I am visiting New Hampshire for the weekend, and the pile of snow at the end of my parents’ driveway is still about five feet high. No feet high is the Russian Living Language Conversation Manual I cannot find, sadly. It’s often one of my favorite parts of coming home, browsing through the passages whose progression comes not from meaning, but rather from grammar and spelling. I was going to type out my favorite passage, a series of mildly connected sentences about Tolstoy and his wife, and I think you would have enjoyed them, but as I said, the book is invisible and gone.
Gone too is a family friend whose memorial service my mother and I are about to go attend. He was a (promininent) member of the church I grew up in, and so we are returning to the room where I was baptized and then never confirmed. (Though I was and am proud to know that New Hampshire’s Episcopalians stood behind Bishop Gene Robinson in the face of the Anglican schism.)
Next to the church stands the hospital where I was born, and where, a few years later, my mother would take my sister and me for our favorite outing: grilled cheese sandwiches at the cafeteria and then a viewing of the newborns. (There are no area zoos.)
Across the street from the church and the hospital is the Wolfeboro Public Library. My mother still has my library card, which I sometimes use when I visit, happily presenting my 10 year old self’s signature for verification. I was so careful! In writing, not in reading. In reading I had no taste, only appetite. I stayed up all night to finish Jurassic Park.
Not missing from my parents’ bookshelf is The Standard Book of Essential Knowledge (1961), which was born at a yard sale, and offers this advice to young writers:
The story that will sell is a story people like to read. Most people do not like to read about unpleasant subjects. Since they identify themselves with the hero or heroine, they do not like to read stories in which those characters come to grief or end up in a state of bafflement or bewilderment.
Oh I am so sad I cannot find the Manual. Maybe you would like to hear the ending? That part, at least, I know by heart:
She loved him once.
And he loved her too.
But that was a long time ago.