Tony Abbott's Blog, page 5

FBR 84: There was a man at the cemetery . . .

Yesterday was my mother's birthday, the second since she passed away last year, so I went to visit the graveyard. Not far away I saw a man kneeling in front of an upright stone, blasting away at it with some kind of tool attached to a gasoline-powered compressor. His truck was nearby. It was all pretty noisy, the grumbling motor of the compressor in his truck, the sound of the machine at his side, and the high pitch — like the sound of a hose full blast — of the tool he was using. A cloud of charcoal-colored stone dust flew up and over the yard. I walked over to see what he was doing. I assumed at first that he was adding the terminal date to the wife's listing on the stone, but perhaps he was engraving all of her information. A template (which looked to have been made out of metal) included all of it: her name, birth date, and death date (June 1, 2010), and it had been duck-taped over the stone. The man was moving his blasting tool over the template, not in exact movements but in a brushing manner, and I knew that what he was doing could not be responsible for the V-shaped indentation of the final letters. He had a cushion on the ground in front of the stone that he used to kneel on. His hair was gray or dirty white, he was stooped over, with old leathery skin — what I could see of it. He wore a kind of gas mask on his face and noise-canceling head phones. During a pause, he went back to his truck for more . . . stuff. It looked like sand. He emptied the stuff from what seemed to be the handle-part of a cut-off detergent bottle into a canister on the machine at the grave site. I asked him what he was doing, "Adding the date?" He said nothing, but nodded quickly and pointed to the taped off section of the marker. I threw out the word "template?" partly to try to get more information from him and partly to seem knowledgeable about work done at markers, but he was done with me. He reattached by means of a hose the instrument he was using, settled back on the cushion, and drew what might have been a bee-keeper's shroud over his head. Then he dug into his shirt pocket for a small rectangular plate of glass. Wiping it clean on both sides, he slid it into an open frame on the shroud, a window for him to see, started up the machine again, and was back to work. I walked over to my mother's stone. It sits next to my brother's. Before going over to see what the man was doing I had wiped away the leaves and nuts that had fallen from the trees above, but more leaves were back. It's a nice spot, shady.

FBR 83: I am nothing . . .

. . . if not apolitical, and yet I found the stomach beginning to twist yesterday when I read one of the responses to David Brook's op-ed piece on Jonathan Franzen's Freedom in Wednesday's New York Times. The letter-writer says:

"If an author focuses on society's absurdities, he should also indicate that he knows where redemption can be found. He needs to include purpose and direction in human existence, and show that despite setbacks, twists and wrong turns, there is a way out and forward."

Ma...

FBR 82: Desperately Seeking Carson . . .

So, yesterday was Celebrate Children's Book Day at Sunnyside on the eastern bank of the Hudson and since my table-time was in the afternoon I decided to drive across the river to visit Nyack. Carson McCullers's big old white house (she lived there from 1945 to her death in 1967) is at 131 South Broadway, up a bit from the darling center of town, and behind some substantial growth, but in fine shape and lived in. Because it was Sunday at church time, the Haitian one across the street was in...

FBR 81: Building Language and Tanks . . .

Building Your Language (Catholic School Edition) is a 1951 textbook by Paul McKee and M. Lucile Harrison I found in the basement of my mother's house the other day. It is stamped on the first page in red: "St. Margaret Mary School, South Euclid, Ohio," which puts it in my possession sometime before 1961. Because of the mold growing in the basement for I don't know how long, the book is a wretched thing, a spore-blowing menace that I'm getting out of my house as soon as I finish writing this, ...

FBR 80: One time I remember . . .

. . . an incident involving a couple of boys and the garden next door to my house. It must have been around 1960. These days, the neighborhood at the corner of Cliffview Road and Weston in South Euclid is dotted with a few empty houses, and the house next to the one I grew up in is one of them. At the time I am remembering, however, it was occupied by a pair of old ladies, sisters, probably, who had aged along with the house. My brother and I even used to call it "the old ladies' house."

On...

FBR 79: O, the Weary . . .

Sometimes you wake up and say to yourself, "I want to be someone else now." After two weeks in a rental cottage on Cape Cod, I wanted to walk away from the noise, but so much of it was coming from me, that I wasn't sure how to put some distance between me and . . . me.

I can't imagine this is an uncommon feeling; most folks must get the notion at some time or other. After all, you've probably been the same person in and out for years, and it's been "all right," but things fall a certain way...

FBR 78: "Wonderful Wonderful Wonderful . . . "

These are the words the editor Robert Linscott cabled to Truman Capote on reading early chapters from The Grass Harp, sent to Linscott from Italy where Truman was staying at the time. "There is a perfection about these two chapters that is simply miraculous." One can imagine how lovely it was for Truman to hear these words while crafting his second novel, a follow up to Other Voices, Other Rooms, published to a good deal of acclaim for Linscott two years earlier.

Discovering, however, that...

FBR 77: Touching history . . .

Because from the beginning, I've wanted to use a poem by Langston Hughes as an epigraph in Lunch-Box Dream, now that the book is nearing advance reading copies, I've had to get permission to reprint it. Discovering the whereabouts of Hughes's estate (he died in 1967) was a little job in itself. The copyright designation in, for example, the Vintage paperback of Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, states: "Copyright renewed 1987 by George Houston Bass, Surviving Executor of the Estate of...

FBR 76: The Divine Collusion . . .

Carson McCullers gives Mick Kelley, the complex twelve-year-old girl at the center of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, both the tortured and splendid parts of herself when she was young. In one scene almost exactly midway through the book, Mick is with her brothers and a neighborhood boy, waiting — as in so many scenes in this novel — for sluggish Time to pass. For Life to move on. For things to be altered forever. Suspended in the porch heat of the long afternoon, even as the reader becomes...

FBR 75: After you have been properly snake-bit . . .

We've talked before about sequence. The order in which a writer chooses (or does not or may not choose) to assemble the shelf of his or her career seems hugely significant in the course of an ongoing writing life, certainly more so than after it's over and the task of summing up an oeuvre, a body of work, is left to someone else.

Last night I asked a novelist how she approaches her next book. "I never leave a book without knowing what I'm doing next, and I start it within a week of finishing t...