CSA Week 13

We picked up our Week 13 (just over halfway through) CSA share at the farmer’s market this morning, and we’ve moved from the early-season’s greens, asparagus, and wintered-over root vegetables to the iconic produce of the summer: This week’s box was packed with arugula, sweet corn, Caribe potatoes, broccoli, summer squash, peppers, garlic, sierra blanca onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, and sungold cherry tomatoes. Our weekly challenge continues to be coming up with menus that use as much of the produce as we can, all of it being the ultimate goal, though of course we always have holdover from the previous week or two to incorporate. There have already been a few dishes cooked and frozen to be resurrected later this fall or winter, and this last week I put up a couple of jars of pickles. On the other hand I have twice had to cut up and put half a bunch of greens that had gone bad into the compost (though that has been a small fraction of our overall share). (An additional advantage we’ve found is that next year’s compost should be quite rich with all the extra trimmings going in.) Tonight’s menu: kabobs of meatballs (with onion and pesto), squash, peppers, and onion; rice with assorted vegetables and greens; and a caprese salad:

Watch

I don’t know when I first started wearing a wristwatch. I probably sported a prototype or toy model (Mickey Mouse?) when I was very young, 50 or so years ago, and it probably wasn’t functional. I may have worn one in high school though I have no photographic evidence. In all likelihood I wore one by the time I started college; the first photo that I have with a watch on my wrist is when I was 19 or 20. And as far as I can recall I’ve worn a wristwatch (left arm, face up) for the past 40 years. Well, except for a few months during my first semester as a graduate student in theater when I adopted the affectation of a pocket watch inherited from my grandfather. (Pocket watches are not intended for jeans, so that experiment did not last long.)

But in a recent convergence of technological and professional circumstances, I’ve pretty much stopped wearing my wristwatch altogether. First, the technological. I only discovered a few months ago that I have to make a concerted effort to find myself somewhere without a clock in easy proximity. We have two in our living room (radio and TV; four if you include the two laptops); four in the kitchen (coffee maker, oven, microwave, and a wall clock (though it hasn’t had the correct time for probably a decade)); two in our bedroom (both alarm clocks); one in the bathroom (a wall clock); one in my study (a camera); and one in my wife’s study (an alarm clock). But I never wore my wristwatch inside anyway, for just that reason. Yet for years I would wear it out in public, despite my having a clock on the dash of my car for at least the last 26 years, clocks on signs outside banks, clocks in most businesses (with the exception of the kindred enterprises of shopping malls and casinos which don’t want you to know how long you’ve been dropping cash). And then last year I finally entered the 21st century and got my first cellphone, an iPhone that first displays, upon pushing the Home button, the date and time (as well as a photo of my granddaughter). What did I need a wristwatch for? Was it just habit?

This is where the professional comes in. When I first went to school, especially college, clocks were not at all as ubiquitous as they have been for the past 30 years, especially the last 20 or 10 years. No doubt I needed a watch to insure my getting to class on time, as student and, later, as teacher. And despite as more and more clocks started turning up on campus — in classrooms, halls, and offices (and in the past 20 years on computers in all those places) — I continued my habit of wearing my watch. But when I retired two months ago, all of the above gradually began to sink in: Just what did I need my wristwatch for?

So for the past two months, I’ve rarely worn my watch, except when I’ve gone out fishing or hiking, where I don’t have ready access to my cellphone/timepiece (nor want it). It may not be long before I’m completely free of the need for it. And that’s not a bad thing. But it does seem a marker of time, of age. I can imagine that there are people (many? most? all?) under 20 — maybe under 30 — who have never owned a wristwatch. But then why should they? They probably have never owned a buggy whip either. Or a slide rule. Or a typewriter. . . . But I could go on.

Nonfiction Accuracy

In rocker/artist/poet Patti Smith’s Just Kids, a memoir of her relationship with the artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, she recalls her being home with her father in New Jersey the night that Robert Kennedy was assassinated:

We sat together on the couch watching the primary returns. I was filled with pride as RFK delivered his victory speech. We watched him leave the podium, and my father winked at me, taking pleasure in the promise of our young candidate and my own enthusiasm. For a few innocent moments, I truly believed that everything would be all right. We watched him file through the jubilant crowd, shaking hands and emanating hope with that classic Kennedy smile. Then he fell. We saw his wife kneeling by his side.
Senator Kennedy was dead.
“Daddy, Daddy,” I sobbed, burying my face in his shoulder.
My father put his arm around me. He didn’t say a thing. I guess he had already seen it all. But it seemed to me that the world outside was unraveling, and, increasingly, my own world as well. (70)

This is quite moving. But it can’t have happened, at least not as described. I happened to have seen Kennedy’s victory speech on TV the early morning following the California primary, 5 June 1968. I was also with my parents, in Wichita, Kansas, though they had long been in bed when I got home from a night out about 1:30 a.m. and turned on the TV. I had followed Kennedy’s campaign that spring and was curious as to the California outcome. He began his speech a little about midnight, California time (2:00 a.m. Wichita time, 3:00 a.m. New Jersey time). At 12:15 (Pacific time), he heads off the platform, disappears from view of the TV cameras. There is general milling around in the ballroom of the hotel, then a chant of “Kennedy! Kennedy! Rah! Rah! Rah!” starts up, but withers as word apparently begins to spread of his being shot, shock spreads, and finally someone comes to the podium to push the crowd back and ask for a doctor. (All of the speech can be seen here, intercut with still photos, audio, and video recorded of the shooting, but broadcast not live.)

So here’s what I would question about Smith’s account:

- That she watched the speech with her father. It would have been 3:00 a.m. in New Jersey, a time I can’t imagine a 50-something working father sitting up watching election returns on a Tuesday night (though I do give it some plausibility in that he apparently was a Kennedy supporter).

- “Then he fell” was something they could not have seen because it was not on live TV.

- “We saw his wife kneeling by his side” also was something not seen on live TV.

- And finally (a minor point), Kennedy wasn’t dead; he would die in a hospital later that morning.

I don’t raise this flawed chronicle as criticism of Smith’s memoir. Indeed, I find it engaging and generally well written. But it is an interesting example of the ongoing debate among literary nonfiction (or creative nonfiction, or whatever) writers about just how accurate a writer has to be in relating personal experience before nonfiction crosses the line into fiction. Personally, I side with those who allow some latitude in the handling of plot, character, setting, dialogue, etc. — as long as it is true to the essence of the experience.

First, literary nonfiction is not journalism (though there is a subgenre, literary journalism, which does require more adherence to facts, quotes, chronology, etc.); it is a reflection of experience on the writer’s part, not reportage, and the point of that reflection — what the writer wants to communicate about their experience — should be what drives the inclusion or exclusion of “facts,” the accuracy of dialogue, the compression of characters, the plotting of events. Smith is portraying a moment in her experience whose point is summarized in the last sentence of the excerpt above: “But it seemed to me that the world outside was unraveling, and, increasingly, my own world as well.” The RFK assassination was — in her experience — a metaphor for her own life at the moment.

Second, essayists and memoirists (unlike journalists or historians) write from memory, and memory is at best shaky. Both at the time of an experience, and certainly over time, our memory is guided by selective emphasis, based on all that has gone before and all that has come after. Was it me who took the broom from my mother (as I recall) or my sister (as she recalls)? There was audio and video taken in the hotel kitchen after Kennedy’s assassination (though I think only after the shots), and there is a still photo of Ethel beside her dying husband on the floor (though I could be wrong about that; I’m relying on my memory), her arms outstretched, begging for help, much more dramatic as a still photo than live video. And these images — audio, video, photos which were broadcast and printed over the week following the assassination — could certainly have become compressed in Smith’s memory of the event, as could her father’s reassurance, which might well have happened the following day.

I do give Smith leeway in this instance, though I raise the example because I also find it right near if not on the line between acceptable and unacceptable variance of the “truth” in literary nonfiction. Reading this passage early in her memoir about an experience that I had contemporaneously experienced, did for me put much of the rest that followed at least under some question. Are there other experiences related in the memoir that go beyond “the essence of experience”? That’s the question that must follow, and why this issue will no doubt continue to be debated in nonfiction circles for the indefinite future.

Flat Tire

I hadn’t changed a flat tire since August 1978 (I recall specifically for a number of reasons, most regarding my frustration and anger, including the flinging of several non-essential parts over a fence across the side of the road). When I first started driving in the mid-60s and early 70s, flat tires were a common experience. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn (I can’t recall) that I had at least one flat tire on each of the first five of my cars (the fifth being the August 1978 flat). Back then it wasn’t uncommon to see some poor schmuck pulled off the road, wrestling with a jack and flat tire and sweating and cursing and in general having an existential inner monologue about the nature of automotive fate. But tire technology took an apparent turn for the better, the more reliable, beginning in the late 70s, and it’s become much more rare to see that schmuck in existential crisis beside the road.

Unless you happen to have been driving the other day along a desolate stretch of Minnesota Highway 61 on the North Shore of Lake Superior. That would have been me out there, about 50 miles south of Grand Marais, just on the east edge of Beaver Bay (population 170). There are two gas stations in Beaver Bay, but one is just a convenience store with pumps and the other just a relic from the past with two gas pumps and a teenage boy who wondered what someone from Iowa was doing all the way up here in the first place. I have a roadside auto plan, but when I checked my cellphone all I saw was “No Signal,” and I don’t know that I would have been able to get someone up from Duluth in any timely manner. So I had no choice but to do something I hadn’t done in 32 years — I first had to take my bike off the back of the car and my fishing gear and luggage out in order to get to the jack, tools, and spare; then had to consult the manual to try to understand how to work something that didn’t look at all like a jack from my youth; and finally figuring things out and muscling the lug nuts off, wrestling the flat off, and getting the “donut” spare positioned and tightened. And repacking my luggage, fishing gear, and bike.

My first hope was that I could get a new set of tires in Two Harbors (population 3616), 28 miles down the shore. (My car is all-wheel drive, so because there would be even a slight variance in the tread, I couldn’t just repair the flat or buy just one new tire; and I’d recently been thinking I needed new tires anyway.) But the only place in Two Harbors that had tires was an auto dealership, and they didn’t have the size of tires I needed. So they pointed me down the shore to Duluth (population 87,000) and the Expert Tire store, and I drove the 40 miles down the expressway at 50 mph, through the city, and without problem to the tire store. And everything from there was fine. Expert had four tires for me (though I did have to get the deluxe in the size I needed because that’s the only model they had four tires for); they could get them installed in a couple of hours; and it was noon and there was a decent restaurant/tavern just a couple of blocks away where I could have a slow lunch and check my email and read newspapers using their wireless.

In the end, things went much more smoothly than I first feared, but that fear was based on memories of experience from over 30 years ago. Things have changed greatly since then (not least of which my having the means to handle this kind of situation, technologically, temperamentally, and financially). And there was no more than an initial frustration and anxiety, no cursing the gulls laughing from above the lake, nothing thrown over fences or trees beside the road. It’s a mellower time, a mellower schmuck.

Superior North Shore

A perfect day on the North Shore of Lake Superior (sun, partly cloudy, 78 degrees), and a solo walk on Pincushion Mountain, three or four miles. Very few other people, a family of four, a couple, and two other solo men; this is mostly a cross-country ski trail, not a hiking trail. For no reason but nothing else to do I try without any knowledge at all to identify the dozen or so bird calls I hear of the birds I cannot see and could not recognize if I had brought my binoculars and bird book. I imagine coming upon a moose or bear or even wolf, but know there aren’t any here in what is only marginally wilderness (how backcountry can it be to hear the semis occasionally boring down Minnesota Highway 61 some 1000 feet below). The trail is broad, about eight feet across, and recently mown, and mostly in sun, and not at all a backwoods feel. But the granite outcropping that rises at trail’s end at mountain crest is impressive and offers a 360-degree view of Grand Marais and the Gunflint Trail and Lake Superior and further to Canada. And then near the return to the trailhead, lost in the woods and bird calls and occasional views across the lake, my cellphone rings. It’s Mike from the bike shop in Grand Marais and they’ve fixed my warped wheel. I say I’ll be there in half an hour. And any sense of wilderness vanishes with “End Call.”

Pincushion Mountain

It looked like a relatively easy hike, about a 400-foot climb and a mile up from Minnesota Highway 61, a spur trail just outside the door of my motel room to Pincushion Mountain. And the first quarter of a mile and 100 feet was fine, if a little-used trail. But as I got further on, the trail became less defined, and I began to have to search for it. In a couple of places tree-fall had blocked the trail, and I had to steer around the fall and find the meager trail again. But when I got up to about 300 feet I ran into granite outcroppings and clearings of grasses of red and gold and funguses of gray and green, and few hints of where the trail might be. Searching around, I would find a cairn, or a brief depression indicating the trail. I also began to look back to where the trail entered a clearing of outcroppings and grasses in order to be able to backtrack down the mountain. But at some point I’d clearly lost the trail altogether. But I saw what I at first thought might be a deer run, but after a while realized was ATV tracks. But I figured at least those tracks would keep me on some sort of relatively civilized path. But after a couple more clearings and outcroppings, I realized that I was way off the track I was originally on, and wasn’t going to make it to the mountain peak. So I decided to head back down. But before long, my landmarks were no longer there, and I was wandering around the mountain, lost. At the uppermost clearing, I kept coming back to a fire ring that I’d used as a marking, but I couldn’t, after at least three meanderings around the area, find the trail. But finally I did, nothing more than a dark depression in pines, and thought all was well. But soon back down I again lost the trail, and again searched and searched for my landmarks. Finally, I just gave up and decided to point myself down the mountain to the highway. I could hear the traffic on the road, and after a while I could see it. So I pushed through a stand of pines and came out at the back of some residences above the highway/lake, and found a path of a phone line that I’d seen at the beginning of my hike, and followed it to a driveway, then down the drive to the 61, and when I looked up the road, saw the sign to my motel. It wasn’t at all the hike I’d expected. But it was an adventure of sorts. With all the climb and loss, wander and worry, it finally was nothing more than a walk up the mountain, a walk in the woods. And awhile of being lost, of maybe losing a few moments of where I just might be.

CSA

We had our first sweet corn of the season last night, and it was as wonderfully fresh and sweet and textured as ever. The corn has been available in farmers’ parking lot stands and the co-op and grocery stores for several weeks now, but we’ve not bought any because this year we have a share in a CSA (Consumer Supported Agriculture), Grinnell Heritage Farm, and for the past ten weeks have been picking up, first bags, then boxes of fresh-harvested produce at our farmer’s market. We assumed that corn would be showing up in our box soon. But when I saw this Wednesday in the CSA newsletter our share for the week — green beans, summer savory, cabbage, winterbor kale, summer squash, green top carrots, garlic, green onions, cucumbers, and two kinds of tomatoes — I decided to go ahead and buy some sweet corn at the co-op.

When I walked into the store, Steve, the produce manager, asked what I was looking for, and I said corn. He took me over to the bin with farmer Marvin’s corn and I related to him (or rather reminded him, as I’d talked with him about it before) that we had a share in a CSA and hadn’t had any corn yet. He said that Grinnell Heritage Farm was organic (he buys a lot of organic produce from them) and that you just can’t grow corn organically — too many buggy and slimy pests. That was reassuring to hear, both that Steve got produce from Grinnell Heritage Farm and that the reason for their not growing sweet corn was organic.

We’ve been pleased with our CSA share. We’ve had a bit (only a bit) of spent produce we’ve had to throw onto the compost pile, but we’ve thankfully been able to consume or freeze in various forms at least 95% of our share (that’s for two people). And it’s also meant we’ve been eating much more produce, in a variety of ways, as we should. But most positively, we’ve had to devise new and different menus each week, sometimes using vegetables unknown to us before now. It’s sometimes challenging, always rewarding.

But we will still be supplementing our CSA share with local sweet corn for the rest of the season. Organic or not, it still defines summer in Iowa.

BP Oil Disaster

OK, so here’s what I don’t understand: We know, three months into the BP Gulf oil disaster (it’s not a “spill”) that there were serious, possibly willful, possibly illegal, certainly incompetent decisions and actions made by BP management and engineers, their subcontractors, and among government agencies, at least the Interior Department and Congress. And now we learn that there were BP ties to the 1989 Valdez oil spill in Alaska and last year’s premature release of the terrorist convicted for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of the PanAm jet so that BP could secure drilling rights off the coast of Lybia. But no one – no one – has been held accountable, fired, or executed. Why is BP even still allowed to operate in the U.S.?

As a teacher, I’ve been following the drumbeat of “accountability” when it comes to education for the past decade or so in this country. Particularly, there has been a call to rid the educational system of “bad” or “incompetent” teachers. Well and good. (Let’s forget for the moment who exactly would replace those thousands of incompetent teachers, although it’s interesting that it’s exactly the “expertise” of the incompetent or corrupt BP engineers that makes the government rely on them to solve the problem they caused.) But why isn’t “accountability” a standard applied to just as important elements of our country – energy and the environment – as education?

My Aging Hands

One of the more visible signs of my aging is my hands. Beyond the increased wrinkling, emerging age spots, and arthritic swollen knuckles, I suffer from Dupuytren’s Contracture (or disease or syndrome or fracture), a painless affliction, a hardening of the fibrous tissue beneath the skin of the palm that causes the fingers corresponding to the affected tissue to slowly flex or curl eventually into a permanent grip. There’s no known cause for the disease, though it seems to be hereditary and perhaps related to alcohol (also a part of my heredity).

I can’t recall when I first noticed the symptoms (it supposedly takes sometimes decades to develop), but at least by the fall of 2007 I’d noticed the nodules in my right palm and that my pinky finger was significantly bent, and had problems getting change from my right pocket and using that finger to type. I went to see my hand surgeon (I’d had an arthritis-related cyst removed from a knuckle a couple of years before, so already had my own hand surgeon), and it didn’t take him more than a few minutes to measure, explain, and recommend surgery – opening up most of the palm of the hand and cutting out the growths, which would hopefully ease the contracture. I didn’t want to see my hand further deformed and lose more function, so I agreed to the surgery.

My father suffered from arthritis, sometimes severe, for at least the last 30 years of his life. The last nine years he lived in a nursing home, confined to his bed and a wheelchair. He would regularly wince in pain doing simple tasks involving his hands – eating meals, taking his medicine several times a day, talking on the phone. When he did talk on the phone, he would hold the handset in his left hand (he was right-handed), against his right ear (his hearing weak in his left), presumably because of pain in his right hand.

But after my diagnosis of and research into Dupuytren’s (coincidentally, only a couple of months after my father’s death at 92), I suspected that he too could have suffered from the disease. So I went into the photos that I’d taken at his 90^th birthday party. We’d taken him from the nursing home to a nearby park, with a lodge where we could accommodate a good number of family and friends and allow him to have food and drink (wine) that he didn’t typically have in the nursing home. And when I looked at a number of the photos that showed him sitting in his wheelchair, holding food or a drink, there was not one of his using his right hand; he had every fork or glass in his left hand, with his right hand resting on his right leg, not spread across the thigh but rather cocked off to the side, as I now must do.

My surgery didn’t go perfectly, though three years later I can still retrieve change from my pocket and use my pinky finger to type. But as my surgeon warned, the contracture did return to some degree, and I am now regularly stretching not just my right pinky finger, but most all of my fingers on both my right and left hands, as there has been a progression of the disease, also as anticipated. It’s just in my genes. But at least I know what’s happening.

Window

I doubt that I would recall the incident at all if it weren’t for the maggot-like scar still on the back of my right hand. I don’t know what incited my rage, or what, if any, punishment or repercussion came of it. What I do remember is that I was only eight years old, I got into a fight with my mother one afternoon about something, maybe nothing, ran out the door and down the three steps from our rented duplex, turned, and put my fist through the plate glass window, shattering it.

I immediately headed down the alley behind our house, running full out, frightened about nothing and everything. My memory is of a canyon of green shrubbery, an enfolding gauntlet with no exit arching above me on either side, though I’m sure it was nothing but the more scrubby patchwork of bushes and vines of my other, less anxious memories from that time. But when I got to the end of the block, I stopped, looked down and saw (as I remember it now) my hand covered in and dripping blood.

I made it back to the house (ran or walked fast, I can’t recall), my mother drove me to the emergency room, and I got a few stitches, though looking at the scar now, white, about half an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide, I don’t know why there would be a need for stitches for what seems a rather small wound. Perhaps a scar shrinks over time. Perhaps the stitches were meant as a reprimand for an infuriated (and infuriating) eight-year-old boy. Perhaps it’s just that memory is a fog floating between an indefinite past and an ongoing rummage for it.

Ellie's Countenance

The great majority of the thousands of photos that have captured my two-an-a-half-year-old granddaughter Ellie, most all record her idyllic smile:

Yet I have been more drawn to the few photos that have caught a much more thoughtful countenance:

The smile is wonderfully engaging and can’t help but elicit a reciprocal response (one of the reasons, I’ve recently read, for an infant’s or toddler’s joy), but it is reaction to stimulus, a visceral response. The other look is a much more reflective, inquisitive countenance – a Robert De Niro “You lookin’ at me?” quality that I hope reveals a mind that is already skeptical but curious, wary but willing to see what else is out there, what’s coming next. And I hope that she can carry that – both the smile and the quizzical gaze – well into her future.

Library

I was at the library, browsing among new releases, when I heard a group of young boys, 12-ish, coming up the stairs, excited, apparently with an adult (“Be quiet! Quiet!” every time their voices rose, which was often). Then what struck me as an odd observation by one of the boys: “They have books at the library?!” And the group then proceeded to the computer terminals to surf the web, check their Facebook pages, whatever.

Now I suppose this could have, and might have (I’d like to be generous), been merely a cute, ironic comment by a precocious kid. Surely one would hope that a 12-ish boy would have been introduced to a library with books before this, if only at school. But still, if only an ironic quip, it reveals the shift that clearly has gone and is going on in both books and libraries. It might not be unimaginable that books are becoming the province of bookstores (at least for a while) and homes (some), and that libraries are where you go to rent DVDs or get online. And that might not necessarily be all that bad a thing. I’ve been reading myself more and more newspapers and magazines online and reading more and more of my books on my computer and iPhone. I can’t imagine ever not mostly reading hard-copy books, bought, borrowed, or checked out. But it’s becoming much easier to imagine a 12-ish boy never reading a book or article except online or otherwise digitally. And again, I don’t know that it’s something to rally the defenders of the Book of Kells to the ramparts. It may just be inevitable progress. Or at least inevitable.

Storm

The storm comes suddenly, first a strong wind bringing low, slate-gray clouds, then the rain hard against the south and west windows. “The satellite signal has been lost.” The streetlights come on, fooled. The gutters begin to fill and turn into a stream, then a river. A biker pedals furiously, smiling at his being caught unaware, perhaps thinking the faster he goes the less drenched he will get. Thunder rolls overhead, and the rain begins to beat down heavier, moving in sheets along the pavement.

Such sheets of fire, such burst of horrid thunder,
Such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never
Remember to have heard.
(Shakespeare, King Lear III.ii)

But just as suddenly as it came, it’s gone. The wind calms, the clouds lighten. The satellite signal is found. The streetlights go out. The rain slows, then stops. Plant pots and a trash can litter the deck. A fire truck, siren screaming, speeds east, following the path of the storm.

Preface (by a friend of the late author)

(after Lamb)

This poor soul, who for several years had been in decline, is finally gone from us.
To be honest, it had long since been time. Whatever occasional pleasure we may have taken in his presence was at best wearing thin; and 61 years is more than enough to endure such a nonexistence.

I can now admit that what many of us suspected about his refusal to write was indeed well-founded. If in his personal letters he remained consistently and engagingly himself (how abandoned and resounding were those letters!), in his very few and scattered public works he chose affectation and alienation – or most often, simply silence. Arguing an unnatural predilection for perfection, or a false humility for his lack of knowledge and skill, he would make almost noble his inaction. In truth, he was just lazy. Death, for him, must no doubt be a familiar state.

My late friend was in all a rather mundane sort. He allowed very few of us to get close enough to know him well and those who were allowed his intimacy often wondered of what worth it was. No one understood him (though some deemed that his charm); and I am not certain that at all times he quite understood himself. His protracted tirades on any subject (it little mattered to him what it was) were artful in their embellishment and excess, though when pressed finally to make some clear point of his raving, he would answer with a thankful hush. Humor was often his ambition, though seldom his effect. When he was funny, it was usually of an offensive sort, producing peals of laughter from him, but embarrassed smiles and an excuse to leave for anyone caught around him. If I needed to find him at a party, I could simply follow to its source a line of people making their exit from a room, and there he would be, curled in convulsions, alone. Perhaps from an awareness of his social incompetence, or perhaps from his inveterate avoidance of anything which demanded even the slightest thought or effort, he was always more comfortable with one person in private than with many in public. Those few of us who were his intimates, therefore, seldom knew each other; or if we did know each other, would not have guessed a common knowledge of him (never do I recall his name coming up in a conversation where he was not present – and most often dominating). Though he had as few enemies as friends (he often remarked on the advantages of distancing himself from others), should he decide not to like someone, he made certain that the dislike became mutual. If his wit failed to offend (a rare event), he could easily fall back on his past, a topic which, once he had raised the nostalgic specter, would bore even the most polite to tears. No one knew for certain exactly what his past had been, for he was never consistent in the telling of it (when confronted with some contradiction in his story, he would shrug it off, and claim that this was, after all, his past, and he could do with it as he pleased); what was consistent, though, in all of his tales of the past was its ennui – in the end, it didn’t matter much whether he was in fact a Boy Scout in Duluth or a Junior Achiever in Wichita; the point was that it was always boring, and one had to wonder why he went on about it so. In truth, he seemed to prefer the dull to the dramatic. When informed that some person of note, a highly placed politician, say, or a scholar of repute, would be appearing and available for introduction and discussion, his response was a curt, so what? He understood and appreciated the allure of the celebrity, but considered it suspect in its obsequiousness. His preference lay with his own chosen ragged regiment of acquaintances, an ill-begot assortment of society’s half-wits, surviving in the margins, ever in danger of falling off the edge – it’s more interesting, he would say, when there’s nothing at stake. He was lavish in his meals and diversions, aiming always to the other side of abstemiousness. His greatest embarrassments were, indeed, the result of indulgence in his various vices – but vices, he claimed, which kept him always aware of the possibility of virtue. How often we heard his invocation for temperance as he slid helplessly from his chair, and under the table.

I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice that my old friend is departed. He had taken in his later days to an uncharacteristic strain of remorse. In our walks along the river, he began to notice how many people failed to recognize him. “No one,” he muttered, “would think twice if I were to throw myself into the water.” Once, he did throw himself into the water, and indeed, no one thought twice about it. He flailed about for a while in the current, finally making his way to shore some distance downstream, disturbing only a group of nesting ducks. He emerged from his swim even more resolute in his resentment for the impertinence of humankind. These were his weaknesses; but such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of his writings – if he ever would have written them.

(This was originally written 25+ years ago as I was completing my MA in nonfiction, but with only a couple of edits it seems more appropriate now as I enter retirement.)