LITMIR.BIZ

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an anglophile. He was born in Italy, but he talks with an English accent.

      Speaks, said the teacher. He speaks with an English accent.

      You did your best to describe your mother, explaining that she was Italian, too, but that unlike your father, who spoke English better than Walter Cronkite, she had a heavy accent and coined her own distorted versions of common idiomatic expressions, turning “when worse comes to worst” into “bad that it goes,” and “don’t stand on ceremony” into “no make compliment,” and “I don’t give a damn” into “I no give a goop.” Some people find it charming, you said.

      The teacher laughed and so did you.

      You told the teacher about your grandmother, Nonnie, who had her own little room in a corner of the house (decorated with Japanese fans, smelling of lilac and mothballs), and the family dog, Pa’al (the apostrophe had been your idea), and how poorly behaved she was, how – to the amusement and horror of dinner guests – she’d climb on the dining room table after, and sometimes even during, the dessert course.

      The teacher asked you about your brother. He wondered how you and George got along. You confessed that you fought a lot, you weren’t sure why, maybe because people were always comparing you or lumping you together – the Selgin Twins; the Selgin Boys – as if you were one and the same.

      Which we aren’t, you said.

      Of course you’re not, said the teacher.

      You went on talking, with the teacher mostly asking questions and you answering them. Meanwhile the rain kept falling, pattering against the carriage house roof, dripping down from its eaves. There was a fancy wooden chessboard at the center of the table, its checkerboard pattern formed by alternating veneers of different woods. Seeing you admire it the teacher asked if you cared to play. You’d never played chess before.

      It’s not hard, the teacher said. I’ll show you.

      He showed you how to move the pieces. At first it seemed impossibly complicated, all those different pieces and so many ways to move them.

      Take your time, the teacher instructed. This is one game that gets played between the moves.

      By the third or fourth game it got easier, though it still took the teacher less than a dozen moves to checkmate your king. You played until it started to get dark outside and the rain fell less hard. It was time to go. The teacher let you borrow his umbrella.

      As you stood ready to leave by the door, he said, I enjoyed our visit.

      Me too, you said.

      I’ll see what I can do about getting you into my class.

      You hadn’t even asked.

      THAT’S ALL YOU’D remember, that and the smell of the stove and candle smoke and smoky tea, and of all the books filling the teacher’s shelves – a musty, vanilla-and-mushroom smell. And the sound of rain falling as you played chess.

      You’d remember too how, as you walked home that day, things were different. The houses, the church steeple, the gasoline pumps at the Sunoco station, the cars splashing through puddles, the streams of smoke rising from people’s chimneys – they all looked the same. The town was the same town you’d spent most of your life in, where you rode your bike and waited for the school bus and watched the hat factories burn down one by one. Nothing had changed, really. Yet nothing would ever be quite the same.

       I’VE LIVED HERE FOR THREE YEARS NOW, SINCE I TOOK a tenure-track position at the state university where I teach writing. When I told them I was moving here, my friends predicted that I’d go crazy, that after thirty-five years in New York City life in a small southern town would be the end of me – and not just any small southern town, but Milledgeville, Georgia, the former home of Flannery O’Connor and Central State Hospital, once the biggest psychiatric facility in the country, the place where “they” sent you if they wanted to get rid of you. Watch out, people down here used to joke, or they’ll send you to Milledgeville. Everyone knew what that meant.

       I guess I didn’t watch out.

      * * *

       NOVEMBER.

       A cloudy, breezy day – the breeze strong enough to raise whitecaps on the lake. The sky gray, the water a shabby brown, the trunks of the trees lining the shore blackened by last night’s rain, everything a variation on a theme of grays and browns. The muted colors complement my mood, the season having laid out my emotional palette for me – umbers raw and burnt, a dab of ochre, smoke black and bone white.

       For my canvas I have my notebook, the cardboard kind used by generations of school kids, with faux black-and-white marble covers, $1.99 at K-Mart. My writing desk: a twelve-foot Vermont Packboat: folding caned seats, mahogany gunwales, lightweight Kevlar hull (deep blue), bronze oarlocks, spruce oars. When not in use it hangs from the ceiling of the basement, where I keep my studio, mounted with a pulley system.

      And though my desk rows beautifully, most of the time I’m happy to just drift along, as I’m doing now – not just physically, on the water, but mentally, in my thoughts. The Japanese have a word for it: zuihitsu. Literally it means “follow the brush,” let the mind flow freely, as it sees fit, from thought to thought with no agenda. Though it pertains to a genre of Japanese literature consisting of loosely connected musings, zuihitsu can apply as well to other forms of creation, to poetry, painting, or music. In this case the term is doubly apt, for as my rowboat drifts so do my musings. If she didn’t have a name already, I’d call her Zuihitsu. But she’s got a name: Audrey.

       All of which is by way of explaining that I write these notes with little respect for order, logic, or causal relationships – not out of carelessness or laziness, but because a person adrift in a rowboat on a lake can hardly be expected to do otherwise.

      * * *

      I TRADED NEW YORK CITY FOR A LAKE AND GOT A GOOD DEAL.

       The best things about living here are silence and solitude; the worst things are the same. Sometimes it gets so quiet it’s spooky. Not long ago, while working, I was disturbed by the sound of what I took to be rap music, a low steady bass note throbbing somewhere. Since my neighbors here are mostly older retired people I figured it had to be coming from a boat. But there were no boats passing. My years in New York have made me paranoid about noise. Thirty-five years of car alarms, truck-backing signals, and ghetto blasters waking you up after midnight can do that to you. Hoping to locate the source of the sound, I went outside and heard nothing. But as soon as I went back to my desk it started again.

       What the hell, I thought.

       Then I realized it was my own pulse throbbing in my ears.

       That’s how quiet it gets here.

       I’m not complaining. The silence is good for writing, a welcomed collaborator, the clear lens through which I look into the past. Looking through it now, I see the Building, the yellow stucco shack that was my father’s laboratory, where he built his inventions.

      United States Patent 2,964,641, DEVICE FOR THE IDENTIFICATION OF ENGRAVED DOCUMENTS. “Apparatus for identification of engravings, said engraving comprising a surface bearing a plurality of spaced, approximately parallel lines of a particular unique configuration and of substantial width, separated by spaces of different reflectance from said lines, said apparatus comprising a complimentary surface bearing lines corresponding in configuration to the spaces of said first surface but of greater width, means for optically superimposing said two surfaces to produce a uniform optical effect over the combined surfaces when the two sets of lines are complimentary and positionally matched, shifter means for shifting said surfaces with respect to each other in a first direction substantially perpendicular to at least

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