Never underestimate the aesthetic value of a quote at the beginning of piece of writing. --AnonymousI’m stopped at a traffic light and got a lot on my mind. Like who would I choose if I had to choose between Gore and Kerry. It bothers me for some reason that I can’t form an opinion. Another thing that bothered me was the huge difference between hummus and humus. Lose an "m" and hurt someone's feelings. And finally I wondered why the lady with the Kerry/Edwards sticker in front of me chose to go 35 in 45mph zone thus assuring Mutually Assured Delay at this light.
But oh the pleasures of an olde-fashioned road trip! You can take your cruises and your flights to Florida or California just give me the wheel, some music and a ribbon o’ highway. On the way to my destination I alternate between some fine German ooom-pah music and Mike McConnell, a Cincinnati talk show host who makes Rush Limbaugh look like a amateur. McConnell made me sigh at the creativity of the young; it is only they (and maybe Lilek) who could come up with such colorful terms for those tattoos girls get on their lower backs: “Ass antlers” and “tramp stamps”. I could not have come up with those had I had all day. But people have different talents.
My first stop in this all inclusive, eight-hour vacation via Interstate 70 enroute to southwestern Ohio was the little town time forgot: Trenton, Ohio. (I think that was the name.) I stopped there on a whim because it looked interesting but sometimes looks are deceiving. From the roadway I saw enough similarities to my home town to provoke nostalgia and enough differences to provoke curiosity. In hindsight, my half hour was a bit long in the tooth.
But oh those old churches! Looked in the window of an old Mennonite chuch (the doors were locked of course – not having the Blessed Sacrament means Protestant churches are closed outside Sunday and/or Wednesday hours). There was a barrister-style bookcase with old books behind the glass. 'Bout gave me a woody. Later, in Oxford, Ohio I found an ancient looking Presbyterian church from the 1830s and to my surprise found the door unlocked. It soon became apparent why as this church was gutted. It was now apparently a parish center and as bland as a conference room. Only the deep dark wood banister remained. I went upstairs and found a basketball hoop, cheap carpet and a few old couches. Next door, it turned out, was where the new church was. I stopped by. It was locked.
Girls, Churches & Books
At Miami University I take a little bike trip before I run. And I see the different nicknames the boys and girls give their rented houses. One group of coeds named their house “Bikinis and Martinis”. This seemed to me rather blatant advertising to the op sex. At least the bikini part. What group of guys would name their house “Speedos and Beer”? Or, if salesmanship is the aim, even “Fat Wallets & Whiskey”? I don’t see it. I also sense some false advertising since weather during the Miami academic year (late Aug-May) affords surprisingly few opportunities for bikinis.
On to a less salacious topic. (Segue alert!). At the old Presbyterian-church-turned-gymnasium, I noted one fragment from yesteryear: a collage of photographs of past pastors (say that five times fast) from the founding to the 1960s. It reminded me of the old pictures of early fraternity classes except the pastors were older. How distinguished and sober they look! Hard-souled men from an age when men weren’t womanly. And the smell in the room was that of old books. Sort of musty and redolent of “old library”. It’s too bad men aren’t shoppers. If they were instead of having to choose from fresh lily scents and vanilla or apricot for your bathroom spray, there would be “Oil de Books”. I’d buy that. Beats lighting a match.
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The new dorms I see have large windows. We had small windows and we liked it, because it gave us something to look forward to when we were seniors.
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The “oil de books” lingers in my mind. I recall books I’ve been wanting for going on ten years now. Like the Miami poet Percy MacKaye’s work. And Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare and Chesterton on Shakespeare. One of the mysteries in life is why Chesterton’s book on the Bard is not only out-of-print but is like $175 for a copy. What are there, like three copies in the world of that book extant?
There are books every home library should have – a dictionary, the bible, Shakespeare’s works, etc..There are books every Catholic library should have: the Catechism, some Chesterton, Butler’s Lives of Saints. And there are books everyone named “TSO” should have: Johnson on Shakespeare, Chesterton on Shakespeare and MacKaye’s poems. Plus I’d like to get a book about the obscure French priest our high school was named after.
My church tour continued with the Catholic church in town which, predictably, was open. I’ve been in there hundreds of times, mostly as an undergrad of course, but the stained glass windows opened up for me today in a way they never had before. So odd! As much as I love and am partial to words it seems that art captures things in a way words can’t. There is no way to describe, for instance, the look on the face of the angel who was delivering the cup to Jesus at the Garden of Gethsemane. Saddness, yes, but more. Jesus appears to receive it with the attitude that “this is good only because of He who gives it says it is”. He drank what looked to be poison except the Father said it was not, another case of the substance changed but the accidents not. A transubstantion.
In another window, Joseph as a carpenter has an axe in his left hand for wood-chopping purposes and is holding his right hand out for Jesus to supply more wood. He is looking at Mary and Mary has a look difficult to describe again but it is both sad and knowing but also curious? She is looking intently at Jesus who is carrying the wood as he would later the Cross, over his shoulder. Jesus looks like Isaac and Joseph like Abraham.
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If It Ain’t Baroque, Don’t Fix It
or Don't Anticipate Calvary
King Library is the king of periodicals; one could die happily in this full and eclectic collection. I happen across something called Paris Review and open at random to a letter written by Tennessee Williams counseling a would-be play writer, saying the writer should avoid all pain, suffering and doubt while producing that first draft. “Then comes Calvary – but not before.” It seemed a message that this life is a first draft and Purgatory will be our editing.
Perusing the periodical New Letters: A Magazine of Writing & Art I came upon the phrase “had to pee like a racehorse”. Gee whiz maybe I have a future in writing.
New Oxford Review and Commonweal represented Catholic interests, which is sort of like representing American liberalism and conservatism with Michael Moore's and Ann Coulter's books.
I headed to another building, the hall containing the Classics Department. There is an aura there that just isn’t present at say the Accounting Dep’t. Here in the Classics there are posted ads for overseas study but what really caught my eye were the free books. I now own Harold Segel’s “A Comparable Study of the Baroque Poem” which will grace my shelves unread until I die. But my slogan is, “if it’s free, it’s for me!”.
I made it my business to read the profferings posted outside the professor’s offices. And the first I came to had an anti-Bush cartoon complemented by a long, whiney quote from Thomas Jefferson written shortly after the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 was passed. Not exactly a motivator to become a classicist since the message seems to be "study the Classics and hate Bush" but you don’t have to do so to be anti-Bush. It seems to bespeak a poverty just as the Clinton haters displayed.
Blinded By the Light
Emerging from the library I felt my own sort of poverty as the day was sunny and beautiful and I’d just wasted a portion of it indoors. I had a sudden urge to read something scholarly under the shade of a papyrus tree. I briefly pondered going on a run but that would be borrowing tomorrow’s energy. So I found a spot next to a wall to sit and drink, beneath windows and across from a parking lot. But I can see an olde brick dorm (“dorm” sounds too coarse and ugly to describe what is a stately mansion gracefully accompanied by her maids of honor, her trees, growing ever bigger with every passing year…). Almost like Monticello, so fine are the columns and the tough of green of the porch awning, the color of rusted coins and old sea wrecks. Clover salts the mid-distance though the sky is cloudiferous though there is full sun.
I underestimate sweet Ohio. I sometimes think there is more to do here than anywhere in the U.S. That might sound provincial except for the fact that I’d rather visit Europe or Russia or South America or anywhere else in the world than Ohio. (And certainly Bill Luse’s snake-swallowing birds sound interesting.) But within the continental United States? Ohio has charms to soothe the savage beast. She is small towns, large towns, tranquil campuses (campii?), deep woods, flatlands, Appalachian hills, Great Lakes, great rivers…But there is also the sweet smell of asphalt and the intoxicating scent of new wood in construction sites and that reminds me of my youth…
There is more peace among the birds on a sunny, summer afternoon than in the softest bed at night. The press of so many clouds above while bathing in full sun only magnifies the grace. It comes to mind unbidden: we are eating dinner at that restaurant near the place we stay in Hilton Head. It’s late in the week and we are well-rested but for the adrenalin hangover caused by the two-hour nightly viewings of “24” on dvd. Oh how good a time that was! My favorite vacations are inevitably not cruises or trips to cities but those sweet weeks. It’s as deeply ingrained as the brief moments in the cabin in the Appalachian foothills where in the morning I’m reading in a rocking chair and the woods surround us and we're living the Little House on the Prairie dream except the chores are done and there are no phone calls, interruptions... just bliss.
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