Surface Tension

Something about the day. Overcast and the air heavy with moisture. I eat the last of the grits, with butter, cream, and brown sugar. Nestle under a blanket on the sofa, rereading George V. Higgens, "The Friends Of Eddie Coyle". I don't think anyone has ever written dialogue better. The way the characters are revealed by what they say is incredible, masterful. And, if you've ever lived in Boston, it is spot on. We all talked like mobsters. I kept a rented room on the Cape, and if I could squeeze out a day from the opera schedule, I'd go down, walk the beaches, collect mussels and clams for a steamed dinner, and maybe letterpress print a broadside in the print-shop I maintained in the basement of a general store. A blur to me now, I remember almost being killed by a press we were moving into the basement. It took out a door-jamb, but I had nimbly stood aside. More luck, than anything else. The story of my life. The first time I went into a Japanese restaurant I was with a Japanese lighting designer, and he knew exactly what he wanted, every time after that, when I went into that restaurant, they deferred to me, as if I knew what I was saying, despite the fact, as Bobby told me later, I was ordering fish eggs with glue. Tangled up in blue. Freeze-up on the river, in the lee of an abutment is not a bad place to be. After lunch, that old Elvis stand-by, peanut butter and bacon on toast, I read Robert Kaplan's excellent "The Nothing That Is", A Natural History Of Zero. Then spend a couple of hours with a field guide to animal tracks and scat, refreshing my memory. Winter is the season of tracks. Above freezing, and the edges of the driveway puddles thaw. It's a track extravaganza. I have a stump to sit on there, with my ethafoam pad; I look at the tracks and look at the pictures in the book, try and figure out who is which and what was happening. One of the most interesting set of tracks today, was a young rabbit, over near the head of the driveway, and they simply disappeared. It took me a minute to realize it had been taken by an owl or hawk. For dinner I just roast cubes of butternut squash and sweet potato, swishing them through a warm seasoned olive oil; I can eat this with just my right hand and hold a book in my left, but even though I'm careful, wiping my fingers on pilfered napkins, I do get the occasional oil smear on a page. You eat about a thousand meals a year, I eat 192 of those with other people, mostly lunch with D, call it two hundred, which leaves me with 800 meals at which I can read. That's a hundred books a year. I read fiction, non-fiction, and poetry is equal measure, so there's no telling what I'd be reading where. I probably lean toward non-fiction at the island, eating, because I keep a running list, and then to gather reference material while I'm cooking, because you have a moment here and there, and the smells of cooking ignite my brain. I remember odd thoughts I had during the day, one thing, how do you do a zero set, brackets with nothing in between?