Saturday In The Country

I woke up in my bed here in Hull on Friday, 26 April; I had flown from Sarasota to New York City, then after a few days come by train to Massachusetts.  Although it seemed excessively cold after Florida I was ready to begin to tackle the garden.  Last November before leaving I had pretty well cleared out what could be brought to the ground, so the work ahead of me did not seem to be excessive.  Apart from a day at the dermatologist in town, I kept at it, each morning and each late afternoon, sparing my skin as best I could from the midday sun, and indeed was happy because the doc had not found any insidious new growths which usually flourish after a winter in Florida.  My gardening friend Sally shared the labors on that first Monday, well, did most all the work, transplanting two rose bushes and lots of purple aster and some other tallish thing, forever nameless to me, which has a beautiful purple bloom in late September into October and at the same time somehow dries up into the ugliest brown stalks.  I was going to pull it out until someone suggested hiding it in the midst of the phlox plants, so all one would see in autumn would be the resplendent purple. By mid-week I had become entirely feeble.  I discovered that I have lost strength over the winter even though I have been faithful in going to the gym.  Still I was happy that my tendency to topple over as I bent to prune or pick or pull at weeds in cracks between the paving stones was considerably diminished.  Hoorah for balance exercises!  Early this morning I finished preparing the garden, and surveyed the fading daffodils and jonquils, the forsythia turning just a bit to green, and the late blooming tulips all in their prime and saw that it was good.  I entered the house to tackle the backlog of mail in my study, mostly the journals and books that have arrived since April 20th, the cut-off date when our friend stopped forwarding to us.  It has been a horrendous experience.  The two issues of Vanity Fair to which I subscribed one day on impulse when I read an offer for 12 issues for 12 dollars, reeked as usual of some obnoxious perfume, were nearly too heavy to hold, and almost impossible to maneuver to what is there to be read, as one fights his way through so many ads of so many boys and girls, with mouths half opened and eyes half shut.  I was angry at myself for subscribing, angry for looking into it, angry for getting sucked into an account of a fistfight in some glitter society bar in the meat packing district!  I turned to the pile of New York Review of Books, and my heart sank at the titles of the articles.  Somehow I knew before looking that they would all be so earnest, so full of moral condemnation or praise.  I had to look away, and there was the New Yorker Magazine, five or six perhaps, and again, the gorge of satiety rose.  I looked at the cartoons in a couple of them, noted some clever film reviews, realized that I no longer knew which films I should be seeing, too long too far out of the loop.  Could not face those long intelligent well written articles, because, my god, there would be hundreds and hundreds of pages.  I looked further and saw two hefty copies of The Art Newspaper.  Did I really care about whether China was buying half as much from the galleries as last year, which the headline of one proclaimed?  No, I didn't.  And there at my feet were at least nearly a dozen of the Times Literary Supplement and The London Review.  My stomach turned.  As God is my witness, I cried out I'm never going to read the printed word again!