Lance Mannion

Autumn on elbow

Four years ago this weekend we were in Chatham. We spend a couple weeks every summer on Cape Cod, but that year we were lucky. Our friend Merlin invited us down for the holiday and we got in what the 8 year old who was then 4 called "a great mini bee-cation."

If you think of the Cape the way Thoreau described it, as "the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts: [with] the shoulder [at] Buzzard's Bay...the wrist at Truro; and the sandy fist at Provincetown, - behind which the State stands on her guard, with her back to the Green Mountains, and her feet planted on the floor of the ocean, like an athlete protecting her Bay, boxing with northeast storms..." Then Chatham, which Thoreau knew as Cape Mallabarre, is on the elbow.

I hadn't been down there in the Fall in 20 years and Saturday morning I got up early and went looking for differences between the elbow I knew from all our summer bee-cations and the elbow in autumn.

—At Lighthouse Beach .—Slick spots in the choppy water that look like skins of ice or spills of quicksilver.—Head of a cormorant periscoping out of the waves. 3 black ducks pushing themselves furiously through the air, leading with their heads, necks straining, as if in harness and dragging great weights behind them, which they are.—There seems to be more dune grass, and from the parking lot the point and the cove behind its dunes look much closer. Is that effect of the clarity of the air, perspective, or the difference in my fall self and my summer self? Do my eyes focus on different things? The sand looks a darker color that seems to be an effect not just in the change of light. Something is not in it that’s there in the summer. Water? A bacteria? Heat?

Every 25 ft or so stands a surf caster. One with a big white floppy double-billed hat. Throws his line out with a violence that comes from up high in his shoulder and travels swiftly down his arm and out his clenched fist as though he’s throwing a punch at a tall man who’s just insulted his mother, wife, dog, and favorite ball club all in one breath.

7:10 am. Sitting on the end of the footbridge by the Mill Pond.—Here water and light and clouds don’t jump at me with any differences between fall and winter. The marsh grass has thinned out, been matted down, something that in the summer grows tall and green has died down, revealing something else, or several something elses that grow short and show brown and blond. Tips of the broken reeds yellow. Swirls of gray and brown in the mix. A crow’s voice dominates the bird music instead of the screams of
the gulls. Since gulls and crows don’t migrate this is either a coincidence or a sign that crows grow more belligerent when the weather cools. Gulls become morose, thoughtful, draw their wings in tighter and lower their heads. They stare out to sea and ask gloomy, existential questions.

Spinning the debate, but not that debate

I've taken part in only one formal debate.

Junior high.

Mike Shorkey, John Shields, and I going up against Nancy Wakeman, Peggy Pryor, and Christine Cafferelli.

That's Mike and me at our 8th grade graduation.  Mike's the kid on the left.  John was probably over posing with some girls.

Mike and John went in thinking we were bound to lose.  The fix was in.  The class would vote on which team won and they figured the vote would be strictly along partisan lines, the boys voting for us, the girls voting for the girls, and there were more girls in the class than boys.

But I was confident.   We had the advantage.  Boys were smarter than girls.  I was willing to admit that this didn't mean that we were smarter than all girls, all the time.  But the odds were with us.  I figured that at least three girls would be intelligent enough to recognize our innate superiority and honest enough to vote accordingly.

And we were on the side of the angels.  The topic was Should Government Workers, Including Police Officers and Fire Fighters Be Allowed to Strike?  We were pro.  Martin Luther King, Jr and Bobby Kennedywould have been on our side.  I couldn't imagine who'd be on the girls'.  In fact, I couldn't even imagine how the girls could argue that any workers did not have the right to withhold their own labor.

Which was my big mistake.  It's always the biggest mistake.  Not being able to imagine your opponent's arguments.  It's hard to think like the other guy, especially when you know the other guy---or girl---is dead wrong.  It's even harder to imagine how the other guy---or girl---can believe they're not wrong.

You think they must know they're wrong and all it will take is one key fact deployed at a crucial moment or one especially well-turned phrase and your opponent's knees will buckle, her lip start to tremble, and with a burst of sobbing she'll rush from the podium.

Sure of my cause, certain of my abilities, I set to work preparing.  I did my homework, I found quotes from Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, and I worked hard on my speeches, practicing them in front of my family, all of whom were ready to join the Wobblies when I was done.

At that time I hadn't yet learned the phrase Preaching to the choir.

You will also note in the above the exclusive use of the first person singular.

John and Mike who?

Day of the debate came.  The format was that each side got to deliver a speech setting forth their argument, followed by rebuttals.   Then the floor would be open for questions from the judges---Sister Mary Jacinta and Mr Schick.  After which we were allowed to question each other.  Then would come our summations.

Although all of us were supposed to be participating in the rebuttals and question and answer, it pretty much came down to a showdown between their egomaniacal smarty pants and our egomaniacal smarty pants.

Nancy Wakeman against me.

I knew we were toast midway through.

I could tell Nancy's points were better phrased than mine and I understood it was because her arguments were more concrete.  I heard myself relying too much on airy rhetoric.  Trying to sound like Lincoln, I forgot to prepare like Lincoln.

There was one moment when I thought I had her.  She used the phrase quid pro quo.  Ours was a Catholic School after Vatican II.   No Latin in our curriculum.   I was sure that nobody in the room besides the teachers knew what it meant.  I was sure that Nancy didn't know what it meant.  Pompous little pedant, I thought, or would have if I'd known either word.  Snooty little show off, is what I did think.  She was faking and I was going to call her on it and send her running sobbing from the room.

I smirked.

I remember that smirk.  I can still feel it on my face.

"And what, pray tell," I said scornfully, thinking I was mimicking the snotty tone in her voice, "Does quid pro quo mean?"

She told me.

And we were sunk.

I managed to remain at my podium without bursting into tears.  But my knees buckled and I was glad it was time for me to sit down.  John Shields read our summation.  Peggy Pryor read theirs.  The quotes from Lincoln I'd written out for John mocked me in my ears.   The debate ended and the class voted.

I knew we'd lost but I was stunned by how badly.  The vote didn't split along gender lines.  At least five boys voted for the girls' team! 

Actually, it was six.  I found out later one of the girls had voted for our team because she had a crush on John.  He was tall and she liked his freckles.

It was winter and after school I went sledding with my pal Joe Jennings.   Joe was a quiet guy, not one of the brains of the class, a solid C student, but somehow we all thought of him as being smart, despite his laconic manner and complete lack of interest in schoolwork.  I think Joe was probably the first proof I had  that whatever it was school was designed to measure and encourage, it was not designed to measure and encourage individual merit and worth.  Joe listened to me grouse about the debate after every run.  It was a great sledding hill, tall and steep, and the walk back up was tough going.  So I had a chance to do a lot of grousing.  After about the tenth walk up, Joe decided it was time for him to speak.

"Lance," he said, quietly and sympathetically, "You lost."

He didn't mean, Lance, it's finished, get over it, you can't change history by complaining.

He meant what he said, that we'd lost on the merits.  The girls had out-debated us.  Nancy Wakeman had out-debated me.  Their argument was the more convincing.  He didn't think they were right, necessarily, but they made it clear they knew what they were talking about, they countered all our arguments, answered the teachers' questions, and successfully challenged us without our being able to respond.

Plus, he went on, they were calm and thoughtful.  I was bouncing up and down all the time and making too many faces and I yelled a lot.

In short, Joe had voted for them!

I sighed, exactly like Charlie Brown sighs after Linus has explained to him how the world is.

"I guess you're right," I said.   And after that we talked about baseball on our walks back up the hill.

That's all I have to say about last night's Presidential debate.

The next day at school I did what I'd forgotten to do the day before.

I shook hands with Nancy, Peggy, and Christine and congratulated them.

And I asked Nancy to explain quid pro quo again.

 

Varmints

You followed the links in the post down below, and you read Steve Kuusisto's poems. You read a lament for his parents, and you read a sad, oblique reference to his uncle. I'm going to tell a story Steve once told me about his grandfather that I hope he finds a way to turn into a poem.

He has written a poem about his grandfather, which I'll quote by way of introduction.

My mother's father built motorcars.
They weren't loud enough, so he built motorcycles.
They weren't fast enough; he produced dynamite.
The dynamite wasn't far enough---he made mortar shells.

That's from "Competing Interests within the Family: 1909." It's true, Steve's grandfather made all those things. At the end of the day, when he had closed up shop for the last time, he had a lot of dynamite left over. He put it to work around his property. He liked to blow up tree stumps. One day he blew up a telephone pole. When the linemen from the phone company showed up to fix it, Steve's grandfather told them he couldn't imagine what had happened.

Lightning must have hit it, he said.

Steve’s grandfather once had a porcupine problem. The porcupines would sneak up onto the porch at night and climb all over the porch furniture. The sound of the animals rocking in the rocking chairs was maddening. Steve’s grandfather decided enough was too much. Dynamite, he was probably sorry to admit, would not be the right tool for the job. One night he waited up for them with a shotgun. When they made their appearance, he leaped through the screen door and started blasting. The porcupines that survived the first fusillade ran for it. Steve’s grandfather chased one into the tool shed, cornered it, and let fly with both barrels. He didn’t notice that the porcupine was standing next to a shovel. Pellets ricocheted all over the shed and one came straight back and smacked the old man in the brow. Right between the eyes.

When he got out of the hospital, he returned to the tool shed to see if along with shooting himself in the forehead he had bagged his prey at last. He had, but it was not a clean kill. The porcupine, mortally wounded, had crawled under the floorboards to die. For his revenge, he was filling up the shed with the stench of his rotting carcass. Steve’s grandfather had no choice but to go in search of the corpse.

So picture this.

The old man with a bandage around his head, on his hands and knees, prying up floorboard after floorboard, moving east to west, one second of longitude at a time, until he has taken up the whole floor.

Because, naturally, the porcupine decided to die on the side of the tool shed farthest from where the old man first knelt down to look for him.

I'll bet the old man wished he'd just tossed a stick of dynamite into the shed.

Summer at North Farm

One of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets who is also one of my favorite people, Steve Kuusisto.

Summer at North Farm

Finnish rural life, ca. 1910

Fires, always fires after midnight,
The sun depending in the purple birches

And gleaming like a copper kettle.
By the solstice they'd burned everything,

The bad-luck sleigh, a twisted rocker,
Things "possessed" and not quite right.

The bonfire coils and lurches,
Big as a house, and then it settles.

The dancers come, dressed like rainbows
(If rainbows could be spun),

And linking hands they turn
To the melancholy fiddles.

A red bird spreads its wings now
And in the darker days to come.

Online magazine called Mipoesis has a whole page of Steve's poems up. Go look.

See John, see Dick, see John debate Dick

This is the year the 8 year old developed an interest in politics.

He's a Kerry man.
Cynics might say, Of course he is. Look at his parents.

And, naturally, he's taken some cues from us.

But he's also a sharp kid, and stubborn. A young man with strong opinions of his own.

He doesn't agree with the blonde and me on a lot of important issues.

Like the value of vegetables.

And he's rooting for Anaheim in the play offs, not Boston. Little traitor.

He's made up his own mind about Kerry.

Hasn't hurt that his given name is John. There's just something about that John Kerry-John Edwards ticket he likes.

To which I say, Thank God we didn't name him Richard.

(The other guy's name was never a possibility. You know any little kids named George?)

So, he's been doing his best to follow the election news. He is fiercely partisan and collects Bush-isms.

His favorite: "Our enemies...never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

He gave 5 dollars from his allowance to Kerry, and another 5 to the Democrats, sacrificing a new pack of Yu gi oh cards and setting himself back a week in his efforts to save up for a new computer game. I swear, his parents did not suggest the idea, he decided to make the donation on his own.

(Kerry's people haven't gotten back to thank him yet. They can fill my mailbox with pleas for more money, but they can't find time to write a simple thank you note to a little boy?

I'm voting for Nader.)

He watched clips from the speeches at the Democratic National Convention on the computer. Jimmy Carter impressed him. Bill Clinton made him laugh. But he stayed up late to watch Kerry's acceptance live. His verdict was that it was a good speech but 10 minutes too long. Kerry should have remembered that little kids have a hard time staying awake, he said. Our little John had to be carried up to bed during big John's peroration.

He approved of the corny salute, by the way. So did his 9 year old cousin. Some grown ups sneered, but 20 years from now there are going to be a lot of young adults whose first political memory is, "I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty."

He didn't watch the debates though. School nights. Plus I didn't watch them. George Bush and Dick Cheney make my head explode and I don't think that's a good example to set.

But he checked the papers the morning after to see who had won. Despite how dedicated he's been--and remember he's been dedicated for an 8 year old---it turns out that the pictures of Dick Cheney and John Edwards that dominated the front page of our newspaper this morning were the first close ups he'd seen of either man.

He asked which one was John and which one was Dick. We told him the guy with the hair was John.

"Oh good," he said.

"Why good? You don't like bald guys?" I asked defensively, reaching up to touch the top of my head for reassurance.

"No, bald guys are ok. I just like the way John looks, but I don't like the way Dick looks."

"How do they look?"

"John looks like he has a lot of feelings. He looks like he can feel anything. He can feel happy, or sad, or angry, or joyful."

"What about Dick?"

"He looks like he can feel only one thing."

"What's that?"

"Mad."

Heart of an anchor

Tricia loved New York because loving New York was a good career move. It was a good retail move, a good cuisine move, not a good taxi move or a great quality of pavement move, but definitely a career move that ranked among the highest and the best. Tricia was a TV anchor person, and New York was where most of the world's TV was anchored. Tricia's TV anchoring had been done exclusively in Britain up to that point: regional news, then breakfast news, early evening news. She would have been called, if the language allowed, a rapidly rising anchor, but...hey, this is television, what does it matter? She was a rapidly rising anchor. She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn't care.---From Mostly Harmless, by Douglas Adams.

Cow green is my valley

A million years ago, and a million miles away, back in Indiana when we lived there, I used to teach at a state university that did not employ Bobby Knight as its basketball coach and where the school colors were not black and gold. Most of my students came from small towns in the southern half of the state, which means even the ones who hadn't grown up on farms were in a lot of ways farm kids. Their idea of a big city was Indianapolis. Chicago was a rumor to them, and Los Angeles was Oz. As for New York, well...

Came the day when it was time for the blonde and I to move on. We wanted to get back East to be closer to our families so we could start our own family where our kids could grow up knowing their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. When I announced to my classes that I wouldn't be coming back in the fall, I was moving back to New York, my students' reactions surprised me.

There was no big Goodbye, Mr Chips moment. They didn't re-enact the last scene of Dead Poets Society. Nobody stood on a chair and shouted out, "O Captain My Captain!" Their attitude might be better imagined as the last scene in the episode of MASH where Radar stumbles into the operating room and announces that Henry Blake's plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan.

Their eyes grew round. Jaws dropped. Some lips trembled, and I swear I saw a tear or two roll down some cheeks.

They weren't broken hearted that I was leaving them. They were shocked, amazed, and appalled that I was moving to New York!

One girl cried out, summing up all their thoughts, "Aren't you scared?"

It took me a second to figure out what she was talking about.

When I say New York, I mean the state where I grew up and where I now live, which means I'm thinking
mainly of the Mohawk and Hudson River valleys, the Adirondacks and the Catskills, and one very small town in the farthest northern reaches of the state where, weather-wise, it's like Nome, Alaska from November through March and, culture-wise, Dogpatch all year long, and where I made the mistake of starting my own college education.

But when they heard the words New York they thought of New York City. The pre-Rudy Guiliani, not yet post-John Gotti New York. The bums in every doorway, garbage piled high in the gutters, gangsters and gang bangers running wild on every street New York.

They imagined me dodging bullets and fighting off HIV infected gay junkie panhandlers on my way to and from work every day. They imagined me mugged regularly on the subways and buying new cars on a monthly basis because mine was always being stolen, vandalized, torched, or just double and triple parked permanently into its spot.

When I realized what horrors were dancing through their sweet, innocent, country hick minds, I chuckled warmly and let my eye twinkle in that way that had made me so beloved among my students and...Damnit, I earned that Mr Chips moment! Where was it? Little ingrates.

What was my point?

Oh. I chuckled and told them that I wasn't moving to the big city, I was moving to Syracuse, which is only technically a city. Imagine, I said, Ft. Wayne with West Lafeyette and Purdue University pushed right up against it.

They relaxed when I said Syracuse. Syracuse they'd heard of. Keith Smart was still as big a hero in Indiana then as he is still a villain in sports bars all over Syracuse.

I went on to inform them---I was after all a teacher and teachers should never let a potentially educational moment pass---that New York State was a lot more than New York City. And that most of what isn't downtown Manhattan and the other four burroughs is woods, farmland, or lake water.

Why, parts of it are indistinguishable from Indiana.

They scoffed.

Moreover, I said, or something like that, since I don't like the word moreover and crossed it out whenever it showed up in my students' papers. (They sometimes used "heretofore" as well. Who taught them these things? If I did any good in my life it's that there are a hundred or so thirtysomething Hoosiers who will never reach for a moreover or a heretofore in their business correspondence. Probably they've all lost their jobs. "What's with this contract, Kirchmayer? I can understand every word of it! Empty your desk. You're fired. Security!") Something like moreover, I said, do you know what the number one industry is in New York?

They didn't. Some of them didn't know what the number one industry was in their home town.

"It's the same as Indiana's. Agriculture."

They scoffed again and this time threw things.

If I lied about that, they figured, I probably lied about moreover and heretofore, as well, and to heck with me.

It was true, though, and it's still true---Tourism is our number two source of revenue---even though we lose 2 to 3 per cent of our farmers every year. We lose 2 to 3 per cent of our everything every year---doctors, hair stylists, steamfitters, orthodontists. I think the only demographics that increase are stockbrokers and aspiring supermodels.

And actors. Which of course means waiters and waitresses.

We have fewer farmers, but, amazingly, more farmland. Most of it belonging to dairy farmers.

This past weekend was pretty quiet here in Mannionville. But the weekend before we were busy, mostly contributing to New York's main industry. We picked apples and we toured a nearby dairy farm.

(For a report on a more recent family outing, scoot on over to Nance's place. She's got a beautiful picture up of a young naturalist in training.)

The dairy farm is in the next county over, Orange County, and it's run by a very young farmer named Matt DeJohn. By very young I don't mean just in comparison to me. I mean young as in I wouldn't be surprised if half the kids he went to high school with are still in college. You have to feel more optimistic about the future of the Republic, knowing that there are still young men and women taking up farming. We learned a lot on our visit to Matt DeJohn's farm.

We learned that Orange County is home to 7500 cows which produce 119 million pounds of milk. We learned that on his farm Young Matt DeJohn has 100 cows (ee eye ee eye oh) and he milks 87 of a day. The other 13 are dry, which, we learned, doesn't mean they're unable to give milk, it's that they've started tapering off during the last stage of their pregnancies---there are 13 calves on the way. We learned that Matt milks his cows twice a day to collect about 10,000 gallons of milk over the course of two days, when the truck from the dairy comes to collect it.

We learned that the reason you see so many more black and white cows---Holsteins---than any other kind, is that Holsteins are far and away the best milk producers, although they don't produce the best milk, it has less fat and less protein, and so many farmers do what Matt does, introduce some Jerseys and Guernseys into their herds and add their milk to the Holsteins' because, we learned, milk from Jerseys and Guernseys is much richer in butterfat.

We learned that an average dairy cow eats 45 pounds of hay a day, 35 pounds of corn silage, 3 pounds of soy mix, 12 pounds of corn meal, 8 ounces of a mineral and vitamin mix, and drinks 25 gallons of water.

We learned that if milk is selling for about $2.45 a gallon, the farmer is taking home $1.12. We learned that calves weigh 80 to 100 pounds when they're born. We learned that they stay with their mothers for only a day.

And we learned that neither of our boys is going to grow up to be a farmer.

It's not the hard work that they minded.

It's the smell.

A dairy farm isn't as pungent as a pig farm, but put 100 cows into one low ceilinged room, even with the fans going, and the windows open, and it'll still get a mite...aromatic.

Groucho writes

From The London Review of Books:

Groucho was a faithful correspondent who took pride in his ability to write with a certain sharpness: the letters to his children that Kanfer quotes are strong and far from casual. He was faster and less reserved in dealing with professional flak-catchers, waterflies and company goons, as in his famous encounter with the Warner Brothers legal department over the copyright on the title A Night in Casablanca. Did Warner Brothers own a piece of the action for a film that promised to be a send-up of their money-maker? The case was full of possibilities: they might be supposed to own the plot, any allusion to any version of the plot, even, maybe, the name of the city in the title. Groucho seized the opportunity in a letter in which a soufflé of more-in-sorrow pieties gives way to deadpan sarcasm:

It seems that in 1471, Ferdinand Balboa Warner, your great-great-grandfather, while looking for a shortcut to the city of Burbank, had stumbled on the shores of Africa and, raising his alpenstock (which he later turned in for a hundred shares of common), named it Casablanca.

I just don't understand your attitude. Even if you plan on re-releasing your picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don't know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try.

You claim you own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without your permission. What about 'Warner Brothers'? Do you own that, too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were. We were touring the sticks as the Marx Brothers when Vitaphone was still a gleam in the inventor's eye, and even before us there had been other brothers - the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Dan Brothers, an outfielder with Detroit.

It is the letter of the shyster lawyer he had always half wanted to be, but the joke was lost on the Warner Brothers legal department...

Girl: You're awfully shy for a lawyer.

Groucho: You bet I'm shy. I'm a shyster lawyer.

Captain Spaulding and the Enemy

Well, Linus, another great writer's centennial has come and gone, and all I got was a bag full of rocks.

Yesterday was Graham Greene's 100th birthday, not that he cared.

I feel like I should have something to say about it because Greene is one of my favorite writers and one of the reasons I wanted to be a writer and thought I could be one.

One year I read A Burnt Out Case, The Comedians, The Honorary Counsel, Travels With My Aunt, and Our Man in Havana, and then I went off to grad school at Iowa and the Writers' Workshop.

But I can't bring myself to write about him. Cuts too close to home, I guess. It would be like a doctor operating on himself and if you want to see that go rent Master and Commander and watch Paul Bettany cut the musket ball out of his own belly. It's excrutiating but it's a great scene.

I did the appropriate thing last night. I stayed up late reading Orient Express. Which is a good reason to stay up late no matter whose birthday it is or how old they are.

Today is Gore Vidal's and Thomas Wolfe's, but since neither one of them wrote a single novel worth staying up late to read, I'll continue with Orient Express again tonight.

I'm not usually moved by anniversaries of public figures and public events. The year I arrived in Iowa was the year William Carlos Wiliams would have turned 100. His actual birthday was a couple days after school started, and a group of poets threw a party for him. My friend Ed and I went. We were the only two fiction writers there. We were also the only two guys, which was ok since we'd only decided to go because we thought it would be a chance to meet girls, even though we both had girlfriends back home.

We met the girls. Almost all of them were lesbians. There were a lot of lesbians in the poetry workshops that year. Nobody could figure out how that happened. A demographic fluke, I guess.

The party for Williams turned out to be more of a memorial service. We all took turns reading his poems. All the lesbians read in hushed, reverent tones. Which seemed like the worst way to read any of Williams' poems.

Ed didn't care that all the girls we met that night were lesbians. He was a very Romantic guy and devoted to his girlfriend. He once told my girlfriend, "I miss Debbie so much, it hurts." Which sure put me on the spot, I can tell you. I never forgave him.

Obviously, I'm vamping here in the hope I'll think of something pithy to say about Graham Greene.

Nope.

Never gonna happen, my friend.

You want to read pithy things about Greene, go look at Maud Newton's site. She's been working up to his birthday for a while and has links to some reviews and essays.

Me, I'm stumped. But...

As it happens, yesterday was also Groucho Marx's birthday. He'd have been 114. I have a lot to say about Groucho, all of it in his voice. I finish up with a rendition of "My name is Captain Spaulding, the African Explorer"---I can't dance like Groucho, but I can dance like Alan Alda dancing like Groucho. It's a killer act. Some other time, though.

I don't know if there's any other connection between Graham Greene and Groucho, besides the shared birthdays and the growling alliteration. They might have met. Greene liked movies. He wrote for them and he wrote about them, and now, damn, I wish I'd thought of it earlier...I could have spent last night watching a double feature of Duck Soup and The Third Man.

Maybe they met one of the times when Greene was passing through Hollywood. Maybe Groucho liked Greene's books. Groucho was very well-read. He corresponded with T.S. Eliot. Hard to believe, huh? But it's true.

Eliot initiated the correspondence, which is even harder to believe. I would never have thought of Eliot as a fan of the Marx Brothers. I always saw him as more of a Three Stooges man.

Back in Iowa my friend Steve Kuusisto, who is a poet and a great admirer of William Carlos Williams but not a lesbian, and I tried to write a parody of Eliot together. "The Love Song of J. Curly Prufrock." It included lines like:

"Shall I part your hair behind,
You curly porcupine?
Oh oh oh oh ohhhh looooook!"

And:

"In the rooms the women come and go,
talking of Shemp and Curly Joe."

We've never finished it.

Probably for the best.

Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

One from Column B

The 8 year old's still not sure how he feels about living here. It's been almost a year since our move but he still misses Syracuse and our house there. When we first settled in he began to keep a list. "Reasons Why We Should Never Have Left." Slowly the list changed. He gave it a column A and column B. "Reasons Why We Shouldn't Have Left" and "Reasons Why It's Good That We Did." His most recent addition to Column B is that at our new house we have a bay window in front, which gives us a place to put our Jack O'Lanterns.

At our old house our pumpkins had to sit on the dining room table after we carved them and only the family got to enjoy them. Now we'll be able to put them in the front window and they can scare all the trick or treaters coming up to the house.

But Column A is still longer than Column B.

I try to encourage him to keep adding to Column B. I want him to be happy here. And there are lots of ways in which our new home is better than our old.

The truth is, though, I keep a similar set of lists in my own head, and my Column A is also still longer than my Column B.

But the first item on the list of my why it's good we moved here is the area around here provides some of the best bike riding terrain I've every traveled.

I'm Lance Mannion not Lance Armstrong. A day tripper not a would be racer in the Tour de France. I don't own any lycra, spandex, or funny little shoes. And it's not tough going. Flat country lanes that take me past farms and through woods and into the centers of small towns. I start at a pretty spot, I pedal through more pretty spots, and I wind up at a prettier spot. I like to think I go for a ride the way Thoreau went for walks. I'm out there to poke around, see what there is to see, and come back knowing a little more about where I live.

Some days I go for 20 miles and more. Some days I don't get very far out of town.

Those are usually the days I make the mistake of stopping for coffee.

We live by the Wallkill River, a tributary of the Hudson. The convenience store where I buy my coffee is right on the river bank. So I usually take my coffee down to the river and drink it while looking at this:

That's the view to the south. When I get tired of that, I look north.

And while I'm looking one way or the other, I can't say I forget about Syracuse and cross off all the items on my Column A. But the print on Column B grows a whole lot larger.

By the way, the bay window is in my Column B too.

An inkling

Fifteen years ago today. A Sunday morning in Ft Wayne, Indiana:

Conversation at the convenience store between a customer and the young woman behind the counter. Customer in his mid to late twenties, unshaven, uncombed, baseball cap turned bill backwards; she, plump, dark-haired, pale—a flourescent pallor.

She: But it doesn’t solve anything, it just creates problems for everybody who cares about you. You think it ends everything but it hurts your family and your friends. I’ve considered it, too. I’ve thought about it a lot.

He: I think about it all the time. All the time.

She: You can’t help thinking about it.

He (with a weary grin wrinkling his face): You know when I really thought about it? When that big bird went up.

She: I think I understand. I probably don’t know exactly how you feel, but I think I have an inkling. I have an inkling of how you feel.