Solid Particularity

Up at one, writing for four hours, then back to sleep at five and back up at nine. Feeling a little stagnant, I cleaned up and went to town. Lindsey behind the bar and a European Cup match on TV. Portugal and Armenia. Reynaldo (?) scored twice for Portugal, both of them lovely things. Grace is wonderful, wherever it occurs. Stopped at the Marina Dairy Bar and got a footer with onion rings, went down to the parking lot to look at the boats. A footer, with sauce (ground beef and tomato), mustard and cheese is a completely delightful lunch, especially with onion rings, at a picnic table under a shade tree, watching people play putt-putt golf. A Saturday afternoon in America. Bought several books at the perpetual sale in the library and I'm starting a new pile of books to be read next winter. This is low-grade ore, but I need a hundred or so to pass the time, when the snow is deep and I'm trapped. I don't need much: booze, tobacco, food, and books, beyond that, your projection probably misses the point. I'm a Jesuit monk, for god's sake, I only document hybrids. They let me skip that earliest call, usually I'm up anyway, and listen from the back hall. These guys are seriously good. Matins in a stone enclosure. I was listening to Philip Glass and thinking about Bach. Glass studied with Nadia, which means Mahler comes into play. Another brick wall, as my cd player had died, but when I talked to Glenn and Linda they said they had a unit they didn't need anymore and were going to send me. This is in a nick of time, as I wanted to listen to Bach right then, and my player refused. I listened to all of the Mahler symphonies, one day, in Temple, Maine, with Ted Enslin, while he explained cutting winter ice to me. He had an old ice-house and still put up ice for the summer. I'd go up there once a year, I must have published six of his books and we were good friends. I'd take a five gallon bucket of oysters, a couple of pounds of fresh ground coffee, and bourbon; we'd talk into the night. He'd play a piece of music, then expound. They had a freezer full of fiddle-head ferns, and I steamed some, with a cream sauce, and slow cooked a pork shoulder, Ted made a couple of calls, and there was soon a jamboree going on with home-brew and back-door whiskey. None of his neighbors knew him as a writer. He was just another guy, in a hard-scrabble world, barely getting by. Cut ice, cut hay by hand, used an out-house, burned 10 cords of wood in the winter. Killed a hog and a steer in the late fall, made head-cheese and sausage. He moved back to the coast, I think because scrounging life in the littoral is so easy, and we lost touch. Actually, we lose track of almost everyone. I know less about my brother and sister, than I do about the guy that washes dishes at the pub. Go figure. I can stuff it into a couple of lines:

Mountain Laurel shines,
I thought at first it was something
but it really was nothing.