Let’s not go overboard about Arizona, UD. Phoenix in January at eight in the morning still has a chill in the air. Yet the innkeeper just escorted me from one of the inner courtyards (huge red and orange ceramic containers full of madly thrusting agave, thick fruit trees heavy with yellow fruit, triangular shade sails) to the front of the inn (solar heated pool, shrieking birds in the bushes, black burbling fountains) which is directly in the sun, and damned if it hasn’t already warmed up.
… said the woman sitting behind me as our plane gently touched down in Phoenix. She’d talked throughout the flight about what a bad flyer she was, and this made UD happy because UD is a bad flyer but not as bad as that woman.
At Baltimore Washington Airport, UD had bought a magazine of New Yorker cartoons, and a magazine with glossy photos of the world’s best spas, to distract her from the ordeal, and it worked. She was distracted from thoughts of how beyond-belief surreal and depressing it would be to perish inside of a flying can with a bunch of strangers.
Mr UD, who claims to have slept through a landing at the Baghdad airport during the Iraq War, had no sympathy at all for UD‘s nerves and said all the obvious stuff about how safe flying is blahblah.
Phoenix appeared out of the black night, a plain of golden lights.
We’ve settled into our hotel, had dinner, had several friendly conversations about what to see and do, and are now ready for bed.
I’ll get back to regular blogging tomorrow.
… for Sedona, Arizona. UD has always wanted to see the red rocks. She’s also never been to the Grand Canyon. Weather for the week seems to be sunny and in the fifties.
UD‘s a Baltimore girl (born in Johns Hopkins Hospital, when her father was a JHU grad student in biochemistry); when she was eight, her parents moved the family to England for a year, and then when they returned to the States, home was Bethesda, Maryland (UD‘s father had a long career at the National Institutes of Health). They had a little weekend house on the Chesapeake Bay.
Although, growing up, UD went to Europe a lot, she seems to have neglected the area west of Skyline Drive. A few trips to California; a stay in Park City, Utah, a stay in Telluride, Colorado …
In short, UD‘s a real east coaster (well, undergrad and grad in Chicago…) and it’s way past time for her to go out west.
Blogging will continue.
I smell fox.
Behind me, in the narrow woods that separate our house from the Dubinskis house.
Well, we have many orange foxes; I see them from my back windows in the early morning.
It’s noon, the last day of the year, and it’s warm enough for me to sit here, in one of our old Adirondacks, watching runners and bikers and walkers pass along Rokeby Avenue.
— Pause here to talk to a new resident, an artist, who tells me about her upcoming show in New York City and “a commission for a house in Takoma Park.” —
The squirrels are doing that monkey-like shriek from the treetops.
A tortoiseshell cat just walked by, wary of me but circling my house. Now it’s pacing up my neighbor’s just-resurfaced driveway.
My across-the-street neighbor, whose house sits up high, surrounded by centuries of azaleas, waves at me.
A train whistles by.
What’s left of the leaves – dry flyaway things – skitters along our pale green lawns.
— Pause. “Happy New Year!” A woman I don’t know hails me from Rokeby. She’s with what I guess is her daughter and her daughter’s little boy. I return the greeting, and she admires my topiary deer which I tell her are topiary bulls. “I have plenty of real deer.” She asks if we string the bulls with Christmas lights, and I tell her that we consider it every year, but “it’s so complicated to trace them that we give up before we start.” —
I’m holding a University of Chicago mug which is rough to my hands because I microwaved milk in it for too long the other night and it spilled over and then dried on the cup. I was making Ghirardelli hot chocolate (Christmas present). I’ve also been stealing the variously flavored Hershey kisses my daughter got from friends. Inside the cup is rapidly cooling TeaLuxe Raspberry Earl Gray.
A shiny golden balloon, its string still trailing, floats high above me, bumping into treetops but still traveling toward the Dubinskis. This would have been a more impressive paragraph if it had touched down right here in front of old UD, but I’m a stickler for historical accuracy.
Although the sky in front of me is clear, bright blue, to the left the clouds are winning out, and my fingers are cold.
In a few days we leave to spend a week among the red rocks of Arizona.
… by Minna Thomas Antrim.
*************************************
Brew me a cup for a winter’s night.
For the wind howls loud and the furies fight;
Spice it with love and stir it with care,
And I’ll toast our bright eyes, my sweetheart fair.
**************************************
UD‘s been handed many cups of mulled cider over the last few days. She likes to see the cloves in the cup, likes to blow on the cider and sip around the cloves and allspice and cinnamon.
The wee verse is charming, but we want something more substantial to mull.
************************************
“It was beginning winter”
It was beginning winter,
An in-between time,
The landscape still partly brown:
The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind,
Above the blue snow.
[Roethke lends a lento, medieval feel to his poem with his simple chant, his retrospection… There’s also a bit of a ghouly feel, with those dead bones in the blue snow still weirdly swinging. Which will introduce his theme – what is the nature of life in the midst of death? What persists? As in Eliot’s Waste Land: What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?]
It was beginning winter,
The light moved slowly over the frozen field,
Over the dry seed-crowns,
The beautiful surviving bones
Swinging in the wind.
[Philip Larkin’s An Arundel Tomb has this beautiful line, evoking the passage of time amid the stillness of an ancient tomb inside of a church: Light / Each summer thronged the glass.
Trying to evoke the same sense of life, movement, amid a larger immobility, Roethke has the light moving slowly over the unmoving field – a residue of vivacity, a messenger from a more living place. ‘Seed-crowns’ deepens the sense of antiquity.]
Light traveled over the wide field;
Stayed.
The weeds stopped swinging.
The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.
[One must have a mind of winter, writes Wallace Stevens in a more famous poem, also mulling the thought that thought itself is the living thing that not only persists but thrives in wintry conditions: The mind of winter must remake the world, reanimate with memory and longing a living world. The silence of the winter world makes room for the mind, undistracts the mind from the busyness of rich natural life, and rivets it on the essentials.]
Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive,
Yet still?
[And so the poet now freely muses, his mind released from the physical life of warm seasons into the philosophical disposition of winter. What is life? What is the life that continues even in the dead of winter? Is it merely the light of my mind casting light over the world? Or is there another source?]
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.
[Who knows? These bright, glacial mysteries are beyond me. Best merely to sit tight and wait for the spring, when the world will become comprehensible again.]
La Kid, last night, in front of the
Quincy Market Christmas Tree, Boston.
… early this evening was the final trick of a long day of tricks the winter sky performed as Les UDs trudged northward from ‘thesda. From morning on, mixed clouds and sun and grey/black threads and occasional rain and occasional black-as-the-grave darkness made the view over the solid brown of the trees quite a thing.
Last year at this time, UD was blizzarded in. Boston was immobile under snow. This year’s weather is mild – just right for last minute late night shopping in Cambridge after a family dinner.
The West Hazleton Pennsylvania Perkins is a lot like the Harrisonburg Virginia Denny’s. Both are just off the freeway, both sell cakes, cookies, and pies, and both greet you effusively.
While Perkins is a mite more upscale, it does not, like Denny’s, offer internet access.
Les UDs were seated at a comfy booth, where Mr UD ordered steak (very rare) and eggs, and UD had the grilled chicken salad.
**************************
During the ride from DC, UD had religion on her mind (probably the death of Hitchens got her thinking about it), so Les UDs talked about that.
When they drove near Fort Dietrich, UD interrupted the conversation with a little nostalgia. “I went to high school with kids whose parents worked on poison gas there.”
*************************
At the next booth, a woman wore a knitted cap made to resemble a pile of vanilla ice cream with a cherry on top.
As Les UDs batted around their well-established Thing on religion (He: Mystical experience suggests the existence of a personal god. She: The mystery of the cosmos is so immense that I’m not comfortable with anything except maybe deism.), a priest sat down alone at an adjacent booth and took out a book. “Let’s ask that guy,” said UD, but she was kidding.
UD acknowledged that religion gave her something to do with, gave her a way to think about, the odd love and heartache she felt for people generally — specifically, at the moment, for the vaguely physically and mentally damaged young man who seated them, and for the coffee-, whiskey-, and cigarette-voiced woman who took their order.
After dinner, while UD waited in line to pay, she talked to a little boy about the baked goods at which they were both staring.
“What’ll it be?” UD asked him.
“My sister likes the chocolate chip cookies. I’m getting a sugar cookie.”
“I’m thinking about buying a sticky bun for breakfast tomorrow.”
The man who seated them took her card and rang her up and asked if everything had been okay and UD said it had been.
… for a Polish Christmas (oplatek-breaking, straw under the tablecloth, and, the next day, a small lunch with cold vodka).
Blogging continues unhampered through all of this.
David Brooks includes, among this year’s winners of his Sidney Awards, an essay by Robert Boyers, editor of the quarterly Salmagundi.
Many years back, Boyers published an essay UD wrote, about living in Warsaw, and she’s always remembered his kind letter (“lots of good stuff in here”).
Boyers’ winning essay is about the novelist Charles Newman, with whom UD had dinner decades ago, in Chicago.
Boyers, in his memoir of Newman, makes much of his physical beauty, as do a number of people who, after his death in 2006, wrote about him.
********************************
From the long desk where she’s sitting now, at 2020 K Street, Washington DC, UD tries to summon Newman, across the table from her as he was that night in the ‘seventies. She tries to put him right over there, facing her, as he was then.
She remembers the restaurant, remembers thinking it was over-lit. The long dinner table had to do with several other people taking part in the event. UD remembers Elliott Anderson, also a writer, and Gerald Graff, an English professor. She’s thinking maybe eight people finally gathered.
Finally. The main thing UD recalls of that evening is Newman and his companions arriving incredibly, unapologetically, late. Since it was a dinner, UD and a number of others arrived only a little late; Newman rolled in two and a half hours after meeting time.
Although she must have just graduated from Northwestern, and therefore have been both young and quite junior to Newman, UD showed him her anger. She didn’t say anything. Saying anything would have been uncool, and this was a cool group. But she let her eyes register surprise, mild contempt.
In response, Newman let his eyes register an indifference that was at once indifference to UD‘s feelings (what she felt was that he was a celebrated novelist and she a nothing not worth showing up for) and indifference to UD as someone he might bed.
That part UD vividly recalls, because she didn’t respond to the beauty Boyers and others describe. Newman was a tall, strapping, all-American boy from the midwest. UD‘s taste ran to neurotic Jews and tormented Europeans. UD was attracted to her Rilke professor – a rotund, irritable, 65-year-old displaced Czech Jewish homosexual.
Plus, Newman was drunk and sleepy – he must have been late because he wanted to tank up – and sleepy drunks didn’t turn her on either.
Having piled on top of his lateness a pointless sexual diss, Newman at this point kind of shriveled up. UD viewed him for the rest of the evening through the mist (quoting Humbert Humbert here) of her utter rejection of him.
It was strange how quickly UD disliked Newman, because she’d entered the restaurant primed for admiration and sympathy. She liked his writing, fiction and non-fiction; she knew his wife had committed suicide. But whatever humanizing struggles he’d had in his life, Newman chose to show UD only the Stepford chill that went with his looks.
*******************************
Stepford’s the wrong reference. This is a story about the ‘sixties, even if it took place in the ‘seventies.
A post-coital, post-chemical languor, a give-a-shit hipness, was the currency of the day. Chet Baker singing My Funny Valentine. Amy Winehouse singing anything. That was the mood. I care less than you care. My transgressions are more self-destructive.
Erich Heller, UD‘s Rilke professor, offered a different model – modernism instead of postmodernism. In Heller’s world, it was all out there; the angst was on the boil and you were actively trying to do something about it. In Newman’s world, which was the real world UD then moved in, the angst persisted, but you boiled it down with irony and a raggedy sense of the futility of it all. She preferred Heller’s way.
… UD’s monthly reportage from her hometown, Garrett Park, Maryland. (Hers is the article headlined Attention!).
… La Kid‘s warbling on TNT. She’s just sung with Jennifer Hudson (the link is to a YouTube of the performance; La Kid‘s in the chorus; she’s got long blond hair and glasses), and will, in a few minutes, sing the concluding carol with Barack Obama.
… but here again is La Kid, at the upper left, glasses, long blond hair.
The orange fox with the bad leg approaches my house as I type. In its mouth dangles a dead squirrel.
Standing next to my backyard fence, the fox seems to consider jumping it – perhaps to enter its enclosure.
Instead, it drops the squirrel into a deep pile of leaves and begins eating it, poking repeatedly into the pile, jaws wide, licking its lips.
It hears a truck engine and retreats – limping – along a path I’ve made through the woods. It will wait awhile, and then return to work on its buried food.
Third from the top left. Glasses, blond hair.
“It went well. I met Conan O’Brien.”
Blurry. But it’ll do.
