I have been twice informed that we are way overdue for a check in on the kitties. This is, of course, the most popular weekly feature on the site, woefully neglected these last few weeks, and how dare I? “Oh. big cats, oooooh. Not the point, friend.”
Twice I have been thusly informed.
Mainly by Phoebe, sitting on the stairs, as if to say “What gives?”
And also by Poseidon, who can’t even cast his gaze upon me in disbelief.
The cats are doing great, even if they have been thusly neglected. Oh, so tragically neglected, just ask them.
I am sadly nearing the end of North Toward Home. I want to continue, but I want it to continue, you see. It’s an odd sensation, even as I have a small stack of other Willie Morris books in the To Read collection. I don’t pretend to understand the phenomenon, not wanting to finish things I enjoy. Is this a vein of anti-completism? An unwillingness to part beloved things? There are TV shows I’ve never finished for the same reason. If I don’t watch the finale or read the last chapters, it is all still out there and we never have to part.
Here he’s talking about his friendship, and his readings, of Albert Murray and the great Ralph Ellison.
I haven’t read this memoir before, but it isn’t my first time around with Willie Morris. I know the broadest strokes of his life and have a comfortable understanding of the style he’s using in this book. In the last 40 pages of so, which I read tonight, he’s written about the changes coming to the upstate community in New York where he’s bought a farm to escape the harsh realities of the city. He wanted to give his son and family a life, while he took the train 70 miles into town. He detailed seeing accidents on the train, the shifting attitudes of people as they got closer to the city, or closer to their homes. He wrote about how he learned about the sniper shooting at his alma mater, the University of Texas, while on the train. He wrote painfully, rawly, about how aghast he was, while his fellow passengers noted the news, and moved on. Suburbia is creeping in on that farm, which is too close to the big city, and too far away from the idyllic small town world he grew up in. He wrote about that too, watching the developers drive out, point this way, look at maps, buy that plot, cut those trees.
“It was impossible,” he wrote, “not to become deeply attached to this old country of the Indians and the Dutch and the Yankees, to the quiet hills and farms of western Connecticut, to the great sweep and flow of the Hudson Valley.”
He quotes the passage from Sleepy Hollow, about “A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere.” Morris tells us that reading Washington Irving to his son on a windy November night, writing that he was glad, for the sake of the child, that a real writer had lived in the neighborhood years before.
By then, before then, it had grown obvious where he was going, but it was breathtaking all the same.
The thunderclap of rightness, which he says came upon “not apocalyptically but slow as can be, slow as good sourmash gets its mellowing or as a young man matures and finds balance” is, somehow, why I don’t want to finish the last pages of the book.
I had a fast little ride this morning, getting in a quick 19 miles before work. I set PRs on four Strava segments, including on two climbs.
It felt like I could have done a lot more, but for time.
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 87 routes down, 42 to go.
Finally, we continue to catch up on the Re-Listening project. Each CD, in the order in which I acquired them. It’s a thing to do in the car, and to write about here. Mostly it’s music and memories and a bit of whimsy, which is what music should be about.
The memory I have with this CD is that I picked it up off a giveaway table because the cover art was great. Otherwise, I have discovered, over and over, try as I might, that Michael Hedges just isn’t for me.
But if you like technically proficient guitar work, new age lyrics and a classically trained flute, the posthumously released “Torched” might be for you.
