Dear Diary: Driftwood
In one of the best developments of 2010, my grandson has taken possession of the driftwood lamp. The driftwood lamp, brought back from Florida by my grandfather and my mother when they took a road trip down there, in 1956 I think (the year after my grandmother died), sat on my “bureau” (chest of drawers) for well over fifty years now. It’s fair to say that it required adult sophistication for me to like the thing; my nature is the very opposite of “free form.”
Miraculously, the lamp and the chest were not separated until last fall, when Quatorze convinced me that the lamp was wildly out of place in the blue room. I had to agree — it was really rather kitschy. Not the lamp itself, but the placement of such a piece of beach-house furniture in sit-up-straight library. So we put it in storage. (On 13 October! I should have put it later than that.) I hated that it wasn’t being used, but I wasn’t about to give it away.
Did Megan ask for it? I doubt it, but I don’t recall for certain. It doesn’t matter. Will is stuck with it now.
***
I had planned to spend the day helping Megan work from home, at her house, but the weather was frightful, and I needed a day to myself. So did Megan and Will, as it turned out — and we all stayed home. I got a fair amount of conscientious work done, but I also spent hours in what, quite seriously, I’ve come to call driftwood mode, not in honor of the lamp, by any means, even if it’s a word that probably wouldn’t have come to mind without it. Driftwood mode involves bobbing among stacks of things and seeing what’s in them. I don’t actually do anything; like a doctor, I palpate. What’s this book? Where does this go? How much of this stuff can I throw away? There is really no sense of “project” about this drifting from pile to pile, but I managed to get quite a lot done.
Don’t think me too virtuous. I was avoiding something: the final forty-odd pages of James Hynes’s Next. There’s no point to explaining why, because every literate person will know what I mean before the year is out. Next is an amazingly strong book, one of a handful (at least) of novels by writers somewhat younger than I am that seem to sweep away all the efforts of the generation older into a dustbin of peculiarity. Vonnegut, Barth, Updike and Roth — wankers all in comparison to artists such as Mr Hynes, writers with a profound regard for the material world — only Updike shared their attentiveness to it, but he lacked their interest in it. But when I saw where Next was going, I was angry — angry! — and had to put the book down. That was late last night. I spent a lot of today in mourning. And I still have to read those forty-odd pages!
***
At one time — did I ever tell you? — I was known as Otis. “Big Otis,” to be exact. I certainly didn’t know what I was doing in those days, or where I was going.