UD‘s been having rather trying summers lately.
True, she doesn’t teach during the summer, which means that her reading and writing time is her own. This fact alone makes her summers enviable from the point of view of most people, who have to go to workplaces.
On the other hand, last summer, as she prepared to go to her houselet in the hills of upstate NY, Righthaven came calling. No traditional birthday dinner for UD at Woodstock’s Bear Cafe. She had to stay home and deal with that.
This summer, which was going to involve a variation on the Bear Cafe birthday — an event at Peter Galbraith’s house in Vermont was planned — is also messed up, because she’s having surgery mid-August. Nothing scary, but she’ll need a few weeks recovery, etc.
Mr UD came up with the idea of their taking a little trip the week before the surgery, so today they drive to a bed and breakfast in Luray Virginia, where they will explore caves (this will impress you). UD will of course blog throughout the week.
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Longtime readers know that Les UDs – for reasons of Soltan family history – own a fifty-acre snail farm in Latgale, Latvia, not far from the town of Rezekne. (“It’s not a snail farm,” Mr UD just said, and indeed no snail farming goes on there; but someone imported snails to the property a long time ago, and they’re crawling all over the place, and someday maybe we’ll farm them, so I call it our Latvian snail farm.)
Time and priorities being what they are, UD has never spent a summer, or any other season, on the snail farm, but there’s a story in today’s news that reminds her she should visit the region.
Vilnius, Lithuania is a couple of hours away from the snails, and its mayor the other day took an armored vehicle and crushed a car illegally parked in a bicycles only lane.
I’m on a break. I’ve been outside with my neighbors Dick Pratt and David Frevert, sawing away at a huge tree that fell with an authentically scary crash just outside my house. It barely missed the living room. Where I was standing.
La Kid, watching a film in her bedroom at the time, claims she heard nothing. The Pratts, four houses down and the owners of the woods where the tree stood, report having heard it quite clearly.
All of our work is overlooked by The Deer Who Are Always Here.
Neighbors wander by and gawk. Pick up a saw, people!
There’s sawing, and there’s dragging limbs and leaves out to the street for the town maintenance truck to haul. Lots of discussion among us as to whether this humongous amount of tree will overwhelm the town’s capacity…
Oh – I take it back. I just glanced out the window, and a woman I don’t even recognize has parked her dog in my garden and taken up the work with Dick.
I’m heading back out there now – cranberry juice for the workers, water for the dog.
The artist.
…contemplating koi at the
Japanese Koi Pond at the
Catoctin Animal Park —
just a hop skip and a jump
from Camp David.
UD thanks her sister
for the photo.
Mr UD is away at the Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies, La Kid is at her internship at Congressional Quarterly Press, and UD is at home in Garrett Park. It’s too hot to go outside. She has positioned her laptop in front of the kitchen windows because she wants to watch two yellow-shafted flickers feed their baby.
These beautiful birds look like this.
If you enlarge the image (click on it), you’ll see a bit of yellow under one of the bird’s wings. What the image doesn’t show you is the whole bird suddenly turning bright yellow when it flattens and shakes itself in the dirt while cleaning its wings.
UD can watch tons of robins and cardinals feed their babies. That’s nothing. The flickers are special.
After her dog died last year, UD cleared the fenced-in wilderness that had been his play area. She took out a lot of bushes and weeds, cut back on ivy, relocated azaleas. She created a path and threw down mulch.
In a hidden corner, she placed a black chaise.
Years of overgrowth and a surrounding of mature trees make the place very shady, a private little garden wrapped in green. As UD cuts back on it more and more, she realizes what she’s got, what she’s wrought, is a meditation space, a zen oasis.
UD‘s first boyfriend – and the person she refers to on this blog as her ‘thesdan playmate, has died. He was fifty-seven.
It was sudden, “a shock to us all,” his mother Rita just said to me on the phone.
He’d been out kayaking – he loved to kayak, and wanted to live, someday, on one of the islands off Washington State. He felt, he said to his companion on the water, “strange.” They went back to the dock, and David lay down and died.
He had a history of coronary heart disease; he’d had a stent put in.
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We met in Mrs Washer’s tenth grade Latin class at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland. We shared, like many kids at WJ, the same ‘thesdan demographics: Jewish, children of federal government scientists.
He didn’t look anything like his well-known sister, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. She talks about this in her book A Dialogue on Love:
We are good-looking.
All Mediterranean, all with fine brown frames
and those sparkling, or
soulful, extravagant-lashed
eyes of chocolate
— all but a dorkily fat, pink, boneless middle child; one of my worst nicknames is “Marshmallow.”
Soulful, extravagant-lashed / eyes of chocolate says it. There’s a photograph of David in our high school yearbook in which he’s tutoring a student. The camera, tight on his face, captures his chocolate eyes trained with enormous soulful attention on the student.
His mother, his sister, David – all teachers.
UD was a protected conventional suburban kid, David a hyper-confident bizarro. He went to New York City most weekends, for shadowy hipster reasons… Something to do with an insanely brilliant lover up there whose mother had been Lord Buckley’s lover… A woman who used words like cathexis…
David didn’t care what anyone thought of him… We exchanged notes every day in class – crazy notes, precursors of our crazy Gchats. These notes were ironic, literary, obscene, hilarious, juvenile. We grew up, but our notes never grew up.
Although I came from a pretty cultured home, real intellectual awakening for me started with David. He was at the time an absurdly precocious Straussian; he also met once a week with a scholar of the Talmud. Neither of these particular things interested me. I was interested in David’s intellectual energy, his mental and erotic brashness, his social insolence, his outrageous openness to anything that might be exciting and provocative and difficult and enigmatic and bizarre and entirely not what other people thought worth noticing.
We had a long tortured love affair which ended in his leaving me for a woman he’d met at Telluride, the summer school at Cornell for really smart high school students. (For some reason, I have in my bookcase the madly scribbled all over paperback of The Waste Land he studied from that summer.) Wounded, I spent years angry at him. But he reappeared in my life at some point, wanting friendship.
He wrote me long letters from his exotic solo world travels. I remember in particular a photo of him in India, looking sallow. He’d gotten hepatitis.
He studied history in the honors program at the University of Maryland, and then got an MA in Comparative History at Brandeis. I read his thesis, on infanticide.
And then he went traveling the world again.
Eventually he landed in Seoul, and took a job teaching English at a university there. For twenty years he used Korea as a home base from which to explore much of Asia.
He wasn’t madly in love with Korea, but he was a born expatriate, loving the feeling of always being strange, at odds… Loving too the daily observation of intricate other realities… He wanted to be an outsider. He wanted to be permanently somewhat ill at ease, a stranger at a strange angle to the world.
When he fell in love and married, and when his Korean wife wanted to move to the United States, he did so reluctantly. As she pursued her medical education, David stayed home and raised their son, lovingly teaching this highly intelligent child all manner of things, training his soulful attention on him alone.
David wrote, in a Gchat last year:
I keep promising to take Noam to a really good limestone cave… I REALLY want to give him some rich experiences… I mean, I think I’ve done a splendid job of kindling his excitement about books and what they offer, but there is so much more to life.
Indeed while David, like his sister, was a thoroughgoing intellectual, he was also a gourmet, a kayaker, a knowledgeable lover of jazz, and a fine guitarist.
I never saw him relax. His intensity, his endless observation and analysis of every person, place, and idea he encountered, his complex and to some extent punishing self-consciousness, meant that his life would be at once effervescent and exhausting. He once startled me, in a Gchat, by saying that death seemed to him a rather tantalizing opportunity to rest.
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Pictures of David when young can be found here.
… deer who live in the woods behind our house, I cannot resist scenes like this one. Two beautiful fawns, leaping about only a few feet from our deck.
I watched them just now – eight o’clock on a still-light summer evening.
Fireflies made a golden corona around them, and they moved to the music of the wood thrush.
… my Garrett Park garden.
After having been away for two weeks.
1. Six rabbits — teens, toddlers — play leapfrog all over my front lawn. Nearby, lying down on a bit of green between a clump of hosta and a clump of liriope, a mother rabbit watches them.
2. In the forest behind the house, a doe leads two spotted fawns through honeysuckle bushes. The fawns trip and tremble on their long stiff legs.
3. All daylily flowers have been decapitated. Ditto hosta flowers.
4. My friend Kim has taken my suggestion and stuffed my bulls with fresh green and hay-colored sphagnum moss.
5. From the bedroom window, I watch the latest cardinal nest shimmy and shake with activity.
6. The Good Humor truck, tooting down the street, scatters the rabbits.
(I found the picture here.)
All the rain has made my woods and garden a rainforest. Every morning I walk around the half acre, holding a pair of scissors with which I clip back ivy and honeysuckle and even hydrangea overstepping its bounds. A bright litter of birdcalls strews the ground.
(I ripped that last sentence off from An Arundel Tomb.)
Today as I passed the small secret garden I made last year, a hidden place just big enough for a writing table and a chair, I saw something on the table. Gray, lumpy, not moving. A dead squirrel?
As I got closer, two huddled mourning doves materialized. Asleep.
… how excited UD was, last spring, to discover a wood thrush nest next to her house, and how much she loved hearing the famous song of that bird.
What they don’t tell you is that it never shuts up. Among the many poems inspired by the thrush, this one has it right:
I hear the thrush, and I see
Him alone at the end of the lane
Near the bare poplar’s tip,
Singing continuously.
Continuously. Morning, noon, and … no, not night. But I’m asleep at night. And they’re loud. Last year the novelty of the thing charmed me; this year it’s shaddap already.
… at the office…
On-site amenities [at a new building across from UD’s office] will include a Citibank branch, Roti Mediterranean Grill, Sweetgreen and Circa. A much-anticipated Whole Foods will open by Sept. 1.
… and at home. (UD reflects on her neighborhood.)
Garrett Park, Maryland, a town near Bethesda, is deceptive, especially if you live, as we do, near the CSX train tracks. From our small house, surrounded by woods, the world looks rural, not suburban. And forget urban.
We’ve got over a half-acre of lawn and trees, on which deer, coyotes, raccoons, owls, and a zillion other animals thrive. This time of year, with the spring blossoms, we can barely see neighboring houses. And because there’s only one through-street in Garrett Park, little traffic passes by our split rail fence and unmanicured lawn.
Yet this sylvan scene has more to do with strategic barriers and bluffs than with reality.
The train tracks themselves represent one such borderland. The end of our land is an abrupt thirty-foot drop into the narrow canyon of the tracks, and on the other side of that canyon, hidden by kudzu and all sorts of other growing things, lies quite-built-up Randolph Hills.
A park jammed with mature trees hides from our house the madly popular Black Market Bistro, which brings lots of cars to the streets of our town. However crowded the restaurant, though, the cars never reach our property.
As for the sound of trains near our house: I grew up in Garrett Park and don’t really hear them.
And anyway, lonely train whistles are echt rural.
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When, a few days ago, my husband and I were shocked out of sleep — out of that particular night’s sleep and out of the larger placidity of Garrett Park — by a big explosion, I assumed something terrible had happened to a train. The tracks vibrated massively in the aftermath of a blast I figured had to do with a catastrophic chemical accident. Afraid of what might have been released into the air, I didn’t throw on clothes and explore. Instead, I waited for sirens, which started up two minutes after the boom. And then I went back to sleep.
The morning’s news about the Randolph Hills house just across the tracks that we’d heard splinter into nothingness was another reminder that to live in Garrett Park is to inhabit a very tenuous tranquility, a shaky small-town life in the midst of the city. The quiet wild greenery of Garrett Park is itself manufactured: It represents the legal and political accomplishment of generations of savvy, feisty townspeople who’ve kept roads closed and trees replenished and McMansions out. They’ve kept our no-home-delivery post office going, an arrangement which means that we take walks and meet our neighbors every day, just the way they do in the boonies.
But the Garrett Park post office is imperiled. Post offices are being closed all over the country.
And ceaseless smart growth near the Grosvenor metro encroaches more and more on the town.
The exploding house across the tracks, then, wasn’t a wake-up call, because everyone here knew, before three AM the other night, that a large noisy world was right out there beyond the barricades. The exploding house was, instead, another of many reminders that small-town Garrett Park, Maryland, while not a fiction, is an increasingly implausible story-line.
Mr UD is in Jeddah, La Kid’s in Ireland, and UD‘s home in Garrett Park, gazing at three ugly cardinal babies in a nest near her front door.
Earlier in the day, UD and her sister did some explosion tourism, visiting the site of a house across the train tracks from UD‘s place that blew up a few nights ago.
Two years ago, one day after its opening ceremony, I went to the Pentagon Memorial, where I sat on Leslie Whittington’s wingseat and thought about her. Here’s my Inside Higher Ed post about that visit.
I’m here again, barely able to write for the wind. But the wind stirs the ponds under the wingseats, so there’s the sound of water (if you ignore the roaring George Washington Parkway traffic), and the wind makes currents that make ripply shadows along the grounded wings.
Four red roses and a lily lie in Leslie Whittington’s pond. I’m sitting on her husband’s seat just opposite hers, looking at the flowers in the water.
Big jets about to land at Reagan keep appearing above the Pentagon’s roof, each one a shuddering reminder. A big helicopter – looks presidential – just buzzed the memorial.
At the memorial’s entrance, there’s a plaque, and under the plaque someone’s propped a photo of Lady Liberty holding aloft the bleeding head of Bin Laden. WE GOT HIM, someone has written on the bottom of the picture. 5/1/11.
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Heat and wind and a cloudy sky. Already a tropical day. If you really want a meditative experience here, you’ll need to get the Pentagon to let you in at one AM. Otherwise it’s jets and helicopters and eight lanes of fast cars and all the daily activity of the Pentagon.
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Is there more security here than usual?
Who knows? It’s the Pentagon!
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Everyone’s assimilating the Bin Laden news in their own way. For me, it’s definitely about this second trip to Leslie Whittington’s wingseat, and some chat with her.
But I didn’t know her – I only feel an affinity with her – and I find that talking’s difficult. The way she died makes her rather unapproachable. I can’t – I won’t – imagine that. But I can’t think of her apart from it.
This impasse makes me dull and stupid on a hot day in the middle of – let’s face it – parking lots. The long walk from the metro stop to the memorial is all about the million miles of parking that surround the Pentagon. Once you get past that, you’re in a water garden hedged with grasses and herbs. You’re in a bounded place of 184 beige hillocks and illuminated basins. Your feet crunch on the gravel as you move from bench to bench, protecting your eyes from the sun as you squint at each engraved name.
Having found Leslie Whittington, I’m struggling against many forces – my fear of reckoning with the reality of what happened to her; the crazy wind and heat of a Washington afternoon; the distractions – in order to lose myself and find her.
The wind suddenly blows the yellow water lily out of the water. It scuds along the gravel. I go after it, pick it up, and float it back on the pond. The simple business of realigning it with the roses does the trick. I sit back down on her husband’s bench and reflect.
At three AM, Les UDs were shocked from sleep by a big explosion.
“I’ve never heard anything like that before,” said UD. “Sounds as though it might be coming from the train tracks.”
Her first thought was a blast of (possibly dangerous) materials on a boxcar.
“Isn’t it raining?” said Mr UD. “Maybe it was lightning?”
“Don’t think so. It’s not raining very hard. And that just sounded like an explosion, not lightning. Maybe a house exploded? I’d go outside and look around, but if there’s been a release of chemicals… Let’s listen for sirens.”
Sirens started up in two minutes. Les UDs went back to sleep.
This morning’s newspaper reports that a house exploded.
Right next to Garrett Park.
Two people were seriously burned overnight after a large explosion destroyed a Rockville area home and threw the pair into the backyard …
Damaged adjacent houses too.
To have grown up here in Washington DC is to have known the children of spies and scientists and satellite image readers and war strategists. Abstract, abstracted people, symbolic analysts, silent about the precise nature of their work. “My former wives,” writes Jack Gladney, hero of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, “had a tendency to feel estranged from the objective world – a self-absorbed and high-strung bunch, with ties to the intelligence community.” Some of my friends’ parents commuted to Fort Dietrich to study military applications of poison. Others – like UD‘s father – drove to the National Institutes of Health to fight President Nixon’s war on cancer.
To have come back here to Washington after graduate school, to have spent my working life at four-blocks-from-the-White-House George Washington University, is to have made a lateral move, to have remained in a world of CIA recruiters and lobbyists and speech writers. White Noise takes place on a college campus, arguably the white-noisiest of wealthy, high-tech American locales, and indeed even an urban campus like GW is very white-noisy. Things tend to be smooth and hushed and abstract — the carpeted, geometric mid-rises, the light-jazz-and-laptops cafes, the calm precise Reagan-bound jets.
To have watched my students rush the White House at midnight on Sunday and raggedly sing The Star Spangled Banner was to have witnessed a breach in the white noise protocol. They were the first to arrive, my students, their dorms just down the block from Lafayette Park. They raced along the darkness of Eighteenth Street, shouting to one another, pumping their fists, conjuring flags from somewhere. From the fog of final exams they were lifted, by Osama’s demise, into a collective clarity having to do with justice.
Strange to think that my students were too young, in 2001, to understand what I understood, to do what I did. I lay down on my basement floor and I said out loud to myself Nothing to do but be brave. Because no one knew how much more punishment we were in for. Someone was trying to bomb us back to the Stone Age. (“They have gone beyond the bounds of passionate payback. This is heaven and hell, a sense of armed martyrdom as the surpassing drama of human experience,” wrote DeLillo in an essay published a few months after 9/11.) My students were too young to marvel at the unity Americans felt and expressed, all of us having been hit so hard. We didn’t know how to respond in the immediate aftermath, but we knew we loved this country, and we all wanted to say that. We wanted to be clear about this love, its particularities. DeLillo praised “the daily sweeping taken-for-granted greatness of New York.”
They were too young, my students, but they took it in, just the way we did. And when Sunday’s story broke, there was a lot of emotion to let out.
Under the hum of white noise beats a perfectly functioning human heart. Even in the fog of Foggy Bottom.
