Conquest

The safe bet: she likes the taste of the old glue that binds the ancient paperbacks. Or the soft, torn covers invite her to chew. And that she’s picked not one, not two, but three of his books could be chalked up to their proximity to her snout (second shelf from the floor). But, for whatever reason, my nine-month old Labrador puppy seems to have a hankering for D.H. Lawrence. She started with volume three of his collected short stories, which could be seen as disrespect to the short story form in general or maybe that it sat on top of the stack. She moved on to The Rainbow a few days later and just this morning has taken a bite out of The Kangaroo. I question her motivation. Maybe, like Geoff Dyer in his book on Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, she will soon tire of the big novels and turn to the collected letters. I should put up some barrier so she can’t get to these damp relics of my young adulthood. But I keep thinking what she’s really after are the steamier texts, Aaron’s Rod or Lady Chatterly’s Lover; that in her innate puppiness she pines for the mystical physicality of Sons & Lovers. None of this late-night book bingeing has gotten me to reread Lawrence, however. (Though I have pulled out the Dyer.) Instead, after each transgression I push the sweet dog’s snout into the pages and intone “Noooooo” before letting her go, though I am not sure I am helping matters. Lola prances around for a minute looking sheepish—clearly it’s a matter of not being able to resist the temptation—then curls up in her dog bed to sleep, dreaming no doubt, of her next conquest.

Summer Stay

After a long day of travel and a night of uneven sleep, I slip out of the house before everyone starts to gather and head out for a walk. Halfway down the block I pass a dilapidated, one-story house on this block of fancy, remodeled homes. I have walked by it dozens of times and never quite noticed the dead Elm standing in the heart of its wild field, nor the uneven line of an old stone wall further in, nor the beat-up truck hidden in plain sight beside the beat-up barn. The reason I haven’t seen this place, why no one but the neighbors sees this place—and then only to grumble about property values or imagine what they’d do with this land—is that it no longer belongs here, not in this condition, not among all these tricked-up homes. I don’t see it because I am not expecting to find the past plopped square inside this shiny present. I ask about the property when I return from my walk, passing up through a young apple orchard, and learn that it is owned by an old man. One of two brothers still alive, he’s ill and so doesn’t come out much anymore. The family, I am told, has let the property go; it’s expected to sell, and there is worry that another McMansion will rise up in its place. Why this expectation, this worry? Might someone in the family decide to keep the house, to fix it up and start a new brood there? Or maybe a young couple buys the land and midwives it even deeper into its wild state. Start a garden. Raise bees. Cut down the dead tree and plant a new one. Fix up the stonewall and talk over it, like Frost, with the neighbors further up the hill. This is what I imagine as I head out the next morning, again searching out a little solitary time. I resist the urge to trespass further into the field. Most likely this place will be gone the next time I come here, and maybe I won’t even remember its former presence.

Heavy Rain

We pull into the little seaside town, early evening, a few hours after a heavy rain: the streets bustling, parking lot nearly full. High summer tourism in mid-swing. As we stroll over to the swanky new bistro, and are led to a table near the kitchen, I flash back on the bookstore that used to be located here but can’t remember the names of the other businesses that have come and gone since. Earlier in the day, before the thunderclouds came marching from the west, Ali and I walked over to the Isinglass River for a soak. The water was low, so we nosed our way to the big rock at the big bend in the river, knowing it would deepen there. Slipping into that cold, bronzed water pure pleasure. The gin drink I’ve ordered soon arrives and I sip it slowly, awakening inside the sip to a sudden clarity of mind, a momentarily stripping away of extraneous thought. We’ve told our waitress to take her time, but an hour has passed and we still haven’t been served our meal. She comes out and asks me if I mind switching from the filet mignon to the skirt steak. There seems to be no choice so I nod. Twenty minutes pass until we finally flag down the waitress. She is wildly apologetic. Seems a man has sent back his filet mignon not once but twice. When our food finally comes, another entrée has been switched out. No explanation. Why I am writing about this? There is no lasting harm in such an encounter—though an obvious frustration arises when the service in a pricey restaurant dips below tolerable levels—and nothing of real consequence has occurred. There will always be men sending back their steaks and waitresses who struggle to accommodate what arrives in the wake of such arrogance. The haggard manager comps our bottle of wine and praises us for our generosity, though we haven’t exhibited any, merely tolerated a distraction. As we walk back out into the night, I recall arriving home from our afternoon outing as the first big raindrops started to fall. The boys had been crouching in the truck bed, ice cream cones in hand, and only just made it up the long front steps before the downpour. I turned back and joined my father under the garage roof as hail began to ping pong on its tin; and we stood there together for a while, happy and quiet, as the rain dropped down in sheets and thunder cracked and rumbled its way across the sky.

News of the World

The grass is so drenched with night rain that the dogs pass through it like little kids running in feathery snow. The soccer fields are full up with summer players, out early to avoid the heat. Runners ring the fields, checking watches and fit bits as they jog. I steer my charges for the back lot and the sandy promises of an uninhabited river bend. The morning paper headlined the street battles in Ferguson: a year later, the police are back out in their battle gear, young men are getting shot, and protesting citizens are getting arrested en masse. It's as if one long curfewed night has extended to cover the four seasons, and we're back in the same place, the same lockdown headlock tailspin. What to do with this world of ours so fractured and fractious?! On the way to these fields, my neighbor drove past without a) seeing me, b) registering my existence, or c) acknowledging it. Nor, when he turned out onto East Hawthorne, did he see, register or acknowledge the car speeding toward him, and so had to pick it up to avoid getting rear-ended. The guy tailgated him all the way down to River Road to punish him for his transgression. I have been reading Teju Cole's novel, Open City, and in it the main character (Nigerian born, in the States studying to be a psychiatrist) walks restlessly through the Manhattan streets. His thoughts expand out as he moves, touching upon his work, his personal life and current events, but also the city’s Dutch history and life after 9/11. These thoughts mix seamlessly into his encounters on the street and on the subway, just as my thoughts get mixed into the suburban scene before me. I have to laugh at the sight of a sodden lounger sprawled open beside an empty green dumpster. Why can't the police in Ferguson see that their stance is the main part of the problem? Their stance and their force. What if they put down their weapons and took off the war gear and came into the neighborhoods to talk, really talk? Could they ever just come as peacekeepers and as friends and as neighbors? For not until they alter their approach and agenda, not until they stop shooting first (and shooting to kill), will anything change. Can’t they recognize that, acknowledge it? Reaching the furthest field, I turn back for the car. The puppy flops literally head over heels into the wet grass and slithers around on her back. As I wait for her, I remember a scene in the Cole novel. The nameless main character is coming down from Harlem and watches himself not get off on 116th. Then he doesn't get off at next stop, or the next. Eventually he's all the way down in Wall Street where he comes upon the 9/11 site, still an empty hole. The Trinity Church is locked up for the night, so the man, filled to bursting with loneliness, ends up at water's edge, looking out over the river. His thoughts are a jumble. He muses on 9/11, the role of the Trinity church in early Manhattan life, on white whales appearing upstream, of the river history of Manhattan and of Moby Dick, about grief tourism and what it means to live in New York at this time, and of his girlfriend leaving him. The scene ends with him watching the skateboarders rise up off the cement and, for a brief moment, fly up into the air.

Swimming Hole

There are only two shady-looking men down at the swimming hole, which is surprising for a late Saturday morning. The place is usually packed. An enjoyable, always slightly chaotic scene, with whole families out with their dogs, packs of young shirtless men nursing coolers of beer and taking turns napping in the bushes. There’s a manmade sluice built into the riverbank, with huge river stones on both sides. Young kids often wedge their bodies up into the first waterfall, letting the current pulse over them before letting go and getting carried downstream. But this morning, water high from recent rainfall, Avery and his buddy have the place nearly to themselves. They take turns jumping off the rope swing, waiting until the top of the arc to let go (so as not to land on the two boulders visible in the water below). They dive for stray golf balls in the deep end, knowing they end up there after a long journey downriver from the driving range. On the far bank, a man uses a long green hose to siphon water into some sort of tank; it’s hard to tell if this is illegal activity or the standard morning fill-up. One of the men jumps into the muddy water, floating for a moment like a big white bear. “It’s a bit nippy,” he says, happily. I nod. His friend, who has yet to step out of my peripheral vision, snorts his disdain. I think he wants us out of there so he can get stoned or maybe even shoot up. When we finally head back to the car, the men have disappeared into the bushes, but the weekend crowd has started to arrive. They climb out of their cars on the edge of the field, lugging plastic rings and towels and transistor radios, speaking to one another softly in Spanish. They will stay until sundown.