I'm Going To Take A Break

The brain has gone dead, and I have to spend my waking hours weeding the garden anyway.  And maybe I will really and truly start the write this novel I have in my head.  I told the plot to a friend who is not given to soft words of encouragement, and she liked it, so maybe in fact it is appealing, or at least to her and to me.  I am tired of reading and writing, perhaps not the best thing to admit whilst also announcing that a novel might be in the works.  Oh, well, let's hope for the best.  Have a Glorious Fourth of July.  We've got rain and mosquitoes, that's for sure.

Time Marches On

“To every thing there is a season,” saith the Preacher, known to most people by the Greek version of the word, to wit, Ecclesiastes.  I was reminded of it again when a dear friend from California who used to be very close to me and my family in our Brookline years remarked on the telephone a few days ago how extraordinary were the dinner parties I gave in our house in the waning days of the sixties and into the early seventies.  Sometimes twice a week sit-down dinners for twenty or more, children, children’s friends, my friends, strangers, a crowd given over to riotous laughter, lots of wine, hilarious singing, hours of merriment, psychic abandon verging on total madness.  I can never stop smiling when I think back to those long ago evenings.  When I was divorced the party moved, often to the seashore where I had bought a large and exceedingly ramshackle summer house (“resembles nothing so much as a third class pensione in Sicily,”  my two Italian friends would laughingly exclaim whenever they visited.) “It was the dirtiest house I was ever in,” a Newton friend confessed years later when after selling it I used to wax nostalgic for its, I guess I would have to say, dubious charms.  Funny how all the wine, laughter, dope, sex, and general hilarity from morning til night covered over a multitude of imperfections. After I sold it, the new owners tore it down before it fell down, thus sparing me an ever present memorial to younger and happier days.  Fate and the financial markets brought me and my husband to another house in the same little town, in much much better condition, a kind of permanent home, with Florida as the winter getaway, the northern abode replete with an exceedingly large and elegant garden, terrace, and manicured miniature lawn.  Life here, forty years on, is all very sedate, charming lunches out in the shade under the wisteria, quiet evenings watching Netflix, a hint of the gracious life.  And, yet, there are the neighbors.  The house in the old days was in an area despised and neglected, somewhat deserted.  Absolute quiet reigned, broken only by the water’s action.  As Arnold so famously described it:
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Our new house is set in the midst of houses, as a typical low income summer beach town generally looks.  What more than anything else characterizes the place for me in this the second decade of the twenty first century is that everyone on all sides seems to have got themselves a small shrill barking dog.  We might as well be in a kennel.  From morning til night it is not the grating roar but the high pitched shriek, over and over again, from thousands of furry throats.  If they do not have a dog, then they have at least two cats, an animal which, considering its small size, can generate an amount of fecal matter that I would have ascribed to an elephant.  In the spirit of the town, feckless, unlettered, rude and untaught, the cats roam freely, most often to their preferred toilet area which is our spacious yard.  I sometimes think that this is god’s punishment for caring so about the garden and for being so proud of it.  Whatever, it makes for a certain sense of being beleagured, which reminds me often enough that these are certainly not “the good old days.”