22.02.12
From "A Last Look Around"
I left the city for the country in the 1980s, preferring at that point, I guess, to watch the carnival at one remove, and haven’t shifted from typewriting essays to word-processing screenplays, as so many good folks have. Indeed my politics and style of dress (both shabby Ivy) have scarcely changed since I left college. I pounded cross-country during the 1950s; heard Martin Luther King deliver his radiant speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963; protested against Vietnam; and saw tickertape parades for FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, plus King George VI and Charles de Gaulle. Didn’t do drugs, but saw action enough, and didn’t drop out of the domestic brouhaha until ten years ago.
I wanted to know shadbush from elderberry, dogwood from chokecherry, bluebirds from indigo buntings, yellowthroats from yellow warblers, the French horn from an English horn, a trombone from a sousaphone, Red Grange from Red Barber, and Newt Gingrich from Joe McCarthy. We opt for what we want as daily conversation in the privacy of our minds, and whether on most days we get to watch the sunrise and listen to a snatch of the genius of Bach. It’s not expensive to pay attention to the phases of the moon, to transplant lemon lilies and watch a garter snake birthing forty babies and a catbird grabbing some, or listen to the itchy-britches of the Canada geese as autumn waxes. We will be motes in the ocean again soon, leached out of the soil of some graveyard, and everlastingly rocking.
Source: Seven Days