We appear to have lost the instructions
It’s been awhile.
I was driving past the mall earlier this week, a day or two after a blizzard dropped a foot of snow on Portland. It’s been bitterly cold, so the snow is light and fluffy, drifting in the wind. I drove past a wasteland site with a singularly ugly building at the center. It’s a car dealership, almost complete, small signs saying “we’re hiring” and “coming this spring” dotting the entrance, mostly buried in the drifts.
There were two speakers at the club lecture night on Friday, both reporters. One was a retired foreign correspondent from National Public Radio, his voice bringing back memories of listening to the news in my bedroom on my old clock radio in the morning before school. The other was the chief foreign correspondent for Cuban national radio, a woman in her early thirties, which relieved me of the pressure of being the youngest person in the room. The crowd was typically Maine – that strange kind of liberal Republican that believes in small government and democracy and being left alone by the state, but also funds good roads and state parks and cringes at businesses which get too big or come from out of state. They’ll vote against the new casino for a variety of reasons, not the least of which the fact that the money for it comes from Maryland.
I read a book recently by a war correspondent, a woman, who had covered wars from the Spanish Civil to the Bosnian (the most recent Bosnian, not one of the innumerable ones prior to the most recent). It was not a book of her wartime experiences; rather, she had five essays of travels which all, in their way, had been for pleasure but which all, in their way, were less than pleasurable. She explained in the introduction that she wrote somewhat at the insistence of her editor and the demands of her finances, but also, she wrote because of what she termed her incredibly poor memory. All of the works had been written more or less when the travel had occurred – either as essays themselves or as collections of notes – but she remarked that memory was something that was always lost on her. The future, in her eyes, presented an infinite and surprising potential source of memories, which made her own past – closed as it was to new experience and limited by what her life had offered to her – seem unimportant to remember.
“Folks, you’re probably noticing a bit of turbulence. I’m going to put the seat belt sign on for the next, oh, fifteen minutes or so. Flight attendants, please take your seats.”
It’s getting a little bumpy over the Wind River Range in northern Wyoming as we cruise at 36,000 feet, on our way towards an early arrival in Seattle. I’m heading back for a four day weekend with my son, and I’m pretty excited about it. We’re going to go suit shopping; I’ve lost the weight equivalent of one and a half sons in the last few years and I now have only a single business suit that fits, which is a handicap. I have fond memories when I was little of accompanying my father to The Men’s Shop in Westbrook, Maine, when he needed a new suit, and I’m looking forward to taking my son to Nordstrom’s for a couple of hours of suit selection and fittings. Despite a rainy weekend we have a packed schedule, and on Sunday it’s my birthday, which I imagine will involve John Howie Steakhouse; my son heard a radio ad for John Howie Steakhouse when he was three and now he asks to go to John Howie Steakhouse for my birthday at least seven times a day when we’re together, regardless of the time of year.