What Are You Reading?

I am -- briefly -- holding off finishing the book I brought with me on this vacation week, fifty pages from the end.

I just turned my gaze away from the open windows behind the couch where I have settled to read off and on this day, resting the open book on the back cushions, finding myself again and again drawn to reflect on this familiar activity.

It is a book that was recommended by a friend who claimed to see me in one of the main characters. I started it in the evenings last week as these vacation days loomed. I did not really expect to be surprised by anything I read in its four-hundred pages. It read like the page-turner that people claim to love to bring to the beach. (I do not love to read on the beach.)

A key premise of the novel is that people can mistakenly think they know what is happening around them and who the people are with whom they deal daily.

In my reading on this holiday, I too began by thinking I knew what I was doing and why I was doing it. Isn't this one of the most predictably enjoyable things I have done on summer vacations through the years?

Reading as a child and reading as an adult, however, I think I have actually expected more than simple enjoyment. Other things happen or don't happen while you read. People often don't bother you if you're reading. People can wonder less why you're not joining them in activities that they themselves enjoy. Some people don't think that a reader needs anything other than space and time alone and a little bit of quiet.

On the other hand, comments you hear suggest that some people don't think anything particularly important is happening while you read. They don't realize that you may be traveling somewhere and trying on worlds and maybe meeting your habitual ideas and finding them simplistic or one-sided.

But you know that a communication is underway. You know that with certain books, certain authors, places inside you are getting attention that they may not have gotten in years.

Fortunate are those readers who can remember as children having an adult sit next to them and ask, "What are you reading?" At its most powerful, the question was never a ploy to get you to substitute talking for your reading. It was rather an acknowledgement that the world you had entered as a reader was worth hearing about.

It was an acknowledgement that you were worth hearing about.

Midway through a Summer Lunch

I met my oldest brother and his wife for lunch this afternoon.

Vacation has officially begun!

On a Saturday Walk in an Old Cemetery

Why is someone else not here? How do I get to be the only one to enjoy this right now?

I shake my head at times, incredulous at my good fortune. Without needing to make way for others or wait my turn, I step up to a view that reveals depth upon depth of morning green. Early sunlight conspires with the highest branches of trees and outlines leaves that no ladder could reach.

I do nothing to make this moment possible except show up, but a whole world seems ready to address a message to the fortunate person who does.

Who wouldn’t listen to a message when it comes with such generosity?

Who wouldn’t send a message in reply, speak words into the morning air and the silence and the welcoming heights above which these leaves lift their green?

Who wouldn’t vow to be back in the same place at the earliest opportunity to speak again?

Lake Cabin

There is the smell of pine needles about the pictures of this cabin on a lake in New Hampshire.


There is the smell of summer sun on the wooden boards that make up the deck.


It takes imagination to understand a need for that desk lamp visible through the windows.


It is the imagination that any writer loves to use.

Thank you to a reader of Writing Cabin for these photos.

Summer Blue

I enjoyed the prospect of reading one of the first ten Penguin paperbacks from their inaugural year 1935. I had never heard of Poet's Pub nor was the author's name familiar to me -- Eric Linklater. I followed the links on AbeBooks.com, however, and placed my order for a used copy of the 1929 novel with a bookseller in Guelph, Ontario. IMDb revealed the existence of a 1949 black-and-white British film based on the novel, but I could find no leads to copies of it available for purchase or rental.

Eighty pages into Poet's Pub, I confess that I am enjoying myself enormously even in these hot New England days.

One passage early on provides a taste of the Twenties and near-Gatsby excess. Proud of a blue cocktail he has created, a bartender named Holly prepares a sample lot for guests of the inn where he works:

'Anything that a lady like Miss Benbow suggests is all right, sir,' said Holly politely; and deftly poured measures of this and measures of that, crystal clear, faintly yellow and richer orange, a glass delicately poised with the rising meniscus unbroken, a drop, two drops of wormwood, a fluid ounce of sweetness and an ounce of twice-distilled strength...gravely, intent on his task as an alchemist seeking the elixir, the aurum potabile, Holly poured his chosen liquors into a long silver shaker, added broken fragments of ice, screwed down the top, and, like a man with the palsy, shook. His hands were clenched on either butt, his muscles were taut, his face was set like a mask. And all this time his audience watched him silently as if a conjurer were at work, and where paper flags had gone in the doves of peace might emerge. Then the rapid shaking changed to a long swinging movement like an old-fashioned concertina-player swinging his instrument to spread his melody wider, more powerfully. And at last he was done. He set six glasses on the bar and poured into each a liquid, at first cloudy-blue like the sky at morning, that slowly cleared to a hue ineffable and serene.

The writing is rich fare, perfectly overdone, excessive and amusing.

May I join in the fun and provide hints of the blues with which I am entertained these warm summer days, both in the kitchen at home...



...and above a bookcase in my office at work?



I am just trying to stay cool. These serene hues help.

Recipe for a New England Fourth of July Cake

Three Weeks Before
1. Crack eggs

Visit a nineteenth-century home in Amherst, Massachusetts. Walk from room to room where a poet spent her days. Listen to thunder in the stillness between rooms. Look through bedroom windows as grey morning skies grow darker. Think back forty years to your first purchase of a volume of the poet's puzzling verses. Take a picture of the house where words you grew up loving were first committed to paper and stored in a dresser's bottom drawer.



One Week Before
2. Sift flour

Visit an eighteenth-century manse in Concord, Massachusetts. Wait outside in the shade for the tour to begin. Ask a friend what he recalls from visiting this house with his father and mother thirty years ago. Watch your head as you enter rooms. Hear the ticking of a clock from days when a favorite author wrote here. Later in the nearby cemetery hear your friend call him "Nate."



Four Days Before
3. Stir gently

Visit a lighthouse in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, that you last saw two years ago. Leave the tour bus and walk to the place where you had taken your earlier photographs of it. Think about your life.

Becoming a Reader of Future Authors

If I wanted to read what authors like Ray Bradbury and Charles Simic and Woody Allen and Herta Müller were writing for publication these days, I could scarcely have done better -- I tell myself -- than subscribe to three journals that have begun to arrive at my new address. I have ignored the voice of experience that reminds me of other subscriptions over the years that each promised a new lease on my reading life. Alas, month after month the issues had collected, barely perused and largely unread, on bedside tables and back porch chairs.

Well, so what?

I am furnishing my new rooms, and I have fallen victim once again to the lure of the printed page to help create a look that would engage me if I met it in someone else's home.

Zoetrope was the wild card in this trio of publications. Thanks to the "Frequently Bought Together" feature on Amazon, I discovered the fiction-and-film journal, first launched in 1997 and headquartered in San Francisco. If Francis Ford Coppola can market wine and The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola can market a literary magazine, and I decided to taste the vintage. Like some unknown author whose novels I will check out at random times from the local library, Zoetrope seemed worth a gamble. I take as a good omen the appearance of an entertaining piece by Woody Allen in the first issue in my subscription.

Subscribing to The Paris Review seemed a privilege. It was a seat unexpectedly pulled out for me in a sidewalk cafe, a place cleared for me at a table strewn with cream-colored Gallimard editions. It is a twentieth-century tradition of writing and reading which I had forgotten to join over the years, and I feel fortunate to have found in the past months that I might still join the conversation. I can discover that cultural link between New York City and Paris as something still capable of bringing alive the hunger for thought and supple expression that should never go away. Lives feel on hold for some of us until that hunger is acknowledged and honored and assuaged.


East Coast and West Coast, Left Bank and Washington Square -- I might not have thought to revisit those literary roots without a nod to the authority of Granta. It is a subscription to Granta that initially led me on online crawls to look for an affordable ticket to a publication that has become synonymous with new writing. Begun long ago by undergraduates at Cambridge University, it was reborn within the last four decades and became a place for the emerging talents in British fiction to reach a reading public.

Beyond fiction, beyond Britain, the magazine has served up a range of writing that deserves attention. I was fortunate by means of the first issue of my subscription to be introduced to British poet Michael Symmons Roberts. His record of an extended visit to a Scottish Benedictine monastery, a record included within a Granta issue focused on writings on Sex, is breathtaking. If you're wondering what he could possibly have said to earn a place within that context, buy the Spring issue.

Renovated Kitchens

It is not clear what had gone wrong with the garbage disposal, but my accountant-landlord knew that the simplest and most cost-efficient way to deal with the issue was to purchase a new disposal and install it himself. No plumbers needed, no team of electricians – one of my landlord’s grown sons came upstairs with him this afternoon and later called down from my unit to the basement so his father knew when the right current had been shut off for the installation.

The son looked around the kitchen at one moment and admitted to me, “You’ve made it look good.”

In the past two months I had worked with the white of the painted wooden cabinets and the gray-speckled Formica counters, had used Soft Scrub on the stainless steel sink and the white porcelain stove top, had created a comfortable eating space with a newly purchased pub table and stool. The chrome from my mother’s Lincoln BeautyWare canisters and breadbox reflected a new red lampshade on the little lamp that had lit dinners for me over twenty years ago. The black frame around a collection of vintage photographs of families at meals looked fine above the metal dish rack next to the sink.

However, I knew that this was a far cry from the renovated kitchens that sell houses and condominiums.

I remember the first renovated kitchen in which I sat thirty years ago with friends of my brother’s. These men’s professional decorating skills had directed the hanging of copper pots over an island and the dimming of lights over granite counters. One of my hosts stood authoritatively that night, martini in hand, as his guests, perched on stools, leaned under the copper pots to listen to his description of the long rebuilding.

All this for a kitchen, I had wondered quietly to myself.

In the years ahead I would have the chance to listen to various friends describe the months of negotiations with contractors and architects as the kitchens of their dreams took shape in spaces hollowed out of vintage floor plans. I came to recognize the renovated-kitchen look in open houses I attended in the search for new homes years later. In time even I got to sit at a table with a contractor and an architect and take part in discussions about undoing one kitchen and creating another.

I got to see the inside of walls in time. Months later I saw the right glass finally arrive for the cabinet doors. Professional photographers came in shortly afterwards to record the kitchen for the architect’s portfolio.

The truth I found, though, is that renovated kitchens change nothing about dreams.

One day, if you’re lucky, you find yourself back in a kitchen that is really yours. You find another kitchen that you can welcome as part of your history. You want the meals cooked on your white porcelain stove top, served in dishes stored in your white painted cabinets.

And you do indeed think yourself lucky.

And your new garbage disposal works just fine.

Readers of Yesteryear

I have a past.

I have a blogging past.

I have a file full of comments that go back to 2005 in the archives of an email account linked to my former blog.

I remember the first comment on any post I had written. From his home in Mexico City, a fellow blogger wrote about the intense admiration and love he felt for a priest. My long-ago past as a seminarian and what I wrote about my decision to abandon those early goals and to pursue a life alongside another man had snared this reader’s interest.

Google helped readers find me. I was not an overly cautious blogger when it came to naming organizations and parishes and schools that had figured in my life. I named internal conflicts that other people recognized. A number of bloggers wrote posts about my blog.

I wrote about a life that some people had not thought possible. I had a career that was not always a safe one to identify publicly if you were living with another man. I had a family who supported me and welcomed my partner. I had a spiritual life that provided the surest interpretive thread to connect a long-ago John with the person I had become.

I wrote about a life that readers occasionally admitted they envied and wanted. To be honest, I wanted people to envy it. I seemed to need the assurance that I had gotten a life that other people would want. I could weave musings about home life and fall in love with it all over again.

Writing Cabin goes back to the fall of 2007 when an anonymous reader of my former blog wrote a series of letters whose denunciatory message eventually reached a range of people, including my employer. I got cautious, I got careful. I have written here about that time. I contacted readers who had followed me for years and asked them to help me start afresh.

Since then my life has changed in significant ways. On the surface, mine is no longer an easy success story. Not everyone would want the kind of transition through which I have been moving.

I do, though.

I love where it is going while it is still hard to name where it is going.

It seems time to extend a hand to those who used to read what I wrote and whose writings had been part of my day. Maybe more than a few of us have learned lessons about courage that we never suspected we could handle.

Welcome back!

Pentecost in Green

Pentecost is about feelings you do not think you will ever have – or have again.

When any of the great Church feasts approaches, I can go through a period asking what possible difference this specific lens on the human story makes.

I grew up attending a Catholic elementary school where my classmates and I recited the rosary every weekday afternoon in May. On different days of the week the repetition of the Hail Mary’s was flavored by references to different events in the life of Jesus or his mother Mary.

In theological language those events were mysteries -- events that could make a difference in human lives. Each Wednesday the Glorious Mysteries allotted time for meditation first to the resurrection of Jesus, then to his ascension into heaven, next to his sending the Holy Spirit upon his apostles on the first festival of Pentecost after his death.

There are images involving these events that I still recall from the prayer books and missals in my parents’ home. Artists’ images of the Glorious Mysteries invariably featured a world open to the sky, airy visitations by flames, angels pointing to the clouds. I sensed that I was meant to like these light-saturated landscapes, and I used to try. In my experience, however, sunny summer days were humid and inevitably uncomfortable, and May in New Orleans was already summer.

In the years that have passed since then, I have had experiences of reflecting on a story from the Gospels or listening to preaching inspired by one of them and finding myself unexpectedly and sometimes unaccountably consoled, restored and even healed. The stories have helped me face my life and what I may have resigned myself to and what I had forgotten to expect.

For the past two years, I have found myself on the road at this beautiful time in the New England spring. Both times I have driven up the Connecticut River valley and let my life and its hopes breathe again in sight of the green mountains. Both times I took a journey into an unknown future and met what I thought I had lost.

A glorious mystery. Pentecost is indeed about feelings you do not think you will ever have – or have again.

Photo of Walpole, NH from Seattle Tall Poppy