one of the last days I ate lunch there--and it helped, I'll tell you, that the EAT chain had a shop just up the street from the square, so that I was able to eat fine sandwiches (salami and roasted red pepper and tapenade on olive ciabatta) and pasta salads (Thai peanut chicken) every day, or at least when I was too lazy to pack a lunch for myself--I sat in the square trying to take pictures of the trees, so that I wouldn't forget them. The pictures didn't come out with nearly the depth of my recollection, but taking them probably helped me encode the recollection in the first place. I'd offer you one of my pictures anyhow, but I took them on film. Here's someone else's image, and though it's from spring and I'm talking about summer, I think you'll get a sense of why it was just the right idyll for an archival sleuth out for lunch. And, lest you'd forgotten the starting point for tonight's post, check the bark on these trees to see their visual relation to the American sycamore.


Now, about that vacation's ending. Alas that I'm leaving tonight's post a little more dangling even than usual. One of these days, I'm going to try and pull together some of these fragments for you, by way of explaining how it is that I've come to have such a fragment-privileging aesthetic in the first place. My mother's quilts shaped my eye, even as they kept me warm night after night and fascinated day after day. Tonight, I may have realized that sycamore bark and the dapples of leaf shade are in there as formative influences, too.


sources for tonight's images: 1, 2, and 7) moi, bien sur; 3) Champion Trees; 4) a truly astounding online version of John James Audubon's four-volume Birds of America (1827-38); 5) Wikipedia's entry about St. James's Square; 6) the Panchromatica blog.

What can any artist set on fire but her world?

This afternoon, I climbed in the car and made the hour's drive into Columbus for lunch with a stranger. As some of you know, I was feeling far from exuberant about this excursion; it felt far more like gritting my teeth and forcing myself into something than I'd have liked. But I did it in the interest of following through, of seeing whether I'm supposed to be doing the hard work of keeping my heart open, just in case. Having done it, I think I'm out of this game for awhile; I don't see myself finding the things for which I'm keenly sore, and which I was so giddily glowing to think that I'd found this winter, by going on in this vein.

There's a big hill one must climb on OH-229 in order to head west from Gambier. As my car plugged away up the hill, a hawk dropped out of the trees to the right and unfurled its reddish-brown and white tail, fanned it open and wide to catch a thermal. It was in my sightline for just a moment before its swoop and my plod separated us. I thought about that hawk during much of my drive. I see a lot of birds of prey here--hawks, mainly, but also the occasional vulture. Usually, I see them circling high above the woods behind my house; the other day, when the wind roared high even though the sun was brilliant, a hawk hung and dipped, apparently moving simply with the wind's motion, near enough to me while I took some pictures that I decided it was best to keep moving. This afternoon, more than ever, I reflected on the cruelty of their beauty, or the beauty of their cruelty. I'm not even sure which I'd call it. Their grace is absolutely purposeful; their purpose is killing; this killing grace is a breath-stopping beauty.

In another kind of life, I would now progress to the next stage of an analogy between myself, kitted up for a lunch with someone I'd never met, and this graceful prey-bird. But another thing I had time to reflect on, as I waited in the sun for my lunch companion, is the variety of lives I have not led and, because I have no interest in them, will not lead. For instance: the two twentysomething people sitting over my right shoulder were planning their St. Patrick's Day drinking strategy. It took me a moment to figure out what they were talking about, because they were throwing around high numbers--"I've got $60, and that's all I'm willing to spend," one of them said. They plotted shots and food intake, discussed maintenance and the possibility that earrings might vanish ("I really like this pair," the woman said to her male companion. "I don't want to lose them tonight."). I used to hate it when an old somebody used to declare things boring. "I just find it kind of boring," he'd say, sometimes about things that were, to my mind, in no way boring at all. But this afternoon I found his voice echoing in my head, as I eavesdropped on my tableneighbors. What am I doing here? was what I couldn't stop thinking. It was as though I were forcing myself to go through the paces of some bizarre dumbshow that is the life of some people my age but simply isn't meant to be mine, not least because I think I'm done having my social life revolve around a metropolis that's an hour away.

When it all came down to it, on a grand scale of terror to wonder, I'd put my afternoon somewhere firmly in the realm of okay--not something I'd want to do again, but not something that made me murderous. In the past two weeks, I've clarified for myself a great deal that I really wasn't fooling myself about wanting to leave an urban area (if a smallish one) to move back to a rural one. And when--because, I tell you, some people never learn--I managed to get myself into rush hour traffic on the northwest side of Columbus and started flashing back to when I'd pull that deft move on myself in Rochester, I realized that I was reconfirming yet again (can I stop now?) that if I can help it I'd like my daily life never to involve a rush hour, or an interstate. Or an interstate at rush hour. Even if I can get good wine by traveling it.

But: because I'd gotten out my camera to try and get a picture of what I don't want my life to look like (in the shape of a five-lanes-each-way beltway backed up at 5:45 p.m. on a Friday), I still had it to hand when the pictures of what my life happily does look like started to present themselves. The pay-off for the entire day--better even than getting some new Staedtler pens and a new plastic eraser (unparalleled for grading)--came when I realized I'd be driving home from the interstate through thirty minutes of my favorite light. And so, when I wasn't near other cars, I started snapping shots for you (and, who am I kidding, myself as well). My horizons are crooked, sometimes, sure, but keep in mind that I was driving the car--and that the ones that are really crooked or blurred are that way more or less purposefully. Here, at long last, are some instances of those barns I talked about months ago, and if you look closely you can see the green starting to appear in some of these fields.


Even the end of my street was lit up when I got back to Gambier, as if to welcome me home. Only, I knew that I was the one doing the welcoming. This light and these trees are here whether I show up or not, and so, at least for now, here is where I show up. Here is where I live.

How it is that things intervene.

I am making my head hurt from thinking so much about all of the things that I don't want to do. I am tempted to continue writing in anapests, since that first sentence scans so nicely. (An anapest is a unit of meter made up of three syllables; the first two are unstressed or weak, the third stressed or strong, and the overall effect rollicking. You may recall that I have confessed my love of triplets and 6/8 time in music. I also love anapests and dactyls. A dactyl is the mirror image of an anapest: it is one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed.) And yet I won't.

Earlier, I was thinking that I would write tonight about the night my Clintonian (but then still Ithacan) friend and I drove all over Rochester on a blisteringly cold November Monday, trying to find a restaurant that would feed us dinner but that wasn't a diner. We drove around the city for two hours. Every time we found a place that seemed like a good candidate--a Thai restaurant, an Italian restaurant, a pan-Asian noodle joint, a Japanese restaurant, even our last-ditch try, a swanky hipster bar/bistro--we'd find out that they'd just closed a few minutes earlier. The situation grew more and more dire, the more we drove around the city. Finally, at about 10:15 p.m., we gave up and went to Wegmans, our mainstay, and bought ingredients for seafood fettucine alfredo. This dish is a good standby in times of culinary need, because it's so rife with shortcuts. Choose your favorite brand of noodles. Choose the bottled alfredo sauce that seems best (read: least full of partially hydrogenated oils). Choose your favorite version of faux seafood (I am partial to faux crab, myself). Boil the noodles. Heat the faux seafood with the faux alfredo sauce. Mix it all together. It will taste delicious.

I was thinking about this meal tonight because my Clintonian friend was just here yesterday, and also because I cooked myself some Faux Fettucine tonight. I wandered through the earlier part of the day before finally driving to the store in the late afternoon to get some groceries, and fairly inventive ones (for me), at that. Pasta in heavy sauce with fake crab felt like a good idea at the time--and in fact turned out to have been a good idea.


What's funny about my writing plans, though, is that they were scuppered a bit by what happened while I cooked. I've mentioned that one wall of my kitchen is basically a sliding patio door. When the fettucine was nearly done boiling, I turned to wash my hands at the kitchen sink, and when I turned again to dry them, I realized with more than a small start that a full-grown doe was standing in the middle of the backyard, also recovering from more than a small start at having seen me suddenly appear at the window. I clambered as soft-footedly as I could into the other room to try and get a picture for you, but the whole photographing deer thing really doesn't work so well at this time of year and in the kind of weather we had today. My only even vaguely viable shot only included three of the four deer who had actually been standing in the yard when I happened to look out and experience a moment of mutual shock with one of them. All four high-tailed it out of the yard, running around to the front of the house and then across the street and onto the college's property--where they proceeded to join five other deer who had already congregated there. Nine deer now. I have a theory about why I'm seeing more deer banding together than ever before: in part because of the protests of my neighbor (who hates the deer for eating his plants and shrubs, despite his having shrouded said plants and shrubs in chickenwire), Gambier orchestrated a legal deer hunt this winter, a kind of second season, to try and thin out their ranks. I wonder whether the ones that are left have now turned to one another, in compensation for the ones who've been lost. I realize that I anthropomorphize. (Here's your evening's etymology lesson, by the way: the verb "high-tail" originated in the U.S. in the 1920s and comes straight from the way some animals--deer included--flee with their tails erect.)

As I stood in the evening-dark house, holding a camera that hadn't managed to get a good image of any of that fright and scurry and regrouping, I thought back to the best image of my drive home from the grocery. Tonight I deliberately took one route to the store and another route home, thereby executing a kind of circle around a particular corner of my world, and my deliberate purpose, as I told it to myself, was to check on everything and see whether anything was different. These were the words in my head as I drove eastward on US-36. I can only imagine that checking on everything encompassed seeing whether any fields have sprung into early green, or whether any livestock are out in different array, or whether the stubble from last year's crop looks different in steely grey evening, which is not when I'm usually out driving that route. No to spring green, yes to livestock (I saw two white horses and a brown miniature donkey that I want to call wee despite redundancy), and a bit to steely stubble. But as I approached the junction of 36 and OH-308, which brought me back to Gambier, I was looking at a barn I quite like, on the north side of the highway: it's not a ruin yet, by any means, but it looks to be less used than perhaps it once was. Its roof is rusted, its walls greying wood with some of their white paint still on, its roofline topped by three evenly spaced lightning rods, the middle of which is also a weathervane. This barn sits a little ways from the road, in a slight declivity, and its rusted roof sets it off from the wintered gold of what's left of last year's corn. I really do like this barn, in much the same way that I realized, as I drove toward the interstate at the outset of my trip a couple of weeks ago, that I really do like mid-Ohio's landscape, its modest hills and small expanses and little streams. Much as I chafe against it sometimes, this alternately bleak and fertile landscape, punctuated with ruin and loveliness and neglect and perpetuated life and idiocy and grace, is home to my eye.

Just as I clicked on my right turn signal, I noticed, off in the distance (and still to my left, on the north side of the highway), a herd of deer standing in a far field, barely distinguishable from the brown monochrome of the lessening light, the hill-rippled rows, the horizon of trees still bare but soon to be leafing. I didn't have time to count them. I barely had time to register them. They were not majestic at that distance. They were tiny, negligible, utterly quiet, curiously unstill. They were a quick glimpse, an absence of color, a presence of life in low light, a closed camouflaged congregation, a weird complement to a girl alone in a car, heading home to stand by a stove in the memory of a meal shared.

I am dazzled in days and lost.

Today the sun was high and bright and the living room was illuminated and warm and I sat on the couch after my friends left and though I was meant to be doing work reading I found my day's title in another Annie Dillard book that I had checked out at the library when one of my friends needed Heidegger like he needed air and when I realized I could find Merleau-Ponty whom I'll probably not get to until May but I checked him out anyway and brought out from the library with me into the sun both my friends and my armload of books and walked to look at offices in my officehouse for this summer I must move and then I took pictures of signs all the way through town and first there was the one that reminded me of seeing Wayne's World with my father


and then I took a break from signs for a moment for this one that reminded me of a certain urban photographer


and then there was the one that spoke (if weirdly) for itself and my friend said isn't found type terrific you can do so much with it


and now it occurs to me that he's right and I could do even more with that one


and then there was the one that you're not expecting


and then there was the one that would be good for my office door and in case you're wondering I think the G and V are for Gambier Village so that we don't have to have any rumbles when people come over from Howard or Danville to take our signs


and then there was the one that made me say to my friends do you think they'd let us be a sixth borough and my friends said no and I thought yeah if Philadelphia's having a rough time of it I guess Gambier's got trouble


and then we came home and I performed the personals from the London Review of Books because my gift subscription started today and here are the three best ones from this week


and before you say there is just so much sometimes and maybe you should save something for later let me just tell you that I am done with saving things for later because even the living room lamp made a spectacle of itself today


not to mention the ceiling during breakfast


and so I trust that abundance will keep coming tomorrow.

I cross the street; I see God.

I was walking across the road about an hour ago, just as the sun hit the moment in its decline that I like best in every season, and I was watching my shadow on the east side of the street; it was about eight feet tall and had funny pigtails because I was wearing the lime green cap my beloved Brooklynite sent me for Christmas. Looking back over my left shoulder as I hopped onto the curb, I saw an arrangement of clouds and sun's rays that I remember believing was God, when I was a child. I have a clear memory of sitting in the front seat of my mother's Malibu, on the day she had to buy a particular kind of notebook (musical staves, I think) at the drugstore near Bell's grocery store, and saying to her, "See that, Mama? There's God." All my life I've been trying out for the most good girl ever, see? I don't remember what she said, but I suspect it was the right thing, since I still remember the scene some 26 years later.

The wind here is so high today it sounds like a jet engine, like a plane passing over when no plane is in sight. The wind is so high that doors don't fall to behind one; the door to the post office hung noncommittally half-open until I went back and tugged it closed after me this afternoon. Out the back of the house, the sky has become a black and white still, except that it's not still at all; it's a monochrome image in intensest motion.


Though the evening is cold and blustery, though the day had me layering up and buckling down again, still engaged on the project of getting rid of all this built-up stuff that's overwhelmed my past few weeks, I am feeling mighty full of pep. Two good friends of mine are on their way here--should be here any minute, in fact--and though I have no idea what we're going to eat, I have a sense that it will be excellent, if only because they'll be here. They're excellent friends that way, and many other ways. And after we eat, who knows? Perhaps there's mischief to be undertaken somewhere in Knox County.

Plus, I find myself continuing to enjoy getting acquainted with people by means of these writings. It feels funny to call people friends when I've never met them, but there it is. Because of one of my blogfriends, I spent a substantial part of yesterday trying to decide whether I'd rank the Pet Shop Boys above the Talking Heads, as a dance band, and whether I'd choose "Baby Got Back" over "Rock Lobster," if I could only take three dance songs to a desert island. (My answers were "no" and "no," by the way.) Because of another, I'm walking around seeing things a bit differently than I did before; she has an amazing way of picking out the essential detail, the most luscious color or grating texture or startling pattern, then skewing it just enough to make it exceptional. On my way home from the office this evening, for instance, I started noticing how street signs get more fun when you start picking them apart instead of seeing them as wholes. Tonight, I played by selecting the messages I liked. But now I also know where to look if I want to reinforce grimmer feelings; "No" and "Do Not" are all over my walk home, as well.

Twinkle gaspingly, like fiery fish out of water.

You can admire Dickens for that title. Any time you see a line of words like that coming from me, Dickens should be your first guess as to source. (And if you are among the millions who believe that Charles Dickens is a big boring waste of time, probably because you had a crappy high school experience with Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities or Hard Times, then start the process of halting your hating. Someday--sooner, rather than later, if you let me know you're interested--I'll give you some reasons why Dickens kicks ass, and then you'll maybe find yourselves wanting to pick up one of those big ol' tomes and find out what's living and crawling and creeping and sneaking and loving within its pages.)

Weather has been erratic here once again today. I awoke to bleary sun, the kind of washed out sun that tells you rain's on its way soon, and within a couple of hours, the rain was coming down so hard and fast that it left enormous pools of standing water in half the lawns on my street--pools that glinted and rippled with loveliness when the sun came out and the breeze kicked up about an hour later. As I sat on the couch reading yet more student writings, I watched the clouds alternately blazing and dulling past. At their best, the clouds came past in multiple layers and at multiple speeds: a stable, thickish body of cumulus fronted by thready wisps (which I would call cirrus, but I think those only occur higher in the atmosphere) slipping past at lower altitude. Round about 6 p.m., as I took advantage of a lull before dinner to order my textbooks for next fall's courses (yes, already; now is when it happens), I realized that the light had gotten mighty strange. The sun seemed to have gone down, but everything was illuminated as though it were just low. Turning to look over my left shoulder, out the small window that forms one end of my living room's bay, I realized that an enormous cumulonimbus cloud was climbing up over the sky from the south and southwest. The cloud was edged in gold remnants of sunlight, though I didn't see the sun again.

Fifteen minutes later, I looked up from my book-ordering to see not only that the huge thunderous looking cloud that I had expected to start dropping more rain on us any second had not done so but also that the setting sun had turned the wisps and contrails in the sky to rose. "Red sky at night, sailor's delight," I found myself whispering to myself as I grabbed the camera and ran out the back door (squelching down into the still sodden lawn).


When I was little, my parents taught me basic weather legends: "Red sky at night, sailor's delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning." "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain." That one occasioned some confusion, because I was a punster even at an early age and envisioned the rain falling on the kind of plane that would periodically take my father off to Cleveland or Detroit on business. Why, in Spain, would the rain fall mostly on the airplane? I have a clear memory of sitting with my father in our family room, in the late afternoon, while he explains the differences not just between "plane" (=airplane) and "plain" (=geographic entity) but also between "plane" (=airplane) and "plane" (=geometric entity). He then goes on to explain spheres, using the example of an orange as a spherical object. I am probably four. I love my father. He is also the person who taught me the phrase "superficial flesh wound" when I scraped my knee at age two. "Did you get a boo boo?" the neighbor asked. "No," I said reassuringly, having myself been reassured by my father as he cleaned and bandaged the injury. "It's just a superficial flesh wound."

He's also the person who taught me how to remember that the sun sets in the west, with another set of rhymes: "Sun sets in the west, fishing is best. Sun sets in the east? Fishing is least." "But the sun doesn't go down in the east, Papa," I said when he taught me these lines. (In my memory, all these meterological lessons happened on the same afternoon.) "That's right," he said. "So, if the sun were setting in the east, it would mean that it was the end of the world, and I think the fishing would be least, then." One could rarely argue with my father.

Based on the small quantity of red in the sky tonight, I'd say that any mid-Ohio sailors should be thinking life is good when the sun comes back up tomorrow. Those of you familiar enough with mid-Ohio's geography to know just how landlocked we are will already have picked up the wryness in my tone.

When I left for dinner (an absolutely exquisite rendition of keema peas, a hearty dish made with lamb and peas, served over rice), it was nearly dark; lightning backlit the heavy clouds that continued hanging about just behind the treeline. And it was about 67 degrees. By the time I left my friends' house to come home, the wind had picked back up, and it was about 47 degrees. The sky had turned to one of my favorite versions of itself: fast-moving clouds brilliantly lit by and intermittently obscuring an almost-full moon, stars tiny and visible in swiftly disappearing patches. Usually, when confronted with a lovely night image, I own up to its fleetingness and do my best to impress it on myself. Tonight, I decided to give my tripod a shot, as it were. This image is my favorite, largely for the weird way my tulip magnolia tree came out looking (and let me tell you--as if you weren't already waiting for spring, wait until you see this tree in bloom):


I also tried to get a good shot of my lightning rod, but I wasn't quite as successful there. I can see what I'm looking at in the picture, and with the help of my photo editing program, I hope you'll be able to see it, too.

All these images of blustery moonlight and changeling weather are entirely germane to what I'm working through tonight: I'm about to embark on the last installment of Dickens's Bleak House, which my evening seminar and I will finish up a week from tonight. Bleak House is one of many novels Dickens published in twenty numbered parts, one part published each month, each part consisting of 32 pages and two full-page illustrations. (Dickens was not, though you may have heard this legend, paid by the word.) The last installment of these twenty-part novels comprised parts nineteen and twenty--it was a sort of two-hour finale, if you will--as well as helpful things like a table of contents and title page for the full novel, in case you'd been buying the individually bound parts for nineteen months and found yourself wanting to get them all bound up together as a book. The installment I'm about to read was published in September 1853, by which time people had been reading Bleak House--silently and aloud, individually and in groups--since March 1852. I try to get my students to imagine the kinds of anxiety and relief that this novel's first readers must have felt--the ways these novels really lived with them for months on end, could settle in and make them wonder, make them talk and speculate and cook up possible plot continuations. (Sometimes, in an early version of fan fiction, people went ahead and pirated continuations of Dickens novels, while they waited for the new installments to come out. Dickens, as you might imagine, was not so amused.) (And in at least one instance, legend has it, people in New York City got so crazed with desire to find out what had happened to a particular ailing character in a particular early Dickens novel that, when the ship arrived from London bearing the latest installment, someone had to read that installment aloud, at the docks, to prevent the assembled crowd from rioting. I've never wanted to hunt that legend down and make sure it's true, because as a story it's just so wonderful. "Is Little Nell dead?!" the people shriek. A reading ensues. Mass weeping and wailing. Who bought the installment after that, I've always wondered? Did people think of it as a souvenir of the collective experience they'd just had?)

I can't even bear to bring this post to a graceful ending, now that I'm thinking about how the novel will end. Even though I've read this one before, and even though I'm through the part that wrenches my heart mercilessly, my readerly desire is getting the better of me.

Here's an easy one.

Look, it's Hem!


Though you can't tell it from this picture, the man with the mandolin is enormously tall. I met him briefly at the wedding of some friends (the ones I helped teach to rhumba). He's one of those people so tall that his waist is at my bustline. I went to high school with a guy like that. Interestingly, that guy's name was also Steve.

Follow the picture for an article with interviews, and file this post under "I don't shill for others unless they're amazing, and these lot are amazing."

source for today's image: John Von Pamer, in New York magazine.

Or I guess the grass is itself a child.

Tonight, I decided to take a walk out to the bookstore to do some of my evening's work (which, to be sure, was the kind of work that hardly feels like work; having begun watching my DVD of the BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens's Bleak House this afternoon, I proceeded to restart my reading of the final quarter of the novel this evening). First, I swung down the road to my officehouse, which was empty and locked, and as I let myself in and thunked the bolt back behind me, I thought about how funny it is to have an officehouse, which really can feel like a second home more than most other offices I've ever had. Having picked up the armload of student papers I needed to retrieve, I swung back out of the building (unlocking and relocking that front door, wishing, as so often, that the mid-door doorbell--one of the old-fashioned kind with a key that turns and a legend emblazoned around the key reading "TURN" and a bell on the back of the door that brrrrings while the key turns--still worked) and headed into town. About halfway there, I was struck, as so often, by the utter quiet of Gambier in vacation mode. In another week, everyone will be back and I'll be listening to sport utility vehicles running the stop sign outside my house and ripping up asphalt as they accelerate. For now, I'm enjoying the sound of spring rain instead.

The other thing that struck me, as I headed toward the bookstore, was the fact that I hadn't seen a single person since leaving my house. I continued not seeing any other people along my whole walk to the post office and then back across the street to the bookstore. And on my walk home from the bookstore, once again I saw no other people. I think I might have seen one car driving, during my entire evening's perambulations. That's one iteration of small-town living for you.

Toward the end of my time in the bookstore, I heard an eruption of thrums onto the roof and was grateful to have grabbed my umbrella as I headed out the door. The kind women working the counter outfitted my books and papers with a plastic bag, and out I went into the rain.

The weather today ran the gamut from pounding rain to blazing sun, and it ran that gamut a couple of times. One effect of the rain and warmth we've had here over the past two days is that all the spring flowers are making their appearances, causing me to feel a bit silly about all my alarmist tendencies in January and February. Now, those little yellow flowers have burst into blossom; with the lawn in full flower, I'm reminded that those early buds were simply the advance guard. The one patch of snowdrops that appeared on the lawn weeks ago is now just one of many. I ventured out to get you some images in the early evening:



If you look carefully, in the upper right corner of that second picture you'll see one of the little yellow flowers.

I'm feeling a little more epigrammatic this evening than usual, perhaps because it's growing late. In quest of my title for the evening, I pulled my copy of the 1855 (first) edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass off the shelf; it seems a natural progression, since you had Dickinson last night and since I namechecked Brooklyn two nights ago. From section 26 of "Song of Myself," I've gotten myself another simple plan:

I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,
And accrue what I hear into myself . . . . and let sounds contribute toward me.

I hear the bravuras of birds . . . . (ll. 584-6)

Whitman goes on to list other things he hears, but I love "the bravuras of birds" far more than anything else he names, so I'm stopping there in order to emphasize it. I heard the bravuras of birds all morning and afternoon today. Two cardinals hopped about in the holly bushes outside my study. Earlier in the day, a red-bellied woodpecker had knocked his way up the maple tree in front of the house. Even the raw cawing of the crows didn't bother me, in amongst all the birdsong and birdsight happening in my corner of town today.

Late in the afternoon, six deer ambled through my backyard. As had been the case with the birds I'd seen earlier, I found myself standing stock-still at the window, simultaneously wanting to photograph what I was seeing and wanting to avoid disturbing what I was seeing through the very action of getting out the camera and aiming it. The birds are most skittish; I knew I'd lose that woodpecker altogether if I even turned the key in my front door, much less ventured into the yard to get a closer look. But the deer are wary in a more intimidating way, especially now that there are six instead of the three who've hung around since I moved here. The deer see me while I sit in the house watching, and they watch me in return. And today, one of them turned her whole body toward me and took a couple of steps toward the house. I've heard crazy stories about deer rushing headlong through people's windows, so I sat as still as I could, and eventually she turned away and went back to decimating some backyard vegetation. Eventually, all six of the deer made their way to the back corner of the yard and headed into the wooded ravine that fills in the U formed by the streets on whose corner I live. And so the only photograph I can offer is this one (from which two of the deer are missing), where you can see that the deer on the right (who is, I think, the one who locked eyes with me) has paused for one last bite before leaving the yard. Note also my quasi-Shakespearean cloven tree (would that it were a pine; perhaps it's actually a Tennysonian tree, with Merlin tranced up inside, courtesy of wily Vivien).


There was a night, several weeks ago, when seven deer congregated in the grassy space across the street from my house. I stood in the dark, in my front porch, watching them appear, one after the other. Just when I thought they were all there, another would make its stiff-legged, backward-kneed, head-bobbing way into the false moonglow of the streetlamp and cross the road to join this apparently impromptu gathering. I found something about the sight tremendously moving. Perhaps it was the fact that it was only a sight. So quietly, so improbably quietly, do the deer move; so silently they stand.

Unto my Books - so good to turn -

The fiction binge did come today, as I suspected it might, and so I have finally finished Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex (2002), which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2003. Someday I'll tell you about my fondness for reading Pulitzer winners and Booker Prize nominees. Tonight, though, I'm tired from having plunged through so many hundreds of pages; instead of my words, you get Emily Dickinson's. (Be aware that the numbering is R. W. Franklin's, not Thomas Johnson's.)

446.
This was a Poet -
It is That
Distills amazing sense
From Ordinary Meanings -
And Attar so immense

From the familiar species
That perished by the Door -
We wonder it was not Ourselves
Arrested it - before -

Of Pictures, the Discloser -
The Poet - it is He -
Entitles Us - by Contrast -
To ceaseless Poverty -

Of Portion - so unconscious -
The Robbing - could not harm -
Himself - to Him - a Fortune -
Exterior - to Time -
(1862)

1062.
My best Acquaintances are those
With Whom I spoke no Word -
The Stars that stated come to Town
Esteemed Me never rude
Although to their Celestial Call
I failed to make reply -
My constant - reverential Face
Sufficient Courtesy -
(1865)

A centurial constellation.

Tonight, I have reached my hundredth post. Because my day basically involved my watching extremely silly contemporary movies, checking out library books, filing some forms, and then eating delicious curried salmon while watching (and helping provide live satirical commentary for) King Vidor's The Crowd (1928), and because I'm feeling a strong compulsion to do something memorable to mark my gratitude that these writings have come to constitute such a productive, provocative part of my life in the past few months, I've decided to revisit a experiment in self-narration that I did last year, in private, after my soon-to-be-Chicagoan friend posted a list of 101 things about himself on his blog. Back then, the Cabinet was nary a twinkle in my eye, and so I wrote my list just to my friend. It gave me such a high that I then proceeded to write two or three pages of fiction, for the first time in more than a decade. I then more or less turned my back on all but my critical writing for another whole ten months, before everything came to a boil in December.

Rather than list 101 things about myself, I will give you only 100. And rather than list them by number, I'll present them in paragraphs of ten. It may well turn out that you'll get ten ten-sentence paragraphs that will be about whatever it is my mind starts constellating, here, rather than 100 discrete things, so consider yourself forewarned. You can double-check my counting, if you want. I predict that your experience will be rather like mine on Nauplion's thousand steps.

One. I was born in Detroit, Michigan. Over the course of my childhood and adolesence, Detroit's decay and fall, and the way it made me fear for my life (so much so that I sometimes put my head between my knees while we rode through Detroit in the car, because I worried that we were going to die), developed my understanding of what cities had to be like. By the time I traveled to New York City for the first time in 1999, I was ready to be felt up, mugged, and/or shot in the subway, if not in Port Authority the moment I stepped off the bus--despite the fact that I had already begun learning the joys of city visiting when I lived in Athens and in London. When I was in Brooklyn last October, I realized, coming in from Ronkonkoma on the Long Island Rail Road and the Q train, that my body has learned a way of holding itself that I automatically and happily step into when I arrive in cities. I gaze straight ahead but still manage to take in everything on my peripheries, not because I'm scared and not simply because I'm vigilant but mainly because there's so much to see and hear that I go into sensory overload. One thing that doesn't change in cities is the length of my stride. I am a fast walker, and not because I take a lot of steps. I realized at a particular moment just how much I enjoyed walking with a long stride: it was in the middle of a swim meet, when I was about ten, and I was walking along the pool deck, getting ready to round the corner near the shallowest end of the part of the pool in which we didn't compete, when it suddenly hit me that my feet were hitting the concrete and my legs were pushing me off with a strength I wanted to keep relishing until I couldn't anymore. One of my funniest memories from high school: shopping for a prom dress with my mother, I strode out of the dressing room in one possibility, and she said, "If you're going to wear that dress, you should take smaller steps." Sometimes I still worry that my mother thinks I haven't turned out to be the right kind of woman, even though she's also one of a handful of women who taught me that there is no right kind of woman--and who thus made me a feminist, even if all those women wouldn't necessarily identify themselves as feminists--and even though her response to this sentence will be, "You have to be the kind of woman you need to be. It's your life."

Two. I wasn't really born in Detroit. I was really born in Grosse Pointe, down the road from Detroit. I say that I was born in Detroit not because no one's heard of Grosse Pointe but because I don't want to sound as though I was born in a wealthy suburb (we didn't live there; we were Detroiters), even though I'm sure that not everyone in Grosse Pointe was or is wealthy. When I finally saw the movie Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), though, I was terrifically excited to see the houses along Lake Shore Drive, because I used to see those houses every time my parents and brother and I would visit our families in Detroit. The movie to which I've had the strongest "I've seen that!" reaction, though, is Hoosiers (1986). If you've seen the beginning of Hoosiers, when Gene Hackman is driving through a steely grey Indiana morning, autumnal cornfields stretching out on either side of the rural routes he travels, then you've seen the landscape that formed a significant part of me. When we first lived in Indiana, my mother told us that the state where one has lived the longest counts as the state one is from. By these rules, Indiana is where I'm from. When people ask me where I'm from, though, I can't just say "Indiana." I tend to go all the way back to Detroit, then mention Buffalo, NY, and then say Indiana, before I finally explain that I now consider myself a Great Lakes girl, having spent highly significant parts of my life in upstate New York.

Three. Sometimes I wonder where I should be buried, when I die--which is not, I'll reassure you right away, anything like wondering when or how I'm going to die. My maternal grandparents and great-grandmother, the only relatives I've known who have died (or whom I know to have died), are all buried in Detroit's Mt. Olivet Cemetery, near City Airport. There's so much wrapped up in that last sentence that it will take several more to disentangle: for one, as I typed it, I realized that it excludes my uncle Chuck, who died when I was six. I think that he's buried in northern Michigan, where my paternal grandfather is also, but I'm not sure. I have not been in touch with anyone from my extended family since Thanksgiving 2004, so it's not likely I'm going to feel any desire to have my remains located where my extended family members are--if there were even any room left where they are (as in, for example, the multi-person family tomb, marked by a giant stone simply bearing my last name, in another Detroit cemetery, or even in Mt. Olivet). I know that there's no room near my grandparents and my great-grandmother in Mt. Olivet because of the story of how my grandfather and my parents almost had to pick a plot far from my great-grandparents' graves, after my grandmother's sudden death twelve years ago. When they all arrived at the cemetery and consulted the map showing available plots, the section of the cemetery where Bushia and Dzia Dzia are buried looked as though it was full, but at the last second, someone noticed that the plot touching corners with my great-grandparents' plot was available and suitable for two. Just over four years later, my grandfather's ashes joined my grandmother's there. As I flew out the next afternoon, watching the Renaissance Center and the Detroit River get smaller and smaller, I said goodbye to Detroit, possibly forever. Sometimes I wish my grandparents were buried somewhere more accessible to me (in multiple senses), so that I could visit them.

Four. Shortly after each of my grandparents' deaths--as in, within hours in one case, days in another--I experienced major epiphanies that helped me clear really problematic relationships out of my life. At each moment, I couldn't help but consider one of my mother's beliefs: that people who have died maintain some spiritual presence in an afterlife, from which they watch over and guide their living. About a year after my grandfather died, I started seeing a monarch butterfly intermittently and somehow became convinced that it was a visitation from my grandmother. I no longer remember that conviction's architecture, but I can't discount it; sometimes that butterfly still shows up right when I've been thinking about my grandmother, or need some sort of assistance that a thought of her or of my grandfather provides. Though I am not a religious person, then, I do consider myself a believer--just a believer in the idea of something bigger than present human life, as well as in the idea that it's impossible for (as Browning would put it) finite beings to apprehend that something bigger with certitude, which means that it's impossible for finite beings to dictate to other finite beings what they should believe. The nebulous, vague "something bigger" in which I believe might simply be the irrepressible, irreproachable, utterly indifferent force of complexity itself, ever unreeling, ever tirelessly speeding. Sometimes I wonder whether my lack of religion will eventually come back to haunt me. Usually, I believe that it won't. I know that this facet of my being makes my mother a bit nervous. I worry sometimes that it makes her unhappy; this worry about a particular unhappiness is only one small facet of my more general concern that my mother is sometimes unhappy.

Five. I sometimes wonder whether other people think it's strange that I'm very close to my parents. For a long time, I thought that my parents were perfect, a belief that both fueled and was fueled by my need to try and be perfect myself. When this belief finally shook loose a few years ago, I spent about a year mired in virulent anger and frustration. Now that I recognize that we're all flawed, life is more fun and I enjoy being with my parents even more than before. (I hate to sound banal.) But seriously: when I arrived home yesterday, I found a phone message from my father that was one of the loveliest messages I've ever received, from anyone--all an elaboration on a very simple sentence that I suspect lots of parents don't articulate to their children enough: "I love you." (I hate to sound like a parenting manual.) Because my nuclear family is so close, and because my parents' marriage is rock solid (though not perfect), I have very high expectations for relationships. I would rather be single than be in a semifunctional relationship. I am also enabled in this principle by the fact that I enjoy being with myself.

Six. In fact, one of the horrifying things about depression, in my experience, is that it keeps me from liking myself enough to want to be in the same room with myself, a real problem when your occupation is an entirely solitary one. In the ugly fall of 2001, I felt as though I'd been abandoned by my closest friend, the person who was always good to be around; all I had left was a kind of blank where all those interests and insights and desires and energies had been. "The terrible thing about depresion," my dissertation advisor said to me one day that December, "is that it's so boring: you find yourself thinking the same things over and over again, and talking about the same things over and over again, and it's all just one note, all the time." Inexplicably, within a few days of our having had that conversation, I started liking being with myself again. I don't attribute it directly to the conversation; I think that a collection of shifts and changes had been coming together and were possibly catalyzed by it. Whatever happened, though, it was as though a bolt had shot back and my regular self rematerialized and we resumed our temporarily suspended interminable internal conversation about books and ideas and dinner. That fall, in the interests of continuing to do my job, I had assigned a great deal of my unplaceable, unceasing sorrow and fear to a small version of myself that I imagined sitting in a corner, somewhere behind me, able to devote herself entirely to weeping and gnashing, possibly even rending some garments. I knew that this kind of self-splitting, taken too far or rendered involuntary, could be a real problem. This winter, I let another little version of myself split out and go off into a corner to spin happily outlandish romance narratives, while I went about my daily business. Obviously, checking in with my extravagant, hopeful romantic was more fun than checking in with my extravagant, hopeless sorrower had been.

Seven. I really am a helpless romantic. I hesitate to call myself a hopeless romantic, because that phrase is so oxymoronic. But I find my mind turning, as is embarrassingly often the case, to a pop song's lyrics: "There's always something so tragic / about a hopeless romantic," sings Peter Salett in "Heart of Mine," which you've heard if you saw Keeping the Faith (2000), because it was the song backing up the Falling in Love montage midway through the film. I have nearly three decades' worth of pop lyrics filling my brain. "Just slip out the back, Jack, / Make a new plan, Stan, / Don't need to be coy, Roy, / Just listen to me / Hop on the bus, Gus, / You don't need to discuss much / Just drop off the key, Lee, / And get yourself free": "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" is the first song I remember hearing. Because of the way my memory works, I can quote ridiculous stretches of lyrics and also sing along with the instrumentals of any crazy number of songs. Even though I know that the brain doesn't work this way, I suspect that my mind's being filled with these words and sounds has something to do with what is often a too-fleeting memory of things that do matter. On the other hand, if I could do the kind of elaborative encoding with, say, every moment of Bleak House that I was able to do with, say, the Eurythmics' "Would I Lie to You?" or Escape Club's "Wild Wild West," on all those junior high field trips--well, maybe I really would be encyclopedic the way I've always wanted to be. Lines from movies don't stick with me as naturally and swiftly as lines from songs; I tend to learn albums I love within days of getting them, and then I've got them, pretty much forever. Because I'm a hopeless romantic, a substantial number of these songs are love songs.

Eight. However, an awful lot of them are Beastie Boys songs, which always seems to surprise people (oh word?). But you know what? Any group that drops a line like "I've got more rhymes / than Carl Sagan's got turtlenecks" into a song called "Hey, Fuck You" (chorus: "And if you don't like it, then hey, fuck you!") is a group that's got my heart. When I helped a friend move from Ithaca to Hamilton, NY, a couple of years ago, her husband (hey, guy!) and I sang that song over and over while we packed, drove, and unloaded the moving truck. When my brother wrote a column for his newspaper last month about our favorite songs to listen to together, three of the ten we listed were by the Beastie Boys, and they were all in the top five. Our number one was "Professor Booty," from Check Your Head (1992), and my brother helpfully pointed out to his readers that one of the reasons this song topped the list is that I'm a professor. But I'd like to set the record straight: this song had nothing to do with my becoming a professor. I was already on this path when that album dropped. And now, I consider the Beastie Boys just one more reason to love Brooklyn. I totally want to represent, out here in Gambier, in one of those Blue Marlin hoodies, but they don't sell the one I love anymore.

Nine. When I was ten months old, I had a sixth toe removed from my left foot; my two biggest toes on that foot are still fused. I have a substantial writer's callus on my right middle finger; it's been with me since 1983. I have never thought my hands particularly lovely, but I have always been glad of what they can do. I played piano from age four to thirteen, a practice that (I believe) gave me my particular memory for musical details (including lyrics) as well as my more general ability to trap a startlingly high number of small details and keep them for a ridiculous amount of time. I have been told that this characteristic can be a bit creepy. I certainly know that it has set me up for all manner of heartwreck, because I can and do remember so much, so vividly and minutely. But I also like to think that it makes me potentially useful as a bearer of institutional memory, sort of like an external hard drive though with more subjective flaws and pitfalls. It has disturbed me, over the past few years, to find that my memory might be too crowded, or my mind too diffused, and that I have a harder time instantly recalling details than I once did. One of my greatest fears has always been that I might lose my mind somehow (through a head trauma, for instance--I used to meditate on this fear a lot while we drove along on I-94, heading into Detroit) but still somehow be able to remember what my brain could once do. Depression feels this way, when it sidles up for a visit.

Ten. These paragraphs have taken longer than I expected, as do most things I undertake, which is why I'm perpetually behind and/or late; now I want nine excellent things with which to close tonight's writing. Here's one: when I was eight, I went geode-hunting with a group of kids on a field trip from the Children's Museum in Indianapolis; they drove us down to Monroe County, near Bloomington, and we waded knee-deep in a river, picking up likely candidates for revealing crystalline glories once cracked. The main library on the Indiana University campus at Bloomington was my first research library; I went there for the first time in 1992 and spent many a day during college vacations racing about, gathering books from all over the grad library's tower, feeling like a real researcher, learning to be a real researcher (which included learning to grab a quick meal, in the café at the bottom of the escalators (!) down from the lobby, and then to get right back to the shelves). My favorite library, to this day, is the labyrinthine, highly cultured nerd paradise that is the London Library, a subscription library in London's St. James's Square; it deserves a post of its own, which it will get, but for now, here are a couple of pictures (note, in the first, the open grating that forms the floor, and understand how funny it felt to show up there on day one of my research work, wearing a summer dress).

(Sigh.)

Ten (continued). I love black licorice, maraschino cherries, gerbera daisies, and barbecued eel. I own five pairs of red shoes. I feel a fiction binge coming on, tomorrow. I have, in the past, occasionally gone out on a shopping expedition with the simple but elusive goal of finding a small and beautiful thing, either for myself or for someone else; often these expeditions lead to my seeing many lovely things but nothing truly, truly beautiful. I turn thirty in just over a month; I am pleased that this year, of all years, the moon will be full on my birthday. And though I don't feel particularly anxious or vexed about getting older--I kind of enjoy finding more and more kinky white hairs making their crazy ways out from behind my ears, for instance, or tracing the newest laughlines that are appearing on my face--I do wonder whether I'll feel strange about moving into a whole new decade, and I suspect you'll hear more reflections on this matter as March slips away and April gears up.

One hundred. My gratitude to all of you who have been reading me so far; knowing that the Cabinet has some glancers and glimpsers has helped me keep at the process of building and gathering, and of reorienting myself in some pretty fundamental ways.

sources for tonight's images: 1) Know Your Art!; 2) the London Library.

So many blooms.

The sights I saw at the start of my journey were far lovelier than anything I encountered thereafter, though I did see a barn with no remaining walls, only its ruined skeleton, silhouetted in the grey afternoon light, and I did see that even our Ohio trees are fringing with red as it warms, and I did see a strange, light mist--a kind of half-fog--gathering in the bottoms of fields as I neared home. But before I left the land of early spring, I saw:

(the same blooms I showed you as blazing-in-sun buds on Tuesday)

and (to rectify the crocuslessness of Tuesday's post):

I choose the side of possibility.

Tonight, the discipline of writing is almost too much; the day was low and cloudy (though warm) from start to finish, and my friend and I spent much of it puttering around Lexington finding great things of small price. I'm going home tomorrow with a couple of new Chaleur coffee mugs for my mug collection; one of them features a brightened up version of the Van Gogh painting I showed you late in January. I also found my favorite Miquelrius notebooks, without even looking for them, at a local bookstore. And after all these years, I've secured a new copy of Emily Dickinson's poems, in the reading version of the R. W. Franklin edition (which I still haven't taken the time to scope out, even though it's been around for almost a decade), so that I can read them unfettered by my young self's inky scrawls. Sometimes I like to look through my old annotations; from too far back, I find that they're mostly quick jottings that make transparent just how tired and overstretched I was during much of college. The quest for Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk continues but looks as though it will get resolved in Columbus, as I wend my way homeward.

From the number of links in that first paragraph alone, you're already getting the sense that today was a different kind of day than yesterday. Some days, I attain a clarity of mind that eludes me on others--which is by no means to say that the busier days don't bring me their own riches. In addition to spending as much time as I could with my friend, whom I now know I've been missing even more than I had realized (she put it best when she said to me, about ten minutes after I arrived here on Saturday, "I realized when I saw you at the door that I miss your corporeal presence."), I commented on a batch of student writings, made headway with Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk (1996), and finished up with Archie Ammons's Tape for the Turn of the Year, from which tonight's title comes.

Because my friend's cooking was so good tonight, and because the wine was so good, and because the poetry I read while stretched across the floor was so good, and because the hot milk (so good) is almost gone, it's time for me to sleep. But first I'm going to mark some places for tomorrow--to keep you with me, and to keep me with myself.

For one thing, one of the unexpected joys of being in Lexington has been hearing the trains pass in the distance. It's a truth universally acknowledged, or at least posited by Paul Simon, that everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance (everybody thinks it's true). I know I do. The right moment will come, and then you'll hear about how and why I love the sounds of trains in distances.

For another, Kathleen Norris did just as much for me today as Wendell Berry did yesterday, as far as thinking about small town living is concerned. Hearing John Mellencamp's "Small Town" while my friend and I walked through a local mall also did a number on me, in a good way; Mellencamp's song is about a small Indiana town about half an hour from where I grew up, and many of its lyrics tell me to myself in ways that can catch me off guard but that are generally reassuring, in the end. I don't plan to marry an L.A. doll and bring her to my small town so that she can become small town just like me, though, in case anyone was wondering; Mellencamp and I also part ways when he claims that he's "seen it all in a small town." While I have had myself a ball in several small towns, I tend to wrestle more with the small town part of my identity than Mellencamp seems to do. Perhaps this divergence is a direct result of my not actually living in a pop song's life narrative; I suspect that things are a lot more nuanced for him, twenty years later, as well.

How Mellencamp got that whole paragraph, while Norris got only its first sentence, I'm just not sure. Perhaps it's because, faced with so much to say about her, my brain is wholly cordoning her off for tonight. But I will say this much about her: she has me thinking, for the umpteenth time, about how I define my spiritual identity, both to myself and to other people. The Cloister Walk is Norris's account of living in the Benedictine community at St. John's Abbey in Minnesota; it's organized both chronologically, working through the liturgical year, and thematically, working through a series of essay-length meditations on various aspects of her faith and experience. One of its simplest lessons is that "monasticism is a way of life, and monasteries are full of real people," and this lesson, in turn, gives Norris's book broad applicability. But her more complicated points are about the confluence of poetry and prayer, creativity and spirituality, in her own life, as she sounds her faith by feeling her vocation--her experience of how "thoughts and images constellate, converging, sometimes violently, in the subconscious" when she writes poetry--and is returned to her vocation through her strengthened faith. "One might grow into faith much as one writes a poem," she suggests. "It takes time, patience, discipline, a listening heart. There is precious little certainty, and often great struggling, but also joy in our discoveries.... In matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will tell you what bears fruit and what doesn't." I have tried to read this book at least three times in the past and have always stalled out after about twenty pages. Now, I wonder whether I simply needed to wait until I was readied for it, in part by having finished grad school, in part by having moved back to central Ohio, in part through professional developments that have freed up some space in which I can turn back toward these kinds of questions.

My friend is a deeply spiritual person, and practicing her religion in an active community of like-minded and like-spirited people is a crucial part of her being in the world. And so I knew that she was the right person to talk to about how tentative some of me feels about the turn toward spirit that my writing has taken since December, and so I broached the topic as we headed home from the Kroger just after rush hour this evening. We talked over what I talk about when I talk about agnosticism; we talked about the limits of knowledge and the borders of belief; we talked about our families and some of our friends and their religious practices.

And then, just after dinner, as I lay on the floor letting Ammons's Tape for the Turn of the Year unspool its way over me, I found an answer to my questions that will do for now and might even do for the long haul. It's as close as I can come to telling myself what I believe. Ammons muses on having gone to church with his wife a couple of days before Christmas in 1963:

the singing started:
though the forces
have different names
in different places &
times, they are
real forces which we
don't understand:
I can either believe
in them or doubt them &
I believe:

I believe that man is
small
& of short duration in the
great, incomprehensible,
& eternal: I believe
it's necessary to do
good
as we can best define it:
I believe we must
discover & accept the
terms
that best testify:
I'm on the side of
whatever the reasons are
we are here:

we do the best we can
& it's not enough:

I really regret that I don't know enough html to get the spacing of Ammons's lines just right; every time I put spaces or indentations in my composing window here, they disappear when I publish my post. You'll just have to check Ammons's poem out for yourself, if you like the bits I've given you in the past couple of days. One of the things I love about Tape is that its formal properties and its diaristic whatever-may-come nature seem to me a more sancitified and rich version of the project on which I've embarked here. The other thing that I love about it is that its sentences almost always end in colons, which at his fingertips, on his adding-machine tape, become the most hopeful of punctuation: There's always a next thing coming: there's always another image: there's always a tomorrow: and it will never, ever be enough:

A sprouting is going to go on.

Today was a day for gathering, taking in, taking stock, assessing what's been seeded of late, figuring out what might grow and what will need to wait for later. My friends were both off to work early in the day, leaving me to shepherd their dogs through a long, sunny day of their sleeping and my reading. And what company I kept today. I feel a bit like a woman possessed, which is likely to leave me stranded where I often found myself during meetings with my dissertation committee: sure that I had terrifically interesting raw material, but not so sure I'd be able to pull that material together and interweave it with my own thinking in order to make it sing the way it needed to. Remember when I wanted to write about nesting? Consider this post a return to, and a perhaps impossible elaboration of, a theme. I'm drinking my nightly mug of hot milk as I write, though, and so it's possible that I will kick out sometime too soon and have to finish my thinking in the morning. You'll be the first to know, if it works out that way.


I started my day with a mug of coffee, a dog in my lap, another dog by my side, and a couple of student plays to read. That task finished up in short order, I turned to Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which I've been wanting to reread ever since my solstice eve post. When I packed my box of books on Saturday afternoon--because I rarely drive anywhere where I'm going to stay for more than a couple of days without taking a box of books along--I grabbed Dillard's book along with most of the others on the list to your right. I'm thinking of my spring break as a hiatus not from work altogether, but away from one kind of labor and in another, and so I piled up the short stack of writers who have moved me, one way or another, with their approaches to the world around them, as well as to recording that world. Annie Dillard is on that list. So are Anne Lamott and A.R. Ammons. I'm giving Kathleen Norris a try, once again, for reasons that I may wait and explain tomorrow, since tomorrow marks a week since my sinking, which makes both more and less sense to me now than it did seven days ago. Joseph Cornell? I think I'd just like to carry him everywhere, from now on. And the walk I took this afternoon put Wendell Berry up there, too, in a way he simply hadn't been before I came down into his neck of the woods.

"There seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous," Dillard claims early in her book. "The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.... The whole show has been on fire from the word go." She devotes much of the early section of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to the idea of learning to see gratuitous grace and extravagant gestures, in large part because, as she argues, "beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there." "I went out to see what I could see," she tells us of her rambles through Virginian woods and mountains. After two and a half chapters, I went out into this Lexington neighborhood, headed for a pair of bookstores about a mile from here, with the intention of seeing what I could see--and with Dillard's warning echoing in my ears: "This looking business is risky."

One thing the walk confirmed for me is that I really may not be cut out for even small city life. Even though I sometimes complain about the overincubating force of my village's smallness, and even though there were birds and trees and flowers to see here today, nature is smaller, more tightly circumscribed, here than where my heart is. I did see shadows and buds and slants of light I loved; witness this fence I walked along on the ground, for instance. Lexington is closer to spring than we are up north, even though I'm only a couple hundred miles south of home. By the time I reached the corner of my friend's neighborhood streets and the main artery that would take me to the bookstores, I had encountered the second of my real beauties, a tree decked out in red buds, very different from the tiny knobby branch-ends that are dogwood buds, all over trees all over town (see the bird's nest photo above for an example). But on the walk from there to the stores, there was little I wanted to photograph for you. The one thing I really regret is that I came home (the last time, later in the day) with my hands empty of crocus photos, even though their gold and lavender and deep purple are bedecking lawns everywhere.

Eventually I did make it to the first bookstore, and on any other day, this post might have been about my longstanding love affair with used bookstores. This first one, which was closed the last time I made the trip down here, was one of the most aesthetically pleasing used bookstores I've ever encountered: no precarious stacks of books on the floor, no dodgy underlining and dogearing in books on the shelves, and no apparent end to its parade of rooms, opening out before me, each after the other, beckoning me to step in and spend $40 on a slim, blue nineteenth-century volume called The Basics of Obstetrics, for instance, though I was frankly too rattled by an image of supporting the perineum during birth (not to mention the plethora of ways delivery can go horribly wrong) to regret the prohibitive price. Even the bathroom was stylish, walls and ceiling covered in rhododendron print wallpaper. I did almost take a picture of the wallpaper. But then I found Wendell Berry hanging on the wall.

Well, okay, it was actually a series of his poems that this particular bookstore has printed by a local fine arts press called Larkspur a couple of times a year. The one that caught my eye--enough so that I started scrawling lines from it on my hand--was Berry's "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" (1973), which I am so very tempted to reprint here in full for you. Instead, follow the title's link if you'd like to read the poem in full; I will give you my favorite bits (the second stanza and the final stanza):

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

... Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

What went on my hand--what is still on my hand, at the end of the day--were "Practice resurrection" and "So, friends, every day do something / that won't compute." By the time I left the store, I had a broadside art print of this poem, wrapped up in brown paper and a flattened priority mail envelope, an early birthday present for myself, just right for the contrarian I'm working my back around to becoming after all these years. It'll get framed and hung, though where, I'm not yet sure. I also carried out of there a letterpress edition of Berry's poem "The Farm," originally published in The Hudson Review. My heart has a large soft spot for "The Farm" because I once wrote an essay analyzing it in comparison with Virgil's Georgics, to which I still think it bears comparing. There's far more to say about Berry's "The Farm," but for now let this suffice: the reason I barely batted an eye when the shop's owner said, "We also have a Larkspur edition of 'The Farm'" is not only that the book itself is a lovely, lovely object (letterpress makes my eyes go wide, and I can't stop touching its grooves on the page; the woodcuts that illustrate the volume are also perfect, somehow both stark and lush) but also that this poem makes both work and worship make sense to me:
Be thankful and repay
Growth with good work and care.
Work done in gratitude,
Kindly, and well, is prayer.
You did not make yourself,
Yet you must keep yourself
By use of other lives.
No gratitude atones
For bad use or too much.

This is not work for hire.
By this expenditure
You make yourself a place;
You make yourself a way
For love to reach the ground.
In its ambition and
Its greed, its violence,
The world is turned against
This possibility,
And yet the world survives
By the survival of
This kindly working love.

Berry is talking about agricultural labor here, but I'd like to believe that any "good work" done "in gratitude, / Kindly, and well" can be prayer, can work against the ambition and greed and violence militating against it. Berry's rural ideals, filled as they are with the cyclical difficulties and deaths that structure farm life in particular, actually help me, just as much as walking along busy streets today helped me, to think about where it is I live, and why I might want to keep living there after all.

My heart already full of those poems, I stepped across the street to a second used bookstore (two! in a block! a mile from where I sit! my heart sings at the very thought), hoping to find a copy of Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk, my book quest for this trip. Though I went disappointed in that particular quest, I surfaced with something better than I could have imagined, a used (though perfect) copy of Archie Ammons's Tape for the Turn of the Year(1965). Do you know this poem? If not, you're missing something extraordinary.

In 1963, just months before Cornell hired him and he decamped for Ithaca, where he lived for the remaining 45 years of his life, Ammons saw a roll of adding-machine tape in a store and thought he could turn it into a poem. "I / thought of the poem / then, / but not seriously," he tells us early in the poem. But two weeks later, on 6 December 1963, he threaded one end of the tape into his typewriter, declared, "today I / decided to write / a long / thin / poem," and started the project that would occupy him for about five weeks: producing a poem confined, arbitrarily, to this single narrow roll of paper, his tape for the turn of the year. I am indeed going to have to put off telling you all about this poem, and about how it has become the happy surprise of my evening, until tomorrow--for the time stamp went onto this post when I started writing, and it's been a good couple of hours since then. But I will leave you, for tonight, with a couple of clippings from Ammons's tape (with some of the spacing screwed up, alas), and an assurance that this particular sprouting of mine is going to go on, in the manner of this blooming-tomorrow daffodil from my friend's front yard:

[from 9 Dec.]
the record
can't reproduce event:
even if I could know &
describe every event, my
account would
consume the tape & run
on for miles into air:

those who rely on facts
have not heard:

[from 11 Dec.]
intellections are
scaffolds, trellises
we wish some vine of
feeling would take to
& possess
completely:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
...we build these
structures because we
have hope, at least:
we're
flat & lifeless,
but these erections,
they have hollow spaces,
room: we mean
to change--that is,
a sprouting is going
to go on: good, bad, &
indifferent are gonna
clutter up all around

They are. Just you watch.

source for tonight's middle image: I feel strongly enough about this one that I'm not even going to reduce the font size, as per usual. BuyOlympia.com is a terrific website of alternative crafts and all around awesome goods--it's like Elsewares but with a slightly more handmade aura around everything. Nikki McClure, whose papercut image "Field" appears above, is one of the most interesting artists on the site. Far from trying to cheat her of business, I'm trying to get you all to go over there and buy her lovely cards and posters and shirts. I'm a particular fan of her jellyfish t-shirt and may have to add it to the summer menagerie.

In the eleven minutes before I cut the pie...

...I pause and I know that the aroma wafting through the house will change once the knife slips through the browned top of the pie on the counter, the pie the dogs sat before the oven smelling and watching and waiting for, the pie I peeled and sliced apples for while my friends watched 24 in the family room, the pie that made me think about my mother and the time she baked and froze eight apple pies because I loved them so much but then the freezer was left cracked open on a summer day and the pies thawed, the pie that made me think about my grandmother who made pie crusts with lard (lard has never worked for me the way butter works; I will tell you to avoid Crisco at all costs because it will kill you) and who so often had a pie waiting when we rolled up in the middle of the night, the pie whose crust I made in the interstices of preparing for a party yesterday (because I know how to squeeze a crust into nearly any gap, because I have been making them from scratch since I got over my fear with the help of some friends five years ago and learned that if you believe the Joy of Cooking when it tells you not to worry about your pies' aesthetics but just to focus on their taste, you'll be patient with yourself and you'll learn that others want the taste and you'll make more pies and then you'll be fearless and they (beautiful) will be your trademark and you'll turn to them with a relief and a glory in what your fingers know how to do with flour, butter, sugar, salt, and water, and one time you'll make eight pies' worth of double crusts in the space of ninety minutes, getting ready for graduation parties, and this particular night you'll warm the chilled disk of dough between your floured hands until it's malleable enough to hit surely with the rolling pin and you'll push it until you have the right round thinness to line a blue pie dish and you'll hear that Jack Bauer is hounding some woman who doesn't believe her husband is the enemy and right then, as though you timed it, though you didn't because you don't have to anymore, the filling will have finished bubblyspitthickening over high heat on the stove and you will pour the apples and their spiced juice into the bottom crust, seal on the top crust, and let your fingers keep doing the work they've memorized, in one of your favorite embodiments of kinesthetic memory, your body's knowledge, your favorite body of remembrance, as they fold and pinch into shape the excess hanging over the pie plate because you believe a pie subsumes all excess), the pie that made me start wondering again about why Reese Witherspoon repeatedly invoked "real womanhood" in her acceptance speech last night, the pie that makes me think there's something to be said here that I just can't say yet about travesties and caricatures of Americanness, the pie that made me think of my beloved Brooklynite who taught me neither to measure the spices nor to stop at cinnamon nor to use a spatula to mix in the crust's water but who still asks for pie recipes every Thanksgiving, the pie that tonight we won't wait to cool, the pie that will fuel my friend's teaching preparation, the pie that we will cut soon, the pie the dogs will want to eat (having tasted the raw materials), the pie we will eat for breakfast for days, the pie for which a knife is even now being selected, the pie that we will cut in thirty seconds.

"Hey, how does pie sound?" comes the call up the stairs. My eleven minutes are up.

A postscript--come on, you knew it was coming. Twenty minutes later: