Edinburgh Days, or Doing What I Want to Do

Introduction

Introduction I got to the dentist’s office early and, sitting down, looked at my fellow patients. Across the room a large woman sagged into a stuffed chair, the June number of Connecticut Magazine balanced on her diaphragm like a screen, on the cover of the issue the phrase “Summer Times” brighter than noon, beneath the words fat hunks of watermelon, red as sunburn. The woman looked inert, and the arms of the chair pushed the flesh along her flanks up over her stomach, kneading it into yeasty folds. Suddenly the woman sat upright and, leaning forward, stared at the rug. Quickly she hoisted herself out the chair, took two steps, raised her right foot then lowered it, grinding the ball into the rug, her heel wagging back and forth like a tail. “I killed that spider,” she said, glancing around the room searching for approval. “Spider, hell!” I said, “You killed God!” “What?” the woman said, rocking backward. “You killed God,” I repeated. “After what you did, you better go home and pray for forgiveness . Who knows what will happen if you go through that door?” I said, pointing toward the door that separated the reception room from the dentists’ offices, for good measure adding, “Certainly God doesn’t know what will happen. He’s dead.” At that moment Donna appeared and said, “Sam.” I stood and sauntered through the door. I met Jim in the hall. “Sam,” Jim said, “What are you up to? I heard a commotion in the waiting room and was concerned until I remembered you had an appointment to have your teeth cleaned.” “Jim,” I said, “I’ve been worried about you. You look tired, and because I am kind and sweet I’ve been chasing away patients so you can take a vacation.” Later, as I left the office, Jim said, “It’s always a treat to see you, Sam.” “The time has come for me to leave Storrs—again,” I thought, the scrubbing having not simply polished my molars but also given me leisure viii Introduction enough to gnaw at my character. I’d been back in Connecticut for nine days, having spent the previous four and a half months in Scotland. Tornados of pollen swirled though eastern Connecticut, and I stayed in bed my first three days at home, my sinuses hot air balloons, a high temperature heating them and making them swell, rising behind my nose and pushing my eyes out, turning them into goggles. The first day out of the house I went to the Memorial Day parade in Mansfield Center. Every year the high school and middle school bands play martial music, the players strutting, banging drums, lifting their legs high with the “field artillery.” Parents amble beside Cub and Brownie Scouts. Coaches try to marshal second and third grade baseball players into squads. The players are wonderfully undisciplined, always skipping out of lineups to hug parents and talk to classmates. Aging veterans throw peanuts and candy from the windows of antique cars. Packs of dogs gambol along, slobbering but not barking or sniffing one another rudely. Vicki and I never miss the parade. We stand beside the road and talk to friends while sipping coffee and eating chocolate doughnuts. This year I felt out of sorts, in part because I recognized few people, our children having graduated from teams and schools. Instead of following marchers into the new cemetery on the hill, I lingered in the old graveyard, the death’s heads on the eighteenth-century stones more familiar than most townsfolk. Below a rise I found a golf ball, a Pinnacle 4. The thought of someone’s practicing chip shots amid rows of leaping boards cheered me, and I turned and strolled up Cemetery Road to the new graveyard. Red-winged blackbirds called raucously from the marsh, and an oriole snapped over the road, black and orange feathers slapping like a flag. “A good day,” I thought, the sky soft as tissue and the sun light and promising. I was wrong. The weather had seduced me into optimism. Instead of climbing the hill in the center of the graveyard and listening to speeches, I walked around the field. A ring of yellow iris circled the marsh, and a wood thrush sang in the woods. I smiled and listened to the bird. But then I came across a new grave on a spit of land at the western lip of the cemetery...