On my walk to my Intro English Lit class on a spectacular early autumn afternoon, I saw, on our greenest quad, two couples lying on the grass. They made a kind of a square, with the men’s heads in the women’s laps, everyone blissful and calm with their eyes shut under the sun.
This was pretty to see, as were all the happy upright people taking in a highly lit day.
Now on the metro, going home from campus, I see across the aisle from me two young men, sweaty from I guess construction work, sprawled asleep on their seats. Their feet are wedged up against the sides of the car, their heads (under baseball caps) hanging off the seat edges.
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Neighbors of UD are retiring to a house they’re building in the very north of the Adirondacks (Les UDs, you recall, have a house near Cooperstown), and Mr UD and I wondered about this, about making it virtually impossible for yourself to take what Saul Bellow called a “humanity bath.” Their house, like ours in upstate, has no visible neighbors, and though the sense this gives you of owning the earth is wonderful for a week or two (we’ve never stayed upstate longer than that) I wonder about it as a way to live every day of your life.
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“Well,” their neighbors’ daughter told us when we chatted with her last night, “the house is one hour from Montreal.”
A French-speaking humanity bath! Sounds refreshing. But how often, really, would you go there?
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UD’s talk about Charles Wright (current poet laureate) at the Georgetown Library was a pleasure. Good turnout – the day was rainy – and people laughed at my jokes. Very satisfying to peer out at the group and see old friends, new students…
UD’s chats with people after, at the reception, were equally gratifying. One guy in particular:
“I don’t read poetry. I don’t get poetry. I go to these things to accompany my wife, who loves poetry. Yours was the first talk to actually help me understand poetry.”
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If you look out the library’s back windows on the second floor, you get a spectacular view all the way down Georgetown to the Potomac River.
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UD‘s stroll to the library from Dupont Circle took her along Q Street Georgetown, one of Washington’s most beautiful residential walks. And since it was a dark, wet Saturday morning, she had the place pretty much to herself. Yum.
UD is partial to small, somewhat over-planted city gardens – the sort you see spilling onto the sidewalk with herbs and hibiscus. These are everywhere on Q. Again, yum.