… when I woke up this morning. A very sorry, beaten up, loosely paged paperback of The Hamlet has been in my bed library for some time now. Last summer I started it, intently meaning to read it. I’ve never read much Faulkner. He has a reputation for being hard to read and I can’t read much anymore. But I’d somehow come across someone reading part of one of his books - A Light in August and I had a paperback with no loose pages of that book and I read the whole thing. Light starts out with a pregnant girl seeking the absent father of her child and ends with an old lady’s house burning down. Meanwhile there is a lot of suffering and bad luck and mule misfortune and a sawmill and perhaps jail and a church - I don’t remember it awfully well. What I liked about Faulkner was how it turned out he was writing about my own life, how my part of the Mississippi and his were enough alike to shine as truth.
I’ll never be a strong Faulkner fan - we are too far apart in time and place to even imagine we are the same person, even for the time it takes to read a few pages of an immense, intense novel. But as the light comes into the day and the leafless trees trace themselves against the gray sky, and I wake up and decide what I can bring to the day, we, me and Faulkner, are the same person.
I sometimes think my writers and I are the most important parts of my life. They are what’s taken me from year to year. They allow me to see myself and the people I live with and know. They give me gratitude and empathy.
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I never really wrote anything. You’ve all read most of what I’ve written. Certainly a representative sample. And everything I’ve typed into the electronic volumes is either lost or lurking. I’m grateful for the opportunity I’ve had to do this. To show someone, somewhere what it is I think, what seems important in the moment.
I’m grateful to be able to see the sun come up, to walk through my hundred yeas old house, to hear the furnace in the stone basement purring its heat, to plan another day… to have more of The Hamlet to go back to. Even if I have to read the same page twice - I mean I get to read the same page twice. 230 is a good one.
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Blessings on us all.
I should buy some groceries. Son and I are out of pop and milk and junk food? Fruit I can still eat.
I have things to do. I need to find and write down and add numbers. I have a $300 bill to pay for what the insurance didn’t pay the local hospital for my 30?, that many? sessions of rehab. I miss my sit-down pedal and pull machine - the women were nice too. And the drive to town and the drive back home.
by the way - I’m getting phone calls from the zombie apocalypse. Or is it the zombie calypso? Either way.
I need to do some house walking - I have 28 bottle caps lined up on the corner of the table. I’ve been enjoying my stone steps and my dark furnace room and my lighter laundry and my infinite piles of sub- or pre- hoarding.
Have a good day.
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