Maine

I must have missed the Richard Russo memoir when it first came out, but there it was this past Sunday afternoon on the table of new paperbacks. A favorite novelist of mine – and I had missed the announcement of this publication?

I understand how that could have happened. Amazon records that the hardcover edition of Elsewhere appeared last fall – on October 30, 2012, to be precise. Two weeks earlier I had appeared in a courtroom to lay a major chapter of my life to rest.

I am approaching the anniversary of those weeks. I expect to find out lots of things that escaped my notice during the fall months of 2012.

Richard Russo is a source of happy memories, though, starting with my reading of Empire Falls ten years ago. Set in a small town in Maine, the novel has a central character whose life I wanted to keep following no matter how dangerously close to permanent discouragement it came. The novel that had earned its author a Pulitzer Prize was a profoundly satisfying read.

In August 2009 I attended a reading that Russo gave after the publication of another of his novels, That Old Cape Magic. The reading, a fundraiser for the Portland Library, was held in what used to be called the First Parish Meeting House. I sat in one of the box pews in the crowded church where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his family had attended services during his youth in Portland.

That evening I joined in the eruptions of appreciative laughter that greeted Russo’s reading of the opening chapter of his novel. I looked around at times and found it tempting to envision a bookish Maine life for myself one day. I sensed the chance of meeting local people who would understand my reading a Mary Oliver poem at the start of every day, my visiting museums and bookstores and old graveyards, my sitting in churches, my spending two to three hours a weekend writing for the pleasure of it.

I took a picture this past Sunday of the Russo memoir on its table in the bookstore, aware of another book waiting for me back home. I would not go to sleep that night until I had finished The Burgess Boys, a novel by another Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, Elizabeth Strout. In this book characters shift back and forth between a town in coastal Maine and New York City with its adult sophistication and social expectations. Strout’s tale keeps a reader attuned to the transformations that loom in any life, no matter how hard each character works to keep that life predictable and manageable.

The final chapter of The Burgess Boys opens in the Portland bus station. I could barely believe Sunday night that I had ended up there, reading about a building familiar to me from repeated visits to the city over the past five years. I recognized the plastic seating, the vending machines, the taxis lined up just beyond the large glass windows, each bus pulling into the lot “like a friendly oversize caterpillar.”

My own life had felt capable of eventual transformation as I used to sit in that station, my future detaching itself more and more mysteriously from patterns of the past. Maine had stood for a great wilderness into which I might get to wander.

Over the past several years I have become better acquainted with Maine. It hasn’t heard the last of me.

An Adult Room

Sitting last night with a late dinner in front of me, I felt I was back in New Orleans.

I felt a Southerner again.

It was not the food before me – a plate of black beans and rice flavored with slices of kielbasa. No, I would not have seen that dinner served at my parents’ table in New Orleans. The foods that I prepare these days only occasionally speak of my home state of Louisiana.

I was thinking of the guest that I had invited to the apartment for a simple meal this coming Saturday. Born in Maine, this guest has lived some of his adult life in Louisiana. Sitting at the dining room table last night, I was attempting to see these rooms through that other pair of eyes. I kept feeling that New Orleans was written all over the place.

Of course, there is a New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival poster hanging on one wall of the dining room. It is a purchase that I had made at the festival in 1978, the year I moved to Boston. I had brought the poster up North in a sturdy mailing tube and taken it to a do-it-yourself frame shop in Cambridge. Familiar with the framing process, my sister-in-law had accompanied me that August day; she helped me choose the blue matting.

But, no, not just a Jazz Festival poster – there is more that spoke to me last night of the city where my parents had spent their adult lives. Displayed in different places in the room are photographs of my mother and my father as well as photographs of aunts and uncles. Behind glass doors of two built-in china cabinets are vases from my mother’s bedroom, serving pieces, gifts of stemware from my brother.

In the end, though, I think it was the quiet of a room in the evening, large potted plants, the mirror over a side table, lamps with their colored shades. Last night this room had felt an adult room. Not cluttered, it had space for a guest to sit and relax and talk over a meal. There will be enough room this Saturday for me to lean over and pick up a finished dinner plate and take it into the kitchen.

Last night I realized this was an appropriate room for such adult rituals.

I have lived in New England for thirty-five years now. I have lived in New England ten years longer than I lived in the South of my growing up. I think of myself as a Southerner, though. Any home that I create would have to recall some of my earlier history – to me at least.

I wonder what it will say to others.

Harboring the Unexpected

Believe it or not, I like how quiet it is.

I am fine that most people who “know me well” do not regularly come to Writing Cabin. I presume they have their own ways of knowing me, some of them ways that may not yet have occurred to me but that have proven perfectly reliable and effective over the years.

Would anything I write here prove unexpected to those people who know me well?

On my part, I like when I meet someone who can recite a new poem to me or the text of an unfamiliar hymn. Words that I have not learned, words that have not yet found a customary place in my heart, can summon a silence within and I come to attention. I become aware of the unexpected.

I suspect I need the unexpected. I suspect I count on the possibility of there being something I have not even imagined.

Two weeks ago a friend was driving me through the mountains of North Carolina. We began talking on a topic that would have been unexpected in most car rides on a Saturday morning. We were talking about experiencing the peace of God when my friend recited a line from a hymn in the Episcopal hymnal: “The peace of God, it is no peace…”

At signs of my interest he recited all four stanzas, his hands on the steering wheel, eyes on the road:

They cast their nets in Galilee

just off the hills of brown;
such happy, simple fisherfolk,
before the Lord came down.

Contented, peaceful fishermen,
before they ever knew
the peace of God that filled their hearts
brimful, and broke them too.

Young John who trimmed the flapping sail,
homeless in Patmos died,
Peter, who hauled the teeming net,
head-down was crucified.

The peace of God, it is no peace,
but strife closed in the sod,
Yet let us pray for but one thing --
the marvelous peace of God.

On the passenger’s side of the front seat, I felt silence within when the end of the second stanza mentions the peace of God and how it breaks the hearts of the first disciples. I felt the silence deepen at the close of the hymn when the summons comes to pray “for but one thing --/the marvelous peace of God.”

The car kept up its speed over the interstate highway through the mountains.

Home in New England, I kept thinking of the hymn without being able to recite its four stanzas the way my friend had. An online search brought me face to face with the words composed by William Alexander Percy. It brought me face to face with another name, a familiar one – that of novelist Walker Percy, whose uncle and guardian this Will Percy had been.

On a visit to a favorite used-book store on Cape Cod two summers back, I had purchased a one-volume history of the Percy family of Greenville, Mississippi. At the time my interest had been in the forebears of Walker Percy. This past week I went looking through the apartment for the soft-cover edition by historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown. I was curious whether something as unexpected as a mention of “They Cast Their Nets in Galilee” might occur there.

Of course it did.

Book Sculptures

I sensed the passenger next to me taking out her Kindle before I actually saw her. Yes, wise move, I understood – this woman knew how to travel, knew how to pack a carry-on, knew where to situate her Kindle so that it was easy to reach. Settling in to her read took no time at all; figuring how to hold her “book” on her lap was no trouble; finding her place in the text would call no attention to itself.

I looked at the library book I had brought with me for the flight to North Carolina. Softbound, call number visible under tape, unidentifiable smudge on the back cover, Lost Classics opened onto pages of a familiar toughness, some dog-eared, some stained, all perfectly readable and all previously read. In my hunt for a more recent publication entitled On Rereading, I had discovered on the library shelf this 2001 volume with its playful subtitle: Writers on Books Loved and Lost, Overlooked, Under-read, Unavailable, Stolen, Extinct, or Otherwise Out of Commission.

As the passenger at my side read cleanly and quietly through screen after disappearing screen, I paged through the seventy-four short essays. Compiled by the editors of a Canadian literary magazine called Brick, these essays were the work of authors invited fifteen years ago to recount each of them a book memory. I got to hear again and again how someone who was used to reading wrote about that experience.

What characterized most of the essays was the sense of a physical text lost – or almost lost – uncelebrated oftentimes, sometimes – it would appear – unknown by anyone beyond these seventy-four authors.

If two different reading worlds were travelling side by side – Seat 25D and Seat 25E – over the Appalachian Mountains last week, still one other book world awaited me in Asheville.

I had an appointment at the studio of a book sculptor in Grovewood Gallery.

The creativity and imagination of Daniel Essig had been familiar to me from the time I first discovered altered books and artists’ books six or seven years ago. I had purchased books with photographs of Daniel Essig’s sculptures. His were not books to be read in any conventional way, but Daniel Essig was indeed again and again creating books that call to those of us who are readers. We recognize pages, spines, covers, bindings when we see these book sculptures – we just need to stop and mull and examine what Daniel Essig is saying with them.

So there I was with the Asheville friend I was visiting and we were entering this man’s workplace, this artist’s studio. And you know what? Daniel Essig’s books did what books do – they stand, they lean, they lie on their side, they take on the shadows of a rainy afternoon, they allow themselves to be overlooked or ignored or neglected unless someone takes them off a shelf and handles them and maybe talks about them.

So we talked about books.

Yes, far from any Kindle, we talked about books in Asheville.

Just Go

 

Sometimes you just go.

It was Friday evening in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, and I was following the lead of the friend with whom I was staying. He had been right to recommend the weekly Drum Circle in Pritchard Park. After driving in from barbeque at Luella’s, we had joined the crowd in the dark surrounding the drummers, my friend instinctively swaying with the rhythms and occasionally rubbing against me.

Walking afterwards, we passed other musicians, small tour groups standing on street corners, children running around a city fountain. When my friend asked whether I wanted to go past the Thomas Wolfe House, I figured proximity was in our favor. It was a favorite site that I had toured on two other visits to Asheville decades earlier. The old boarding house was down a quiet street, the only rambling Victorian structure left in a neighborhood of office buildings and restaurants.

The porch that wrapped around the front and side of the house reminded me of chapters in Look Homeward, Angel. The boarders visiting the mountain health resort used to spend evenings rocking on that porch, sometimes engaging the Wolfe brothers and sister in conversation late into the night.

When the house was open to tourist visits during the day, I used to cross the porch without thinking and head straight for the front door. Friday night I could see that the house was closed, but it seemed someone might actually just walk up the front yard path, climb the steps and enjoy the view from the porch the way the boarders used to. There were rockers and even a porch swing in view, but I could barely believe they would not be chained in place for security.

I checked every sign on the lawn. Nothing warned of alarms. Could I really do this? Could I really just go up the steps? Could I have this pleasure to myself? Could I really enjoy something just by going up to it and being there? Could I really have what I wanted?

A wary adult self was not sure, but I looked at my friend. “Let’s go,” I said.

In no time I was on the porch swing, still startled by the sheer luck of it – a place on the porch for me and for the friend with me.

I told him, “This is where Tom and his brother Ben used to sit in the evenings.”

My friend had already driven me a few days earlier to sprawling Riverside Cemetery. We had stood in a light intermittent rain next to the Wolfe family plot. We easily located Tom’s marker. It took a while to find the low stone where Ben is buried next to his twin brother Grover.

A little while later the rain had let up. My friend filled his pipe and lit it. I recalled having wanted to get here from the first days of planning the Asheville visit.

Three days later I was on the porch swing. I had not planned on anything just like this.

Sometimes you just go, though.

Heading to Asheville

I was making vacation plans for next week with someone on the phone this morning.

Suddenly he remarked, “A clock is chiming.”

I was taken aback by his comment until it registered that a clock was indeed chiming, that I could hear it still chiming, and that the clock was on the mantelpiece in the next room in my apartment. It was that perfectly normal phenomenon of no longer being conscious of hearing something that I have grown accustomed to hearing every fifteen minutes for years.

Once I began to describe the mantle clock, I realized that FaceTime would make it very easy to show what I was attempting to make familiar to someone who had never seen the clock. I would not have to worry about what my words, what I chose to mention and what I presumed must be obvious by my calling this a mantle clock, might fail to make clear.

Sometimes you just have to see something if you’re going to make headway in knowing it.

Next week I get to meet someone with whose writings I have been familiar since 2005. One blogger to another, he and I have read what words we have each chosen to describe the tenor of everyday life and eventually a significant transition in each of our lives. Over time our communication moved into other media, phone calls and text messages and Facebook.

It seemed time for us to sit across a table from one another, order barbecue and beer, and watch how the other fits in a chair and surveys a room and makes his points and names his dreams.

Sometimes you just have to see someone if you’re going to make headway in knowing him.

Outermost Community Radio

It was a Saturday evening in the winter of 2006, and I was taking my niece Marie to dinner for a belated celebration of her January birthday. It had been lightly snowing through most of the day, and the outline of street lamps against a white Boston Common made a lyrical view from the upstairs windows of the French restaurant.

At times during the evening with Marie, it was too easy for me to recall the spirited high school student or the pre-med junior I had visited in her college dorm room. I would briefly forget that I was facing a professional woman in her mid-thirties, a successful OB/GYN with a practice in central Massachusetts.

Though unmarried, Marie had determined a number of years earlier not to delay the purchase of property. She had built a two-storey house in a neighborhood ten minutes from the clinic where she had her practice. She was eager for her home to become one of the venues the rest of us considered for holiday meals.

Then Marie got to buy a small summer house on Cape Cod. After that purchase she made sure that her parents began to count on this home away from home for their use. Eager to acknowledge the role Marie was beginning to play in the family, I told her pointedly during our birthday evening that it was lovely to imagine Augusts in the future when yet unborn generations of the family would think of Marie as the magnet for fun gatherings.

Since then the first of those unborn generations has been born. There are toys collected in bright plastic tubs in the main living room of the Cape house. Stacks of children’s books show up in different rooms. There is a swing set in the back yard.

Next week I go to that house for a few days. It is a time of year I have gotten to count on having that home away from home to myself. I will set the kitchen radio to play the eclectic music of a Provincetown radio station – WOMR – OuterMost Community Radio. The call letters recall the title of Henry Beston’s 1928 masterpiece of naturalist writing, The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod.

At one point during our dinner in 2006, Marie recounted her recent unearthing of a composition she had penned at the end of second grade. In it she had written of her excitement long ago at the prospect of her Uncle John’s moving in with her and her family. My older brother had generously arranged for me to live with his family for the year after I left the seminary.

When I go to Marie's house on the Cape next week, I live my own life but I live with my family again.

Kind Reader

There is no practical reason for me to own a copy of the Bible in Latin. When I discovered mine in a box in the basement this weekend, I was actually hunting for my copy of the novel Look Homeward, Angel. Biblia Sacra Vulgata was a purchase I had made almost two decades ago out of curiosity and what I will call a sort of devotional playfulness. What would the psalms have sounded like to Francis of Assisi in the 12th century? How would religious communities have heard the gospel stories read at Mass in the 18th century?

The book I purchased has remained packed and largely unmissed over the past five years. If I took it out of its moving box and carried it up the backstairs this weekend, I was falling victim once again to a pleasure in the feel and heft of the volume and its tight compactness.

Ready for a little sleuthing?

This page of Latin text from the beginning of the book shows three indentations. Can you find the beginnings of three paragraphs? The first paragraph begins “Verba Vulgatae…” The second paragraph begins “Habes ergo…” The third begins “Ordinem librorum…”

My interest is in the second paragraph. This is not a page of ancient Latin, by the way. You are looking at the first page of the Praefatio composed by Dom Robert Weber OSB as chief editor. First published in 1969 by the German Bible Society in Stuttgart, the volume also contains Dom Robert’s preface translated into German, French, and English.

Why would I be interested in the preface in Latin if it is available in three other languages? Precisely because it had not needed to be written in Latin at all. But Dom Robert Weber was addressing a community of scholars who would probably all know some Latin if they were going to use the biblical texts he had edited.

And now the line that stopped me. The start of that second paragraph: “Habes ergo…” Here is the simplest of Latin verbs in the present tense, second person singular. “Therefore you have…” Dom Robert is addressing some ONE person at this point. But who? For the answer, look at the phrase that follows, set off by commas: “benevole lector.” Kind reader.

Something prompted me to look at each of the three translations that followed. Not one begins that same paragraph in just that way. Not one addresses a “kind reader.” The English version reads: “The present edition contains all the Biblical books that are found in the Roman edition.” The German and French translations follow suit.

Only in the Latin version, when Dom Robert is clear he has the attention of some rank of fellow Latinist, does he invoke a relationship between himself and his reader. It is a relationship that will otherwise go unnoticed and unacknowledged.

Until this weekend I did not know Dom Robert Weber OSB. I certainly did not know that I owned a volume that he had edited. The pleasure of handling the book now feels like a gift. I like to think I am that booklover, that kind reader about whom Dom Robert thought.

Connecticut River Valley

I drove west for ninety minutes last Saturday morning.

When you drive for ninety minutes west from Boston on the interstate highway, you come to the Connecticut River Valley. If you know your Emily Dickinson, you have come to her hills, her grasses, her skies, her summer.

My Mapquest directions had simplified my search to looking for a sign marked Exit 4. That’s one way of explaining how I began driving north along the Connecticut River. Less than two hours later the friend I had arranged to meet in Northampton was walking with me through the quiet of the Bridge Street Cemetery.

Might the poet of Amherst have attended funerals in this cemetery the next town over from her home? If so, her attention may have settled at one point on this hoary stone.

Something would have stirred in her at this sight, I have to think.

Maple Walnut Summer

I found it – my mother’s occasional personal splurge when it came to ice cream. Chocolate might do it for the rest of us, vanilla, strawberry, three flavors – but the ice cream treat my mother occasionally required was black walnut. Sometimes it gets called maple walnut, and I looked for some yesterday in my neighborhood frozen food cases. Eureka!

Nothing much changed for my mother at the June end of each school year. She still had to do the daily load of laundry, the house cleaning, the preparation of my father’s dinner and ours. Summer lunches for us just added to the work she was accustomed to the rest of the year. No ironing of school uniforms, though! The sacrifice she and my father made for private education certainly made for a busy life.

Without a driver’s license my mother was limited for much of her life to our family outings for her distraction. Every other Sunday was a day-long trip to our four grandparents. Secret: there was a young doctor in New Orleans who paid her some attentions when she had just graduated from high school. Her choice of my father, though, the brother of a classmate, was one she made and, but for her children and sisters, no one would have heard her say a word against life with him.

Might her life have been different with that doctor or a lawyer or a college professor? She might have thought so. What about a summer house? A dream come true. The chance at a job that would take her regularly out of her house? Not in the stars for her.

For the first time in fifty years I had maple walnut ice cream last night. I like to think that pleased her.