Poetry and Your Whole Life

Growing up, I didn’t expect to be a reader of poetry all my life. It was not a role I saw either of my parents or any of my Louisiana aunts or uncles or grandparents take on and model. If any adult I knew might be an inveterate reader of verse, it would have been a teacher; in that case, however, the habit of reading poetry seemed likely a mode of professional development rather than a vocation or a facet of identity.

Through the years of my early education, poetry was a unit in English class or a section in a literature textbook. There were italicized introductions to each poem, biographical sketches of the poets, footnotes on foreign or particularly elusive expressions, numbers in the margin next to every fifth line, and sometimes reading comprehension questions. All of the instructional paraphernalia gave poems some of the same feel as word problems in a math text, and what adult made a life of tackling word problems? So, poems were practice; they were exercises; they were unlike anything that a normal hour in your parents’ kitchen or living room made seem essential over the long haul.

With the first paycheck from a summer job, however, I walked into a bookstore down the block from my temp office and bought a book of the poems of Emily Dickinson and another of the poems of John Keats. I had handled each of these Dell paperbacks several times in the days before buying them, taking them down from the bookstore shelves and leafing through them and reading at random. There was the reassuring recognition of poems that my favorite teachers had covered in English classes; there was the promise of unsuspected joys in the poems with unfamiliar titles.

The joys that arose for me then in the reading and discussing of poetry had to do with hearing what it could sound like for someone to say that he was sad. (I couldn’t say that.) Or that he found something beautiful. (I rarely said that.) Or that he was less lonely when certain people directed their attention to him and listened. (I didn’t dare say that.) Or that he occasionally experienced something that matched what he understood his tradition was calling God. Conversation of an unusual power and promise, conversation beyond the daily requests for information and compliance loomed real and possible in the wake of being steeped in the words of poets.

The experience ahead of me as the owner of books of poetry was uncharted territory in the household to which I was returning at the end of that workday the summer after high school.

And both books that I bought that day are on my shelves still.

In a recent re-organization of my library, I put all the volumes of poetry together on the same long shelf – French poets stacked on top of Latin poets, Elizabeth Bishop standing next to Anne Sexton, Billy Collins next to Rilke and Baudelaire, translations by C. Day Lewis alongside anthologies of sonnets. There seemed unlikely conversations arising from those juxtapositions, a strange literary dinner party, a long corridor of monastic cells about which the Grand Silence threw a creative mantle.

Pride of place on my poetry shelf goes to the volumes by Mary Oliver, and through my interactions with them something has happened in the past few years in the way I regularly read poetry at home. For the first time I don’t simply page through a book to find particular poems or particularly appealing poems. I start with the first poem in a book by Mary Oliver and then move to the second and then the third until I have reached a point where I am content to stop. My next reading resumes where I left off. Just as I presume someone pays careful attention to the varied colors of the endpapers and cover fabrics of her handsome hardcover editions, I trust that the order of the poems in a volume by Mary Oliver is considered. Even if I start with the poem on the final page of the volume and work my way backwards, I think I am having an experience significantly better than if I were picking pages at random.

I count myself fortunate to have among my friends people for whom poetry matters. One friend recently sent me a copy of the eulogy he gave at his father’s funeral in which a Mary Oliver poem plays a prominent part. Someone else sent me a photograph in which he is reading Yeats’ “I Am Ireland” to his favorite uncle at a birthday celebration. One friend keeps her latest literary efforts available to readers of her blog although occasionally she emails me poems for which she wants a more private audience. A former classmate from New Orleans showed me the box in which his first edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry is ready to be carried to the car in a future evacuation. I have even had the experience of finding poetry on my voice mail, read without any explanations by a friend who knows I will enjoy just the sound of a poem being well read. When one work colleague, a fellow lover of poetry and a poet herself, left for another city, I wrote my farewell as a poem to her.

Cathy: A Poem

Some people are the kind of poem
that reads smoothly,
truly from the first line.

Some people are the kind of poem
about which you speak
only if you are ready
to speak about your whole life.

Some people are the kind of poem
that just proves
poems are possible –
and likely to arrive
any blessed moment
of your day.

What Matters

I was sitting outside one late summer evening a year ago under a tree full of lights.

Ten friends around a table that had the look of cast iron, we might have just walked onto a scene from a Smith and Hawken catalogue.

The chairs and tables were arranged on the wooden deck in the suburban backyard of a couple that I had known for a long time. The reason for their organizing this evening together was the chance to visit with Ron and Trudy, two friends who had spent the last year and a half in New Zealand and who were preparing to return there in a week. A significant career possibility had prompted the move across the oceans, and the evening was threaded with tales of cultural adjustment and economic realities and surprises and opportunities to savor what stays important in lives no matter where they are lived.

The conversation whirled and eddied over food and drink that was as creatively orchestrated as usual with this group. Someone had prepared an amazingly fresh bowl of greens; someone else, a potato salad with the crunch of carrots and red onions and parsley. Our host fired the grill for ribs prepared with a paprika rub. Pitchers of white sangria heavy with orange and peach and grape slices circled around the table for the first two hours – a nod to the recent trip to Portugal on the part of the host and hostess.

“So what’s new with all of you?” Trudy asked the table during a lull in the Auckland questions and answers.

Someone’s daughter had just published a first book, and we were all urged to go onto Amazon soon. Someone else had this week returned from a conference in New Orleans and recounted latest impressions of the city’s recovery from Katrina. Another friend had started a business in the past few months with someone we all knew from New Year’s parties at our host and hostess’s home. There were lots of itineraries recounted all around, and someone even mentioned my two trips to France the previous spring, one to handle work commitments, the other to provide a taste of vacation in a low-travel time of year.

As I listened to the catalogue of activities, I knew that I would find no way to mention the most important thing that the year had brought to me. I was not going to talk of the energy that had returned to my life with that year of weekly meetings in an office in a quiet neighborhood in another part of the city.

Looking around the table at people that I had known for over twenty years, I could imagine no way to tell them that I was growing happier and more confident than I had felt in a long time. Trips to France would have to suffice for now as the new landscape in which Ron and Trudy and the rest of these people pictured me. I became aware that there was little ease for me in thinking about talking with them about what had become important in my life. With that awareness, I knew that the work I had to do in that office was not over.

At the end of the evening, I followed Trudy onto the front porch to wish her a final farewell. It was our first time together that evening, just the two of us. With her usual ready smile, she asked how my nonprofit work had gone this year. Coming from someone else, it might have sounded like a stock question. It was with thought, however, that I told her, “Great!”

“You still enjoy it, don’t you?” she asked.

“Absolutely!” I answered.

“It’s rare to hear someone who is able to say that about their work after all these years.”

Her comment cut through all the other topics and drifts of conversation of the evening. I felt at that moment that my answers mattered to her and that I mattered to her.

I looked at Trudy and thanked her for asking what she had.

I love good questions. I am learning how to ask them and how to recognize the people who ask the ones that give me the most life and light.

Big Screen on a Friday Night

I grew up knowing that the pleasure of films went beyond simply viewing them.

When my oldest brother sent home a record set of the entire soundtrack – music and dialogue – of Mike Nichols’ film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, I sniffed the promise of a particular kind of conversation. It was conversation that would draw on understanding the freeing possibilities of art and on asking the hard questions about life itself. My brother’s visits back home were the occasion for invoking the lines of Edward Albee’s play in various situations. Those lines became a kind of private language by which we exchanged impressions about a lot we saw and didn’t see in our parents’ household and the world beyond it. “George and Martha – sad, sad, sad…”

My favorite teacher in high school included me among the students he took to a series of Ingmar Bergman films at a local university. I was frankly intimidated by the world I saw in those films and wondered whether I even understood all the questions that the Swedish filmmaker was raising in them. I approached that teacher on another occasion when I had just seen Julie Christie in the movie Darling; I admitted to him that I didn’t understand why the main character was so taken by the elderly academic whom she visits once in the company of her journalist boyfriend. It took me a while to learn that my teacher was even more interested in my questions about the films I saw than he was in my answers.

My best friend in high school invited me to see my first Eric Rohmer film with subtitles at what was then the Delgado Museum of Art in New Orleans. Ted smoked a cigarette as we exited the museum that Sunday afternoon and, after talking about the black-and-white landscapes of My Night at Maud’s, asked whether I would be willing to make a short film with him. His parents had agreed to buy him a Super-8 camera and tripod and projector and provide all the film he needed and cover the developing costs of the film. I became both actor and co-director, and Ted and I discussed what effects we wanted to create in our film and why. Even more valuably, though, we learned what happens inside an artist’s heart when we ended up at times seeing in the developed film something better than any of the effects we had originally planned. And I fell in love with him.

Hearing of my experience making short films, my supervisor at the high school where I did something like student teaching asked me to help with a one-semester arts elective in filmmaking and film appreciation. Of course I learned as much as I taught that semester. Nothing helped me better understand the vocabulary of the filmmaker than a short film available from Janus on the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. Watching again and again the series of shots showing Cary Grant gaining access to the wine cellar of a Nazi collaborator and discovering the hiding place for enemy uranium, I got it – got what any filmmaker tries to accomplish with each frame of the movie that escapes the editor’s floor. My cinematic eyes had been opened further.

Movies were a key bond between one of my first work colleagues and his wife Greta and me. Fresh from advanced degree work, Paul and Greta longed for a kind of company that seemed in short supply sometimes in the Florida city where we had all gotten our first teaching jobs. Comparative literature, art history, French literature and theology – our recent academic backgrounds made us natural partners on a Saturday evening. Greta would sit on their sofa, feet tucked under her, and sip the wine Paul had poured and probe one more facet of a character from a film we had just seen. “Who really does things like that when they learn a friend has cancer?!?” Greta did not succumb to the melodrama of a movie like Bobby Deerfield in the way that I might, but her questions came from the delight of talking with friends who said things that she thought mattered. Films mattered in the conversations with which we lengthened weekend evenings. "I'll be curious to see what you think" meant something when we said it to one another.

All this personal film history – and more – came to the surface Friday evening as I settled into a seat by myself at a 7 o’clock showing of North by Northwest. It was a Friday evening on my own, and I had omitted making any plans earlier in the week; a 24-hour bug had left me iffy about committing to anything. At an art house in the university section of the city, I got to do something that I have not done in a long time. I allowed sudden whim to get me somewhere to see something that had nothing more compelling to recommend it than that it called to me. Crop duster and Mount Rushmore and all.

And I enjoyed myself. I gave in to the experience. I yielded to the big screen. I savored the wonder of seeing what was familiar and then seeing things I had forgotten to expect or to notice before. I monitored no one’s enjoyment but my own. Sitting at a hotel bar an hour earlier, I had mentioned to another bar patron my plans to see the Hitchcock at the nearby movie house. “Hitchcock on the big screen – what a treat!” she said. And she was right. I had made a good decision on how to spend the evening. I had made a decision out of the best in my personal history. I had fundamentally said to myself, "I'll be curious to see what you think."

Mine had been one more hopeful face lifted in delight at the show before us all.

Photo from Soundtrack Collector

Aimez-vous Brahms...

The used bookstore was nearby. A work friend and I had just finished Sunday brunch, and the basement store, that warren of narrow aisles lined with books that had already spent time in other people’s homes, exercised its customary lure. I had no precise title in mind, and I was ready to be surprised on this midday visit.

Truth be told, it had been a while since I had even thought to include a stop by the French language shelves. I had made analogous online crawls at different times in search of a particular softcover edition of Aimez-vous Brahms… by Françoise Sagan. I had loaned my original copy to… I don’t remember who. A purchase made in a Montreal discount bookstore provided me with a later Livre de Poche edition; the text of spare French prose was intact (intégral in the phrasing on the cover), the font identical to that in the earlier edition, but the cover featured a photograph of a heavy-lidded woman’s face reflected in her make-up mirror.

I don’t know when – or exactly why – I began to crave a replacement copy of the slim French paperback with the vase of flowers on the cover – the cover I associate with my first readings of the novel. How proud I had been to negotiate my way through a French novel in its entirety, a book not assigned for a course but chosen for sheer pleasure! A heady experience for someone in his twenties and a French major in his back pocket.

The edition with that cover is no longer in print. But there it was this Sunday afternoon. Three dollars later, and it was mine. Again.

I make no exaggerated literary claims for Françoise Sagan. My first reading of that novel followed a television showing in the late 70s of the movie Goodbye Again. A friend watching the movie with me yelped and waved his tall glass of tea and crushed ice when the forty-year-old character played by Ingrid Bergman calls after the twenty-five-year-old lover she has just dumped and shouts, “I’m old!” For two gay men approaching thirty, her admission had the ring of high camp. My friend would begin that night to include her words in his repertory of lines to be invoked against a background of disco recordings as he showered each Saturday night before heading to the bars.

If the novel retains some compelling message for me from reading to reading, it is contained in the title. The character Paule, a successful career woman in Paris, has been invited by the younger Simon (Philip in the American movie) to a Sunday concert of Brahms; he prefaces his invitation with the question “Do you like Brahms?” She later remarks to the older man named Roger with whom she has maintained a steady but unfulfilling relationship that she was startled by the question, that she had actually forgotten whether she liked Brahms or not, that it had been so long since anyone had asked her what she liked. Roger appears not to understand why Paule might respond so earnestly to the question nor why she would think to recount her reaction to it. His apparent indifference confirms Paule in her decision to let Simon more significantly into her life.

Let me simply go on the record right now and say that I do indeed like Brahms. Were someone to ask me why some day, I will answer the question earnestly – and hopefully.

Lincoln BeautyWare

Breadbox and canisters – the language of another era of kitchen design.

For four years a movers box containing items from my parents’ New Orleans kitchen stood in my New England basement. Nostalgia rather than utility had motivated me to ask for these remnants of my home growing up. Kitchen renovations here two years back made the fate of these items nebulous.

The past two weeks I have had the task of outfitting a small room as a kitchen – or a kitchenette in older parlance. Guess what finally escaped basement shadows for a new life?

There are four canisters and a breadbox in the chrome Lincoln BeautyWare set that used to sit on my mother’s kitchen counter. I will follow her example and ignore the labels affixed to some of the canisters. There will probably not be coffee in the canister labeled “Coffee”; foodies’ habit suggests a refrigerator or freezer for beans or even ground coffee. Nor could anyone in good conscience these days use enough sugar in a year to warrant the tall canister labeled for “Sugar.”

Rather than prominently displayed in a symmetrical row on a kitchen counter the way they had been in my mother’s day, the canisters now line a shelf behind the doors of a wooden cabinet.

On the other hand, the breadbox has too many ready functions to be hidden in that way. Perched on a butcher block counter against one wall, the breadbox will, I am sure, be opened and closed frequently each day. A simple turn on a black knob releases a door on the front of the breadbox. Imbedded in the back of that chrome door is a wooden cutting board that lies flat when the door is open. One of my brothers reminded me of that feature just this past Sunday, on what would have been my father’s 98th birthday.

It struck me this weekend that my father had died within sight of this breadbox. His body as he fell to the kitchen floor after emptying the dishwasher that November morning may have been reflected one last time in the well polished chrome of the familiar door.

In the years after my father’s death my brothers and I would take turns visiting my mother, usually a week at a time. I used to sit at the kitchen table in the evening after my mother had gone to bed. Not five feet from this same breadbox, I would write or read alone, sometimes a novel, sometimes from a book of prayers. Far from my New England home, I would wonder about what I had learned and what I had not learned from my years growing up in this household years earlier.

I still wonder.

Imagine if I had actually heard my father asking my mother one day what she liked particularly about this Lincoln BeautyWare set. If I had heard him asking what it did for her to buy something this fashionable for her kitchen, how it made her feel. If I had heard them discuss together whether there were other ways she wanted a kitchen in her home to look and feel.

I wonder how I would feel today if I had actually heard my father ask her if she knew how happy it made him feel to see her happy.

Last night I turned on the lights in a mahogany case with my parents’ wedding china. I sat in a favorite chair nearby, and by the light from the china cabinet read through the messages that had emerged from my prayer last December. I have recorded them here before. One message in particular stirred me afresh last night:

I have done this much for you. Trust.

God has done this much for me in my life. I keep trusting.

Images of Lincoln BeautyWare from PeacockModern

Let Me Just Be

In late September 2000 I made a weekend retreat with members of my worshipping community. I recently came across writing I had done on the final day of that retreat. It is personal writing, revealing writing about a troubled time in my life. I would gently warn off any readers for whom this effort is more than they need just now.

It is Sunday morning, an hour before the closing liturgy of the retreat. I am sitting in my room, using my desk for the first time, lighting the candle before the hinged icons I brought from home. Who wanted to be holed up in a room when all the sky and coastline rocks and walkways and chapels beckoned these past two days?

On the other hand, it seems only fair to the time spent away from home to attempt a thanksgiving for these hours and interior movements. I have just opened the window in my room to allow in the sound of distant waves and gulls and the smell and feel of rainy breezes. Autumn approaches, and the God of my autumn is waiting, it seems, for me to let him get close.

The retreat started with a vivid sense of the reality of past retreats. My usual attempt to imitate or re-create those earlier retreats seemed useless this time, but I wanted to know myself as someone who still wants to know God and find God. It has pained me at points in the past months to imagine that I had made facing God a venture too fearful or shameful to attempt or even envision. I thank God for trying to get the real me in touch with the real him in these forty-eight hours of retreat. Even listless hours, waiting for focus or insight or clear reward, sitting in the sun with a breviary lifeless in my lap, were contact of a sort.

“I wish I knew more… I’m not at all sure.” That was the refrain that came this Sunday morning sitting in the small chapel from 6 to 7:30. “I am someone worth living with.” That phrase as well was key to realizing the ferocity of the self-judgments with which I have been living. Later I sensed an anger building within me as I thought of what I had put up with over the years by my eagerness to be liked, to meet with approval, to get on people’s good side, to charm and disarm. What a waste of time, what a waste of energy! I pray now to take a little pity on myself, to unlearn lessons about how to get along with powerful people who could, I thought, make my life miserable.

I want to be chaste, I want to be good, I want to be strong, but ultimately I think I just want to be God’s. And why do I persist in thinking that I may not want that or that I am not in fact God’s? That real God – beyond my feeble, ferocious attempts to grab and capture his attention and ultimately control and show him how to do his job!

O Mary, Mother, calm me, rock me into careless abandon, accompany me as I age and become someone with friends in their fifties and sixties. Let me know my true worth and stance before God with you by my side. Let me welcome this task of being a 48-year-old man, a 49-year-old man, a 50-year-old man. Does everyone fight it so much? Does everyone play the sad clown attempting to pretend it’s perfectly okay with them when it galls them, hurts them, seems like one more piece of evidence that you were a mistake all along, a bad bet, someone not worth living with?

Let me just say “Amen.”

Let me just say “I love you.”

Let me just say “Thank you.”

Let me just say my name.

Let me just sleep and sigh.

Let me just be.

Let me praise.

Let me sing.

Let me live till I die.

Let me die when I will.

Amen.

I love you.

Thank you.

-- only John

Photo uploaded by John Fenzel

A Place of Honor

Last weekend I had the privilege of officiating at the wedding of my niece Theresa and her fiancé Carter. After submitting the requisite applications, I had received a one-day authorization to be the solemnizer at their service. My niece is a church musician, and Carter is a research psychologist one of whose recent projects required a stay on Mount Everest. Reflecting on the readings they had chosen for their ceremony was an opportunity for me to wish them well on their venture and to say some things about the journey they were undertaking:

Theresa and Carter, you are on a high mountain today. This is a high holy day in your lives.

Theresa, you know better than most how to make an hour on a Sunday feel elevated, how to make it feel different and important, at once festive and inspiring. You choose your music to help people feel elevated and festive and inspired; in a way you choose music to help people feel that their lives are important – with all their dreams and mysteries.

Our Gospel reading today comes from the Feast of the Transfiguration which Christian churches celebrate this week. Jesus leads three of his closest disciples to a high place, and they see and hear things about Jesus that overcome them with wonder and with fear.

Carter, after your time on Mount Everest this spring, you know better than most of us what begins to happen when people live too long at an altitude to which they are not accustomed. They may see or hear things that disorient them without their being aware, things that can overcome them with wonder or with fear.

So, Theresa and Carter, between the two of you, you appreciate better than most of us how important it is to live well the rest of a Sunday AND how important it is to live with our feet on solid ground. I think that’s what the Letter to the Romans means by “thinking with sober judgment.”

Theresa and Carter, it will be hard for you ever to hear the words of Ruth again without remembering this day on the mountain. Live all your days in the confident belief that you deserve to hear those words spoken to you. Over the next twenty-four hours, over the next twenty-four days, over the next twenty-four years, you will need to keep finding ways of saying to one another, “Your God will be my God. What is important in your life will always have a place of honor in mine. I cannot imagine the day when I will stop being your strongest advocate, your best friend, the person whose dreams and mysteries I will not tire of asking about and marveling over. It is still good for us to be here.”



Photo of Everest by Himalman

Among the Mainers

It was important for me to get out of town this past weekend. In years past, that strategic exit from the city signaled the end of my availability to answer the kind of questions with which my office can be deluged at this time of year. I took advantage of a friend’s offer to play tour guide, and I settled for a few days in the Portland area.

As part of my Maine venture I reached Winslow Homer’s studio in nearby Prouts Neck. I visited the Portland Museum of Art another day and caught a great exhibit on the role of photography in the career of Georgia O’Keeffe. I sat with my morning coffee on benches lining the docks of the Old Port section of the city. I learned about the influence of Portland architect John Calvin Stevens as a tour bus carried me past houses he had designed in the Shingle Style and others he had designed in Colonial Revival.

I drank homemade lemonade, walked along rocky coasts, smelled the unmistakable aromas of Scarborough Marsh, and watched tanks of blue lobsters bubbling out their final hours in dockside shacks.

A surprise of the three days was a chance to visit the Portland Head Light one morning. I walked a little ways from the lighthouse and the museum next to it, pulled out my phone and captured my own image of a kind of structure that has stirred my imagination for as long as I’ve lived in New England.

I read a plaque near the lighthouse commemorating Longfellow's passion for this dramatic corner of his Maine home. Words from his poem "The Lighthouse" line the monument:

Sail on! sail on, ye stately ships!
And with your floating bridge the ocean span;
Be mine to guard this light from all eclipse.
Be yours to bring man nearer unto man.

Night Air at Open Windows

I recently had dinner with a friend who for some time in college had seriously considered a monastic vocation. Our conversation reminded me of something I had written awhile ago. It will soon be August, and an anniversary of sorts looms ahead for me.

Leaning against a windowsill at night and breathing in the cool air, I am sometimes awakened to an old hunger for truth, an early yearning for something real and dear. I imagine myself again as someone I can trust to welcome the best there is in a world so large and wild and worth being vulnerable before.

In the language of my upbringing and training, God is in that air, in that wild, fresh darkness right outside a window at night.

And briefly I become twenty years old again, sitting by a window that is not in my parents’ air-conditioned New Orleans home. I become someone sitting by an open window in the 70’s in a seminary building in the rural South where I had recently begun a program of studies that over the next nine years would lead me close to ordination to the Roman Catholic priesthood.

When I entered the seminary, the Roman Catholic Church was still within the first decade of energy and upheaval resulting from the "new Pentecost" for which Pope John XXIII had prayed in 1962 at the opening of the Second Vatican Council. The final message of that Council in 1965 had been addressed to young women and men, exhorting us to do two things, to open our hearts "to the dimensions of the world" and to find in the Church "the face of Christ." I think I was trying to do both that August day that I walked with my parents into the dim, high-ceilinged front hallway of the seminary.

Even that first day, I marveled at the building that was to be home for most of the two years awaiting me. It was not a particularly elegant structure, but it was a place that would become mine as I explored its four floors and its extensive grounds. I imbibed the flavor of the place through long, solitary walks.

The front driveway late at night, silent and black, led to an empty road and a glimpse of a distant traffic light.

Early morning there were fogs in the front of the house that you could smell and feel through the screens in the doors and parlor windows.

Walks at night on the dark road behind the chapel led to moments of standing and staring into the night sky through the black, spreading branches of the oaks, waiting for a clearer sense of a presence that seemed out there waiting for me.

And indeed, I would realize more clearly years later, God had been there, had been with me in each of those places.



Photo by georgeindenver

Persuasion

I need air-conditioning before I can try on my new LL Bean Adirondack Barn Coat.

I don’t live in the Adirondacks – or in Maine for that matter. I don’t own a barn or work near one. No coat is necessary on a steamy July day. I have to open the package from UPS, however, and find out whether the color “Dark Mushroom” is something I’ll look good in.

Part of any purchase involves a mental picture. I picture myself using something new or listening to it or drinking it through a straw as I walk across a hot parking lot back to my car.

I take what other people recommend into account when I make a purchase. I trust an auto repair shop because a colleague backs it. I order a CD after an email pal sends me the YouTube video of Richard and Teddy Thompson singing “Persuasion” on Scottish television. I visit a friend’s home to see whether a curtain can really look good hanging from a steel cable system that West Elm sells.

I think I know what I generally prefer, and then a week like this comes along, placing me in three new settings. So much of a good life is comfortable routine, and then three friends say things and I end up in what are unusual poses for a man named John. One day I am serving rice in a soup kitchen. The next day I am sitting with my elbow on the bar of a local tavern. Later in the week I am tasting a decidedly good mushroom soup in an oversized booth at a nearby Cheesecake Factory.

The mushroom soup is darker, however, than the "Dark Mushroom" of the LL Bean barn coat. I still like the coat, though. And I'd still like the soup.

Part of any purchase involves a mental picture. I picture myself wearing something new in a few months when it will be hard to remember temperatures in the 90’s on a Saturday afternoon in mid-July. I hope you will like the look too.



YouTube video of "Persuasion" sung by Richard and Teddy Thompson downloaded by joni39

Photos from LLBean and West Elm