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BOYS who DO the BOP 9 New Yorker Stories by Rick Rofihe
“These surgically precise slices of intelligent life are distinguished by virtuosic phrase-making and fetchingly off-beat specifics.” —Bruce Allen, The New York Times Book Review
“Mr. Rofihe can be surprisingly effective, with a quirky tenderness. Oddly touching, the interest here lies not in the stories’ mundane incidents, but in things barely hinted at: beneath this calm surface, powerful currents flow.” —Bruce Bawer, The Wall Street Journal
“Rick Rofihe’s stories have bulging motor nerves and threadlike muscles. They are contour almost without mass; lines of fierce magnetic energy with only a dusting of iron fillings to reveal their course. They are elusive, but not in the sense of escaping us. It is more as if we are unable to find them, and then they spring out at us; we are not sure from where.” —Richard Eder, The Los Angeles Times
“The narratives weave toward minor epiphanies, backing and filling, curving around their characters with a seeming lack of coherence—yet they are strangely compelling, as the refusal to make plain their meanings gives more depth to implication.” —Michael Darling, Books in Canada
“A gentle but insistent touch. . . . Rofihe pays close attention to how people talk about what they think and do.” —Publishers Weekly
“What makes him different from some of the other successfully quirky writers? The difference seems to be one of commitment; he takes the big risks so many stylists never do. Without moralizing, Rofihe judges. His nose quivers at a new odor in the emotional air, and he makes a guess at what it is. Like all the good poets, he’s there to name things—in his case, things most of us don’t even notice.” —Marianne Ackerman, The Montreal Gazette
“Rick Rofihe’s short stories are very sophisticated indeed, and it comes as no surprise to learn that they have appeared in The New Yorker. He is a talented writer whose versatility and empathetic sensibility are remarkable. This is serious literature.” —Joan McGrath, CM, Canadian Library Association
“Rofihe speaks convincingly in many voices. His characters are absolutely believable, and the kind you wouldn’t cross the street to avoid meeting.” —Gregory McNamee, Washington Post Book World
“Life’s victories and defeats are measured by little moments and insights. But in the stories of Rick Rofihe they become unusually dense, compact fictions that resist easy reading and quick retelling almost as much as they resist leaving your memory.” —Jacob Stockinger, The Madison (Wisconsin) Capitol Times
“The proof of true mastery is making what’s difficult look easy. Rofihe has a real knack for telling a convincing story; instead of playing the puppetmaster, he becomes the puppet itself, breathing life into each character. These stories are rich in detail, nuance and feeling, each a separate gem in its own modest way.” —Library Journal
“Most of these stories are told in the first person by characters who are unsure of their thoughts’ importance, who are searching for explanations. In their narratives, the trivial and comic jostle the momentous. Uneasiness hangs over every scene, a chronic strange vibration, but all are enormously sympathetic, and their courage and humour haunt like sad music. (All the stories would be wonderful to hear read aloud.) Every sentence—cryptic as it may be—both rings true and sounds poetic, as if some massive emotional significance is close by, only a paragraph away. No words are wasted. These are small, quiet stories, serious, sophisticated, and evocative. This is a literary book.” —Russell Smith, Quill & Quire
“Each of Rofihe’s stories is a puzzle you want to solve, and you smile when you do. Communication in one form or another is the key to these playful warm tales. A fresh, funny, and deeply felt collection.” —Donna Seaman, American Library Association
“. . . brief, mostly first-person stories about the riddles of communication and the grammar of loneliness. Rofihe’s oblique narratives are coded messages, waiting to be deciphered.” —The New Yorker
All of these stories first appeared in
The New Yorker.
CONTENTS
Father Must Satellite Dish Elevator Neighbors Read Chinese Cousin Yellow Dining Room Jelly Doughnuts Carmen
BOYS who DO the BOP 9 New Yorker Stories by Rick Rofihe
Copyright: Rick Rofihe
For Alice Quinn— my best friend at The New Yorker and
“No, an illusion can never be destroyed directly. . . . It must be done indirectly, not by one who claims to be extraordinary, but by one who, better instructed, is ready to. . .approach from behind the person who is under an illusion. . . . One must have resignation enough to be far behind. . .otherwise one will certainly not get the person who is in an illusion out of it—a thing which is difficult enough in any case.” —Kierkegaard, The Point of View
“I love you so much I hate you.” —Carlene Carter, Every Little Thing
Boys Who Do the Bop by Rick Rofihe
Learning to type? Not easy, right?
It is work which gives flavor to
life.
It can’t be easy, with the letters presented to you shuffled up the way they are. Few typing instructors will concede that there’s any disarray, but at least half the instruction books I’ve seen feature practice sentences that try to play up the learner’s sense of purpose and foster a feeling of order where there’s apparently none. Enid is in her room putting on makeup. Why do anything to those delicate features? “Because it takes up time,” she would say if asked. Enid closes her bedroom door when she changes her clothes but leaves it ajar when she’s doing her face; is she hoping some small talk might reach her dainty ears? If that’s so, and if I am to oblige, I have to keep one eye on the keyboard, one eye on that door. Have I been much too quiet already? It must be so, for she’s starting to sing.
I’ve been across this country
clear
That’s a good song; why would I want to interrupt it? Besides, typing requires concentrated practice.
Do the thing and you have still the
power; but they
Soon she says, “Oh you want more floor show?”
When Lady Luck would treat me right, She stops making up in her oval dresser mirror and comes out to look in the full-length one. “These pants are too . . . what is the word, Noonie? Or cats got tongue?” I like Enid, and I like just about anything Enid says to me, and I’d just as soon hang around here with her and her cats as just about anything, maybe anything. Now, to talk or to type?
If you would not be forgotten, as soon
as you are
“Unable to wear THESE pants at THIS time,” she says, and walks back into her room and closes the door. This is the longest I’ve stayed at Enid’s, six weeks now. The sofa here is certainly comfortable; I prefer it to the bed in the spare room, to my bed back home, maybe any bed anywhere. Now the door is ajar again.
I’m a girl who digs a chance
Her room, if you enter, is just a neat, compartmentalized, one-windowed box with sections for books, for yard goods, for notebooks, for keepsakes— but the first thing you notice is the background odor, which is of perfume mixed with stale cigarette smoke. That doesn’t sound inviting, but you might not turn and run.
I’ve danced in the east,
Enid once told me she was going to be a singer— that was when one of her husband’s friends, who instead became a doctor, was going to be a songwriter. Do I think Enid might get married again? Any such new husband would certainly want the sofa cleared, or perhaps a new, less comfortable sofa, and, simultaneously, the cats declawed. That would all be too bad, but what do I have to do with it outside of being a worrier about Enid? Now the bedroom door is opening wide.
BOYS who do the BOP,
Enid, wearing different pants, walks from her room toward the bathroom.
those BOYS—Boys! Boys! Boys!
I’m no help, either. On Tuesday, after I came back and told her about a girl I met over at the Peabody, Enid stopped wearing a bra. She set up the ironing board right in front of where I was typing and started ironing with her shirt mostly open, so what did I do but ask how come she usually wears a bra. She said something about gravity and time, then left the room, and when she came back she’d buttoned her shirt nearly up to her neck. “Hullo, anybody home?” Enid, now through with bedroom and bathroom, says to me, then turns her attention to one of the cats. “What, not enough litter for a cute thing to scratch? We call Cat Litter King, o.k.?” She picks up the cat and brings its face to hers as she sits by the phone and dials the King’s message machine. “Greetings! Enid and cats on Comm Ave. wouldn’t mind a royal visit. We want a case of cat food that says ‘Cat Food.’ Not without labels, not cat-and-dog food, and not labeled ‘Dog Food’ that you say is cat food. One hundred pounds of litter in ten-pound bags, not two fifties—what do you think we are? We’re home late tonight and all tomorrow night. Sois prudent, Your Highness.” What an entertainer! Enid is no snob! Enid puts down the phone and the cat, and is lost to me for a few minutes. I think she is thinking about the past, which is something I’ve pretty well cultivated out of myself, thinking about the past. As I turn off the typewriter, Enid looks over at me and says, “Let’s go here, let’s go there! That’s the thing to do, right?” There was nothing like the Cat Litter King where I came from; there were also things in Boston I couldn’t get used to. Just before I first visited Enid, her small white cat, the one she told me would sleep on her neck, got stolen from out front by the junkies down the block. “Let’s go get it back?” a friend of hers had mocked my suggestion. “Noonie, you don’t go confronting addicts!” So as I went up and down Commonwealth Avenue putting up Lost Cat signs I had to fill my mind with other things, like memorizing the alphabetically ordered cross streets—Arlington, Exeter, Fairfax or Fairfield, Gloucester; that’s all I remember now, and Exeter Street’s easy, because that’s where the Exeter Street Theatre was. It was only a couple of days later that Enid started talking about my getting some kind of job, though following right up with how after she moved to Boston she’d go through the Help Wanteds, circle all the interesting ones, fold the newspaper neatly on top of her recycling pile, and then go out to a museum or two. Once Enid did get me something part time at Faneuil Hall Marketplace. She was working near there then, so a lot of times we got to have lunch together, and I even started thinking maybe that’s why she got me the job. If it was a nice day and I got off early, I would go back to her place and sleep on the sofa in the sun with the cats. On days I wasn’t working, I would walk and walk—one day I did the whole Freedom Trail—or just turn to my Old List, which was some basic things that had looked at first to me impossible to do but that just about everybody seemed able to do, like skipping rope, riding a bike, driving a car (or, as I updated the list, if you learned on an automatic, then driving a standard), swimming, and, of course, typing. (I don’t have a New List but do keep an Auxiliary one, which is for not-impossible-looking things, like certain dances.) Enid and I set out walking and, by the Charles River, Enid lights up a cigarette and tells me how her mother, who smokes, too, waits until everybody at their house has gone to bed and then goes outside on the patio and breathes out, all the way, emptying her lungs—push push push—completely, then breathes in a full load of fresh air, and then forces every bit out again, convinced that she’s cleaning that day’s smoking out of her lungs. I laugh at that, really laugh, and after a two-second delay Enid laughs, too. I’ve never actually met Enid’s mother, but I talked to her on the phone once when she called and Enid was out. She knew who I was and kept calling me by my first name, again and again, with the most luxurious voice. Enid has every right to sound like that but doesn’t. Enid’s mother wanted, I think, to ask me how Enid really was, and I wasn’t so sure of myself that I said anything that would make her worry, but I didn’t try to make her not worry, either. Here, there; and from the Cambridge side of the Charles, up by MIT, Enid points out the narrow eastern face of the new Hancock building and tells me that it reflects the sunrise in a long vertical line, and that the western end does the same at sunset. (You’ve got to admire the Hancock, though it’s tall and modern, and modern with problems. Try looking at it from the south when you’re way down on Tremont, or from the north, from beside the old Hancock, going right up close.) “I liked it in plywood and I like it now—windows and all, as long as nobody gets hurt,” Enid says, while reaching one hand over her head, tracing a halo’s shape with her finger, around and around. It isn’t late when we get back to her place, but Enid’s tired, and does have to get up early to move her car for Friday street-cleaning before going to work, so right away she puts on that white cotton nightdress of hers and gets into bed. I feel bad that we’ve developed any sort of routine at all, Enid and I, because soon I’m probably going to be someplace else, and, to take just one example, who’s going to read from her book, that scrapbook of stories about sleep she’s put together in her more-than thirty-one years? Every evening I’ve been reading something from it to her after she gets into bed. It’s a great book—so good that I’ve had all three hundred and sixty-six oversize pages photocopied to take with me when I go. Tonight’s story was taken from the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: . . . I had walked again up the street,
which by this Philadelphia? I only have to hear a city’s name and I start to get ideas. Actually, I’d kind of made up my mind to try New York. “Enid?” “What, Noo?” “Are there any more words to the song?” “There’s more I can’t remember right now. I think I’m asleep.” Before I leave this time I’m going to get those Bop lyrics on paper; otherwise I’ll have to write to wherever she is, and what if she has a new last name? “Is it o.k. if I stay up and type?” “S’all right. I like a little background noise when I dream.” (Enid really doesn’t mind it when I stay up late and type.)
CURB SERVICE
It was only ten-thirty and I still wasn’t sleepy, so I started looking through the cupboards for something to eat. Next to three boxes of Wheatena and behind the saltines was an open bag of Pepperidge Farm Tahiti cookies. There were only two cookies in the bag, and since I hate to eat the last of anything when there’s someone else who might come snacking, I took just one cookie. Then, maybe because I was alone and it seemed so quiet, I got out a pen and wrote in ink on the bag, “Contains One Only—No Good if You’re Hungry.” I put the bag back on the shelf, went and stretched out on the sofa, and thought some more about Benjamin Franklin, and then Thomas Jefferson, and then John Hancock, and then whether or not I’d kissed Enid good night. I had, but it was the kind of kiss you can’t expect to go far, a kiss without plans. So all that was a Thursday night. Then Friday, then Saturday, then Sunday; then Monday I left for New York, and I haven’t seen Enid since. I did leave her my P.O. box address from back home, because I wasn’t sure where I’d end up, and my cousin who works at the post office is good about forwarding things. Using that system, I’ve received three communications from Enid, three in five years: 1. In a puffy envelope mailed not long after I left Boston was the empty Pepperidge Farm cookie bag, with an “N” added to my note; i.e., “Contains NOne Only—No Good if You’re Hungry.” 2. Several months after that I received a postcard showing the lobby of a hotel in a place like Tahiti, and there, among other words, was “honeymoon”—not as in “Hoyle Up-to-Date,” not honeymoon bridge. (Enid once told me that her mother used to tell her, “You might as well be nice.” Even with that I couldn’t decide whether or not to send a wedding present, which is to say I didn’t.) 3. Then nothing for over four years until this menu, here in my hand, reached me earlier today. No message, but each dish and price printed in Enid’s hand, along with the restaurant’s name, and its address, three thousand miles away. I looked at the menu for a long time, and did think of writing something on it like “Menu Only—No Good if You’re Hungry” and sending it back, but then thought better of it. (Another thing I’d been cultivating was thinking better of things.) As for what went the other way, once in a while I’d sent her funny newspaper clippings and stuff, but every time I wrote a real letter I knew it was a mistake the minute I dropped it into the big blue box. And telephones? You can’t get them to work right. That’s still a great song, that Bop one. It’s a good thing I wrote down the words before leaving, but just getting lyrics on paper is not really how such things should be done. The way to make a song yours is by singing it—right? Some how-to-do book must say that. I gave my typing one away, because learning was so hard for me I began to feel that if I ever got good at it it would be while getting less good at something else. Doing all right in New York, with all my books in one place for the first time in fourteen years, including two big identical old Random House dictionaries. I keep one at each end of my apartment so there’s no lugging around. I turn to them often. “Menu” comes from the French for “detailed list,” “detailed” as in “small and detailed,” while “snob” has no accepted etymological origin—though I’ve heard of Latin teachers who like to say it’s short for “Sine NOBilitate”, “without nobility.” But Enid was no snob! Enid’s sofa was comfortable, yes, but on that Thursday night there was some noise from the street, a car radio playing loud, I think, so I moved my blankets into the spare room in back, which shared a wall with Enid’s and was its mirror image. Unfortunately, the bed there was much too soft, and I still couldn’t sleep. I started wondering if there was any part of a moon out that night, and if the long narrow ends of the Hancock ever reflect moonlight in a line—if not when the moon is large but pale on the rise, then maybe when it’s small and bright in the sky. A little while later I heard Enid get up, use the bathroom, and, I thought, go back to bed. A few more minutes passed and then, from outside the spare-room window, came a sound that should have made me think of death, or birth, but even before I got up to look I knew what it was: Enid, expelling a day’s intake from her almost thirty-two-year-old lungs, cleansing them well with the damp, night-morning air.
Father Must by Rick Rofihe
The question he asked me didn’t start with “Father” or anything like that—I’m not his father. It wasn’t the words in his question that made me think of the question I’d once asked my father. The kid’s a good kid. He’s full of good questions. And while it’s true that I haven’t let him call me anything, that doesn’t stop us from talking. I did, different times, consider all the names he might call me, like Father or Papa or Daddy, but none ever seemed right. I could have let him call me by the name his mother and others do, but since I really don’t care for it, that would miss the whole point. I just once, early on, asked about the father, and she said it had been only one night; then, smiling and pretty, she said it gets dark at night. She said it takes more time than she took to know how a person really looks, so it was a very good thing that the kid looked like her. When I’m with the kid and someone says he must look like his mother, I just say, “O.k.” I don’t say, “He’s not only her.” I don’t say, “She’s the one who had him, and now, mostly, I have him.” I don’t say, “She says that even though I don’t let him call me anything she thinks that he likes me.” It’s a nice place, this place; in the day, it has very good light. It’s the same place that it was when she first brought me here—same full cupboards, same clean table. I did paint the ceilings, but everything else is the same, except for a few things now that are mine and more stuff that’s the kid’s. By the way, I do like him, and it’s not just because he’s not my own age. When we go out for a walk—well, at first he was two in that red-and-blue stroller—I always ask him about something, because after he answers, and it’s always a good answer, I like to ask anyway, “Now, are you sure?” I do it just to see that firm way he nods yes, and when I nod back, that dreamy look he gets because he likes being sure. Billy Blair’s my own age. He was my best friend in sixth grade, but now I don’t see him often. The last time I did, I asked, “Hey, Billy Boy, does your mother still sing?” He said his mother never sang, and that’s a bad answer, so I said, “But she did. When she was folding the wash, she would sing.” And then, you know, he said something, and I didn’t say back to him how maybe I was a drunk now but that I was just a plain pure boy in sixth grade when his mother sang. Should I find a good doctor, or go to the meetings, meet people? I’d rather—really, I’d like to—go see Mrs. Blair. She’s not my own age, so the question would work fine, and she’d even call me Jacksie, my name to people from then. What if I was the only boy who ever noticed her singing? What I mean is not just the only boy but only man. (Someone should tell her. She really could sing.) Of course, I’m not going to see Mrs. Blair. From the Blairs’ house you can see my old house—diagonally across the street, on the next block, the house without trees. Well, there might be trees there now; it’s been twenty years. My father wouldn’t plant trees around the house. He said trees around a house get big by making the house small. Did my mother like trees? I’m not saying my father was wrong; I know what he meant, and what that meant, but it would have been nice to have trees. Am I thinking of my father because of Billy Blair’s answer, or because of the kid’s question, or because today’s Sunday? Just because the sun’s not up yet doesn’t mean it isn’t Sunday. I’m here in the kitchen, drinking black coffee. In Japan, there are now big factories that operate all night without lights—robots don’t need lights. These factories of robots are dark in the dark; all black in black. You can hear these factories long before you can see them; you can be almost next to them and still not see them; you might have to touch them to see them. I don’t know why, but on Sunday mornings my father never got drunk. It wasn’t because the liquor store wasn’t open—he’d buy his week’s supply on Saturdays. And it wasn’t because he was religious. He used to say, “Don’t tell anybody, but I’ve got some different angles on the cross.” Maybe that’s part of an old joke, I don’t know. My father also used to say something else like that, but he’d recite it like poetry: There’s only one God / God sees the little sparrow fall / There’s only one God / He’s for sparrows. I never went to Sunday school, because my father, who wore suits and ties, didn’t want to see me wearing suits and ties. The sky, except for a few stars, is still dark. The moon has gone down without waiting for the sun to come up. I was only thirteen when my mother died in the spring. I still think that spring is a strange time for someone to die. It was about noon when the people came back to the house from the funeral. My father came charging through a crowd of them shouting, “Take off that tie! Go to your room and change out of that suit!” That day wasn’t a Sunday, but it was like a Sunday. I don’t care what everyone thought, he hadn’t been drinking that morning; he wasn’t drunk, he was wild. My father didn’t last long—four-and-a-half years isn’t long. I wore a suit and tie at his funeral and I thought, and people said, that I looked pretty good. They let me stay in my house while I finished twelfth grade. I just wasn’t supposed to be alone, although it turned out that a lot of the time I was. When anyone was staying in the house with me, I would sleep in my room, but when nobody was I’d move out into the den and sleep on the rug between lots of blankets. A housekeeper would come in from ten until two five days a week, so I’d come home for lunch and when I’d finished eating she’d pour herself and me fresh coffee. I’d never liked coffee before. Because she hadn’t known my parents, we talked about just anything while she mostly kept moving around the kitchen. When the housekeeper did sit, it was in my mother’s chair. The housekeeper didn’t know whose chair it had been, and I didn’t mention it. I was o.k. for money and had accounts at some places. When I had to go to a doctor or dentist or something, I’d take a taxi. The first snowy day that winter, I got a driver who had just moved from China and had never seen snow before. I remember now that he kept saying, “So white. So beautiful.” over and over again. Although he didn’t speak English very well, he had a way of making the word “white” sound white and the word “beautiful” sound beautiful. On Saturdays, the housekeeper would come for just two hours in the morning, so weekends were pretty quiet. Sundays were really quiet. After the house was sold for me, I never went back there. I’d been thinking again lately if I should let the kid call me something. If it doesn’t work out between his mother and me, and I leave, he should be able to call me by a name if he sees me somewhere. I’d have no reason not to let him, and, who knows, sometime he might want to introduce me to someone. If he called me by the name I’m called now, I still wouldn’t like it, and especially not from him, because the name was my father’s, so I’d been thinking, Why not Jacksie or Jacks? Until yesterday, I’d pretty much settled on Jacks, which was what people called me when I lived alone in the house. If I let him just once call me something, I was thinking, then it would be up to him—he’s almost seven—whether or not to call me that from then on. But then I thought should I let him start calling me something right away or wait to see how things work out with his mother and me? It might not seem easy to breathe any love into a name like Father. It’s a stiff word—it’s not soft, like, say, Papa—but sometimes you have to breathe love into names you don’t choose. Yesterday, Saturday, in the afternoon, the kid had a question he came in the house to ask me, and the question didn’t start with “Father” or anything like that—he knows I’m not his father—and there was nothing like “must” in his question. (As the sun comes up, this kitchen will get brighter; the ceiling, the table, the cupboards are white.) The kid’s question was just one about a picture on the box the Wiffle ball come in, which shows the curve and the slider, but because he was looking lower than my eyes, at the bottle I’d just opened, it made me think of the question I’d once asked my father, who I called Father. It’s only now that I’m thinking that my father might have heard my question before, not from being asked but by asking, and the answer he might have been given could have been the same one he, a glass at his lips, gave me. When the kid asked me his question yesterday about the curve and the slider, what he wanted was for me to come outside and catch the ball for him, and throw it to him. He wanted to watch his own throw and see mine, and then talk it over, so he could be sure. So I went outside with him and the Wiffle ball, but first I used the same answer I’d been given to a different question. Now the kid can call me that or not that, whatever he likes; he doesn’t have to worry. And I know that he heard me—he looked up at my eyes when I said, “Father must.”
Satellite Dish by Rick Rofihe
If you think it’s too cold for a woman my age to be eating her lunch out here by the beaver dam, then the first thing I have to tell you is, don’t worry about me. Or, if I say it the way I first said it as a little girl, “Don’t worry ’bout me.” I seem to have been saying and thinking the same things right from the beginning. For a long time my mother would look at me as if the things I was saying were a little bit funny—just a little bit, not funny enough one way to laugh at or the other way to get upset about. I don’t know—is “Don’t worry ’bout me” such a funny thing to say if you’re a small child? Many times after I’d said it my mother would ask me if I was angry about anything. I told her I didn’t think so. Maybe what I should have said to her was that I just didn’t like to have anyone worrying about me. But I don’t know if I knew that yet. After a while my mother didn’t say any more about it, but she would still sometimes look at me closely when I said it, as if she were looking not just into my eyes but into my whole face, if that’s possible. I did start to wonder once if it might have something to do with the trains that used to go by our house—if the things I was thinking and saying might be funny because whenever I asked anyone a question I didn’t hear the answer right because just then a train went by. This is nice and hot, this vegetable soup. I make it with celery, onions, and carrots. Fresh tomato for base. The sandwich I baked the bread for in the wood stove. Now, it might look like that’s roast beef in the sandwich, but it’s really a thin-sliced leftover from last night. We had steak, with green beans and mashed potatoes, and then apple pie for dessert. I could have brought some apple pie with me today, but there was this nice little piece of angel-food cake. It wasn’t so cold yesterday, but I didn’t take my usual walk out here. A rather cheerless day, yesterday. Maybe just because it’s the end of the season. Couldn’t interest myself in anything—not knitting, not reading, not anything—so I just crawled into bed with my thoughts. Just as one thing I say is “Don’t worry about me,” one thing I think is that you love somebody by living with them. Now my husband—maybe he lived with me because I loved him, and even maybe he lived with me because he loved me, but he never loved me by living with me. Anyway, I was married once, long ago. Three children, two now away. The satellite dish up by the barn, next to the road, on this side? Hard to miss it. My son, his wife, and the boys watch programs from all over the world now. I really do like living in my own home with family about, yet often when I hear them talking and I think it has to do with people around here but the names aren’t familiar and I ask, it turns out to be about something that was on TV. So I do miss out on some talk that way, because I really don’t look at the television too often. And if I haven’t much interesting to say sometimes, maybe that’s why. This bread of mine, I think it’s very tasty. It’s from my grandmother’s recipe, though I never knew her. But I do make it like my mother did, not only by the recipe but from having watched her. So it should be the same. And I’ve started using the wood stove again. So now it’s exactly the same. They say you shouldn’t slice bread hot, but my mother would, for me. And now, if anyone’s interested, I offer to do it for them. And I do it for myself, too. Because it’s always the same for me, that fresh hot bread. The pond here, that’s something that’s not the same. More like a lake now. Up at the other end, it’s still as good for wading as it used to be, but most times now I’ll just sit down at this end and watch the water trickling over the beaver dam. When it’s warm enough, I dangle my feet in. And I saw lots of baby beavers this summer—so cute. Do you think people change? Maybe it’s that they appear to—if they really do, I don’t know. If it’s a sudden change, maybe it’s just that they go back to being like they really were all along. If it’s a slow change, as they grow older, it’s probably just them becoming more like they are—I think people don’t get less like they are; they |