Terrible Sanity

Sam Pickering

Description

"Terrible Sanity is wondrous sanity. Pickering's essays are acetaminophen for hippish days. "Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end," Roger, a character in V. S. Naipaul's Half a Life, says. "Life is always going on." In this collection, Pickering depicts the joy and sadness of life's going on. He observes that great knowledge often brings small pleasure while the small knowledge that all people experience brings great pleasure. A dental hygienist tells him that every day patients greet her on the street and in stores. "Their faces are always unfamiliar, and I never recognize them," she says, "but if they opened their mouths wide, I'd know them immediately." For the record she also volunteers that in twenty years of tooth-scrubbing, she had only been bitten once"--

Sujets

• Writting
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Nonfiction
• CNF

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 08 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781948692533
• Langue: English

Extrait

Terrible Sanity
Other Books by Sam Pickering
Essay Collections A Continuing Education The Right Distance May Days Still Life Let It Ride Trespassing The Blue Caterpillar Living to Prowl Deprived of Unhappiness A Little Fling The Last Book The Best of Pickering Indian Summer Autumn Spring Journeys Dreamtime The Splendour Falls All My Days Are Saturdays Happy Vagrancy One Grand, Sweet Song Parade’s End The World Was My Garden, Too
Travel Walkabout Year Waltzing the Magpies Edinburgh Days A Tramp’s Wallet
Literary Studies The Moral Tradition in English Fiction, 1785-1850 John Locke and Children’s Books in Eighteenth-Century England Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children, 1749-1820
Teaching Letters to a Teacher
Memoir A Comfortable Boy
Terrible Sanity
Sam Pickering

Lake Dallas, Texas
Copyright © 2020 by Sam Pickering All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
Requests for permission to reprint material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions Madville Publishing P.O. Box 358 Lake Dallas, TX 75065
Acknowledgements:
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge River Teeth and The Chattahoochee Review in which selections from these essays first appeared.  
Author Photograph: Vicki Pickering Cover Design: Kimberly Davis Cover image: Detail from a twelve-pane panel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder—Scan aus: Rose Marie und Rainer Hagen—Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. um 1525—1569. Bauern, Narren und Dämonen, Köln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag GmbH 1999 S. 34 ISBN 3-8228-6590-7, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6887712
ISBN: 978-1-948692-52-6 paperback, 978-1-948692-53-3 ebook Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941271
Dedication
For Vicki whose remarks have enlivened my living for over forty years. She is eleven years younger than me, and her take on life is slightly different than mine. Two days ago, after returning home at the end of a long walk in the woods, she exclaimed, “God, am I tired! I just want to sit down and put my feet up. I feel like I am seventy-eight.” “I know exactly how that feels,” I said. “Oh, no,” she said, “I didn’t mean.” “I know what you meant,” I interrupted. “It feels like a bowl of chocolate ice cream.” “And maybe a slice of coconut cake, too?” Vicki said. “Darn straight,” I answered.
Table of Contents
Virus Days: A Preface of Sorts
Terrible Sanity
On A Siding
Not Much Longer
Exhilarating Things
Obit.
Repetition
Roadway
Always Going On
It’s Thundering in New Brunswick
A Joke?
Mockingbird on the Wreath
About the Author
Virus Days: A Preface of Sorts
The letters began as the life I had long known vanished. In early February things started to seem akimbo, bothersome but not frighteningly so, a bit like the Bombay Kipling’s father Lockwood described in the nineteenth century. “No masonry is square, no railings are straight, no roads are level, no dishes taste quite like they should, but a strange and curious imperfection and falling short attends everything, so that one lives in a dream when things are just coming about but never quite happening.” Age makes sane people fatalists. Vicki calls me a curmudgeon, but a curmudgeon is simply an old guy who tells the truth. He is someone who can’t stomach the Wonder Bread soaked in messianic pap that society spoons down the gullets of the young and the naïve.
Actually, becoming a pessimist is a good prescription for increasing a person’s zest for life. Unlike the optimist who mopes through days being continually disappointed, rarely is a pessimist depressed when the best-laid plans of the well-meaning mildew and turn dark. In fact, fatalism kindles high spirits. “The virus is quicker than dementia and not as hard on families and savings accounts,” my friend Josh told Vicki then slapped his knee and laughed. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said kindles . Vicki has yet to measure me for an oak kimono. In any case since funeral homes are closed, she’ll have to jettison the sartorial box and settle for a fire bath, surely a high-octane immersion now that the price of gas is low. In truth, I don’t know what plans Vicki has cooked up for me once I conk out, but if I see her storing kindling in the woodshed, I’ll break quarantine and head for an Arcadian place beyond the evil eye of television. Every night on every channel, lollipops announce “good news.” I realize that tolerance and lies bind society together. Nevertheless, although I discount the announcers’ remarks, the phrase brings to mind the old gospel song “Good News. Chariot’s Comin’.” Although a white robe and a starry crown wait for me in Beulah Land, I prefer to ignore the entreaty and hope that the chariot makes a wrong turn and leaves me behind. Even the bonus of a personalized harp doesn’t seduce me. I’m not musical. I am tone deaf. I’ve never played an instrument and couldn’t learn even if that famous chorus of angels long heard on high tried to teach me.
The virus has not only affected how I act but also how I think. For decades I taught Thoreau and preached the virtues of simplicity. Now that my life is simple, I yearn for complexity. Many things I wrote in healthy decades past and which seemed to ring with sonorous rightness now appear silly. Boredom “with its blissful calm,” I once declared, “is an aspiration devoutly to be labored for but impossible to achieve.” Coping with momentary isolation isn’t difficult. What’s tough is adjusting to the realization that all I have to look forward to is isolation. In past years when winter became oppressive in Connecticut, Vicki and I decamped and took a warming cruise through the Caribbean. During the summer when society seemed too much with us “getting and spending,” we went to Nova Scotia and rusticated on a farm her parents bought seventy-five years ago. Cruise ships are now mothballed, and the Canadian border is padlocked, not depriving us of actuality because we hadn’t planned to visit Canada this summer or book a cruise next winter, but denying possibility and impoverishing imagination. Aging constricts life, but I anticipated the natural loss of abilities and had adapted well to the diminished me. However, I resented the unexpected narrowing caused by the virus.
Of course, Vicki’s and my isolation was not that of people confined to apartment buildings or tract housing. The quarantine was partial and only separated us from other people. We still received mail and robocalls. I adjusted to the university’s shutting and curtailing my jogging rounds on the indoor track. Instead, I cycled to the soccer field and ran four miles around the artificial turf. The field was almost abandoned. Some days “the Chinese tire-tosser” appeared. He was a body-builder and spent hours lifting and pushing tractor tires. We smiled and waved but did not speak. My friends Tim and David showed up around 10:30, and we walked together for old time’s sake. Conversation was difficult because we kept two lanes apart and David is deaf.
The few eateries that remained open limited purchases to take-out, not something that affected Vicki and me because in the best of culinary times we rarely dined outside the house. We continued eating dinner in the television room and watching movies on Netflix. Some nights we bought Indian, Chinese, or Lebanese take-out in hopes of seasoning the films, but we had done this long before the virus appeared and the purchases did not change the pattern of our evenings. Every afternoon we wrapped ourselves in coats and scarves and donning ear muffs and gloves walked downtown. Vicki bought coffee at Dog Lane Café, and we drank it slowly, sitting on a bench in the town square. We did not speak to anyone. We told each other that we were such a regular sight that our figures should be bronzed and anchored to the bench. We stayed for an hour. We ignored cold and drizzling rain and studied the absence of people. Foreign students marooned by the virus crossed the square masked and walking slower than when the university was open. Joggers hurried around corners; all were alone and female. Every twenty minutes the man operating Insomnia Cookies came outside and cleaned the door to the shop after which he smoked a cigarette and called people on his cellphone. Workers from the branch of the university health center located in a row building behind us bought Mooyah Burgers, and teenage boys clacked by on skateboards, jumping from walkways to the tops of walls.
Dog walkers were the most ubiquitous breed of pedestrian. They were also the most alert, careful to prevent their animals from straying off sidewalks and ready to scoop up droppings. We often brought our dogs with us. Vicki leashed them to the bench and occasionally fed them kibble. They took their lead from us. They never barked and sitting motionless also looked bronzed. After finishing our coffee, we ambled to the university and freed the dogs letting them scamper about searching for groundhogs. The campus resembled an empty suburban park. Some evenings after daffodils began blooming, Vicki strolled around the corner to nearby dormitories and picked a bouquet for the kitchen table. Dogs, not words, harnessed people together. For years we’ve spent Saturday and Sunday afternoons walking dogs though the woods above the Fenton River. With the exception of mountain bikers, we didn’t meet other people. Only rarely had we leashed the dogs, this only after Vicki noticed an abundance of coyote scat or someone spread alarmist news about the presence of a mountain lion. Now after the appearance of the virus, our bosky paths became thoroughfares. Tethered to their owners, packs of dogs pulled families: mothers, fathers, and cabooses of children. In contrast to the dogs which “verbally” acknowledged our canine threesome, people turned aside and looking irritated passed by silently.
Our walks were not as quiet and somber as tombs, however. The beaver pond was lively with amorous frogs: shrill spring peepers, wood