note books

You drive out of Hancock, across the bridge, across the Delaware, from New York State into Pennsylvania. We were together soon after his birthday, Marco and I and he was seventy-four years old. I called him my younger brother. He was pre-old. Japanese say seventy-five is old. But before “old” comes “pre-old”, sixty-five to seventy-five and after that you’re old and Marco was just seventy-four years old.  We were together in the Subaru speeding along the northeastern country roads in  Pennsylvania in early spring and the buds were blushing and coming now and the forsythia was blazing and the daffodils too and the Saskatoons on the forest edge were blooming white flower clusters in the crisp shadows. But it was  cold, a gray day with a twinkle of ice in the air and the new green fields were dusted fairy white. Sometimes when I drive through these old hills I think about Andrew Wyeth’s haunting painting of Christina , the crippled young woman in the yellow grass field lo...

It was like a wraith, a cold shadow and a feeling, a visitation before or after death and like a cat or a wolf detecting danger, my hackles rose and my mind jolted down to earth and it all came together. There had to be an end of the world pot luck and I would host it.  It’s hard for me to put thoughts together because there is so much. It goes back fifty years or more. But let me start on the beach. Nevil Shute’s novel about an atomic apocalypse and the end of the world. It stayed with me. On the Beach . And then came the film directed by Stanley Kramer.  It goes something like this. They’ve dropped the Bomb and all life north of the equator seems to be gone. No signal. Incommunicado. Nothing. And now radiation is slowly making it’s way across the equator, high-altitude currents gradually mixing with southern winds drifting down towards Melbourne, Australia, possibly the last place humans survive after the apocalypse. It was my home.  And then they pick up an errat...