All My Days Are Saturdays

Introduction

1 “I do not suspect everyone who speaks a foreign language of being a thief,”V. S. Pritchett wrote in The Offensive Traveller, adding that on his journeys he didn’t see bacteria everywhere or scream when he could not get a good steak in Morocco or decent haggis in Naples. I do not say, he continued,“the country is wonderful, but you can have the people.”One thing annoyed Pritchett, however: other tourists. “Clear the Americans out of Paris,” he wrote. “Throw the Germans out of Venice,” and “rid Majorca and the Costa Brava of the British.” In this book I travel a little, primarily to the Caribbean, and although I sometimes lament, I rarely complain. Tourists entertain me. Frequently they were born in places with memorable names, Frying Pan Creek, Tennessee, or Burnt Corn, Kentucky. Tourists say things that occasionally cause me to break stride, if not think.“A dog has four feet, but he can only go in one direction at a time,”observed a man sitting beside me in a van in Dominica, afterward nodding his head vigorously and knowingly. A former banker advised me, “Don’t trouble trouble until trouble troubles you,” a proverb I first heard thirty years ago but had forgotten. “My specialty was the treatment of wastewater,” an engineer told me in Saint Lucia. “Old dogs really can’t learn new tricks. Although I’m retired , I’m unable to stop recycling. I own a small gift shop in Sarasota. The day before I opened the shop, I painted a sign and hung it in the front window. ‘I buy junk,’ the sign says, ‘and sell antiques.’”“My father Introduction 2 All My Days Are Saturdays was an alcoholic,” a tax lawyer recounted. “He was a terrible man, but childhood in the house with him taught me the importance of disconnecting , and that shaped my success. I am able to disconnect from people , places, and public opinion without batting half an eye. My wife likes me to accompany her to the theater. I’m not fond of plays, and midway through most first acts I walk out. I don’t know why she keeps buying two theater tickets. When she returns home after a play, she always says that I embarrassed her and that everybody in the audience stared at me and frowned when I left. Frown people might, but when the IRS comes after their bank accounts, they run to me. I don’t care what people have done. I don’t care for them or the truth. I don’t care if a person is a robber or poisoner. If he is able to pay my fee, I’ll settle his case.” I am not naturally critical or irritable. Like a painter studying a canvas, I move about slowly, shifting perspective and observing, hoping to notice difference more than to change the textures or tones of things. In an old fable a fox staggered under a blanket of stinging, blood-sucking flies. When a hedgehog noticed the suffering of the fox, he volunteered to pluck the flies and kill them. “No, no. My flies are fat. They eat small breakfasts and dinners and hardly ever indulge in midday snacks. In fact they are almost vegans. Moreover they are so comfortable and self-satisfied they rarely sting, and when they do, the pain only itches. Once you remove these flies,” the fox explained to the hedgehog, “a swarm of hungry sansculottes will take their place. Because they have been flying about starving for a long time, they’ll be angry and resentful. They’ll dig gluttonously deep, and, no matter how much they eat, they will distrust their newfound fortune. They’ll siphon gutters of blood from me. They will sting often, not because they need to do so but just for the pleasure of viciousness and to illustrate what they’re capable of in order to discourage less fortunate flies who might be tempted to wedge into the table.” The idea of change doesn’t upset me as much as it did the fox. Still, my words are not hot and sharp. I’m not a doctor snake capable of curing the wounds of the downtrodden and the night crawling. Nothing I have written has bettered, or worsened, a long-lasting abuse. I have enjoyed a comfortable life, and I rarely write fervently about social matters. I am not a son of Zeruiah, and when I tell the truth, I...