A Nostalgic Road Trip

I usually post something about our travels.  This one is way overdue as in late September we took a 2,400 mile road trip catching up with old friends and revisiting favorite places, but also experiencing some very delightful times, unique to this trip.

We started out by having a dinner in Savannah with friends who we first met while boating in Connecticut, Suzanne and George, reminiscing about old times and philosophical discussions about the randomness of life which brought us to Florida and they to Savannah.  In spite of changes, health challenges we’ve managed to stay in touch and to be emotionally close.

This was an overnight stop on the way to our initial destination, Asheville, NC; staying first at a condo we once rented 15 or 16 years ago in the Asheville Racquet Club.  Very neat and clean, we shopped a little for breakfast stuff as we were very familiar with the whole neighborhood.  But where there was once a cow pasture opposite the condo there are now apartments.  In fact, the entire area south of Asheville has been built up, new neighborhoods and condos galore.  Traffic was a nightmare, although we were there before the peak fall season.

We called our old friends Irene and Pete who live in Flatrock to confirm lunch sometime during the week.  We spent our first Sunday walking all over downtown Asheville, grabbing a bite at Early Girl Cafe, having a cappuccino in our favorite bookstore, Malaprop, and just enjoying a town we had come to love. It’s become even more gentrified on the one hand, with pricey shops, restaurants, and an arts district, but still a destination for a hippie population of young people, reminding me of my days in the East Village of NY.

I’ve always made it a point when we’re in Asheville to buy a hardcover book from Malaprop, usually a signed edition, this time Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte.  The problem with purchasing a signed hardcover with a jacket is trying to keep it in pristine condition, so no notations and careful handling to preserve the cover in its original condition.  It’s the publisher in me that appreciates the physical attributes of a book, but not the book reviewer.  Nonetheless, I’ll have something to say about it as I make my way through it.  So many interruptions now, as I am finally getting things back together after the summer.

One day we took a familiar drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway up into the Pisgah National Forest and enjoyed a delicious luncheon at the Pisgah Inn with breathtaking views.  Everyone who has ever visited us while we rented previous years here, George and Suzanne and our son, Jon, were all treated to the views and food here. 

Vacations often allow us a special treat, like going to the movies!  So one afternoon, we found a nearby theatre, so close in fact; we could have walked there to see the newly released movie, Downton Abbey.  We’ve been stalwart devotees of the series and we totally loved a movie that seemed to tie up some loose ends.  We were in a comfortable condo, so between dinners at some of Asheville’s “hot” restaurants, we ran out for soups, sandwiches and salads sometimes.  We were very “homey”.

Time, time, time, what has it done to us?  We met our friends Irene and Peter for lunch mid week and unfortunately Pete has neuropathy in both feet and can no longer walk without a cane and aid.  Irene thankfully is in good health and had hardly changed.  We picked right up where we left off.  We saw them again our last night in Asheville at a fabulous Greek Restaurant right on the grounds of our hotel, The Golden Fleece in Grovewood Village (more on that site below).

It may seem strange that after our condo stay, we packed up and departed for a nearby hotel which we originally booked when we conjured up this road trip.  But this isn’t just any Hotel.  It is the iconic Grove Park Inn, where we have talked about staying during our other visits to Asheville.  Although it was 9:00AM in the morning when we checked in, luckily they had our room ready for us.  There was a method to our madness as on no other occasion would we show up so early and expect to check in.  No it was because Ann had her heart set on spending the day in their world class Spa and in order to do that, we needed to show up, together and ready to enter the Spa at 10:00AM to purchase the very scarce Spa Day Passes. 

Lucked out again, getting our passes and changing into our suits and with spa robes and slippers met in the pool area.  Nothing electronic is allowed, only a book or magazine and library voices.  We swam in the mineral pools, sat under waterfalls, went outside on a beautiful sunny day and enjoyed an enormous heated pool with jets, lounged on the chaises, enjoyed lobster salads al fresco in front of a roaring fireplace while Ann drank icy Prosecco.  We swam and relaxed and were there the entire day.  By the time we showered, shampooed and dressed, we were totally waterlogged!  Then we rested a bit as our dinner wasn’t until 8:15PM on the magnificent Terrace Restaurant overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountain Range.  Ann had a fantastic piece of Chilean Sea bass cooked to perfection.

The next morning, upon awakening in such an historic and magnificent Hotel, where 10 Presidents going back to Calvin Coolidge have stayed, including Obama, who visited twice in fact, plus thousands of luminaries from famous writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, inventors like Edison, artists, actors, industrialists, athletes  etc., we decided to spend a good part of the day simply exploring the hotel and all the historical artifacts, portraits and photographs, many of the actual excavation and construction of this unusual stone edifice.

In fact, that weekend the Hotel was honoring F. Scott Fitzgerald who occupied rooms 441 and 443 in the original Inn during two summers while his wife Zelda was convalescing in Asheville.  Those rooms were opened to the public, with memorabilia appropriate for those years, imagining how it might have looked, his desk, his bed, but the view out the window and down the hall are of course the same.  Fitzgerald thought he’d pick up enough gossip at the Inn to write a number of short stories, but he mostly lounged and drank.  He even invited “women of the night” to his rooms, while the Inn made an unsuccessful effort to cut off his drinking and even philandering, all to no avail.  Fitzgerald, the charmer, was a generous tipper so the help managed to smuggle in all the gin and other things he wanted.

The next morning, we agreed to experience something very extravagant and special, the Grove Park Inn famous Blue Ridge Breakfast Buffet.  It is almost impossible to describe the cavernous rooms with an enormous variety of breakfast food of every description, including an omelet/waffle station and 15 or 20 heated casseroles containing eggs and meats of every description including a spinach frittata.  There was an enormous array of homemade breads and pastries, southern biscuits, pots of fresh whipped butter and jams and jellies. Tons of gravlax and lox and smoked fish with bagels and all the accoutrements plus of course every hot cereal imaginable as well as an entire area devoted to cold cereals with fresh fruits and a large variety of yogurts and sauces. 

We had a table next to large beautiful windows overlooking the exquisite grounds as well as the omnipresent majestic mountain range.  Our waiter, Stan, an actual Ashevillian, continually refilled our coffee cups every 30 seconds.   Totally self indulgent.  We waddled away.  The best part, we skipped lunch.

Frequently overlooked is one of Asheville's hidden gems, which is adjacent to the Grove Park Inn: Grovewood Village, an historic site which once housed the weaving and woodworking operations of Biltmore Industries.  Here we spent an entire afternoon touring working artist studios, the Biltmore Industries Homespun Museum, a very large gift shop filled with unimaginably beautiful hand crafts from woven goods to jewelry to large pieces of furniture, all hand rendered.  And then there was Asheville’s only antique car museum, which had a wide range of antique cars (although, some, cars of my youth).   We were lucky enough to have a docent lead us around and even admit us into the cavernous building which once, long ago, housed the looming business, not set up for visitors but I appreciated the way it once was, the way it was left. 

Their website explains the fascinating history: “Biltmore Industries, a noteworthy enterprise in the history of American Craft and textiles founded by Edith Vanderbilt and two inspired teachers, Eleanor Vance and Charlotte Yale.  At the height of its success in the late 1920s – under the direction of Fred Loring Seely – Biltmore Industries had a total of 40 looms in steady operation producing bolts of some of the finest hand-woven wool fabric in the country.  Orders were shipped as far as China and Uruguay, and customers such as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Helen Keller, and several U.S. presidents and first ladies.”

At this point, I need to introduce some serendipity.  Ann’s lovely friend, Joyce, has a daughter Terri, who Ann met once briefly.  She, along with husband Bryan, built a contemporary house up a steep mountainside in a little town just on the outskirts of Asheville.  When Joyce heard we were going there for nine days, she told Terri who immediately invited us to dinner.  How awfully nice to have total strangers over for dinner!

Terri is a professional “food stylist” – those lovely pictures you see in gourmet magazines don’t happen by accident.  She is also a French trained cook and she and her husband have lived in Tuscany (did I mention Bryan is fluent in a number of languages?), and her other guests, a gay couple who have a house in walking distance on the same mountain and a condo in downtown Asheville contributed exotic hors d'oeuvres.

It was a long, festive night, with a delicious dinner and homemade chocolate chip cookies to end a perfect meal and when time came to leave, the wisdom of my-forward-thinking when we first arrived paid off.  When we drove up the narrow mountain road and squeezed into their driveway, I thought there is no way I would be able to turn around in the dark to go back down the mountain, unless I back into the driveway while I can still see it.  So, as we emerged into the blackness of the night, I was feeling pretty good about the decision until I realized that one could hardly find the car.  Their neighborhood association has a no light policy at night so those beautiful dark skies squeeze out every drop of starlight and/or moon light, but the moon was not up.  So we carefully made our way to our car until I heard one of our hosts say, “if you hear a sound, it’s probably one of the bears in the area” (seriously).  It was as if we had rockets on our shoes from that moment to get into the car.  Mountain living would appeal to me, but this old salt is shipwrecked at water’s edge.

We left Asheville for an overnight in Cary, NC, near one of my best friends, Ron.  He and Barbara, like Ann and I, come from publishing roots.  Ron and I worked together since 1986 when the company he was working for, Praeger, was acquired by mine, Greenwood Publishing Group.  He and I forged a strong professional and personal bond.  When later he received an offer to run the Naval Institute Press I advised him to take it, knowing full well the loss to us and to me personally not seeing him day to day. Barbara had worked for Oxford University Press and Ann before becoming a Mom in her mid thirties, worked for a division of Academic Press, so we all have a professional life in common as well as similar politics, interest in travel, and let’s not forget food as Barbara made a delicious salmon dinner, our second homemade meal.  It was so welcome to spend a night with good friends, and not at a restaurant.

Ron, like me, was a baseball player as a kid.  And he’s a lefty too, so I promised to bring my mitt which I stuck in the car before we left.  I last threw a baseball with my elderly neighbor (who in the 1950s faced Herb Score in high school, and got a hit!) but it’s been years.  So the questions were a) could these septuagenarians still throw a ball and b) could they do so without having their arms in slings afterwards?  I’ve always wondered watching old timer games, seeing ex MLB pitchers having trouble even getting the ball to home plate from the mound.  Well, Ron and I found we could still bring it.  We probably threw for about 20 minutes, tosses of course, not heat (no heat left), but we felt pretty good about it and the next day nothing hurt.  Now that NY has lost the ALCS, I’m not expecting an immediate call up, but maybe for spring training?

The next morning we left for the Jane Austen Society of North America’s annual conference, this one “200 Years of Northanger Abbey: ‘Real, Solemn History,’” which fittingly took place in our nation’s colonial capital, Williamsburg, VA.  Now in the interests of full disclosure this is one Jane Austen novel I’ve never read (Ann has and it is her least favorite).  But that did not ruin it for us as between the plenary and breakout sessions there was lots of lively talk and presentations from scholars all over the world.  As Jane said “My idea of good company...is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.”

The conference allowed us to see other old friends, including Betty and her daughter Claudia, both Janites, who drove down from Connecticut.  We shared a dinner on our one free night.  Also, the evening of the ball is always fun, many dressed in their finest costumes of the Regency Period.

The best part was the location.  We wanted to take in Colonial Williamsburg and scheduled two whole days of sightseeing before the Conference officially began.  However, the weather was uncooperative, 98 degrees with a heat index of 107.  Yikes!  Also, our hotel was a couple of miles away from the conference center, and a long walk into town.  There is a bus which circles the area, every ten or fifteen minutes for which we bought a pass. 

How we could have put a visit to Williamsburg on the back burner all these years traveling between Florida and Connecticut is unconscionable, and I tried to make up for that one morning, striking out on my own, by foot and taking in every bit of history I could.

One of my main objectives was to visit the campus of William and Mary the oldest university in the American South and the alma mater of Thomas Jefferson.  It is right at the base of the Duke of Gloucester Street which is the main street.  I walked much of the W&M campus, classes were changing and I walked among the students, so different than when I went to college holding books and notebooks under my arm.  Now, there are just small knapsacks to hold one’s notebook computer or iPad, and snacks.  I guess they looked at me as one of the old professors, or didn’t notice me at all.  That’s ok.  I drank in every bit of architecture and greenery I could, having gone to a city school which had none of those attributes. 

I thought much of my friend Ron, who I had just visited and thrown a ball with.  W&M is his alma mater and it made me feel closer to him on the one hand and wistful on the other as unlike his father who encouraged him to go there, I had a family who just wanted me to go into the army and the Signal Corps to learn photography and then join my father’s photography business.  No, this campus life was never meant to be for me.

As you probably know, this is a pedestrian only area and people in the town are dressed as they would have been in the 18^th century, practicing their trades in real time.  We took in the printer and bindery, the courthouse, the wig maker, the weaver, the shoemaker, among other sites.  At the peak of the hottest day we visited their beautiful Art Museum, which is being expanded, showcasing furniture, weapons, silver, ceramics, paintings, toys, & folk art.  They also have a nice little restaurant.

And, needless to say, we had to have a colonial meal at King’s Arms Tavern where Ann had their house specialty, the peanut soup.  This is made from peanut butter and has the consistency of pea soup.  Delicious.

On the streets we saw ministers of the time, and even George and Martha Washington riding by.  Town’s people dressed in 18^th century costumes were moving up and down the streets.  One could spend a week here and not see everything.  We will come back, but maybe in the spring, not summer!

So, after five days and nights there we drove home, made an overnight stop for sleep as a 14 hour straight drive with pit stops would have been too much. Finally, home once again and as usual, trying to catch up!

Hurricane Irene and Jonathan Tropper

We are hunkered down in a hotel awaiting Hurricane Irene, our boat secured to the best of our ability. So we wait, with our flashlights (as power will inevitably be lost) and enough bread, and peanut butter and jelly to outlast the storm. The storm surge will be the key to our boat’s survival, a sickening feeling having to wait out the next two days and hoping we can return to find minimal damage when the storm finally passes. Meanwhile, it is time to complete an entry concerning Jonathan Tropper which I had started to write before Irene dictated the turmoil of preparing for the storm.

I’m becoming a Jonathan Tropper admirer, a clever and talented writer, with a unique voice, who may deserve to join the company of some of my favorite contemporary American novelists, Richard Russo, Anne Tyler, Russell Banks, Richard Ford, John Irving, E.L. Doctorow, Pat Conroy, and Jonathan Franzen, Ever since John Updike died and as Philip Roth ages, I worry about their understudies, who might fill the shoes of authors dedicated to the craft of writing and the chronicling of American life and The Dream.

I had just finished Russell Bank’s The Reserve, a beautifully written novel but humorless and needed a “pick me up” so I returned to Tropper, having liked his Everything Changes, and was curious whether one of his earlier ones would measure up. I chose The Book of Joe with some hesitancy as it seemed to have all its cultural references to the 1980s, where part of the novel is set, the main characters being in high school and juxtaposed to the same ones today. This is my younger son’s generation, not mine. I’m closer to Updike and Roth’s age, no doubt one of the reasons their writing so resonates with me.

But Tropper deals with such universal truths they transcend generational provincialism, certainly the mark of a good writer. My high school years of the 1950s had the same raw pulsating teenage angst, sexual urgency, and social vulnerability, the very ones portrayed by Tropper at Bush Falls High, their Cougar basketball players revered, and everyone else in a subordinate role. Teenagers can be the most sadistic humans on the face of the earth, something Tropper well understands.

Events concerning my 50th high school reunion brought home the fact that the caste system had hardly changed. It was amazing to me that the long bridge of 50 years hardly mattered. It was back to the clickish high school years as if no time had passed at all.

And Tropper poignantly captures this feeling in The Book of Joe, using Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel experience as a very loose outline. Wolfe’s novel outraged the residents of Asheville and had Wolfe returned (actually, there is a fictionalized version of his return written by Asheville native and playwright Sandra Mason which we saw several years ago in Asheville), he, too, would have been vilified as is Tropper’s Joe Goffman who leaves the small fictional town of Bush Falls, CT, somewhere north of New Haven. He writes a novel about the town and it becomes a sensational best-seller, thanks in part to his agent. He tells all in thinly veiled fiction, even his most private sexual fantasies concerning his best friend’s mother. He finally returns 17 years later as his father has had a stroke and he now has to confront his family and former friends and high school hell raisers, the love of his life, and even the mother about whom he had fantasized.

Tropper writes terrifically believable dialogue and it is not surprising that he is also a screenwriter and a couple of his novels are in the process of being adapted for the screen. The Book of Joe is a fast read, poignantly tragicomic. Sometimes his writing reminds me of Joseph Heller’s special gift for ironic humor.

I was surprised by how engaged I was in the world of this thirty-something protagonist, a world more inhabited by my sons, but universal truths never change.

Conroy's Reading Life

Our good friend Edie gave me My Reading Life by Pat Conroy when I recently entered the hospital, which was supposed to be for a more routine visit than it turned out to be. She knows I love good writing, and she thinks of me as a writer as well. It was a very thoughtful gift. Yes, I write, and I enjoy it, but to be a real writer means to forsake just about everything and dedicate yourself to the craft. It also helps to have an abundance of talent, an omniscient eye and an encyclopedic memory.

I cannot think of any great writer who is not obsessive compulsive about writing. In many ways, I wish I could roll back time and make that choice, but it would have been to the detriment of a publishing career I loved and other avocations such as the piano, studying the machinations of economic markets, politics, and a bunch of other things. Although I started Conroy's work in the hospital, I had difficulty concentrating on it or anything else after undergoing such major surgery. My recovery left me unable to do much but change channels watching awful TV which I can only describe as crap, and if that is emblematic of where American "culture" has migrated, there is no hope for our society.

Once I returned home, I picked up the book again. Conroy achingly cries out in poetic terms for an understanding as to why he writes, why he found refuge as a child in literature, first as a means of connecting with his mother (no, worshiping her) and as a means of escaping his father. I have a particular empathy for literature as a means to understand family, as I wrote in an earlier piece: "What draws me to these writers is families, or more specifically, dysfunctional families. Strong mothers or weak fathers or weak mothers and strong fathers with borderline “crazy” behavior, dark humor and the unpredictable maturation of children from those families. Of course if art mirrors life, it may be that “dysfunctional” is merely normalcy in today’s world."

It was heartbreaking, though, to read Conroy's dedication page. My Reading Life begins with: "This book is dedicated to my lost daughter, Susannah Ansley Conroy. Know this: I love you with my heart and always will. Your return to my life would be one of the happiest moments I could imagine."

So, as in my family, succeeding generations are affected by the tribulations fostered by previous generations. I naturally tried to discover more, and found his comments about the dedication page in an NPR review: Apparently he has been estranged from his daughter since divorcing her mother in 1995: "She has a perfect right not to see me. She's 28 now. But I thought this [dedication] was going to be a last cry of the heart. I would at least try to get her attention and see if I could get her to come back. It has been one of the most soul-killing things to ever happen to me." [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Maybe his daughter will reconnect with her father if she has the opportunity to read this book and understand the undertow of Conroy's maturation as a man and as a writer. He covers a wide range of influences on his writing, first and foremost his mother, who became immersed in Gone With the Wind, continuously reading passages from the novel to her son, beginning when he was five years old. "I owe a personal debt to this novel that I find almost beyond reckoning. I became a novelist because of Gone with the Wind, or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a "Southern" novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word "Southern," because Gone with the Wind set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl in Atlanta, and it was the one fire of her bruised, fragmented youth that never went out....It was the first time I knew that literature had the power to change the world."

Then there were the teachers, in particular Gene Norris's English class, and the "anti-teachers" in particular his father, Donald Conroy, the Marine who beat his family. Conroy bore much of this. "From an early age, I knew I didn't want to be anything like the man he was....I was on a lifelong search for the different kind of man. I wanted to attach my own moon of solitude to the strong attraction of a good man's gravitational pull." Gene Norris was that man and he became a lifelong friend and mentor to Conroy and introduced Conroy to a wide range of classic literature.

Then there were people in his life who could have been negative influences, the librarian, Miss Hunter, at Beaufort High School, Cliff Grabart, the proprietor of the Old New York Book Shop in Atlanta, and the cantankerous, but lover of literature, a book representative, Norman Berg, who I met on several occasions at book conventions. Conroy even went out on sales calls with Berg. That was the foundation of the publishing business then.

From each of these people Conroy took away something and bonded with them in his own way. In fact, Conroy was sponge-like in his dealings with people and the literature he read, recording everything, the eyes and ears of a writer on duty at all times. This is what separates mediocre writers from great ones.

He did the ex-pat "thing" in Paris in the late 1970s. "Parisians... relish the xenophobic sport of stereotyping and love to offer an infinite variety of theories on the nature of Americans. To them, we as a people are shallow, criminally naive, reactionary, decadent, over-the-hill, uncultured, uneducable, and friendly to a fault....Whenever Parisians heard my execrable attempts at French, they would cover their ears with their hands and moan over the violation and butchery of their sweet tongue." My own visits to France taught me a similar lesson, my high school French had to be left behind and I sometimes pretended to be Canadian. But maybe the French are on to something, given my captivity by the mindless TV programming during my hospital stay.

Conroy was finishing The Lords of Discipline in Paris, staying at a hotel where he encountered a wide range of travelers, including other artists. As my son is an inveterate traveler, I was fascinated by Conroy's exquisite explanation as to what it is to be an ex-pat, meeting other people on similar journeys: "Because we were strangers who would know one another on this planet for a very short time, we could trade those essential secrets of our lives that defined us in absolute terms. Voyagers can remove the masks and those sinuous, intricate disguises we wear at home in the dangerous equilibrium of our common lives. The men and women I met at the Grand Hotel des Balcons traveled to change themselves, to trust their bright impulse with the hope they would receive the gift of the sublime, life-changing encounter somewhere on the road. There is no voyage without a spiritual, even religious impulse. Each of us had met by accident, our lives touched briefly, fragilely -- then we continued on our own private journeys, and those intense encounters left a fragrant pollen on the sills and eaves of memory."

But to this point, My Reading Life is merely a warm up for what is the main event and influence on Conroy's writing and he appropriately entitles the chapter "A Love Letter to Thomas Wolfe."

It was Gene Norris who gave him Wolfe's classic Look Homeward, Angel in 1961 as a Christmas present. "The book's impact on me was visceral that I mark the reading of Look Homeward, Angel as one of the pivotal events of my life....The beauty of the language, shaped in sentences as pretty as blue herons, brought me to my knees with pleasure....I was under the illusion that Thomas Wolfe had written his book solely because he knew that I would one day read it, that a boy in South Carolina would enter his house of art with his arms wide open, ready and waiting for everything that Thomas Wolfe could throw at him."

I felt the same awe when I read the novel in college, probably at about the same time as Conroy. Never before had I felt that way when reading fiction. The only way to describe his writing is as being concurrently prodigious and poetic, an uncommon combination. And the novel was even larger before publication and luckily for Wolfe his editor was none other than the legendary Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's who also was Ernest Hemingway's and F. Scott Fitzgerald's. Wolfe was in good company.

The publication of Look Homeward, Angel, had, at its heart, detailed autobiographical elements, the same sort of autobiographical elements in which Conroy's own The Great Santini is grounded. Wolfe's work caused an uproar in his hometown, beautiful Asheville, North Carolina. For a while he was banished from the town, but he did return later to write You Can't Go Home Again.

Conroy has made the pilgrimage to Asheville, first with his teacher, Gene Morris, to visit Wolfe's "Old Kentucky Home," the boarding house maintained by Wolfe's mother. Conroy rocked on the chairs where the boarders gathered on the porch. He toured the home which has been so lovingly restored. I wonder whether Conroy has seen the wonderful play about Wolfe's return to Asheville, Return of an Angel which we were lucky enough to experience during one of our visits to Asheville. It brought Wolfe's return to Asheville alive.

We have been to the Wolfe home in Asheville twice and came away with the same feeling of time having been stopped during those years, before Wolfe's untimely death at the age of only 37. Imagine the great works he would have written if he had lived. As Conroy says, "I think the novels of his fifties and sixties would have been masterpieces. Time itself is a shaping, transfiguring force in any writer's life. Wolfe's best novels sleep in secret on a hillside in Asheville -- beside him forever, or at least, this is what I believe." I agree, Pat, and thank you for reminding me of Wolfe's passion, an invitation to reread his work.

Conroy's concluding chapter, "Why I Write" is probably one of the best I've ever read on the subject, setting the serious writer apart from the potboilers that weigh down today's best seller lists. "Stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself...Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear."

Also in that chapter, he returns to the overarching theme of literature and family, the role of literature explaining who we are and where we came from: "I've always wanted to write a letter to the boy I once was, lost and dismayed in the plainsong of a childhood he found all but unbearable. but I soon discovered that I've been writing voluptuous hymns to that boy my whole life, because somewhere along the line -- in the midst of breakdowns, disorder, and a malignant attraction to mayhem that's a home place for the beaten child -- I fell in love with that kid." And I too fell in love, as much with Conroy's nonfiction as his novels, particularly with My Reading Life, as well as My Losing Season. Such truthfulness and beautiful writing. One can only hope his honesty will lead to a reconciliation with his daughter. It would be just.

.

Homer & Langley

Ever since I first dealt with Amazon.com as a Publisher, sometime in the mid 1990’s, I also became their customer. Back then we were receiving regular faxed orders, usually for a few copies (with a photocopy of Jeff Bezos’ personal credit card!). I might have spoken to Bezos at the time, or one of his colleagues. Customer service, they explained, is their credo and they will build their business on that. We began to ship on open credit. The rest is history.

I buy most of my books from Amazon, frequently from their partners which costs nearly nothing, except shipping. It is sort of ironic as this can undermine prices on their Kindle, but given my interest in the physical book itself, the Kindle is not for me. I’m not a Luddite, but there is nothing like handling a printed book.

When we were recently in Asheville, we made our regular visit to Malaprop’s, one of the great remaining independent bookstores. They usually have a good selection of autographed copies and a couple of years ago I bought Russo’s Bridge of Sighs there. I was looking for Russo’s new novel That Old Cape Magic. Disappointed they didn’t have one this time, I sought out the next on my list, E.L Doctorow’s Homer & Langley. It is the best Doctorow novel I’ve read since Ragtime and the World’s Fair.

Reading an autographed copy has its drawbacks. No turning back corners to be able to find favorite passages. No reading on the beach. Handle with care. After reading, it belongs under glass like a museum piece.

The book itself is beautiful, printed on antique eggshell paper with a deckle edge, set in the Caslon type face, an old style face in the same family as Garamond, the classic crispness of which almost cries out to the reader to savor every word. And Doctorow’s writing is of museum quality too in its stark clarity and beauty. There are four main characters in the book, the brothers Homer and Langley Collyer, New York City, and Time (or the passage of the same).

Homer is blind but he is the one who can see truths as the book’s narrator and in various parts of the book is the one who leads the sighted. “People my age are supposed to remember times long past though they can’t recall what happened yesterday. My memories of our long-dead parents are considerably dimmed, as if having fallen further and further back in time has made them smaller, with less visible detail as if time has become space, become distance, and figures from the past, even your father and mother, are too far away to be recognized. They are fixed in their own time, which has rolled down behind the planetary horizon. They and their times and all its concerns have gone down together.”

A “Theory of Replacements” obsesses Langley, his older brother. “Everything in life gets replaced. We are our parents’ replacements just as they were replacements of the previous generation. All these herds of bison they are slaughtering out west, you would think that was the end of them, but they won’t all be slaughtered and the herds will fill back in with replacements that will be indistinguishable from the ones slaughtered.” Consequently, Langley lives his life collecting newspapers, categorizing stories, preparing what would be a “perpetual newspaper.” “He wanted to fix American life finally in one edition, what he called Collyer’s eternally current dateless newspaper, the only newspaper anyone would ever need. For five cents, Langley said, the reader will have a portrait in newsprint of our life on earth. The stories will not have overly particular details as you find in ordinary daily rags, because the real news here is of the Universal Forms of which any particular detail would only be an example. The reader will always be up to date, and au courant with what is going on. He will be assured that he reads of indisputable truths of the day including that of his own impending death, which will be dutifully recorded as a number in the blank box of the last page under the heading Obituaries.” Langley devolves into an antisocial eccentric, hoarding everything he finds, including his newspapers.

Doctorow’s story is somewhat based on the real life of the Collyer brothers who lived in New York City but it only serves as a loose sketch for the canvas of this tour de force. An odyssey of people, representative of time’s passing, drift in and out of their home, inherited from their parents, people from the depression, to WW II, to the Vietnam era, and the flower generation. While the brothers wage war with New York, the utility companies, and their neighbors, their home slowly degrades as time has its way and they withdraw from life itself.

Homer is a gifted pianist, the artist in the work, clearly Doctorow’s voice and sensibility. Homer has had one true love in his life, Mary Elizabeth Riordan, who, like everyone else in the novel, transits through the Collyer home never to return. She was his “prompter” in a silent movie theatre, whispering the changing scenes on the screen in his ear so he could play the appropriate music, his only job when he was younger. Then, she becomes his piano student and finally she leaves, becoming a Sister and a missionary in far away places, Homer occasionally receiving a letter. She is apparently murdered in Central America. Homer laments, “I am not a religious person. I prayed to be forgiven for having been jealous of her calling, for having longed for her, for having despoiled her in my dreams. But in truth I have to admit that I was numbed enough by this awful fate of the sister to be not quite able to connect it with my piano student Mary Elizabeth Riorden. Even now, I have the clean scent of her as we sit together on the piano bench. I can summon that up at will. She speaks softly in my ear as, night after night, the moving pictures roll by: Here it’s a funny chase with people hanging out of cars…here the hero is riding a horse at a gallop…here firemen are sliding down a pole…and here (I feel her hand on my shoulder) the lovers embrace, they’re looking into each other’s eyes, and now the card says…’I love you.’ ”

And as at the end of a silent movie the lens slowly closes and Homer cannot “see to see.”
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Nice to be Home?

On our way back to Florida, we spent a few days in Asheville, NC, one of our favorite places, the mountains being such a contrast to the horizontal topography of our home. While taking a walk in that area we met someone who lived her entire adult life in Florida but had moved to Asheville to be closer to her grandchildren. When she heard we lived in Florida she commented that the reason she misses her old home is she can no longer see the moonrise until it is high in the sky, the mountains dominating everything. That is what she missed the most.

In Asheville, we visited with our friends, Irene and Pete, who also relocated there from Florida a few years ago. They now have second thoughts about having made the move while sometimes I have had second thoughts about moving to Florida from Connecticut. Perhaps one’s preference boils down to a whimsical perspective on the moonrise.

Returning to Florida, we were greeted by a few unwelcome notices, thanks to the economy and new county and local “budgets.”

Unlike the federal government, which can run deficits ad infinitum, state and municipal governments can’t print money and must have a balanced budget. So far so good. During this Great Recession, with declining receipts from sales and property taxes, they must either cut budgets or increase revenue. After years of bloated budgets, thanks to the chimerical prosperity since the last downturn, any cutback would have to be drastic to align itself with reality. The path of least resistance is to find ways of separating the taxpayer from his money in a stealth-like fashion.

Case in point, we returned to multiple notices of a speeding ticket (made out to me, although my wife was driving) from our neighboring community, Juno Beach. This ticket was issued by an automated camera in the back of a van operated by LaserCraft, a company in Georgia. One is instructed to send the $125 fine to Georgia; probably LaserCraft getting the majority and Juno Beach the smaller share, but a small percent of something is better than 100 percent of nothing.

This is the most nefarious kind of revenue raising tactic, with the taxpayer being forced to pay a fine without being able to face the accuser (there is a $50 fee to file an appeal, one you are warned you are sure to lose). Non-payment results in being turned over to a collection agency, with all the attendant credit history ramifications. The “evidence” is two photographs of our car clearly showing it in front of and behind other cars in a lane so presumably every car received a ticket. Desperate economic times dictate desperate tactics for municipalities, and this is one of the worst. Lest one thinks that this is typical FloriDUH and it can’t happen here (wherever that might be), if Juno Beach gets away with this (there is a suit in court to overturn this), other cities will surely follow and why not automated cameras on Interstates as well?

Then, as our Florida home is our primary residence, it is “protected” under the Save our Homes act, the property tax increase one year over the next being capped at 3% or to the Consumer Price Index, whichever is less. Read the fine print – that is during good times only. Palm Beach County property market value has decreased so much that it has simply frozen or reduced the “appraised value” of homes (thereby staying within the 3% cap), and increased the tax rate to take up the slack. (From the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser: A property's assessment could stay the same or go down but property taxes could go up any given year because of millage increases levied by your local taxing authorities). Why bring a budget in line with the economic times when it is easy to pick the pocket of the taxpayer? PBC tax rate will increase 15% over last year.

We are told there is no inflation, that this is a deflationary economy. It is true that there is no investment return to be found on our woefully declining US dollar, and no doubt there is asset deflation (e.g. homes), but consumer inflation is alive and well, the manipulated CPI not reflecting the real rise in the cost of living. Unemployment continues to grow (albeit at a declining rate) and until there is sustained employment growth – real growth – the recovery forecasted by the market is suspect (it’s time to “party” as the Dow passes 10,0000, Leo Kolivakis writes in his Pension Pulse blog)

Bottom line: if you want job security, retirement and health insurance benefits, work for your local government.

Welcome Home Taxpayer!.