Dreamtime: A Happy Book

Afterword

144 Afterword Last Saturday was gray, the snow thin and hard across the yard, rising into brown welts at the edge of the road. Silence was rusty and thick. Squirrels stayed in their nests and didn’t scribble through trees. I watched an oak leaf drag across the ground, staggering and shuffling as if on crutches. Chopping fruit into bites and dumping them into a bowl of granola seemed work, and I skipped breakfast. Vicki asked if I wanted to accompany her to the biannual book sale at the Mansfield library. In the past I enjoyed the sale and, when in Connecticut, never missed it. This time I pouted and refused to go, saying, “Repetition used to be comforting and assuring. Now it’s irritating.” After Vicki left, I felt guilty, so I wrapped myself in coat, scarf, gloves, and two stocking hats and, going outside, scraped dog droppings off the snow, tossing them into a rumple of periwinkle. While in the yard, I mulled the conclusion to this book. “Instead of an afterword,” I thought, “I’m going to write a farewell to writing.” Last week in rejecting one of my essays, an editor called my writing “completely charming.” “I’ll bottle the sweat charm wrings out of my hide,” I muttered. “Next I’ll lament having earned only pizza money from my books, and plain pizza, too, without mushrooms or pepperoni,” I said aloud. “And,” I concluded, “I’m tired of being reckoned an amiable buffoon. I’ll show readers that the person they think a hamster is actually a bushmaster.” “I’ll have to work on that last analogy,” I thought, as I turned toward the back door. Happily indulgence had warmed me and the day, and I noticed a nuthatch spinning around a maple, jabbing the bark searching for insects. “Bon appétit, pal,” I said. When Vicki returned from the sale, I was finishing breakfast, granola buried under fields of strawberries and blueberries, the whole atop a banana plantation. “I’ve brought you a couple of treats,” she said, “a cranberry muffin and a slab of fudge. Which one do you want?” “I’ll eat both right now,” I said, pushing the Afterword | 145 cereal bowl aside. Shortly afterward my friend Josh telephoned. He’d seen Vicki at the library, and he wanted to tell me about the sale. He didn’t buy any books, but he noted two titles, both numerological, A Thousand Days in Tuscany and 26 Minnesota Writers; the first book, he said, 998 days and 320 pages too long, the title and the contents of the second “canners even if split in half to produce two primes.” What local Republican, Josh speculated, had owned The Goebbels Diaries, 1942– 1943 before donating it to the sale? Josh kept an eye on the book. “Doing my civic duty,” he explained. “The person who purchases the book merits observation, if not reporting.” Actually Josh himself deserves watching . He discovered two copies of Male Sexuality for sale. On the inside cover of the volumes, he wrote the names of their previous owners, attributing the ownership of one book to a man, the other to a woman. “Giving the two prissiest, old-maidish nincompoops on the Mansfield Town Council secret lives,” he said. Josh also found and inscribed one of my books. “I jacked the price up from one dollar to four,” he reported , “and on the title page wrote, ‘whoever buys this book is one goddamn smart son of a bitch,’ after which I signed your name.” Although the hounds of spring still shivered in their kennel, Josh’s conversation raised my spirits, and sassy summer blossomed in imagination and on the page. In fact the previous day a reader had sent me a springlike couplet, one I’d initially thought corny, but which now made me smile. “’Tis wheat to n-oat the progress of the approach of spring. / Onion-der hills and meadows nature is bean arrayed in all herb beauty.” My correspondent enjoyed puns and ended by observing that sophisticates schooled in the language of diplomacy referred to a dogfight fought over the affections of a “mongreless” in season, as “an affaire du coeur.” I realized that reporting such correspondences might provoke an occasional reader to shout “farewell” and abandon my writings, especially a reader who believed Male Sexuality a “must read.” For my part, however , the afterword suddenly became a continuance of paragraphs, work appropriate for...