We wake up and make sushi. A dream, to find a boy who knows how to roll the finest Californias, to cone the sweetest temakis, and here he is, slicing carrots and cucumbers into little sticks. I think, my time has come, my ship has arrived, my boy with the toe socks, the book on flower arranging, the pillow in the shape of a cat.
I was not sure what to make of Alberto Manguel’s reference (in “Wordplay,” No. 63) to Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Nine Billion Names of God,” in which Tibetans in a lamasery search for the name of God.
On Sunday evening we pulled into town after four nights on the road. Four nights of snow and rain and eighteen-wheelers sucking us right off the highway every time they passed, and now here we were in Selkirk, Manitoba, with that big fish leering down at us.
Last summer I fell in love with a lifeguard. He said, you can tell everything about a person by how they enter the ocean, so we sat all afternoon and watched fat mothers standing on the hot sand, boys playing water wars, couples strolling along the edge.
Toward the end of her life I drew close to Althea, the cat who had been with Mary and me for five or maybe six years, ever since her real owner, Mary’s daughter Karen, had to find a home for her when a landlord invoked the no-pets rule, and Mary and I were living mere blocks away, completely petless and, some might say, carefree.
In Half Nelson (THINKFilm), Ryan Gosling plays Dan Dunne, a strung-out teacher working in an inner-city middle school in New York, where, as the teacher, he is the only “white kid” in the classroom. Dunne’s passion for teaching history and his genuine respect for the kids is equalled only by his severe substance addiction, and each day he arrives at school a little more messed up than the day before.
