by Brian Doyle
Inside all of us there are many children, some we used to be, and some made of our deepest dreams, and maybe who we are now sometimes needs what mesmerized us then; so the man at the breakfast table, with his sensible shoes and plastic cards, his cell phone and his pension plan, needs that eager heedless dreamy boy more than he knows, and maybe that boy inside him needs only the slightest invitation, the slimmest opening of windows, to leap out, happy and silly and wild; and there, tucked quietly in the corner of the business section, is the Port Calendar, a glorious window to the wondrous world. Fifty lines, at most, in two lean columns, the type as small and unadorned as a baseball box score — but in those workmanlike sans-serif lines there are oceans vast and wild…
The man passes the ketchup, finally, his son wondering what exactly has gone wrong with the paterfamilias this time; and the man drains his coffee, and distributes the rest of the paper around the table for the woman and the girl who will arrive momentarily, and he girds for work, phone in one pocket and wallet in the other, car keys ready to start the day; but he gently folds the Port Calendar into a tiny square the size of a postage stamp, and tucks it in a pocket, for there will come a moment, today or tomorrow or next week, when he will open it, and read the words Polar Queen and Paranagua, Veracruz and Shimonoseki, Busan and Brazil, and he will smell the sea…
A Note on the Similarity of Books to the People Who Read Them
They have faces, of course — covers for what is inside, and so often the cover belies the interior, just as the bright alluring faces of people often hide the seething and confusing stories beneath them.
And they have spines of various strengths and tensile pliability like we do, spines that sag and crack and creak, spines that are wonderfully strong and flexible for a few decades and then invisibly deteriorate and lose their glue; and they have arms, so to speak, a book opened wide very like arms flung open; and their back covers, so dense with explanation and blurb, look very like the hirsute backs of heads; and like people no book is exactly symmetrical, the printing of pages necessarily leaving the edges just slightly awry, as we are always, despite all preparation and presentation, slightly awry, one shoe tied loosely, the beard unevenly trimmed, one eye larger than the other, the spectacles askew, all the bills paid but the one that arrives with a snarl.
Some books as small as a hand, some as fat as a head, some broad as a beam, some very nearly the size of a coffee-table themselves; some faint as a whisper, some old and brittle, their skins leathery, their stitching unraveling; some so fragile that a good sneeze would reduce them to dust; yet the ancient fragile ones are so often the ones with the most dignity and the most remarkable stories inside, just like people.
Some blandly bound but roaring inside, some brightly bound but insipid, some missing pages, some amputated, some excoriated, some burned in piles, the ideas inside too incendiary for the authority of the moment. Some imprisoned for the ideas therein, some confined to cells. Some stolen, some kidnapped, some tumble into rivers and oceans, a few have traveled into space and hovered weightlessly under the patient and uncountable stars.
Some humble, some pompous, some evil, some crammed with inextinguishable joy; some born to delight children, some to poke the powerful, some to pierce the heart. Some have no words at all and some are so wordy as to be unintelligible. Some earnest, some nefarious, some renowned, most obscure. Some advance the universe in extraordinary ways, many distract and delay rather than enthrall or edify. Some filled with lust, some with song, some brave, some craven. Some famous for no reason, others incredibly unsung.
All have layers upon layers and are more subtle than they appear. Most get better the longer and deeper you pursue the story. Some end with a bang, some just slide quietly to a close, all are born in mysterious ways we think we can explain but really we haven’t the slightest idea how a wriggle of story wends its way into complex creation.
Some we cannot live without, some we leave after years of struggle, some we cannot comprehend or engage, some we cannot forget. Some we wish to have by our sides always, their familiar faces beaming nearby, their voices warm and wise, their lean spines welcoming your fingers, their very scent a redolent country you itch to visit and are loathe to leave. Yet some we dislike, some we detest, some we set ourselves against with faces like flint; many we ignore too easily, many we will never read, a million we will never know, such being the way of the world.
Some once meant everything and now mean nothing. Some grow quietly in our hearts as the years go by. Some spoke powerfully once and then faded. Some arrive suddenly, stunning and refreshing, from unexpected quarters of the compass, and you know in moments you will be friends for life. Some are dressed in motley and rags but a light shines forth adamant and strong; some are all thunder and no rain; some are wiser than their own words can measure.
All matter in ways great and small, as all house stories, and stories are what we are and how we speak and how we mill mundane into miracle.
We take them so for granted. We think new ones will always be freely born. We see them so often we forget how extraordinary they are; until, once in a while, maybe this morning, we think for a moment what the world would be like without them.
II.
NOTES ON WRITING
Apostrophism: a Note
My name is Brian, and I am an apostrophist. Unrepentant, unrelenting, and armed with huge honking magic markers in three colors, which I carry with me in the car in a brown bag for emergencies, like recently when I saw a mailbox with THE COONEY’S in big proud letters, and I went back there at dusk, on foot, and deleted the apostrophe, because it’s just wrong, and someone needs to blow the whistle on this sort of thing, or else we will all be back to wearing leisure suits again, and did that work out for us? It did not.
You could argue that the mailbox belongs to the Cooneys, and so, technically, it is a Cooney’s mailbox, and you would have a point, but not a very good one, as you well know, because the only other even faintly acceptable option is to reverse the S and the apostrophe, but that entails more work for me, and I have other fish to fry, like getting up on a ladder one of these nights with a can of white paint and painting over that five-foot high E at the end of the word PREMIERE in the phrase OREGON’S PREMIERE AUTO BODY SHOP, a sign in Sherwood that drives me stark raving muttering insane every time I drive past it, as my children can attest, sighing like ancient elephants.
I hear your gentle remonstration: who made you grammar cop of the universe, you pompous idiot? And the answer is, my dad, who initiated me into the inky corps of proofreaders and editors and apostrophists when I was but a pup, meekly holding his hand as he doffed his fedora and pointed out to the village baker that the word BAQERY was illegal and would soon draw the wrath of the intelligence services, and other moments like that, of which there are so many that they flock around me like jackdaws attacking a deacon wearing a coat made of meat.
I remember my dad writing many letters to the town elders until the sign at the end of our block that read YEILD was replaced, and I remember him leaving a copy of The New York Post in the confessional booth at church to shrive its many grammatical sins, and I remember him once, on a ferry in New York Harbor, posting me as a sentry at the end of the passageway by the restrooms while he took a bottle of Wite-Out from his pocket and painted out the A in the word WOMAN on the women’s restroom door, replacing it with a meticulous E, in pretty much exactly the same typeface. He was a wizard at typefaces, my dad, and, as he says, typefaces are good things to be wizardly about, as you just never know when a typeface emergency will arise, a lesson I have remembered ever since, and often chat about with dad as he plans his corrective adventures. One great thing about retirement, he says, is that you have a lot more time to go around and fix signs like THE LORD IS COMMING, and SALMON FOR SELL, and RUSH LIMBAUGH IS A DOOFUS, which should, of course, read RUSH LIMBAUGH IS A BLOWHARD WHO SHOULD BE SOLD TO SLAVERS IN THE FORMER RHODESIA.
One of my sons, I report with pride, appears
to have inherited the clan mania for accuracy, a virtue I discovered in the boy when he was only four years old, and we were poised at the capacious doorstep of a friend’s house, and as I nattered away about cabbages and kings and things, I noticed my son attacking the nameplate with a hammer, which he explained later was because it said THE MILLER’S, which was just wrong, dad, and if I don’t do something about it, who will? This seemed to be an inarguable point, so I didn’t argue it, especially as he still had the hammer.
What Writers Think
(All day long) Money money money money money money girls money money money money money money beer money money money money money money money beer with girls.
(At a reading) How many people are here? Will they buy my book? Does the microphone work? Do I need the microphone if only four people show up? Is everyone here related to me? What is everyone leaves during the reading? What if no one wants me to sign a book? What if all these people are here to return my book? What if they throw books at me? Is the microphone big enough to hide behind? Is my fly zipped?
(At a reading with other writers) Who goes first? Who’s the head-liner? Should I go first and get it out of the way and then sit and think about girls and beer or should I pretend to be the main draw? What if these other writers are poets and they drone on incessantly about their gall bladders and previous rafts of husbands? What happens in the question-and-answer period when someone asks a general question and there’s that uncomfortable silence as no one wants to be the assertive person who answers first? Should I jump in then and talk about gall bladders? I could tell a joke: there were these three gall bladders in a bar…there was a Catholic bladder, a Jewish bladder, and a Muslim bladder…
(At an awards ceremony) What if I win and have to give a speech and can’t get a word out and my gall bladder falls out onto the stage and shimmies off into the orchestra pit? Should I stoop to retrieve it or just let it go where it will? What if I don’t win? Do I have to be polite and unassuming or can I stand on my chair and scream imprecations? What if I win and do like Marc Acito did that time, run down the aisle and run up onto the stage and trip on the top step and go flying across the stage into the stunned arms of the mistress of ceremonies? What if I win and get up on the stage and start laughing so hard remembering how Marc Acito flew through the air that my gall bladder falls out?
(Wheedling a publisher) Because this is the greatest book that anyone ever in the history of the universe ever wrote, except for Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin. Because this book is so much better than a stick in the eye. Because this book is way better than any of the other books that you have published, one of which seemed to be the confessions of a gay heron. Because Ken Kesey is deceased and someone should write wild muddled novels about rain. Because I bought the beer today. Because there’s a shred of a chance we can persuade Gus Van Sant to make it into a movie because you know his aunt’s cousin’s previous rafts of husbands. Because the market niche for novels written from the point of view of Muslim gall bladders is, shall we say, wide open.
(In the middle of any piece of writing) O my gawd this is drivel. This is the worst muddle ever inflicted on an unsuspecting populace. I should crumple this and go into insurance. I should cease to write forevermore. I should be a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas. Maybe the Mariners are on. I should eat. Maybe I should take another shower. Who will ever pay for this muck? This is worse than anything Jerzy Kosinski ever wrote, and what could be worse than that? My gall bladder hurts. Just one more cookie. Is that the mailman? How do you spell labyrinthine? Should I do the laundry? Hey, Ichiro tripled!
(At the beginning of any piece of writing) This is the greatest idea ever! I am a genius! No one ever had this idea before! What a great first line! Being a writer is better than a stick in the eye! This is so exciting! Those words were never in that order in the whole history of the English language! That’s incredible! That’s astounding! Now what?
Mr Borges
One evening during my sophomore year at Notre Dame I emerged from my dorm room and for once did not wend like an arrow to the Knute Rockne Memorial Gymnasium, where I spent much of my time, nor to the South Dining Hall, where I spent much of my time, nor to any of my mysterious classes, one of which featured a man lecturing mostly in French about paleontology, a class I enjoyed though I spoke neither French nor paleontology, and another of which was a year-long seminar in William Faulkner with five students total, a course in which the five of us kept a surreptitious count of the number of times our professor began a sentence with the phrase Bill and I… no, this evening, this soft and redolent Indiana evening, I walked into Washington Hall, a rickety lovely wooden castle, which that evening was to host a writer from Argentina named Jorge Luis Borges. I was not then, at age nineteen, familiar with the work of Mr Borges, but I had accidentally read some of his stories in the library, someone kindly leaving his book open for me on a table and my attention being snagged like a jacket in a door, and I had really liked the way he surfed along the razor edge between fiction and reporting, his scholarly tone somehow making the most amazing pronouncements possible, and I thought I might as well wander over, while he was on campus, and tell him that his work, or what I had read of it, was not bad, not bad at all, which is high praise coming from a teenager, it still seems to me.
Washington Hall then, and perhaps now, was sort of a welter of stairs and doors and odd corners, and as I had never been in the hall before I wasn’t totally sure where I was to go to meet Mr Borges, but I figured there wouldn’t be all that many people there, I mean, how many people are up to speed on scholarly Argentine fantasists, you know? So I stood by a side door, thinking that probably I would be able to pick Mr Borges out of a group of passersby, and maybe the poor guy would even be on his own, and not know where Washington Hall was, so maybe I could be of use, somehow — an idea that had not occurred to me before, probably ever. So when a small older man in an excellent natty dark suit appeared, accompanied by a helper student with his hand on the older man’s elbow, I assumed, correctly, that the dapper older man was Mr Borges, and I said hey, Mr. Borges, how’s it going?
Very well, he said, in crisp English, a plus, for I did not speak Argentine.
I read some stories of yours the other day and they were pretty good, Mr. Borges, pretty fine altogether, I said. I thought I would come over and tell you that they were really pretty good. I bet not enough people tell you that they like your stories, if they like them. Sir.
Many thanks, he said, peering up at me, and I realized he was blind. The student who was helping him looked annoyed and sort of seniorish, you know that supercilious look that senior English majors have, like they are very soon going to be Major Novelists and you are a slug in the path of their impending glory, and he, the senior helper student, took a step toward the door, looking particularly supercilious, but I sort of liked Mr Borges and didn’t see any reason to cut the conversation short, so I held my ground.
Which stories did you like? said Mr Borges.
Well, sir, I don’t remember the titles, but there was a tiger on the cover of the book.
Ah, yes, tigers. Remarkable animals. Both alluring and terrifying at once.
That’s exactly right, sir. Maybe you should write more about tigers.
The senior helper student pretty much had smoke coming out of his ears at this point for some reason, and he tried to angle me away from the door with his shoulder, but I have brothers so I know from shoulders, and I boxed him out, and told Mr Borges that I too was a writer, and someday I would write books too, and I would send him one or two, if he wanted. He said that would be very kind of me, and then he asked me a question I never forgot.
Why are you a writer? he said, very polite. He was a very courteous guy.
I don’t know, sir. I just am. That’s what I want to be.
Get as close to the truth as you can, he said, which turned out to be the last thing he said to me, or me to him, because by now the senior h
elper student, who had been working hard on his footwork behind me, got the drop suddenly, and backed me against the railing, and popped old Mr Borges through the door into the hall before Mr Borges could even get off a parting hey or anything, and I didn’t get to say hey or thanks or good luck or anything to him either, which made me feel bad, because he was a really polite and courteous guy, and all in all you would think a blind older guy in a country not his own, accosted by a teenager who has read a few of his stories and cannot remember the titles, would not be quite so courteous, but he was, which I will always remember. Also get as close to the truth as you can seems like ever more excellent advice to me, so I share it with you, in memory of Mr Borges. He was a very courteous guy.
A Finger of Speech
…as one of my young sons says at the table one day, superciliously, that’s a finger of speech, to his twin brother, sneeringly defining a metaphor that just floated by, and away goes dad’s brain, sliding right off the table past the ketchup and off into space, where I contemplate the essential accuracy of this remark, for indeed there are fingers of speech, aren’t there? The middle finger of speech, used so very often with in many offensive and defiant and enraged manners; and the index finger of speech, indicating primacy or direction, or, if being wagged angrily, denial or disapproval; and the last finger of speech, accusatory or indicatory of prissiness; the left ring finger of speech, indicating marital status; the thumbs up and down of speech, indicating approval, direction, a Tom Robbins cowgirl heroine, or that you would very much appreciate a lift to town; and then there are fingers of speech in endless combinations, such as the thumb and forefinger indicating loserness, the index-and-pinky combo advertising a rabid affection for the University of Texas or gang affiliation (really the same thing), the circled fingers of zero, the circle and ruffled cockscomb that says okay!, the number of fingers brandished to number the items under discussion, the flourished forefingers of an Australian Rules football umpire affirming a goal, the forefinger-and-thumb pistols that people point at each other for no good reason, the fingered v of victory and peace, the massed ranks of fingers pressed together in prayer and supplication, the ordered ranks of fingers telling motorists to stop, the peremptory forefinger summoning a taxicab, the fingered triad by which we swear fealty and the Boy Scout Oath, the split fingers of the Vulcan salute by which we live long and prosper, the motley parade of fingers playing here’s the church and here’s the steeple open the doors and there are the people to a child agog…