Point of View: Unleashed

It’s Friday and it’s almost as if a show’s begun: There were 12 instead of the usual five or six servers behind the counter at Starbucks this morning. Main Street traffic was very, very slow. Noses were pressed up against the doors at BookHampton, which was to reopen the next afternoon. 

My pent-up demand includes Jim Harrison’s “Songs of Unreason,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West,” and the recently published book of essays by Annie Dillard, whose memoir, “An American Childhood,” served me well during a recent visit to my sister, who lives down the river from Pittsburgh and who listened with interest to the passages I read from it about dancing school — where we all wore white gloves — and Roberto Clemente and the blizzard of 1950 and societal herding of the young and the urge to leave all that.

And yet, the suburban town from which I fled, and to which she’s returning after having lived for a time in Virginia, and more recently across the river, in Moon, seems to me to hold more promise — beginning with the leafy, thick dark-trunked trees — than I once thought it did. 

A doggy parade, a benefit for the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society, that closed the village down the Saturday I was there was also persuasive. 

I cased it out beforehand inasmuch as my sister has difficulty walking at the moment because of persistent back pain, and I needed to get her to a park bench at the corner of Beaver and Broad Streets by 10:30, when the parade was to start.

Thanks to an amenable policeman, who let me do a U-turn in front of the paraders just moments before they set forth, I was able to provide her with a ringside seat to joy. 

And off they went, tails wagging, eager, eyes lit up, mingling with the spectators — bulldogs, pugs, Labs in bandanas, hectoring little ones, gentle big ones . . . there was a Great Dane as high as your waist . . . Rottweilers, Berneses, even foxhounds with huntsmen and huntswomen in pink coats. . . .

It was . . . endearing. That’s the word. 

And there are good restaurants there now, at least four, some with tables on the sidewalks. There’s life there, communal, out of doors. Sewickley, what I used to think of as strait-laced Sewickley, is unleashed! 

As for East Hampton, it goes without saying.