Point of View: All Ye Need to Know
“Only two more weeks,” I said to the young woman at the liquor store, who, I thought, did not entirely comprehend.
Scott Rubenstein wanted to know exactly what I meant when I’d said there was no summer here. “No summer as it is traditonally known,” I said. “You know, when you’re lying dreamily in the hayloft on a late summer afternoon and the air is redolent with the effluvium of cow manure.” Ou sont les étés d’antan?
Speaking of which, we — well, most of us — got it wrong in last week’s column when, owing to a last-minute editorial snafu, it came out that the fellow perched on a tree in Fellini’s “Amarcord,” had cried out, “Voglio una donne!”
“No,” Aldo, with whom I was playing tennis a few days later, said. “It’s ‘voglio una donna.’ ”
I had initially written “dona,” and that’s where the trouble began. The plural of “donna” was “donne,” Aldo said, and, clearly, Mariolater that I am, I hadn’t meant to say, in Italian, or in any other language for that matter, “I want women!”
Mary is quite enough, all I’ve ever wished for, the paradigm of her gender, beautiful for one, I never tire of looking at her, a boon companion for another, I never tire of talking with her — it used to be thought almost obscene by other family members.
She is, in brief, true blue, and we are most times wonderfully linked, but she sometimes is baffled by my waspy indirection — as am I — and by its tendency to set us apart, as if at times I were creating a gated community of one.
Ah, but once I’ve thought about things and have acknowledged that my habitual reaction is to scuttle sideways whenever called to account — Mr. Mercer didn’t call me “Mr. Responsibility” in high school for nothing — there is, I’m happy to say, reconciliation — what, in fact, we all want.
Steve Sigler spoke to me about this years ago, in the last interview I had with him. Mozart, whose music gave him joy, was all about reconciliation, he said. No wonder, he said, that Mozart had died so young.
Reconciliation: That is all ye need to know.