up the driveway with the newspaper this morning, I was suddenly conscious of the noise, through the sparse intervening woods, of the sea; it had a new, louder voice. There was a warm, snow-eating drizzle in the air, and a wet wind during the night had activated our outdoor burglar lights, I noticed when I awoke to urinate. The air carried the thrashing of the waves on the beach with the urgency of fresh news, the yowl of a creature new-born. The infant spring has its own acoustics, I noticed. Walking a bit around the property a few days ago, I had taken note of the heavy-headed little snowdrops, and the first pale edges of daylily leaves in the drab soil, but these signs bore no glad message for me. This breezy moist sea-roaring possibly did. Such marine thunder, slowly grinding up the continents, must have sounded thus in our planet’s earliest days, when the lifeless seas beat upon rocky shores now lost beyond all geological conjecture. This prezoic sea’s invasion of my ear somehow cheered me. I liked the fuss, the stirring up. I walk carefully these days, trying to avoid any thought that will tip me into depression.
Deirdre in her renovations, as she bravely tries to oust Gloria’s décor from a few corners of the house, sends me down to the barn with rugs and items of furniture she wants out of sight. Already, in this barn originally built to accommodate carriages and their horses, with troughs and stalls and a drain in the middle of a sloped floor for an Augean hosing, there is an accumulation of old bicycles and skis and collegiate lamps and chairs and hide-a-beds and cardboard boxes of textbooks that will never be consulted again. It is easier to keep these condemned objects here in a kind of life imprisonment than to steel oneself for execution out on the curb on trash-collection day. Such repositories, in garages and basements and closets and attics, pledge our faith in eternal return, in a future that holds infinite temporal opportunities for eventual reuse and rereading. Alas, time’s arrow points one way, toward an entropy when all seas will have broken down all rocks and there is not a whisper, a subatomic stir, of surge. So to fumble and stumble around looking for a cranny of space in which to lay an old Oriental four-by-six whose American domestic career began in Gloria’s father’s grandmother’s Danbury, Connecticut, foyer is a wallow in one’s own death, in funerary spaces as futile as Egypt’s treasure-crammed tombs.
I recognized a black English bicycle that Perdita and the children had given me one Christmas when I, wheezy and overweight, had complained of never getting any exercise. Its bell was rusty and its tires were flat and I had never ridden it much. A bushel basket splinted and stapled together by some artisan from the other end of Massachusetts over sixty years ago held a smattering of my childhood toys which I had come upon in my mother’s attic when she a last died. The toys seemed older than I—some bas-relie Mickey Mouse blocks, a cap pistol with fake-ivory handle, tin Pluto who when wound up would whirr himself to th edges of a table and then, his weight shifting to a sideway wheel near his nose, magically turn back from dange Could these toys have belonged not to me but to my fathe that least playful of worried, work-degraded men? He ha been a child in the Depression, when toys were still sturdily fashioned of tin and wood. In the barn I noticed pieces of rusted drainpipe I had saved when we had the house painted too many years ago, and a crude wooden table, covered with dribbled shellac, that little Henry had proudly built, with my grudging help, when there had been three of us living here. All these uselessly preserved pieces of the past were jammed suffocatingly in. In a kind of panic I roughly, angrily rearranged a few things so I could fit in the old carpet, a tarnished brass ship’s lamp, a faded needlepoint footstool, and a pallid, washy watercolor portrait of Gloria’s mother that Deirdre had replaced with a soft-focus tinted photograph of herself in her low-necked high-school prom dress. This duty done, I fled, gulping the air outside the barn like a man who had nearly drowned.
Once I did nearly drown in the dismal detritus of time. Perdita and I, in our earliest thirties, lived in a