all this
so one might send an exile’s perfect letter
to an ancient hometown friend
—Leonard Cohen
I think I may be in love with my dentist.
This thought crosses my mind as I stare into the eyes of Dr. Sherry Kirsch, on the occasion of my first visit to her practice. Dr. Kirsch—or Sherry, as I’ve already begun to think of her—seems to have violet eyes, or maybe it’s a trick of the light. Does anyone really have violet eyes? Can’t be contacts, since she’s wearing glasses. Or perhaps the glasses are props, placebos designed to give patients the sense that one is dealing with, being dealt with by, a serious professional and not merely some bimbo who’s managed to scrape through dentistry school on the basis of charm alone.
She’s what you might call “petite”—or would if you were still in the 1950s—and there’s a sweet earnestness about her nearly pretty face as she gives me the scoop on what’s happening inside my mouth. Why only “nearly pretty,” and what does that even mean? Strike that from the record. We’re not judging here. There’s something, not to put too fine a point on it, sexy about the brisk professionalism of her manner that trumps any pointless detailing of physical features (perfectly disciplined shortish dark hair, but no opportunity to observe the contours of her body, concealed as it is beneath her dentist’s scrubs). And as for what’s happening inside my mouth—not much, is apparently the bottom line, but the subtext is that it’s me she’s telling me about, there’s no reason to change anything in the immediate future, I’m okay, I will continue to be okay, I’ve received the blessing of the secular priestess, she who knows everything it is necessary to know.
There is of course that mysterious fracture in the upper left incisor, of which I have until now been unaware.
“What could have caused it?” I ask her, eager to show I’m no passive recipient of her wisdom but a keen, self-motivated student of all things dental. Why wouldn’t I have noticed when it happened?
“Who knows,” she says. “It’s probably something that happened eons ago.”
“Like so much else in my life,” I reply, with what I hope seems like rueful, self-deprecating wit.
I’m sixty-two. Sherry can’t be much over thirty.
She smiles. Her teeth are perfect.
I have sought out the services of Dr. Sherry Kirsch, DDS, because my last dentist, Dr. Sylvester O’Connor, committed suicide a few months back. An occupational hazard of dentists, conventional wisdom has it. Theories abound. At his funeral, attended by a strong representation of his clientele (not me, though), it was noted that neither his wife nor his daughter expressed much in the way of grief, both having been seen to sport tight, self-satisfied little smiles. The only public blubbering emanated from his long-time receptionist, unlikely to have been an erotic interest of his, but sounding sincere nonetheless. And where, people said sympathetically, would she get another job at her age?
Sylvester was seventy.
This being St. John’s, there was a literary angle. A character based on Sylvester figured prominently in a story by a local writer published, remarkably, in Harper’s around 1980. He was the cheating husband in a love triangle. The story was widely anthologized, but the writer never published another. She too is dead.
Sylvester’s daughter would have been born around the time the story was published, though who knows what significance, if any, that fact might have. But as a card-carrying English prof, I have to think there might be one, even if I don’t really want to “uncover” or “unearth” it.
So here I am in Sherry’s chair, sitting up with what I hope is a reasonably dignified posture as she browses through the material in the envelope I’ve retrieved from Sylvester’s office. The examination was over quickly. She began by feeling my neck, something Sylvester certainly never did, but which, she explained, was standard procedure for her (lest, presumably, I should conclude that there’s something special about my neck).
Oh, and Sherry, those ridiculous gloves, you don’t need them, not with me of all patients. You have nothing to fear, truly. Shed them. Shed them.
My exercise in mind control having failed, I listened, fascinated, as she told the story of each of my teeth in turn to her bored but attentive hygienist amanuensis. Buckle here, crown there, this that and the other thing somewhere else, fifty-percent overbite. Sherry! Isn’t that a bit harsh. Can’t we shade the truth a little here? Or perhaps, for all I know, a fifty-percent overbite is as good as it gets, some sort of golden mean, a phenomenon any dentist is glad to discover.
Now she’s looking at the information sheet I filled out earlier. I’ve answered No to all the questions aimed at finding something wrong with me. “No medication?” She looks skeptical. “Of any kind?”
No. Nothing.
“Vitamin supplements?”
No. Go ahead. Keep asking, Sherry. You know you want to.
But she doesn’t.
Perhaps she intuits the truth.
Yes, there on a shelf above her computer is a photo of her, a man, and two young children, but who knows what that may mean? Nothing conclusive certainly, a PR gesture, reassuring image of domestic normality. For all I know the diploma on the wall of the outer office is bogus too. But what odds.
“Lots of work down the road,” Sherry is saying. “But nothing immediate. And I think the university plan covers major.”
It doesn’t, I know, but I don’t want to contradict her.
“Wouldn’t want to hit you with a thousand dollars out of the blue.…”
Sherry! What’s a thousand? Don’t even think about it. I’ll give it to you right now.
She’s slender under her light blue coverall, her dark hair appropriately under stringent control, only a single ringlet dangling free.
Sherry Kirsch. What were your parents thinking? It would be nice if people associated our daughter with the idea of a sweet alcoholic haze? If she turns out to have a drinking problem, people won’t be judgmental—they’ll say, With a name like that, what can you expect?
And where are you from? Not here, either by name or accent. Your husband (maybe ex- by now) is probably a Newfoundlander. You met him at dentistry school on the mainland. Refused to change your name. Good self-assertive gesture. But then he insisted you both move here, and you caved. Not so good. Or is it: willing to compromise, willing to try new things. That’d be okay, then.
She leads me back to the outer office, where the receptionist tells her the university won’t pay for major.
Am I afraid to visit the dentist was a question on the sheet I filled out. Actually I’d prefer, just now, not to leave the place where Sherry is. Not, of course, that I’m afraid, exactly.
She’s “happy” about the condition of my gums, she’s said. Happy.
Of course I’m not really in love with my dentist. That particular cloud-capped tower comes tumbling down the instant I step into the parking lot of the strip mall where Sherry’s, Dr. Kirsch’s, office is located.
There’s the hot sun, the banality of asphalt, the rows of motionless vehicles somehow radiating an aura of stolid insolence, as though having ignored the commands of their owners to take them somewhere. There’s also the dispiriting insight that with all the resources of the human imagination hypothetically at their disposal, the folks who control this parcel of land could think no higher thought than: Parking.
But it’s not only that.
There, heaving herself out of what appears to be an absurdly undersized Yaris, is my colleague, Dr. Bernadette O’Keefe. She seems to be shaking her generously proportioned clouds of gray hair at me, though I can’t quite believe this. “Hugh,” she says, mock-severely but with a layer of real severity tucked away in there somewhere. “We need to talk.”
“Uh, do we?”
“Don’t be coy, Hugh. You know what I mean. Does the phrase ludic narrative ring a bell?”
“Tolls me right on back to my sole self,” I say, never at a loss for creaky pedantic jollity.
Bernadette’s brief smile is suggestive of someone tasting an obscure wine and quickly deciding No thank you.
She has what I imagine would in other circumstances be the aura of the Mother Superior about her, something that strongly implies (without stating anything directly, mind) that one should pay attention. Or, possibly, else. My colleague Barney Power loves to tell the story of being approached by a student looking for Bernadette, but unable to remember her name. “You know, sir,” the student said, “the one that looks like a grandmother hippie.” Barney, not a fan of Bernadette, is so pleased with this anecdote that he repeats it two or three times a year, making sure Bernadette is out of earshot.
“Here for my physio,” she says, waggling her cane as if to evoke the unmentionable complexity of her constellation of ailments.
Beothuk Physio occupies the same building as the Colonial Dental Centre.
“Teeth,” I explain.
“Hugh, about that proposal…”
Bernadette and I are members of the departmental graduate studies committee, responsible for, among much else, approving thesis proposals. She has a bee in her bonnet about “Destabilizing Indeterminacy: A Poststructural Analysis of Three Ludic Narratives,” submitted by a student unknown to either of us, to be supervised by our newest young hotshot, Lister Craddock, noted mainly for his ironic T-shirts and general sense of entitlement.
“Surely you must agree,” Bernadette is saying. “Not a single English-language-written work.”
“How many hyphens would you put in there?”
“What?”
“I’d put in two. Between English and language, of course, but also, and here’s where it gets dicey, between language and written. What do you think?”
“Don’t try to change the subject, Hugh. This is serious.”
“But so are hyphens. Why don’t people use them anymore?”
Bernadette doesn’t respond to this question, but reminds me that the student plans to write about a novel translated from Spanish (whose title I’ve already forgotten), a Chinese film (ditto), and a video game titled something like Major Felony Gangsta. Bernadette doesn’t understand how a video game can be regarded as a “narrative,” ludic or otherwise. But the student asserts that all three “texts,” as she calls them, will be shown to be ideal vehicles for the exploration of the world of ludic narrativity, said world having been discovered by a couple of no-name theorists in whose ground-breaking footsteps she will be pleased to follow. This is what passes for significant novelty in these parts, though really the project promises to be a hunting-and-gathering exercise, which will nevertheless pass easily, if recent history is any guide.
But not if Bernadette can help it.
“Need to take a stand on this one,” she’s saying. “Are we now the Department of Everything but English Literature? Or, well, not just English Literature, but you know what I mean.”
She has me pegged for an ally. We both teach Creative Writing (me, fiction; she, poetry). We both publish in unpopular areas (me, on obscure Canadian fiction writers; she, poetry). That is, she publishes poetry itself, not articles about poetry. Her most recent book, Rampsing along the Landwash, was widely praised on the mainland for its attempt to preserve authentic Newfoundland speech (though “widely,” as applied to a volume of poetry, is of course intrinsically hyperbolic). And precisely what the mainland reviewers knew about authentic Newfoundland speech was somewhat unclear. Perhaps they were relying on the author’s preface, which stated that “where possible, every noun, verb, adjective, and adverb is taken from The Dictionary of Newfoundland English.” Only one commentator slyly noted “a certain gimmicky quality.” The book was nominated for a major award, which fact Bernadette took as supreme validation of her literary career, despite her contempt, in other contexts, for “the mainland literary establishment.”
In any case, she’s long since forgiven me for my own mainlanderness. We have too much in common: our propensity for professional self-marginalization, our teaching interest in actual literary creation be it ever so humble, and—unspoken, but overriding everything—our allegiance to the old-time religion of humanist values.
So why am I reluctant to ride along with her on this one?
“Lister’s research,” she snorts.
“Well that’s not really relevant to the proposal, is it? The student—”
“It’s all part of the same thing, Hugh.”
Lister is interested in postscripts. He believes postscripts are best studied separate and apart from the letters to which they are appended. He is reputed to have developed complex theories about the aesthetics of postscripts and their cultural importance. The humble postscript, hitherto disregarded by conventional scholarship, can say much about a civilization at its most inadvertently self-revelatory, he thinks.
Bernadette is staring at me, daring me to contradict her.
“Uh, times change, right? It is 2006. And yes, I am ashamed to say that’s all I’ve got. Sorry.”
She’s starting to get angry now, though she’s struggling to project an expression of goodwill. Haven’t we been on the same side for nearly two decades, she seems to be asking. And haven’t I long since forgiven her for the satirical poem about a Creative Writing instructor from the mainland named Hubert, who sought to convince his students that publishing outside Newfoundland might be a good thing, and as punishment was tortured and then dismembered by several female spirits of place with unpronounceable names from Irish mythology? Well, haven’t I?
What she says is: “I would have expected more of you.”
“Look, Bernadette, I don’t mean to be flippant here, but the thing is, if we try to draw a line in the sand on this one, we’re going to end up looking like twin Canutes with the tidal wave of 1929 bearing down on us. What’s the point?”
I’m quite proud of myself for this, the “twin Canutes” idea stressing our putative common cause, and the tidal wave reminding her of my hard-won immigrant’s knowledge of all things Newfoundland. But she’s not mollified.
“Fifteen years ago, or even ten,” she says, “you wouldn’t be talking like this. You wouldn’t have given up.” There’s a note of sad reproach here. I’m being reclassified under the rubric of “lost cause.” She’s ready to make a more serious move toward Beothuk Physio.
“I’ve seen the future,” I tell her. “It has an endless supply of cool T-shirts and an insatiable desire to inflate the importance of the trivial.”
But she’s already limping away as I finish.
“I agree about the hyphens,” she says, over her shoulder.
Driving home along Elizabeth Avenue, I feel a certain low-key guilt-related pang of sorrow at having let Bernadette down. She’s right, after all—our profession, it sometimes seems, has been sliding downhill for about forty years now, with increasing velocity lately. But I’m right, too. With three years to go in my career, why bother circling the wagons? No cavalry will come riding over the hill. Chief Lister Craddock and his tribe will prevail. The chronicle of the Battle of Destabilizing Indeterminacy will be written in a language unintelligible to me. But I won’t be around to read it anyway.
This thought cheers me up somewhat, as I cruise past a building that used to be a high school but is now, if I’m not mistaken, an old folks’ home, nice visual metaphor for the transition I’m about to undergo. A new life awaits, and although it’ll be much shorter than the old one, it won’t involve making a fool of oneself in front of groups of forty or fifty inattentive twenty-year-olds. What it does involve remains, of course, an open question. But it will be new.
And from this perspective, how unnatural does my professional life now seem. Forcing people to read poems, stories, novels, herding them into classrooms and insisting they pretend to listen to me talking about them. How cruel. And what a disservice to the authors, to their works. As if literature existed to fuel an obsolescent machine in an obscure corner of a factory whose products no one can see. Something out of Orwell. The Ministry of Whimsicality. The Department of Pointless Wordmongering.
Three years to go.
Up the hill on Mayor Avenue, past the cemetery on the left, the new tiny overpriced row houses on the right, past the aging nondescript residential blur higher up (yes, yes, each dwelling no doubt containing its precious cargo of unique misery and—long shot—joy, unknowable to the dilettante passerby), then around the corner onto Freshwater, and home.
Maureen, the love of my life, and “partner” of four years (impossible not to say the word as though there were quotation marks around it) comes out of her study to greet me, face serious.
I’m not sure I’m ready to hear whatever it is she’s about to tell me. There’s a natural severity to it, her face, the features a tad sharper than what would be considered ideal by whoever it is who determines these things. At first glance there’s something formidable in the blue gaze, something in the expression that speaks of prudishness, as in “I have more important things to do than descend to that level.” But then you notice the lips, full, lush, sensual despite—one thinks, but for only a moment—the probable desire of their owner. The shoulder-length dark-blondish hair seems designed to have one’s fingers immersed in it. (By “one’s” I mean, of course, mine.)
I stand there, besotted. I want to hug her but resist the impulse. (That serious face!) Then she speaks.
“Sandra called.”
Sandra is my ex. We’ve been apart for close to twenty years. Just now she should be regally ensconced in Ontario cottage country with her second husband, Keith. Enjoying martinis on the deck overlooking the lake. No, it wouldn’t be martinis. What would it be? I’m drawing a blank. Lemonade, probably, it’s an hour and a half earlier there. She doesn’t call often.
“They’re all right,” Maureen says, responding to something in my expression. I know she’s referring to my daughter, Emily, and her two kids, as well as Sandra and (last and least) Keith. “But somebody died. I wrote it down.” She produces a slip of paper. “Clifford…Clifford MacIntyre?”
Now here’s a surprise. Haven’t been in touch with Cliff since before Sandra and I split up. I feel a certain pulse of irritation. He’s my age. Was my age. Where does he get off, doing something like that? It’s not time for people my age to die, certainly not people I know. Knew.
Maureen is watching me, tactful.
“Who was he?”
She’s wondering if she should throw her arms around me as I high-dive into grief or maybe hold back to see if it’s that important after all.
It’s a little hard to explain. I knew him when we were kids, in Ottawa. Then much later in grad school at UBC. After having no contact in the interim. Something uncanny there, someone turning up at two widely separated periods in my life, I’ve always thought, the sort of coincidence that might be allowed once, but only once, in respectably literary novels.
Maureen is waiting for more. In a certain kind of fiction she would be “raising a quizzical eyebrow.” Except there’s nothing quizzical about her eyebrows even when they are raised, which they’re not. Blunt, assertive eyebrows, that’s what she has. She doesn’t say anything, but she wants to know what happened to the last twenty years.
“Sandra and Cliff’s wife, Arlene, were sort of friends, too, so when we moved here it was Sandra who kept up the connection, and then when we split up, well…”
I don’t finish the sentence because I don’t know how. Why didn’t I call Cliff once in a while? Or write. And then when email came in, why didn’t I use that?
“I really have no explanation,” I end up saying. “I don’t know why I let things slide. So what else did Sandra say?”
“Not much. She gave me Arlene’s address. In case you want to get in touch. Didn’t know much about how it happened, except it was sudden and in a hospital. He was sick and went in for some kind of tests, and something went wrong, she thinks.”
So it wasn’t anything as arbitrary as being hit by a bus. It was something to do with an aging body ceasing to function. Fuck.
“Feel like a drink? By the way, my new dentist loves my gums. They make her happy.”
Cliff MacIntyre, mon semblable, mon close-to-frère. Well, not that close. And not all that semblable, either, except in our boyhood interests and later our choice of profession. From the ages of eight to sixteen, when his family moved away, we interacted almost daily as classmates, teammates, guys hanging out. No contact for almost ten years, and then from ages twenty-five to twenty-nine, our time overlaps in a doctoral program at the other end of the country. Is there not an aura of significance attending such coincidences? Perhaps not. And now, thirty-plus years later, someone thinks it’s important for me to know about his death. No need to ask for whom. I get it.
The image that comes first is of Cliff at fifteen, wearing a torn football practice jersey, the left shoulder pad protruding. The background is vague, suggestive of overcast, wind, and drizzle. It must be the field behind the school, but no one else is present. He’s holding his helmet in his right hand as if gesturing to me, but the movement is frozen as though I’m looking at a portrait. I have no idea what the gesture might mean. He’s tall, slim, has black hair and brown eyes. He seems about to speak. The jersey is mostly black, but gray around the shoulders. The helmet is green, and I think of the cheer: Green and white, green and white / For what we want we always fight. His expression is serious. He’s an intense guy, and what he wants to tell me—in this me-produced internal pop-up version of the truth—is important but also (the eyes seems to imply) may be the sort of thing that might inspire a wry smirk.
Possibly it’s: See, there’s no more to it than we thought. Or: I knew you’d be doing something like this when you heard. Or: Have the sense not to make too much of this. Or: Wouldn’t you know, I got here first.
We met in the early fifties in a suburb in the south end of Ottawa, the baby boom in full swing, new unpaved streets plunging into wooded areas, new houses springing up constantly, each one seeming to spawn one to six children overnight. The house my family moved into was the second-last one before civilization dead-ended in what we called the bush. Within months the street was a hundred yards longer, and the smell of construction, of clean new wood, was everywhere. We’d collect soft-drink bottles left by the workmen and turn them in for two cents apiece at the nearest convenience store, a twenty-minute trek away.
Cliff was there before me, as were Rex and Jimmy, the four of us at eight or nine forming a natural community, often augmented by others. We’d play hockey on a pond, that cliché of Canadian childhood, not really a pond but a miniature frozen swamp useless to builders, the puck endlessly disappearing into snowbanks, rocks for goalposts, no raising above the knee allowed. The stuff of which bullshit eulogies are made.
As though anyone would ask me to deliver one. And what to say? He was a person of reticence. A man of self-control. He never, as far as I can recall, lost his temper, or acted in a way that was petty or spiteful or intended to wound. He seemed not to function on that level. Would that be enough?
“I can see I’m not making much sense,” I say, when I’ve told Maureen this much.
She’s too tactful to agree. She’s a poet, too. This town is full of them. During the time I’ve known her, her work has gradually morphed from a stolid, outdated feminism to something in the ballpark of the mystically gnomic, a realm where the verbal equivalent of silence is oddly sovereign. If that makes sense. Or even if it doesn’t. I can take no credit for this evolution, as she herself is quite capable of pointing out. And now it’s okay to hug, the warmth and softness and solidity of her making everything fresh again, as it always does.
It’s entirely characteristic of her that, post-hug, she responds to my comment by going for crystallization.
“So if you had to sum him up,” she says, “in a phrase or something, the defining quality of his life, let’s say, what would you say? Quick, don’t think, just blurt it out.”
And without thinking I say: “Awkward incompleteness.”
In the evening, eightish, the doorbell. Maureen and I in the living room, reading—or, in my case, pretending to read; scattered inconsequential memories of Cliff keep intruding. The ring is followed by a knock, a loud one. We look at each other. I roll my eyes. We know who it is. Or we’re ninety percent certain.
“That would be Andy,” one of us says, as though delivering the punchline of a long-shared joke.
Andy Lawson, who’s lived next door for the past six months, has never figured out our street’s unwritten code of etiquette: spontaneous encounters with neighbours are to be conducted courteously but must be brief and superficial. Yes, if in winter someone gets stuck backing out of a driveway while you’re shovelling your own, you stop and help to push. Yes, if on a windy day someone’s empty garbage can rolls down the street, you rescue it. If an adolescent girl lives close to a house with younger kids, babysitting may be arranged. But that’s it. No neighbourhood parties or barbeques, no having people from across the street over for drinks. No casual socializing.
None of this has registered with Andy Lawson.
Several times a week—or so it seems; we don’t keep stats—Andy will come to the door, or, if one of us is outside, call over the back fence, wanting to chat, inviting us over (“Who’s up for a beer?”) or inviting himself over on some pretext (“Can I pick your brains about composting?”), usually cheerful, and always—as far as we can tell—genuinely interested in how we’re doing, to the point of plausibly deniable impertinence: “How’s your day been? What are you up to?”
None of your business, Andy. Piss off.
No, of course we don’t say that. But often we’d like to, or at least I would. Maureen is more hospitable, in large measure because she wants to find out what makes him tick. So far she’s been coming up empty. At first she thought it may have been that, as a mainlander (Andy’s from Calgary, has some executive job in the oil industry), he was perhaps trying to play the role of some stereotypically gregarious, over-friendly Newfoundlander. But she no longer thinks that, having established that Andy is basically clueless about anything to do with Newfoundland. He seems to have had no preconceptions about the place at all, nor does he seem interested in learning about it. “He hasn’t noticed that he’s not still in Calgary” is how she put it after a frustrating (for her) conversation this month. “There’s a certain bland geniality to him,” she’s said, and that phrase has become a staple of our Andy-related banter.
He’s younger than we are, early thirties, Maureen estimates. And good-looking in a nondescript way, she’ll add. I’m not sure what she means by that. He’s tall, maybe an inch or two over six feet, but somehow fragile-looking, thin, very slightly stooped. He’s bald, his scalp often seeming preternaturally shiny as he peers down at the world. There’s an engaging aura of eagerness about him, his facial expressions somehow communicating the idea that he can’t wait to see what will happen next. His blue eyes will narrow slightly, evoking the image of a bird of prey focusing on an unsuspecting field mouse, his long nose contributing something to the effect. He claims to have a girlfriend but we’ve never seen her. She’s in Toronto, he’s told us, a grad student, will be joining him soon, the date never specified. In the meantime her absence gives Andy innumerable excuses to badger Maureen with questions about traditionally female household matters, details of furnishing and décor, learning from what he calls her “invaluable advice.”
Maybe he’s just lonely, we usually conclude, though we both suspect there’s more to it than that. “Maybe he’s just like that.” Whatever that means.
All this goes through our minds—or at least mine—when the doorbell rings and the knock ensues.
“You’ve got the short straw,” Maureen says, meaning that I’m closer to the front door so I have to go.
“Howdy!” he says when I open it. I think he’s being ironic, but I’m not sure.
He makes as if to move forward, but I stand my ground. Once he’s in, he’ll be difficult to dislodge.
“Hi there, Andy,” I say, hoping to convey pro forma politeness underscored by the heartfelt message that trespassers will be prosecuted. And yet, as I say this, I’m filled by the sense that, despite everything, I actually like the guy. It’s as though he needs to be there before I can remember that. All of a sudden I don’t want to turn him away, don’t want to disappoint him.
“Hugh, I’ve got a favour to ask.” He says this in the tone of someone revealing a distant yet disgraceful indiscretion, the sort of thing to be discussed in low and serious voices.
“Yes, Andy?”
“My sprinkler. It’s not working. Is there any possibility…?”
“Of course, of course.” What a relief. I can take him directly to the shed, avoid the trauma of having him in the house. Maureen will be pleased.
And we haven’t made it to the shed before I’ve spilled the beans about Cliff’s death and the unsettling effect it’s had on me.
“That’s tough,” he says. “I guess it’ll take a while to process that.”
Yes, he says “process.” But his heart’s in the right place, I’m pretty sure.
He takes the sprinkler away, and I go back inside.
“Thanks for taking one for the team,” Maureen says.
Long after midnight, Maureen asleep, I stumble half-awake into the kitchen, open the fridge door, fumble with the orange-juice container. The light preternaturally bright. The roof of my mouth has never known moisture. This is what I get for not drinking anything before trying to sleep. Of course if I had drunk something I’d now be in the bathroom, thinking once again about the Philip Larkin poem about peeing in the middle of the night. In old age.
I don’t think he wrote about groping for orange juice in the wee hours. Maybe I’m striking a blow against the death impulse (if it exists), refusing to capitulate to whatever urge compelled him to write.
Cheers, Philip, I think, raising my small glass. Too bad you can’t join me.
I remember a TV series Sandra and I used to watch, back in the eighties. One of the characters died suddenly but came back to one of his friends, climbing out of a grandfather clock and spouting a few pretentiously enigmatic lines before disappearing forever. I refuse to let that happen.
Cliff. If you’re lurking in the dishwasher, stay in there, okay? I won’t even check.
And what should be said in these circumstances anyway? I’d have to go back about a half-century for an answer to that one. Our grade-eleven Latin teacher was a just-off-the-boat Scot (in those days it might even have been a boat) called Mr. MacSweetie, whose name was the clearest case of false advertising we’d ever seen. Bright, acerbic, simmering with a sense that his merit would never be recognized in the secondary schools of Ontario, he was, despite his contempt for us, deeply in love with the likes of Catullus, Horace, and company.
“Consider the sound of the phrase,” I remember him remarking as we plodded through a Horatian ode. “Durum est. It is hard. Yes. Durum est. You can hear big heavy doors banging shut. Durum est.”