Dog Days

Last Thursday I took a vacation with my family, a mini jaunt to the Eastern Shore of Maryland where my sister lives. We planned on swimming in her pool and grilling venison and then spending a day at the beach. As Thursday approached so did Irene, a category 3-4 hurricane that was expected to wreak destruction on the eastern seaboard from the Carolinas to Maine. That did not deter us. We headed off Thursday night with sandwiches, two dogs (an old man and a new puppy), and the driver’s side window, which is broken, covered in industrial strength SarinWrap and duck tape. There were blinding thunderstorms on Rt. 476, but by the time we got onto Rt. 50 the skies were calm and all the traffic was going the other way, as the beaches were under mandatory evacuation orders. We would not be swimming in the ocean.

All day Friday we watched CNN with increasing scorn and the boredom of addiction. We dutifully bought supplies in the event of flooding, still an assumed likelihood, but I went for a long run, we swam and grilled chicken (the venison was thawing in the sink, for Sunday). By Saturday the storm was not really a hurricane anymore. A hard rain was a-gonna fall, but that was the extent of it. The apocalypse this year would be in Washington and on Wall Street. So Maja and I went to the local used bookstore (in horizontal rain) where I bought some very cool old books: The Reverend Carey’s early 19^th century translation of Dante’s Commedia (Carey was also a librarian, bless him); Edwin Arlington Robinson’s book length poem, Tristram (Robinson has been anthologized but neglected except for the occasional enthusiast, so much so that his Wikipedia page contains no critical evaluation or even description of his works, noting only his shitty childhood, failed romances and multiple Pulitzer Prizes); two books by Conrad Aiken, one of poems and one a short novel (Aiken is another neglected author ballyhooed also on occasion); the poems of the mad 18^th century poet William Cowper; and finally, Boswell’s London Journal for the year’s 1762-1763. The bookstore is replete with such titles, and in the past I have not bitten the proffered fruit. Titles like this reflect the personality of the bookman behind the counter, who is as dour and cantankerous as every other used bookman I have done business with. On this day he was talking convivially on the phone about the storm, towards which he directed all of his sarcasm and cynicism, a more worthy target than the usual hapless victim trying to sell him books. He was transcribing an ancient journal on a giant Mac. But at checkout he registers in an illegible hand the title and price of each purchase in a dogeared notebook, subtotals the amount and determines the tax on a calculator, rings up the sale on a 1920’s cash register, and takes the credit card on a manual machine with the credit card slips of yesteryear.

It seems that I was doing more than aligning with the qi of the place. I think I was making ready for (the season not to be mentioned). Before a fire, with a pot of good black tea, the Reverend Carey’s Miltonic translation of Dante is perfect, as are rhymed poems perversely penned during the period of High Modernism, and the reflections of a 22 year old Boswell on the make in London. I don’t read much contemporary poetry or fiction, and less over the years. At times I become enthusiastic and will read a novel by Jim Krusoe or Jonathan Lethem or what have you, and I still love a good rigorous Modernist or Post Modernist poem (though the latter always lack vigour). These moods brought me to the wonderful, if Ulyssesian Briggflats, a surprise. Boswell’s Life of Johnson is, with Proust and Gibbon, in reserve for retirement. But the London Journals are bon bons to be consumed on a snarly day, which I did on Sunday, sprawled out with several dogs on the couch, while ragged remnants of Irene lashed the windows. Later that day the sun came out, I went for another run, swam with the kids. That night we feasted on venison grilled rare, sautéed vegetables and roasted new potatoes, with friends who are organic homesteaders and brought wine they had made. Meanwhile, the storm passed north and destroyed towns and counties remote from the coast.