Journal of a Sabbatical

October 24, 2000

wired, buzzed, caffeinated, and talking a blue streak

Today's Reading: Coming Home Crazy by Bill Holm

I missed Fowle's coffee so much while I was in China that I think I've been overindulging since I got back. Also I think I'm brewing it stronger because I'm guesstimating when I put the coffee in the filter. The coffee measuring spoon I've been using for years was gone, vanished, disappeared when I got back. That's a total mystery. I couldn't find it anywhere. So I've just eyeballed the ground coffee. My 1 and a half mugs full of coffee this morning probably had 6 cups worth of caffeine.

So I was already wired when I went over to Ned's house for the meeting of the Tom Mofford Appreciation Society. Tom wasn't there yet and Ned was having a political discussion (Nader vs. Gore and would a vote for Nader really be a vote for W?) with a friend of his. I can't talk politics without a cup of coffee in my hand, so immediately accepted when Ned offered it. We tried to explain to Ned's friend that I am to the left of Ned and Tom is to the left of me and La Madre is to left of everybody (this guy apparently lived in Newton at some point but miraculously had never heard of my mother despite her managing campaigns of Ethel Sheehan, Matt Jefferson, and I think Dick McGrath and various other politicians). Anyway, Ned suggested that Tom would probably write-in Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The weather is so perfect we cannot waste it by reading poetry in the basement so Ned suggests we sit outside while we wait for Tom. Tom arrives just as we've decided this and votes we meet outside. We sit on rocks in the backyard among the fallen pine needles and pass around my China/Tibet pictures and my picture book of the Potala while I regale them with trip stories. Neither Tom nor I have heard Ned play the trumpet yet (this is his mid-life crisis instrument) so we ask to hear it and he obliges. He can actually make music come out of it. Trumpet seems like such an unlikely thing to take up at 50 but he's making it seem easy. It sounds even better inside the garage. Tom says this is probably where the term garage band comes from. I don't think you can be in a garage band at 50 though!

The lure of the book-filled basement finally prevails so we move inside for awhile to see how much Chinese poetry Ned has - not enough. I propose once again that Tom do a performance piece based on the titles of the books in Ned's collection. He says he'll do it for the next poetry event except the next event is something Tom Edmonds is doing at the Whistler House museum in which poets choose a work of art in the Whistler House collection and write a poem based on it. Unless there's a work of art related to Ned's book collection we'll have to wait until the event after next.

The idea of writing in Ferlinghetti has not occurred to Tom but he's enthusiastic about it when I bring it up. I wonder if it's too late to start a national write-in campaign?

Tom reports that he has seen Patrick more recently than Ned or I have. Apparently he has a girlfriend and a beard now that he's away at Harvard. No report on the quality or quantity of his recent poetry.

Suddenly it's after 3:00 in the afternoon! Where did the day go? I've been chattering a blue streak about my trip, performance poetry ideas, official languages, politics, and religion. It's rare that I talk more than either of the guys, but I am wound up. The meeting breaks up 'cause everybody's got fields and commitments or cows or whatever (I know nobody is getting the allusions but I'm still wired as I write this).

I grab some lunch at the Earth Food Store and cart it over to Starbucks to eat. Naturally I order coffee - half decaf, but still coffee. I'm just starting lunch and coffee when Queen Isabella (QI henceforth) walks in. Now I haven't seen him in months! He's been doing the coffee thing at 6:30 in the morning, when I am not up and he has classes all afternoon normally. He's only in the coffee shop because he let his 75 minute class out early on account of having a nosebleed (which seems to have stopped). I tell him to stay right there while I run back out to the car to get the trip pictures.

I talk a blue streak about my trip and show QI the pictures. We discuss The Dream of the Red Chamber (of which I read the first two volumes on my trip and will plunge into the third volume as soon as I can find a cheap used copy of it at Brown). We discuss his students, who don't find literature fun. I claim I can't imagine not finding literature fun. I've been enjoying alleged great literature so much lately. Of course he's teaching Spanish literature and I'm reading Chinese literature in translation, but still ... Students don't want to discuss the ideas in books? Why are they in college?

Oh, but wait, I hated literature, especially English lit, when I was young. My high school English teacher spoiled it for me. It was all about memorizing details to prove you'd read the book and not about discussing the ideas. And there was only one right interpretation of the main points. And, of course, no room for associating the themes to your own personal experience. But all these things are what QI wishes his students would do. Maybe they had bad high school English teachers too.

QI wants to know what my next trip is going to be. I have no idea. Seattle? Tuscany? Budapest again? All these are on the table. Me I still have jet lag. QI's next trip is to the Philippines this winter. I tease him saying I didn't know the Philippines played a big role in the life of St. Augustine. To my surprise, he responds that he is in fact doing an errand for the college and there is a huge Augustinian presence in the Philippines. Somehow I had the idea that the only Augustinians in existence are the ones down the street from me (QI's employers). Shows you how much I know.

And here I am still wired, buzzed, caffeinated, and talking a blue streak (not to mention writing a blue streak) when I should be settling down for a good night's sleep.