Alas, the young-male metaphor is, in fact, just a metaphor for this gray-headed sixty-five-year-old. Yet the feeling of that restless sexual motive is real and does, as I say, seem apt for the élan vital (or something) that was sweeping through me...Was sweeping through me? Yes, now it seems already to have died down and left me in its wake rational and contemplative. But hopefully not spent. So many ways to go, in which to head?
Home
On a particular day in early May our move from the house of twenty-five years to the temporary apartment (on the way a few weeks later to the new house abuilding) arrived at that point where we had to start sleeping in the apartment, which I may have thought could never for a moment achieve the status of "home." On that day, and for a couple of days thereafter, both of us (my wife and I, not to mention perhaps our dog) were confused and ambivalent about what to call "home." The day after our first night in the apartment, for example, one of us said, as we returned to the old house for some more things to remove before the closing, "Let's go back home...."But for weeks now we've referred to the apartment as home. I call my wife from the sidewalk waiting for the bus to tell her I'm leaving work, I'll be home soon. Or last night, at the president's barbecue, we looked at each other and one of us said, "Ready to go home?" (Ready to go home and watch another episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"?....) I noticed, even on our vacation in California, and on Bainbridge Island, that we spoke of "going home," back to my sister's house from the harbor after getting off the boat from Santa Cruz Island, back to our daughter's condo from watching "Iron Man" at a movie theater, back from the Suquamish Museum or from the Naval Undersea Museum to my high school Latin teacher's condo we used on Bainbridge Island for our last three nights on the West Coast.
What makes a place home? Possibly it's having the sheets you slide between to sleep at night. Or the place where you park your toothbrush and dentifrice. Where the coffee beans are in the morning. Something utterly basic and essentially everyday. Even the visiting team's third-base coach unselfconsciously waves his (or her) runner..."home." Home is where you score?
“A man leaves home, follows a path, and turns left. Upon returning home, he is confronted by two masked men.”
ReplyDeleteDid you ever play this game? It’s a riddle. Your subject can ask as many questions as he likes in order to make sense of the above sentence, but you can only say “yes” or “no.”
Never heard of it [the game]. The paragraph seems to make immediate sense, but I assume that the "obvious" sense isn't the one the game's inventor had in mind. How am I supposed to know when "my subject" has made appropriate sense of it?
ReplyDeleteYou've played the game? Tell me about that, if you would. I mean, for example, did you play it at camp, around the fire at night? Did your grandfather put the riddle to you?
Is it simply an elaboration on the "make up a story" passtime? I can imagine the "subject's" fabricating a story in the process of formulating questions and hearing the yes/no responses.
Hmm, my fiction-writer's imagination can even conceive a short story written along these lines. Like something Donald Barthelme might have written (and maybe did write).
No, I just meant that riddling was a game, and that first sentence an example, prompted by your post.
ReplyDeleteSince you feel you solved it easily, try this one:
A man walks into a bar and orders a glass of water. The bartender pulls a gun and points it at the man's head. The man says "thank you" and walks out.
Ah, the non sequitur! I get it (I think).
ReplyDelete