"Houston, we have arugula!” Mary cried after hanging up with One Stop Market, which has been wonderful, providing curb service during these trying times.
Also, and probably even more important when it comes to our overall health, Atlantic Wines picked up the phone after a number of frantic calls to other liquor stores had gone unanswered, prompting me to wonder out loud if they weren’t now considered nonessential businesses. How else can we keep our spirits up?
Well, of course, there are other ways. Our dog, O’en, has never had it so good — we’re walking him all the time, and it’s fun to be with Mary more.
Though I do miss the office, silent though it is even when there is late-breaking news. No clackety-clack, clackety-clack and dings as the carriage reaches the end of the page anymore, no more furious wadding up of paper and errant waste-basket tosses and undeleted epithets. Everyone’s hunched, in their own world. It’s strange to think that I miss that feeling of isolationism.
But it’s always been pleasant in the office to be among my most edifying books, dog-eared, underlined, some held together with rubber bands. . . . Plato, Aristotle, Voltaire, Shakespeare (wait, I just heard Mary say on the phone that she shouldn’t laugh, but what else is there to do?), Joseph Campbell, Lewis Thomas, Montaigne. . . . Spencer Schneider, a long-distance swimming lawyer, having eyed them once, said it seemed I had all the books that one should read. Better well read than dead. Ah, the gallows humor again. I must stop.
Montaigne said that he wanted death to overtake him as he was planting his cabbages. I too would like to be evanesced in midcareer, though not while planting cabbages, and certainly not while reseeding the backyard, which O’en will, once the orange plastic fencing is removed, paw through yet again — his nose pressed ever downward, oblivious to my tap, tap, tapping and reContinued from B1 monstrating at the kitchen window, rooting out moles in hole after hole after hole. “I’m like Sisyphus,” I say to Mary. “It’s all what you’re thinking about on your way back from Agway,” she says.
Mary, by the way, is extremely well read, far more than me. Frankly, she has in her bones all the wisdom I’ve been trying to soak up for years. She may not have read the actual books I have, the books which impressed Spencer Schneider, but she doesn’t need to. It’s like Emerson and Thoreau. I can write about it — it being Nature in their cases — but she is of it. Not to dismiss Emerson, but there’s a difference.
Neither Emerson nor Thoreau much cared about government, by the way, so taken were they by the sanctity of the self, but that was then. It’s evident that strengthening communities throughout the nation is what we need at this time — social democracy and sociability (though at a safe distance, of course). And maybe, once this scourge is over, or at least abated, this country will have undergone a sea change — into something new and strange — and for the better.