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Short Season

Short Season

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I had long remembered the essay I’m about to excerpt but didn’t have it at my fingertips until I found it in a battered file folder of clippings a few weeks ago. I can’t credit it to any one author; it was an editorial in the New York Times. But I’ve thought about it often this time of year, during these golden days of just enough warmth and just enough light, days of languid loveliness like the one we have right now, temperature not even 80, humidity no more than 40, cloudless sky.

Labor Day is really the beginning of a short season all its own, an in-between time, a month of not-quite-summer, not-yet-fall. That season, whatever you call it, often feels more like the new year than the New Year itself — new books, new exhibitions, new music, new commitments, and never mind that it has all been in the planning for months.  

The city is full again and no longer in dishabille. The leaves are still green. None of the races, pennant or political, have been run to the wire just yet. Night closes in on both ends of day, and still on fair evenings the light seems to linger. The subways seem to exhale. ….

This is the time we should take off from work — only we never do — to watch summer and fall collide, to feel the sharp nights and the warm days, to walk through a garden that is ripening and dying all at once. In the country, a morning will come soon enough when all the gnats have disappeared, a sign that this short season is over.

Giving Up the Ghost

Giving Up the Ghost

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I just finished Hilary Mantel’s memoir Giving Up the Ghost, a powerful story of childhood fears, adult sorrows and the writer’s ability to triumph over them by putting pen to paper. 

Mantel writes that she has a “nervous sort of nostalgia” for any surface she’s written a book on. “I think the words, for better or worse, have sunk into the grain of the wood.” In Mantel’s case, many words. The Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and Mirror and the Light trilogy about Lord Cromwell top out at more than 1,500 pages.

In interviews, Mantel says she had the idea to write about Cromwell even before she was published, which means that it was likely on her mind when she wrote her memoir, too. Perhaps when she wrote these words, some of the most evocative I’ve read describing books not yet written:

“Sometimes, at dawn or dusk, I pick out from the gloom — I think I do — a certain figure, traversing the rutted fields in a hushed and pearly light, picking a way among the treacherous rivulets and the concealed ditches. It is a figure shrouded in a cloak, bearing certain bulky objects wrapped in oilcloth, irregular in shape: not heavy but awkward to carry. This figure is me; these shapes, hidden in their wrappings, are books that, God willing, I am going to write.” 

Write them she did. In an interview with The Guardian in 2020, Mantel says that as soon as she started writing Wolf Hall, she knew it was what she had been working toward. Starting the trilogy was “like at last delivering what’s within you … an enormous shout from a mountaintop.”

I marvel at such surety. I wonder what it would be like to feel it.

(The Old Library, Trinity College, Dublin)

Endings and Beginnings

Endings and Beginnings

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August 31 is a big day for endings. It’s the end of the month, the end of the summer — and the end of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. 

But it’s also my first day of class. This evening I officially start the master’s program I enrolled in months ago. 

In a way it’s just a return to the program I began a decade ago when I took a Georgetown class called A Sense of Place: Values and Identity. But it’s been 10 years. The program has changed, and I have, too.

Now I’m enrolled in one of four required foundation classes, Science and Society. To prepare for it I’ve read four chapters of a book on the history of science, taking notes on Bacon and Newton and Tycho Brahe. 

What will it be like to sit in a classroom again, to write papers, to be graded? I don’t know … but I’m about to find out.

(Lamplight on the Georgetown campus)

Shooting Rain

Shooting Rain

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I’m an amateur photographer, doing the best I can with my iPhone 7 and enjoying every minute of it. I like framing the shot, trying to capture a digital image of what I see and want to preserve.

But sometimes I try to get technical, to shoot the difficult and ephemeral — to photograph the rain, for instance.

I wasn’t sure I could do it, have tried before. But the rain in New York last month was falling so fast and furiously that I was able to snap this shot of it streaming through the skies, down the tenement fronts and into the rooftop pool of the newish hotel across the street.

This shot captures a moment and a downpour I won’t soon forget. Water was streaming into the New York City subway system that evening, flooding major highways and making national news. 

What I didn’t know then is that the rain would also delay the bass player from the band my cousin leads and in which my brother plays drums— the band we had come to New York to hear. And in fact, the drummer would end up missing all but three songs in the set. 

On the other hand, I did get an interesting rain photo out of it. 

A New Milestone

A New Milestone

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I typically note the passing of blog milestones when there are round numbers ending in zeroes, but today I’ll mix it up a little and note the passing of a milestone ending in 9s. 

This is the 3,499th post I’ve written since I began A Walker in the Suburbs in 2010,  the 87th since I left Winrock and the 499th since my last milestone post. 

Since then I’ve written about the pandemic’s beginning and why despite its gift of time I’m still not getting anything done. 

I’ve written about trips I’ve taken, books I’ve read and walks that have inspired me. 

Mostly I’ve just tried to capture life in my little corner of the world, the joys and trials, the profound beauty of each day passing. 

The Lark Ascending

The Lark Ascending

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I was lucky to find early in my life the twin passions that drive it still. One is words, the other is music. I’ve made my living from the first and kept the second for pleasure. For that reason, music has been the great unexplored ocean — restless, deep and ever-changing. 

This morning for some reason I hankered to hear the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Thanks to the streaming service I had free for six months and decided I must keep, his pieces were at my fingertips. 

My walk began with Overture to the Wasps, which after a buzzing start, settles into a brisk march and then a shimmering serenade. 

I listened to The English Folk Song Suite, Fantasia on Greensleeves, and then… The Lark Ascending. It’s this last one that I can’t get out of my mind, so much so that I came home and started playing it on my computer. The comments on the YouTube page — more than four thousand of them — speak to the power of this special piece and of music in general.

People write about emerging from depression after listening to The Lark, of saying goodbye to dying loved ones with this soaring melody. The piece harkens back to a simpler time, said many. One man wrote that it reminds him of his parents peddling through the English countryside during World War II, his father on leave from the RAF, the couple picnicking one golden afternoon. Life amidst the madness, ending somehow on a high note, despite it all.

Garden Bench

Garden Bench

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I’m writing this post from the far reaches of the backyard, a place I seldom sit but am sitting now because of a lovely new garden bench. 

The garden bench is a wondrous invention. Made of wood and surrounded by trees, it invites contemplation, pause, taking stock. It’s a place for reverie. 

From here the house is just part of the equation, silent and still. Its worn flooring and stained carpet are safely out of sight. 

The bench sits where I was thinking of putting my writer’s cabin, back when I was thinking I needed a writer’s cabin. 

Now I think I may have what I need: a series of places — my new upstairs office, this wooden bench, the hammock, the trampoline, the deck under the rose-covered pergola — and, most of all finally, some time. 

Tales to Tell

Tales to Tell

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For the last few months I’ve been slowly moving books into the spare bedroom I now call my office. It was my office once, long ago, when I was a full-time freelance writer and two of our daughters still bunked together in the room across the hall.  

But since then it has been Claire’s room, from the time she was a grade-schooler with hermit crabs and hamsters (including one who miraculously gave birth two days after we brought “him” home from the pet store) to a teenager with walls covered by photos of the band Green Day.  

The door to this room has been slammed shut so many times that it barely closes. But it does close, and that is important. 

For now, I sit here in hard-earned quiet, thinking about the journey it took to reclaim this room — not just the painting and decluttering but the long journey from moving out to finally moving back in. 

This room has tales to tell. 

ISO Open Days

ISO Open Days

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For someone recently retired I haven’t exactly been twiddling my thumbs. I didn’t intend to be idle but I did expect to experience brief periods of thumb-twiddling, cloud-gazing or even some good old-fashioned afternoon ennui.

Nothing of the sort has happened. 

In part, this is because — in what seemed smart planning at the start but I now realize was the exact opposite — I spread out long-overdue appointments and errands so that no day was too full. As a result, there have been almost no days that are open enough for cloud-gazing or thumb-twiddling.

Even a planned business phone call can bisect a day, can puncture its purposelessness. This from a person who used to pride herself on how many to-dos she could pack into 24 hours. 

Lo, how the mighty have fallen.

(I borrowed this meme from a Jeff Speck newsletter.)

 

Voice as Vehicle

Voice as Vehicle

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I’ve just finished Gail Caldwell’s Bright Precious Thing, her third or fourth memoir but only the second one I’ve read. I found it while browsing at the library last week and picked it up immediately, based on how much I liked Let’s Take the Long Way Home, which is about Caldwell’s friendship with the late Caroline Knapp.

Bright Precious Thing is a slender book, and I didn’t bond with it at first. But 20 pages in I was hooked — not so much by what Caldwell was saying — the women’s movement and its effect on her life — but how she said it.

This has me thinking about voice, writerly voice, the tone and style a writer uses to communicate with her readers, and how personal it is. 

Voice is the vehicle, and when it’s humming along, I don’t much care where the reader is taking me. As long as we’re together, I’m content.

(The vehicle above is a Seattle-bound Amtrak train, this coach almost empty.)