Moth fought his last fight in the basement of a church forty miles out of town. The crowd was polite and applauded after every round, but made hardly a sound while the punches were being thrown. None of the overhead lights were extinguished and there was a constant buzz of fluorescence. He lost a decision to a good-looking guy his own age from the ymha, and punch by punch it was his most painful fight.
When my friend Barbara heard a description of this photograph of a friend’s aunt taken when the aunt was nine years old, sometime in the early 1950s near the town of Barrington, Nova Scotia, she was put strongly in mind of her own mother, who had grown up in Nova Scotia and who used to tell stories of catching fish when she was a girl.
All the coolest kids in my junior high school went across the street and sat on the steps of the church during lunch hour. On this spring day, they sat there long after the bell had rung for afternoon classes. I was not cool but was sitting in the crowd anyway because today the cool kids were having a protest, and if I joined in maybe I could be a cool kid, too.
As his father drives him to the dance, Leonard thinks that his father has a lot to worry about. God is probably going to have Leonard stabbed at a urinal tonight, which will probably lead to his whole family suffering from depression.
They were not useful, they were not hearty: theirs was the peripatetic life of the mind, a clear contradiction of the Presbyterianism of the world of learning, of the work ethic and the fraternities and sororities and football games and heartiness that constituted its alibi.
