Journal of a Sabbatical

October 29, 1998

an afternoon

the book pile

Copyright © 1998, Janet I. Egan

My Dad would have been 74 today. It seems strange to think of him old. For some reason this makes me think about fishing. We used to get up really early in the morning on the first day of fishing season and head to Lake Cochituate or Walden Pond (do they still allow fishing there I wonder?). The rest of the time we fished when we felt like it, which suited me because even then I was not into getting up early.

I was reading a passage from Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers the other night about watching a fresh water sunfish hovering over its nest and I had this sudden vivid memory of watching a sunfish doing that constant sculling motion to stay in one place against the current in shallow water close to the river bank. I remember it as a golden and copper color that blended with the stones and sand on the bottom. Thoreau describes it as "green, red, coppery and golden". It was a memory of such stunning brightness that it seemed more like a divine revelation than a memory. And I thought of my Dad.

Thinking of Dad, I think of fish. Thinking of fish, I think of Dad. He was a fishing kind of Dad I guess - as opposed to a "fathers playing catch with sons" type of Dad, or a remote work-all-the-time sort of Dad, or whatever stereotypes there are... Fishing and of course tinkering with things in the basement and the garage and designing and building inventions to accomplish whatever task was at hand.

But fishing has been on my mind anyway as I'm midway through reading Song for the Blue Ocean and getting more and more worked up about the declining fisheries. Not just cod, which already collapsed, but bluefin tuna and swordfish... all east coast issues I already knew about... and the Pacific salmon, which I sort of vaguely knew had problems and now I'm getting depressed about. It's amazing how if you screw with just one piece of the whole system, all hell breaks loose and the balance of nature goes haywire.

Reason enough to be sitting at the counter in Starbucks without my nose in Song for the Blue Ocean today. That and this gigantic bump on the back of the left side of my head - and the headache that goes with it. It's huge and swollen and painful to touch and I don't remember hitting my head or anything. I don't even notice Tom and Ned come in until they come over and invite me to join them.

Ned is working on a collection of his poems. He's bought Tom lunch - fried clams, french fries, and onion rings - in exchange for some help in organizing the collection and choosing titles for the sections and so on. They offer me some of the fries and rings (I don't eat anything I might come back as and I'm pretty sure I'm going to come back as a quahog :-)). Ned reads his poems to us and we come up with a new idea for the section titles. Some of the poems I've heard before. I especially remembered one about a barn,which he'd read at the noon time poetry reading in the Andover Historical Society's barn.

Before I know it, two hours have gone by and my parking meter is about to expire. So is Ned's so we walk over to the parking lot behind the old town hall to feed the meters. Tom is not parked in a metered space so he guards our space and the comfy arm chairs by the front window. We spend another hour or so going over Ned's poems and discussing the failure of capitalism and the decline of civilization.

Somehow we got into talking about Kerouac. Ned is not as fond of Kerouac as Tom and I are. In fact, he hasn't read him. The conversation drifts around. We're done with the poems for now. Ned wants me to read an article about Fred Rogers in Esquire and announces he is going over to the Andover Spa (which has a great magazine section) to buy a copy for me. We both tell him Kerouac is on the cover of The Atlantic for November - I heard about this at Lowell Celebrates Kerouac - Sterling Lord and John Sampas were talking about it. Ned tells us to stay put while he goes to the Spa. He comes back without Esquire - they're out of the current issue - but with two copies of The Atlantic, one for each of us.

The afternoon starts to fade toward darkness and get cold. But it feels like an afternoon well spent.