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| The City Mouse |
I must admit I was nervous six months ago. The city mouse
and I had not met in ten years. Our connection had been entirely by means of
e-mail on my part and written letters on her part.
She no doubt would notice the buzz-cut of my thinning hair, just
forming jowls, lips thinning, eyes narrowing, speech more deliberate, more
carefully considered and reflective, less spontaneous and daring, and I had
gotten a pair of new glasses, more modern than the old, round, owl-eyed looking
glasses I wore in college and after years.
I was prepared for some changes on her part too, though I
understood her to have been careful about her looks – sorry, her presentation;
not the same thing as “looks”, she often reminded me – from the early days of
our acquaintance. She was always modestly well dressed, never went out without
makeup and had shimmering, cornflower blue eyes.
Funny, you carry around in your mind an image of people that
does not change through the years, provided you do not see them again after a
long absence. Then the new presentation overtakes the old and you are momentarily
unsettled and confused, until you are able to make necessary mental and
emotional adjustments, after which things putter along as usual.
Would her new presentation shatter the old, I wondered?
Still, there is something about people that time’s transforming finger does not
touch, some solid, fundamental center of being – a witty way with words, imperishable likes and
dislikes, the result mostly of Johnsonian steel in the personality, common
interests, and such – that survive the passage of time.
We decided to meet at a diner just outside of Hartford.
She was unchanged, or the changes were so slight as to be unnoticeable.
The most captivating feature of the city mouse was her world conquering smile.
It altered instantly and radically not only her expressive face but also the
people around her.
The diner was relatively unchanged too – same oversized,
yellow sign, same bullet shape trailer, same staff. I thought to myself, as I watched
her get out of her car, perhaps a repetition would be possible. I knew what was
on her mind these days, and I knew we could still talk about things and remain
on speaking terms, increasingly impossible in the post-modern world. Post-moderns
rarely get off on the right foot with each other because, preferring assertion,
the rude imposition of personality, to
modesty, they are impatient and lack the kind of tender manners in which a
friendship with a stranger may bloom.
Our friendship already had long ago put forth blossoms. She lives
in Hartford, Connecticut’s capital city. I live in Vernon among the
proletariat. Both of us were born in Windsor Locks, within sight of my sun
spangled river. Our parents were on speaking terms with each other. She was a
brilliant student. Cursed with a shyness I never could shake, I was a just a
touch afraid of her, until she moved away. We wrote to each other, my shyness dissipated.
She was very kind.
It was the beginning of March, unusually warm, the sun
coursing in a darker than usual azure sky. She was wearing a dramatic, I
thought, flowered dress and there, wagging on her neck, glinting in the sun, was
the tiny, modest, gold cross that had caught my attention nearly five decades ago when we were students
at Danbury College, since renamed Western Connecticut State College, now a part
of Connecticut’s university system of colleges.
That March was the last month any of us would spend unmasked
and sequestered.
The diner was full, the surrounding space stirring with the
lawless chatter of human voice. I waved to her from the window. When the
waitress had seated her, her cross winked at me, she
smiled, and everything disappeared.
Her first words to me were, “I see you’ve lost some hair” –
a real ice breaker.
“Yes, it got thin. And one day, tired of pushing a few
strands across the wasteland above, I bought an electric hair clipper and cut
it down to stubble. I see you still have your cross.”
She fingered the cross.
“Yes. I tend to keep things. You should see the mantle over my
fireplace, very cluttered.”
“Do you still keep your diary as well?”
“Of course. We call it a journal now. It helps me to order
my thoughts. I’ve been wondering about you the last few days.”
“Oh?”
“In preparation for this rare meeting, I made some few notes." Here she noticed my discomfort and added... "mentally.”
“We have about an hour. More than that and the wait staff
begin to be anxious. They are in the business of making money.”
“So are we all. Thoreau use to say most ways of making money
lead downwards.”
Thoreau’s father, I reminded her, owned a pencil factory. He
probably put a few pennies away for a rainy day – and Thoreau. Henry David
pretty much invented a new way of making pencils, which boosted the family
business considerably. But he left the business and took up residence at Walden
Pond, where he wrote books that did not sell as well, during his lifetime, as
the pencils he had created.
“He found a generous patron in Emerson, whose house was a
little more elaborate than the shack Thoreau built at Walden Pond. I’m not sure
what moral we should draw from all this.’
She smiled again, and such was the brilliance of her smile
that the entire world blinked.
“The moral,” she said, “may have been that most ways of
making money lead downward.”
I attempted a compliment. “You don’t look very down and out.”
It was an easy meeting. Time, which alters everything in the
final act, hadn’t touched our long friendship. We began again where we had left
off ten years earlier. A doom note rose in my mind as we parted. Why should
time take all? We would begin a correspondence across the years.
“Can I write to you?”
“Of course.”
Life
goes on. Andree’s brother Ernie died in Florida. Titan, Andree’s guide dog for
the last dozen years, died as well. Our beloved priest, Father John Antonelle,
has been transferred out of St. Mary’s parish in Coventry to St. Mary’s parish
in Portland. And my cousin, the
city mouse, writes to tell me: “There are two kinds of cynics among us,
Republican cynics and Democrat cynics. The Democrats are better able than
Republicans to dress their cynicism in gorgeous, empathetic cloth. They are
here, they want us to know, to help with the problems they have caused. It all
reminds me of a quip by Karl Kraus on psychoanalysts – they are the disease
they purport to cure”
In an earlier letter, she wrote, “Whatever the problem is,
you may be sure that a political solution to it can only make matters worse.”
And she wonders why cultural antibodies in the United States
have not yet produced an Aristophanes or a Lucian, author of the biting
satirical play The Sale of Philosophers.
Instead we are confronted daily with unintentionally comic politicians. And our
too, too serious politics has murdered comedy. Lincoln could never have
survived this poisonous sobriety.
Fall has arrived. Brown leaves are scattered across the
property. I’m waiting for the wind to do the work of raking. The wood pile and
the furniture out front and down by the lake, now sprinkled with a bib of
leaves, have been covered with tarpaulins. We are waiting on winter. Certain as
the arrival of dawn and midnight, it will come and cover all in a blanket of purist
white silence.
Andree is having some difficulty in attaching the new dog’s
name, Dublin, to her commands, and the commands too have changed. Thank God and
Fidelco for Dublin, a sleek and attentive, male German Shepard with large eyes
and silver-tipped fur. Andree mentions to the many strangers who pause to
comment on the dog, “He is the only Irish German Shepard in Connecticut.”
Every so often, Titan’s name is mentioned. This is usual; in
our naming and our prayers, we cling to a safe and bountiful remembered past. I
have had two dreams in which my father was a presence. This is very unusual for
me. One does not dream of the center joist of a house. It is simply there in
one’s life, preventing the whirlwind from carrying away the heart's treasures; for that
is what a home is – a bank of treasures much more reliable than bank notes.
The pandemic, the city mouse tells me, is useful primarily
as a political hobgoblin to frighten people into a political posture of compliance and
submission, not to say that it is not a serious threat.
She certainly has her finger on something there.
Did I watch the last presidential debate, she asks?
God no!
To the country mouse,
Well then, you missed
a gaudy show, a significant part of it – Hunter Biden’s delinquencies, and his
father’s memory lapses -- unreported by Connecticut’s left of center media.
Trump was his usual solipsistic best. Biden looked as if he had been biting
bullets for weeks while hunkering down in his bunker. The less one sees of
Biden, the more popular he becomes. His is the first “front-porch-campaign” the
nation has seen since the McKinley’s 1896 campaign and the advent of 24/7 news.
The opposite is true,
of course, with Governor Ned Lamont. As befits an autocrat, he is seen
everywhere, rearranging the constellations in the sky, crowing up the sun,
destroying yet another business, citing for the hundredth time the death toll
in Connecticut, sixty to seventy percent of which is attributable to bad
political decisions made by the autocratic governor.
There will come a time
when even the most insensate retailer of fact in Connecticut realizes that
Coronavirus is not responsible for a single business closure in the state – all
of which have been shuttered by politicians, not a virus – and that our
economic malady is every bit as serious AND DEADLY as Coronavirus.
But not yet. Perhaps
after the November elections have been concluded to the satisfaction of the
state’s dominant left of center party, the truth may once again resurfaced and
break the hard-shelled exterior of campaign propaganda.
My city cousin certainly is right there. Coronavirus is a
viral infection, not a politician, and viruses, unlike governors out rigged
with plenary powers, are powerless to close by gubernatorial edict a school or
a nail salon.
A Hartford Courant front page, above the fold, headline
screams, “Just
how bad could the latest spike get?”
About a week and a half before Election Day, Lamont, it
would appear, has hoisted himself on his own petard. Connecticut’s Coronavirus
numbers, though still far below spring numbers, are rising steadily.
Connecticut is now “on the pathway to being bad.”
“I am concerned,” Lamont said. “I take nothing for granted.”
Sure, sure, but when will be pull the lockdown trigger? The Democrat dominated General Assembly has recently given the trigger happy governor five additional months as autocrat in chief.
“We need to slow the resurgence right away,” a Courant editorial barks this Sunday. Clamp down
on the number of people allowed at indoor gatherings; stop playing softball
with coaches and sport parent; order all schools to revert to hybrid learning
models, and stop saying the surge was “expected.”
Find a hole, jump into it, pull the hole in over your head.
Don’t worry about Connecticut’s economy. The state is in arrears in payments to
its public employees by about $68 billion; we are among the highest taxed, most
progressive states in the nation; businesses have fled the state for greener pastures
elsewhere; clamorous state employee unions are still petted by the progressive
politicians they help to re-elect; and the only sunbeam shining through the
darkness is that the real-estate sector is flourishing, because whipped
millionaire New Yorkers are fleeing their state and settling in Connecticut’s
Gold Coast, abandoned by companies such as GE and Raytheon Technologies, formerly
United Technologies.
Lucian, where are you?
... to be continued
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