Dave’s Jungle Adventure! (Really!)
categories: Cocktail Hour
8 comments
The next day--going back in
DUNGO IN THE JUNGLE
“Now the spoiler has come.” Robinson Jeffers
They were poaching deer and drinking dark rum out of a decapitated spring water bottle, Dungo and his friend. In the front seat were two shotguns–Dungo’s 12 gauge–he’d re-welded the barrel himself with bronze–and his friend Lilpo’s 16 gauge that looked like a Civil War musket. In the back of the truck lay two rusted machetes (pronounced with two syllables–ma-chet–in southern Belize.) Lilpo thought he saw a light far down the trail and so Dungo drove in further over the bumps and ruts, though he didn’t see it himself. But as they got closer, they were sure they made out two or three flashlights.
As it turned out we were the ones waving the flashlights. They stopped twenty yards from us and called out.
“Jake?” I yelled back. Jake was the name of the man who ran the research station we’d been scheduled to hike into that day. We’d been lost for several hours so I thought he might have come looking for us.
“No, it’s not Jake, man,” Dungo yelled back, already laughing. He pulled the truck up to where we stood.
I later teased my wife that she ran up to them as if they were Triple-A rumbling up the interstate: Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Mac Bates
Rock Lit 101 (or: Rock and Roll for English Majors)
categories: Cocktail Hour
8 comments
[Today’s guest blogger is Mac Bates, who writes about Rock ‘n’ roll on his website All Those Wasted Hours. He’s Bill’s brother in law, and lives in Snohomish, Washington. The portrait is by MacKenzie Brewer and Mac’s daughter (Bill’s niece), Isabella Bates. Mac is an English teacher, mountaineer, record collector, and author.]
#
ROCK LIT 101
As a teenager besotted by rock and roll, except for the one night when I sneaked into my parent’s liquor cabinet and sipped my way through a little vermouth, a little sherry, a little drambuie (A note to the kids: Do not try that at home, trust me), I wanted more than anything for my parents to love the music, which ran counter to one of the basic tenets of rock: we love rock and roll Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Nina de Gramont
Bad Advice Wednesday: Beware to Com-PARE!
categories: Cocktail Hour
22 comments
Dismissal at my daughter’s elementary school is staggered by ten minutes, with the younger kids leaving earlier. Hadley leaves at 2:30, and on the rare days I get there early I sit out front and wait with the first graders. The other day one of them – we’ll call him Johnny, which I’m reasonably sure is not his real name – was in a bit of a state. While his classmates sat quietly on the front stoop, he marched up and down the sidewalk as if he were orating . “I’m so mad at Bill. I know he’s had three play dates with Dave, and now they’re having another play date this weekend.” Johnny was wonderfully unselfconscious about his jealous frenzy, the way only people under the age of six can be, and he didn’t mind at all that his entire social world could hear his griping. It was time for Ms. Rennie, the first grade teacher, to intervene.
Ms. Rennie was Hadley’s teacher last year and I Love her so much that I had to capitalize the word. She was born to teach young children: wonderfully kind and serene, with a soothing and melodic voice, but also with an almost mystical ability to impose order. I watched her stride across the sidewalk, place both hands on Johnny’s shoulders, kneel down and look him in the eye. Continue reading →
Skiing the Beach (Redux?)
categories: Cocktail Hour
3 comments
We are getting senile here at Bill and Dave’s, and neither of us is sure if I have posted my movie “Skiing the Beach” before. I probably have……but here goes again anyway: Skiing the Beach. (It’s about how I stuck to my northern exercise routine even after moving south.)
And then there’s the piece below, which, to the best of my knowledge, is the first essay inspired by a Youtube video….
SKIING THE BEACH
Over the last three months I have become the freak of my Southern neighborhood. I am the guy of who skis the beach.
It started one day when I was jogging. At forty-four, running at any speed is not a joint-friendly enterprise, and I feel the slam of every step in my achy knees and partly torn rotator cuff. For this reason, I was running, as I always do, along the water, hoping the sand would serve as shock observer. But even with sand softening the blows, jogging was drudgery, and for about the hundredth time I felt displaced in my new Southern home, longing for mountains, for snow, for the north. And for cross-country skiing, since its remembered velvety athletic rhythm, glide-push-glide, seemed the opposite of the trudge-slam-trudge of my present.
It was then that I glanced down at the sand close to the water, right where the waves licked and not ten feet from where I jogged. The sand looked slick, slightly wet, flat—and invitingly snow-like. Not heavy snow of course—that was higher up where folks put their beach towels—but packed snow like a cross-country trail that had been skied a few times. And then I thought “Why not?” My old skis were back in a storage locker in the north, but my birthday was coming up. Continue reading →
Hostages
categories: Cocktail Hour
2 comments
So, much to my surprise, my “Ultimate Glory” post of the other day has spread around this here inter-web, closing in on a couple thousand viewers. It occurs to me that the post might have benefited from a few more photos, but I don’t have many from the old days, at least in places I can get my hands on. I did manage to scan the picture below, which came out of the book, Ultimate: the First Four Decades by Adam Zagoria and Pasquale Leonardo.
These are the Hostages mentioned in the essay. (Though the photo is missing a couple of very important characters.) P.S. The guy on the far right with the suitcase is a frequent commenter on this blog. (Not me.)
Getting Outside Saturday: Field Notes on My Daughter
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays
1 comment
We moved from Cape Cod to Carolina about eight and a half years ago. I wrote this soon after our first school year in the South ended, when we returned to the Cape in June. It turned out we weren’t the only ones with a new baby and this is the story of how we interacted with another pair of parents and their off-spring. It was originally published in the great journal Isotope. Long may it live!
FIELD NOTES ON MY DAUGHTER
1. Fox
During these joyous days back on Cape Cod I am taking field notes on both the local foxes and Hadley. Hadley is now just over a year old, a completely different animal than the one who moved south: a walking, talking, gesturing hominoid. Last night she rode my shoulders to the beach, and we found that a fox family had built a den in the seawall rocks. Hadley pointed at them and said “cat,” the word she is stamping on everything these days. Still, if her term for them was not entirely accurate, she was close. The two kits, their legs covered with black stockings, ambled right up to us, and she could barely contain her excitement. Meanwhile, I tried to maintain my scientific sobriety, taking notes on their black eyes, their white-tipped tails, their foolish trust.
Hadley’s physical development, like those of chimps and apes, her closest relations among primates, is relatively slow compared to other animals, these foxes for instance. In humans, physical growth, height and size, is retarded because time is required for us to learn the complex, symbolic and ever-changing world of our species. But the mental growth is wild. You see it in Hadley’s eyes and her hands and in her intense interaction with the physical world. Not long ago I taught her how to snap, and now she moves around the house going at it like a Beat poet. Her prose poem of course is made up of that one obsessive word, “Cat,” though she inflects a hundred emotions from the sound. The other night she woke up from a dream and said quite clearly: “Cat. A cat.” The alliterative and vaguely homonymous “Cow” has also leaked out, so you get the feeling that a hundred other words are gathering, readying, almost a cloudburst. Continue reading →
Movie Night: “Pina: A Movie for Pina Bausch”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies
2 comments
#
I’ve just come from the beautiful new Film Society theater at Lincoln Center, where I saw Pina: A Film for Pina Bausch, made by Wim Wenders, a genius on the subject of a genius with a cast of geniuses, and I’m not kidding. The movie is in 3D and it’s the best use of the recently revolutionized medium I’ve seen yet, stage spaces taking on form and outdoor spaces vastness incomparable. The film as conceived wasn’t meant to be one but became a memorial to the great German dancer and choreographer (also actress, in at least on Fellini movie), who died five days after diagnosis with an unannounced cancer (the film never mentions it at all), two days before Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Thisness of a That
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
16 comments
My mind at work
Metaphor is the elemental condition of language. English teachers forever have been saying, “A simile is a comparison using like or as, and a metaphor is a comparison not using like or as.” That’s simple and plain, but it’s not quite right. I’ll buy the old definition for a simile, but a metaphor—wow!—a metaphor is something enormously greater than allowed for by Mr. Bottomlifter back in ninth grade. First of all, a simile is just a kind of metaphor. A symbol is a Continue reading →
Losers
categories: Cocktail Hour
7 comments
Americans aren’t too keen on losers and losing. I thought about this during the pain of the Patriots’ loss over the last couple of days. “Pain” is the right word, even if it seems overdone to non-sports fans. I know there is a big gap between people–and between the readers of these pages–on how seriously they take these things. It was nice of my wife Nina to pat me on the back and console me after the game. But you had the feeling this was a little hard for her to take seriously, as if I were consoling her after someone she liked got kicked off The Bachelor.
I don’t care. It did hurt. If only through empathy—for instance seeing Wes Welker–great, gutsy Wes Welker–cast as a goat, his eyes red from crying and his voice quiet. And not only empathy. I was sad for me as well as them. When I think Patriots I think sitting on the aluminum benches at Schaefer Stadium with my Dad watching Sam “Bam” Cunningham or Randy Vataha, so yes I sometimes say “us” or “we” when I refer to the team, feeling at least a much a part of the whole thing as last year’s third round draft choice. Still, I didn’t expect to suffer this time. Hadn’t dread fled New England after the Sox won and the Pats did a judo flip on their perennial loser tag? In the days running up to the game I talked to a couple of friends who had grown seriously depressed after the loss to the Giants in 07/08. I felt for them, but I thought “I’m different…I get all the pleasure of rooting for the team but I no longer let what happens on a football field affect my emotional life. It’s only a game after all.”
