The late August temps are surprisingly mild compared to recent summers of heat domes and wildfires. This summer, I’ve noticed “We Have AC” signs on businesses that solicit schvitzy passersby.
Back-to-school time always brings excitement and renewal for me at any age. It’s an instinctive refocusing on hearth and home, ancestrally, vestigially preparing for the harvest and long cold winter.
My parents provided safety and comfort for my sister and me. My fondest memories are walking through the front door from a day of untethered play to a steamy kitchen with warm food bubbling, the purpling dusk silhouetting the bare November trees. My mother chopped, and my dad sipped a cold beer after a New York City commute to the suburbs every day for 20 years. I noticed his quiet satisfaction, not desperation, in being home. He told me to put on socks because it was getting colder.
I lounge supine on the roof deck under a sun sail, reading John William’s Stoner. It’s a novel I picked up randomly at Barnes & Noble because the cover was intriguing: an introspective man looking down, “STONER,” beguilingly minimalist across the cover. The title reminded me of the Grateful Dead and a childhood friend named John, a “stoner” with a collection of live Dead concerts he flipped onto his tape deck and smoked a bowl. He lived in the present.
Sometimes, judge a book by its cover. It is a riveting novel about an existential man, William Stoner, who plays the long game unwittingly in a search for elusive happiness. As I’ve aged, happiness has always been elusive, with ebbs and flows. Happiness is accepting that there are vicissitudes.
In John Williams's novel Butcher’s Crossing, a young Harvard student named William Andrews takes some time off from his urbane East Coast surroundings to explore the wilderness. He ends up in Butcher’s Crossing, Kansas, to meet an acquaintance of his father’s, J.D. McDonald, who runs a buffalo hide business.
An excerpt:
Young people," McDonald said contemptuously. "You always think there's something to find out."
"Yes, sir," Andrews said.
"Well, there's nothing," McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you — that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you're the only one that knows the secret; only then it's too late. You're too old."
"No," Andrews said. A vague terror crept from the darkness that surrounded them, and tightened his voice. "That's not the way it is."
"You ain't learned, then," McDonald said. "You ain't learned yet. . . .
Today’s lesson: How to suck the marrow out of Sunday?
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