A Trip to the Library

I had read that it was a beautiful library. My project today was to drive to the neighboring town and see for myself.


I loved that there was an old New England cemetery right next to it. Someone must have known that a stroll through one was a fitting path to the other.


Care had been taken to protect the architectural elements of an older style while providing the security of a sturdy renovation.

I took a chance and searched the Fiction Room for a copy of the book that I had purchased a few weeks ago in a used book store in downtown Boston.


I took down from the shelves the library's copy of Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins. Long since separated from its dust jacket, the book was the same 1956 edition that I am reading now. What this copy has than mine does not is that unmistakable library smell wafting from the pages as soon as I opened the cover.

On the covers on my bed, I had left the copy from which I read last night before falling to sleep -- page 393!

A Toast to Household Browns

On the Road to See an Old Friend

The bus ride from Boston to Portland is two hours on a Sunday morning.

Two hours is not an inordinately long trip to see an old friend. I last saw him a year ago in my hometown of New Orleans, where he and his wife live ten minutes from my brother’s. At a table in an uptown coffee house, I had handed George a brochure about a March 2012 conference at Bowdoin College. Dressed in his lawyer’s long-sleeve white shirt and tie, George had taken the brochure and thanked me.

I was fresh from last year’s Winter Weekend centered on Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, which had brought a number of scholars to the Bowdoin campus to address a gathering of readers. Treating the participants to a banquet that took its inspiration from the literary work under discussion had been part of the winning recipe on the part of the college. I was able to assure George that the upcoming year’s conference on the Iliad would prove a satisfying experience – especially for someone whose diversions include translating the Iliad from the original Greek.


My preference for the bus this past Sunday came from the leisure it would afford for the two hours up to Portland and the two hours back. I would get to read further in The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir. A happy chance of a purchase in a used bookstore a few weeks earlier, the 1956 novel promised six-hundred pages of political and literary discussions among characters based on Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and their friends. The French major in me welcomed the diversion.

Would George and I have a similar conversation over our own lunch?

There was some talk about recent publications by the presenters at the weekend conference. There was talk about preferences for translations of the Bible. There was on George’s part the frank admission that few reading prospects of his had yet supplanted the Iliad for the capacity to engage him intellectually and maybe even emotionally. One of the great sagas of war opening on a scene of dissension in the ranks – George smiled in savoring the possibilities for insight the old epic could offer.


Over lunch and later on a walk through the Old Port, our conversation touched on teachers we had shared in high school and classmates and other authors like Mary Oliver and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, before whose family’s home and parish church we paused. The ease of the talk and the welcome and trust we each could sense from the other made this walk a strange one – that it had taken us so many years to find our steps matching this way and our moods agreeing.

Within four hours of arriving in Portland, George was heading to the airport. Talk of his wife and daughters had made it easy to imagine his life in New Orleans, and I knew he was returning to questions and satisfactions that someone of his intelligence and thoughtfulness expected at our age.

After my two hours’ read on the bus back to Boston, I picked up my car from the garage and drove home. The light was late afternoon light, Sunday afternoon light. Briefly it would touch my pictures and chairs and plants in a certain way. If I decided to capture it, it was because of who I had been almost fifty years ago as well as who I have since happily become.

Grits and Bacon

The simple rhythms are the best ones for Lent.

Simple meals can be the most satisfying.

Saturday morning gave me the chance to bring three slices of bacon to old-fashioned crispness. The balance of grits and bacon and coffee did its customary job.


The lessons from years of preparing meals provide some of the surest ways we return to ourselves.

Collision

I do not think a lot about my car until I do not have the use of it.

The Subaru I usually drive is in the garage. There was no one hurt in last week's collision, and that is what matters. The only vehicle available from the rental dealer was a Dodge Grand Caravan, and I climb into it each morning to go to work or to church.

I miss the ease of the Subaru, the familiarity, its decade-old companionship.


I am disoriented more than I realize at times this past week. It seems that writing is one way to acknowledge that things have not felt the same.

What have I given up for Lent? What, indeed.

Bread

I know you can write all sorts of things about bread. I will try not to do that self-congratulatory thing that food writers sometimes do when bread is their topic.

I want to talk briefly about the experience of walking to my car with a large brown paper bag, the kind with twisted handles. Nothing is in the bag but a loaf of bread -- no wrapper, no twist tie.

I bought a larger loaf of sour dough bread than I technically needed. It was what the bakery had labeled a "grande round," and it was the last such loaf they had at that point early Saturday afternoon.

I bought the grande round because it looked like something I would enjoy holding in my two hands when I took it out of the bag at home. It might look like an extravagance -- but in the way that a simple bundle of supermarket flowers can look just a bit like an extravagance.


I sliced into the loaf this morning for beakfast. I had wanted toast, and the long bread knife cut easily through the crust. The side of bread that my knife exposed was a pleasure to see.

It had been a good extravagance to buy for this long weekend.

Leaving Your Mark

Responding recently to an invitation to dinner, my oldest brother proposed spending part of the evening at my apartment discussing a trip that he might make to Paris.

What my brother and my sister-in-law wanted to do was simply talk with someone who had already been to Paris more than once or twice. They wanted to hear what someone a little more familiar with Paris than they were might suggest.

What kind of memories do I have? What might I suggest?

Buildings in Paris can be centuries old. Unheated buildings that are centuries old settle each in their own way and each at their own pace. At some point custodians of those structures must have begun to shrug their Gallic shoulders. Where there might originally have been tight corners joining wall to wall, cracks developed. Up and down a wall, fissures snaked.

During the eighteenth century, Europe developed a taste for picturesque ruins. If you had that "Romantic" turn of mind, you might have pressed your face up to one of those cracks in a Paris wall and convinced yourself you were breathing air trapped since the Middle Ages. You could have imagined slipping something through that opening -- a message of some sort maybe -- and known that it would remain undisturbed behind that wall for centuries to come.

You had left your mark in a way.

One Paris visit I took a liking to the idea of leaving my mark in just that way. I packed in my bags a printed reply card left over from a celebration at home. When I came to a sight in Paris that moved me in some special way, I determined, I would look for a way to leave that card. I was intent on not making work for anyone else by my gesture; under no circumstances would I deface or litter.

Stopping by myself one afternoon in a neighborhood church in the Latin Quarter, I sat in a side chapel for several minutes of reflection. There was a statue of the nineteenth-century French saint Thérèse of Lisieux next to an altar that was in some disrepair. An unevenness in the floor had developed over the centuries, and the altar leaned forward, away from the niche in the wall into which it had been built. Into the opening created by that leaning, I slid the small card I had brought from home.

I am part of that church in Paris now. As long as that church stands, I imagine, I will be there.

From River Road to Richardsonion Romanesque

I like grits. I really like them.

This Saturday morning I needed to replenish my supply of Quaker Grits. On my grocery run I bought a fresh container of the kind of enriched white hominy that can take an average of twenty minutes to prepare on stove top on a winter morning.

I would feel a little like Geraldine Page if I took the full twenty minutes, but I generally use a microwave. And then it is only eight minutes before a pat of butter blends its yellow with stir after stir of smooth, creamy grits, steaming in a white bowl.

What other New Englander had treated himself to that kind of breakfast Saturday morning?

Any of my fellow concertgoers Saturday evening?

I had not ever before been in the church where the choral concert took place Saturday evening. Friends who were members of the chorus were performing here for the first time. Not a fifteen-minute drive from my apartment, and I sat in a setting so unexpected and beautiful that I had to take pictures.

At intermission I stood with my usual crowd and gaped with them. I learned from one of them, a student of architecture, that the church was not -- as I had presumed -- the work of the architect of Boston's Trinity Church, Henry Hobson Richardson. The style was definitely Richardsonian Romanesque, but this 1888 structure had been designed by another architect -- John Lyman Faxon.

Well, what did I really know about Henry Hobson Richardson anyway, I asked myself this Sunday morning.

Not that he was a native of Louisiana, I assure you. But that's what I learned this morning, again and again, all the online resources corroborating the fact that he had been born and raised on a plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana.

I had travelled along the River Road through Vacherie time and again in my youth. My own father's mother had grown up in another of the plantation homes there. We had passed the home of Henry Hobson Richardson in our green Chevrolet, most likely, without knowing it.

Henry Hobson Richardson, the architect of Boston's Trinity Church, a man who ate grits for breakfast on winter mornings growing up?

Most likely.

Neo-Victorian Dust Jackets

I think I know what the story would sound like that could use this solemn photograph for its dust jacket.

Something like French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles comes to mind. Or something like Possession (1990) by A.S. Byatt.

It’s a Victorian – or Neo-Victorian – image for me. If the book suited to this image had a distinct Victorian forebear, it would by something written by Thomas Hardy rather than anything by Charles Dickens or George Eliot.

If the novel were good enough, it might be hard for it to escape an eventual screen version. And that would be the disappointment – to have an easy way for the story to go away, reduced in memory to movie stills, an IMDb listing, a line in filmographies. The story would become so much data, fodder for Wikipedia articles, a target for comparisons, something you found in Google searches.

The image is about winter and an earth that absorbs the universal return to something indistinguishable. The image is about a point where no amount of care can preserve or make compelling. The image is about being forgotten.

A latter-day Matthew Arnold might agree to have his literary portrait snapped as he holds the book with this cover, his finger apparently keeping his place in a read he is determined to resume as soon as the photographer's session is over.

Who would not be aware of another mood when a book with this sunny wall on its cover happened to hand? Which of us latter-day Matthew Arnolds would not pause before just such a winter wall and salute the design below the window sill? What photographer of latter-day Matthew Arnolds would not drag his equipment outside to capture it?

If a book could be written worthy of that moment, its winter readers would be on their way to being cheered, heartened, infected with a chance for mirth.

The Measure of Our Days

How do you take the measure of a week? What gives a week its flavor?

Do you measure it by a book you finished reading?

Do you measure it by a meal you ate at a friend’s table?

Do you measure it by whether you wrote something of which you are proud?

Do you measure it by a film you saw?

Do you measure it by the range of temperatures through which the sun shone through the dining room windows?


Do you measure it by the person who stopped by your office and asked for help?

Do you measure it by the meals you prepared in your kitchen that week?

Do you measure it by the number of nights you managed to sleep straight through?

Do you measure it by the plans you made to celebrate a family birthday?

Do you measure it by music you heard?

Do you measure it by photographs you took?

Do you measure it by the grocery run?

Do you measure it by the freshly laundered flannel sheets with which you made your bed?


Do you measure it by whether the reflection at Sunday services moved you to tears?

Do you measure it by an hour of therapy?

Do you measure it by a museum visit?

Do you measure it by the bills you paid?

Do you measure it by the dishes you washed and the rooms you cleaned?

Do you measure it by the ideas that came to you?

Do you measure it by love?