If a bunch of fundamentalist Christians wish to secede from the United States of America, that’s just fine with me. Were it not for the fundies, my state wouldn’t be the scientific laughingstock of the world for its early (and ongoing) views on evolution. Thank you, Dayton, Tennessee. Were it not for fundies of various creeds, we might not be at war today, and it’s highly unlikely that the World Trade Center would have been destroyed as it was. Were it not for fundies, we might be a good bit closer to having equal rights for all in America rather than only for those who, a hundred years ago, were white and those who, now, happen to be attracted to members of the opposite sex. The fundies want a state of their own? I say give it to them. I say give them California and hope it’s in their vengeful fundy god’s will to split it off into the ocean sooner than anticipated.

Whence this outburst? An acquaintance sent me a link to Christian Exodus today. The site provides information about a movement appealing to the Christian Right to find 50,000 people willing to relocate to a conservative state and vote to rescind that state’s ratification of the constitution and thus to become an independent state. The site seems to be self-contradictory, as its author cries out for a return to the “moral and constitutional government that we have demanded for so long” while encouraging the denunciation of that very constitution.

The fact is, it’s not the constitution that’s problematic. There are means to amend it, as the Christian Right, with its Defense of Marriage Act and its attempts to have the U.S. declared a Christian nation, well knows. The problem here is that the Christian Right just doesn’t have the numbers to get what it wants. Rather than filtering the issues through the appropriate (electoral) channels, this group is skulking off to find a way around the protocol defined by the very founding fathers they insist were all good Southern Baptist prayer leaders. Yet they consider me unpatriotic because I don’t support their war or their particular ancient set of moral codes.

I do think it’s a shame that they’re going to ruin a perfectly good state for those of its residents who disagree with the fundamentalist ideology. (And by the way, I’m not railing here against Christians generally — just this particular offensive subset of them.) If the fundies were coming in such great numbers to Tennessee, I’d be inclined to move away, and I’d be pretty steamed about it, because I like it here in spite of the stifling climate of intolerance for anyone besides the hetero WASP. My residency here is safe, it turns out, as they’ve narrowed their prospective venues down to Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina. And they’re welcome to the hypocritical legacy of Strom Thurmond and racial division, which they were happy to spur on with scripture 150 years ago.

Yes, they’re welcome to any of these backwater states, as far as I’m concerned, though for my part, I’d have the government designate an island for them so that they can commit their social atrocities in isolation without displacing any harmless non-extremists, hurting or “helping” none but themselves. If as big an island as Australia was good enough for British criminals, then surely we could devote a few hundred square miles to the likes of Falwell and Robertson.

My reading lately has set me to thinking about art. Gaddis treats of it extensively in his books (The Recognitions is specifically about art and the others all hover around the topic), and that’s what really got me going. From there I went to rereading a bunch of Browning’s poems about artists and picking up an edited book about art and aesthetics. One of the most thought-provoking things I’ve read recently comes from the April edition of POETRY, which half celebrates poetry month and half decries the fact that there’s any need to stand up and wave arms and say “hey, look, poetry!”

Part of the April spread was a pair of reviews of Garrison Keillor’s newish anthology, entitled Good Poems and filled I believe with many of the poems he reads daily on his writer’s almanac segment on NPR. Neither reviewer was especially fond of Keillor or his baritone rendering of the poems he selects (which rendering I’ve always found to be rather pleasant), but August Kleinzahler in particular was utterly vitriolic, executing an ad hominem review that, as a subsequent leter-to-the-editor writer noted (one of many such letters crying foul in the subsequent two editions), was so focused on assassinating Keillor’s demeanor that it gave hardly an indication as to the quality or composition of the anthology. I found Kleinzahler’s review to be jaw-dropping and brutal and a little inappropriate by and large, but it contained one very interesting assertion:

“Most people have neither the sensitivity, inclination, or training to look or listen meaningfully, nor has the culture encouraged them to, except with the abstract suggestion that such things are good for you. Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not.”

I think he’s correct that we’re culturally conditioned to accept that art is good for us, and I don’t think most of us question the fact very frequently or broadly, a testament to the depth of the conditioning. Is art really good for us? Really?

I suppose we can use art as a barometer for a given society’s capacity for flourishing. If you’re busy trying to scrounge up food, you don’t have time for art; so societies with a rich and ongoing tradition of art, one might argue, are in better shape from a survival vantage point than those with a paucity of art. Thus, in a sense, the urge to make art (and to have the leisure to enjoy art) is good for us because it drives us to do things that help our society to flourish.

I don’t really believe that, though, or not the part about our being driven to flourish by our desire to have the leisure to enjoy art. And I’m not convinced, either, that the production of art correlates with the flourishing of a society, if only because I don’t have the data to support such a proposition, and I do know that even the poorest societies paint their household implements and make carvings and perform dances.

So, though, is art good for us or do we just want to think it is because we’ve always been led to believe it is? If the latter, have we always been led to believe art’s good for us because it actually is (or was when that belief took off) or because artists and art dealers nurtured such a belief for various self-interested reasons?

I don’t have any answers. It occurred to me while tapping this out just now that maybe Mencken (with his derision of the Bozart) has some answers. Off to the bookshelves I go.

A friend of mine got me interested in wine a couple of years ago. He’s what you might call an armchair connoisseur (of wine, not of armchairs); that is, he knows a fair amount about wine and how it’s made and how to tell the different varietals apart, but he’s not one of those people who can swish a mouthful of vintage around and tell you which small vineyard in France the grapes came from. Nevertheless, he taught me everything I know about wine (not much, but that’s my fault and not his), and with his help, I’ve gone from thinking wine tasted bad (my sweet palate accustomed to and expecting something more like Welch’s grape juice) to really sort of liking it. I prefer the bitters to the sweets; a good Shiraz beats a fruity Riesling any day.

But it’s not that Dionysian beverage I ultimately wish to focus on here. It’s my own connoisseurship of another thing entirely, without which none of us could even speak about the things we value. Namely, and to quote Hamlet, “Words, words words.” For years, I’ve had a healthy obsession with words and their etymologies. I call it healthy because it doesn’t interfere with my daily life, because I have maybe 8 or 10 non-dictionary/thesaurus books dedicated to word origins rather than whole shelves full. I consider it healthy because I’ve lived a period of about two years during which I had no access to my copy of that venerable old reference work the Oxford English Dictionary. If the word monkey on my back were too furious and insistent, I would surely have caved in and repurchased the OED during that period of deprivation.

While I would love to own the full twenty-some volume set of the OED (or at the very least the two-volume set that comes with a big magnifying glass), I can hardly complain about a lexicographical deficiency when I do own the OED on CD-ROM. My parents bought this for me when I was in college (they were the worst sort of enablers). And I happily used it for years. Windows 95 was the standard PC operating system for individuals at the time, and the software ran wonderfully in that system. With just a few keystrokes, I was able to discover that the word “elephant” may have come from an old Teutonic/Slavic name for camel (olfend) or that the evil eye can also be called the “jettatura” (from an Italian word). But then came the new millennium and a spate of new operating systems. I used Windows 98 for a while and then moved, briefly, to the factory install of Windows Me, which caused all sorts of problems for my computer. Whether it was with that OS or with the later installation of Windows XP that my OED became obsolete I can’t remember; but at some point a couple of years ago, my OED was no longer functional on any computer I had.

I wrote the loss off to progress. My interest in words hadn’t really waned, but because I was out of school and had a job that didn’t have much to do with words for their own sakes, my focus had changed. And I did still have those eight or ten books I could go to if the history of a word was especially elusive. (Between those and a pocket American Heritage Dictionary, I was able to discover that the word “demijohn” comes from the French phrase “Dame-Jeanne,” or “Lady Jane,” presumably because the shape of a demijohn is similar to the shape of a centuries-ago French lady in her hoop-skirted dress.) I did nevertheless occasionally lament the loss of my dictionary.

The other day, while talking with a coworker about software incompatibilities, I brought up my loss of the OED as an example of one tragic side-effect of such incompatibilities. Since that loss, I have become a Linux user through and through (yet more progress). I cringe at the thought of booting into a Windows system. And my like-minded coworker knows this. So he mentioned a program for Linux called WINE that might be of some use to me. I had heard of the program but had never had good reason to use it. WINE, which I believe stands for “Wine Is Not an Emulator” (in the best geek tradition of recursive acronyms), provides an abstraction layer that allows Linux users to run many Windows programs on their Linux systems. What’s more, it allows you to select the Windows version you wish to run. And best of all, as with much of the software written for Linux, WINE is absolutely free.

So I installed a copy, dug up my OED software and data CD, and got it running successfully on my Linux laptop. And voila, I have my precious OED again. At my fingertips are multifarious words such as multifarious (having great variety or diversity), multifid (having many divisions [rather like the Windows security vulnerability list]), mutessarif (In the Ottoman Empire and Iraq, a governor of a province), and mydaleine (a poisonous ptomaine [the generic name of certain alkaloid bodies found in putrefying animal and vegetable matter, some of which are very poisonous] obtained from putrid flesh, etc.). Knowledge is bliss (a good Germanic word), it turns out.

Furthermore, because of the way WINE masks the Linux file system as a WIndows file system, I was able very easily to fake a CD-ROM drive, copy the data file into the directory mapped to the drive letter, and use the dictionary without having to cart the CD around.

And so it turns out that I am, after all, somewhat of a connoisseur of WINE, a software package that has, to use an old phrase, left a most pleasant taste in my mouth.

“Do I turn left or right here?” I ask. We’ve been through this intersection a thousand times. It’s within five miles of our home, and we’re usually coming from the same direction. I have already asked whether we turn left or right out of the bookstore, which we’ve also been to a thousand times, and I’m just not oriented yet.

             * * *

“da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM,” she says, flapping her hand on her leg on every second beat. “I can hear it if I take a few minutes to really think about it.” Her stumbling block is meter. Though she teaches English and is very good at it, she can’t pick out an iamb from a trochee, a dactyl from an anapest, a pyrrhic from a spondee.

             * * *

It’s strange how our faculties differ. Like a savant child, I can rattle off lines of rolling dactyllic hexameter with hardly a thought:

Tenderly fondling her breast, he assumed she had given permission.

Up in the sky was a man with a plan, a canal, and a country.

Lions and tigers and bears making love to an octogenarian.

And like an explorer or an on-board GPS system, she can decide to turn down a side road she’s never noticed before and find her way home magically in half the time it would otherwise have taken. I don’t understand how she can do it, and she doesn’t understand how I get lost as soon as I leave our driveway. Our handicaps are really very similar in nature, a matter of what we manage to remember, how we process what we perceive.

She asked recently if it would help me to have a little map on the dashboard of the places we frequent, something I could glance at to orient myself, a big X for our house, I can’t help imagining, a book icon for the bookstore, a sitar icon for the Indian restaurant we favor. I couldn’t help picturing also a big map of Knoxville unfolded and taped up to the windshield.

Interstate highways and rivers hung up like a portrait of history.

Navigate poetry navigate, poetry navigate poetry.

I wonder occasionally who got the better deal. It is unsettling to perpetually not know where I am or how to get where I’m trying to go. Hers is certainly the more practical skill, one that I admire and even at times try to cultivate, rather like a blind person trying to cultivate sight. Really, we’ve both fared alright. I, the aimless, have a constant and understanding navigator to keep me ever on course, and she, the meterless lover of words, has her own private poet.

Over lunch yesterday, I dreamed up an April Fool’s prank that I figured would freak my boss out. Some background. My boss left on Wednesday afternoon for a long weekend at Hilton Head. Tuesday evening, we had made some network changes (DNS modifications) that could very realistically, because of the nature of DNS changes, have not caused any problems until yesterday. Like me, he had been a little iffy about pulling the trigger on the changes, but sometimes you’ve just got to plunge in.

The gag, then, is to find a way to use the changes to freak him out, ideally interrupting a restful vacation afternoon. I was going to need help. So I emailed a rough plan to one of the owners of my company, who’s the immediate supervisor of my boss. Essentially, the plan was to have him call my boss on his cell phone and act angry because we had clients and prospects unable to get to our various Web services, presumably because of the DNS change. Further, when he had confronted me about it, we locked horns and I wound up storming off (which is hilarious if you actually know me; my demeanor is rather like that of the mild mannered Clark Kent, and such an outburst from me would have been about as dramatic as the change Kent undergoes when he heads for the phone booth — this was the only weak part of the prank, incidentally; I was afraid my boss would catch on right away because my locking horns with anybody would be so wildly out of character).

Sam (the owner) improved upon the plan by suggesting that we play it as if the other owner, who heads the sales team, had been showing a live demo of our services to a (real) potential high-dollar client and that things had started screwing up left and right. So it’s not even a matter of poor service to existing customers, but of cutting off potential revenue. The sales lead owner called in (so the story goes) livid and demanding an immediate resolution. To round things out, we also brought in our systems guy, who’s the only other IT staffer in the office this week and who doesn’t know much about DNS, etc.

So Sam gets my boss on the phone. He’s on the road, and Sam tells him he might want to pull over for a minute. Then he narrates in sufficiently irritated boss-like tones the scenario we had created. Then he puts my boss on speaker phone so he can bring the systems guy in on the conversation to try to describe the problem. My boss was gracious in that he didn’t badmouth my anomalous behavior, but wanted simply to work toward a resolution of the emergency issue. During the call, which was fraught with puzzlement, Sam gestured at me to run into my office and call his cell phone; when I did so, he pretended he was talking to the other owner, and of course my boss could hear it all. Finally, after some further bewilderment and attempts at remote diagnosis of the problem (my boss no doubt saw my job and his hanging in the balance), Sam busted out laughing and fessed up that we were pranking him.

It went off quite well, and I (who as noted above am thought of as the quiet guy) got comments all day long about the stones it took to pull such a prank. I think I surprised a few people. Of course, it couldn’t have gone off nearly as well if Sam hadn’t played his role perfectly. My boss’s reaction upon learning that we were pranking him was good-naturedly offensive, and I can hardly wait to rib him about it on Monday when he’s back in town.

Saturday, eight days ago. Dropped a project I was working on pro bono. With making stuff for the baby’s room and trying to enjoy the last few months of my childless life, I just didn’t have it in me to maintain the commitment. I felt guilty for leaving the guy hanging (but not too guilty — I did a lot of work for free and turned it all over to him), but I feel like a big weight’s been lifted. I no longer feel guilty for not getting up at 6:00 on Saturdays to put time into the project before my day proper starts. No more guilt about vegging in front of the TV when I should be either programming or reading so that I’ll have time to program later without digging into my reading time. It’s a small thing, but the quality of my life has risen a lot since I dropped the project.

Monday through Thursday. Worked my butt off. I’m putting together a bunch of static demos of dynamic programs my company uses on a daily basis. The demos, it turns out, are very useful to the sales team. So while I hate the physical act of creating the demos, I don’t mind doing them, because they’re useful. I joke with my boss that if the demos are so helpful to the sales team, I should be earning part of the commission for jobs reeled in. Partway through the week, we got a call telling us that one of Mleeka’s aunts was moving to Florida the next day (first we’d heard of it) and that we were welcome to come scavenge the belongings they were selling at a yard sale the next day to get first pick. I snagged a box full of books, including the following stand-out titles:

• Gray’s Anatomy
• Subterranean Kerouac
• The Satanic Verses
• Calculus (with Analytic Geometry)
• Practical Mathematics for Home Study
• Man and His Symbols (Jung)
• How the Mind Works (Pinker)
• University Physics
• Principles of Surgery (never know when you’ll get caught unawares at home without transportation and a surgeon)

Friday. More demos. While I was working to meet one tight deadline, I was hit with another one (more demos). Meanwhile, there were some software issues that I had to spend a few hours looking into, and my primary desktop system started acting up after I reinstalled the OS. Rough day.

Saturday. Up at 6:00, in to work by 6:30, doing one of the demos due early this week. Because of all the distractions I’ve had this week, I figured I needed a few hours uninterrupted to get at least one of the demos done. Out at 12:30 and off to pick up a glider we ordered a few months ago. I had to cram the partially disassembled glider in the car with me and almost had to call on a friend with a truck to come help me out. Got home and put the glider together and spent a warm afternoon partially outside prepping our little garden area and partially inside rearranging furniture while enjoying a nice cross-breeze afforded by our open windows. Stabbed my palm with a garden tool by accident. Later, my brother in law came over to bring some pictures to Mleeka, and he and I wound up going back to his apartment to play tennis, something I haven’t done for a couple of years. I’m sore today in that good limber way. Went out later to an eatery called The Tijuana Taco and invalidated my rare day of calorie-burning physical activity by stuffing a grande burrito down my gullet. Wobbled over to Linens and Things, Pier 1 Imports, and Target to look for bath mats and rugs for the baby’s room. (Won’t it be funny, when my forthcoming daughter’s a little older, to joke about going to Lennons and Things?) We almost bought a 12-piece set of pretty attractive cookware for 100 bucks, but couldn’t figure out why the price was so low and decided not to make the purchase. Came home and sat in the glider absently leafing through the eyeball section of Gray’s Anatomy. Eyeballs begin as little outcroppings of brain that become specialized, apparently. And (my reading wasn’t utterly linear) some people have taste buds around their epiglottis and their soft palates. It was a good day — very full, but very satisfying.

Today. Rolled out of bed a little before 8:00 (late for me for a weekend — still glad I dropped that project a week ago) and read email. Got ready for a program I had helped to organize that turned out to be pretty successful and then went out for a late lunch at a local eatery that serves brunch until 2:30. I had a ham and cheese omelette with three or four glasses of complimentary champagne and topped them off with a couple of gimlets. Mmmmm. Came home afterward and read some more of The Recognitions, which I had sort of partially back-burnered because of the aforementioned project, napped a little, caught a short snippet of a basketball game (way out of character for me), and then grilled some burgers for dinner. Caught a new Simpsons and here I am, relaxed and content and just about ready to hit the sack and fall asleep reading.

In choosing marriage partners [people] solemnly and seriously follow a custom which seemed to us foolish and absurd in the extreme. Whether she be widow or virgin, the bride-to-be is shown naked to the groom by a responsible and respectable matron; and similarly, some respectable man presents the groom naked to his prospective bride. We laughed at this custom, and called it absurd, but they were just as amazed at the folly of all other peoples. When men go to buy a colt, where they are risking only a little money, they are so cautious that, though the animal is almost bare, they won’t close the deal until saddle and blanket have been taken off, lest there be a hidden sore underneath. Yet in the choice of a mate, which may cause either delight or disgust for the rest of their lives, men are so careless that they leave all the rest of the woman’s body covered up with clothes and estimate her attractiveness from a mere handsbreadth of her person, the face, which is all they can see.

Sir Thomas More put it pretty well in his Utopia, a bogus and sort of pedantic travelogue whose title (meaning “no land”) coined the word we’re all familiar with. In more bizarrely anachronisic modern terms, “Try the milk before you buy the cow.” Or at least, before you buy the cow (or bull) make sure the cow’s teats (bull’s balls) aren’t cankered and thus indisposed to provide what you expect from the cow (bull).

What brings this to mind is a discussion over lunch with some of my coworkers recently in which a couple of them were bemoaning marriage. If he were ever to get divorced, one of them said (the other seeming to agree), he wouldn’t marry again. In fact, when his brother, recently divorced, had been about to marry again, one of my coworkers had commented that the brother must be crazy indeed to go down that road again.

One of the predominant concerns seems to be with the stereotypical spending of money by unemployed wives (stay-at-home moms in this case). I’ve heard this complaint from coworkers across multiple employers. It’s not a novel complaint, in other words. When I countered, at lunch, that I must be lucky indeed to have the frugal wife I do, my coworkers said that it wasn’t just the money. They didn’t elaborate about what else it could be that drove them to speculate that they’d never marry again, however.

Granted, they’ve both got about ten years on me, though I think they both got a later start on marriage than I did. I celebrated three years of marriage (add that to a couple of years of shacking up) this weekend and so can’t be too far behind them. Maybe something happens after four or five or seven or nine years of marriage that I can’t even imagine now.

I’m more inclined to think, though, that, as by and large rational and thoughtful people, my wife and I both made smart decisions about our mates. We declined to be slaves to convention (we met over the Internet before it was common to do so) or to the standard restrictions of Judeo-Christian doctrine and assessed one another based on personal valuations.

If I hadn’t valued my then-girlfriend, I wouldn’t have moved to Tennessee. After the trial period following my move, if I hadn’t determined that I still valued her, I wouldn’t have bothered to spend money on an engagement ring. And if, after the engagement, I hadn’t resolved that she was a good match for me, I wouldn’t have gone through with the marriage. I’ve heard of many couples who were for whatever reason (usually religion) reluctant to try before they bought (so to speak). And I’m not talking just sex here. There are all sorts of compatibility issues that can pop up once a couple’s been living together for a while, and they can stress the relationship. These couples have a harder time of it, I imagine, than I’ve had. The most popular argument rebutting my point probably suggests that marriage is all about compromise and getting through the hard times. I’m not sure I buy that, though. When I’m making a large purchase, I don’t think of its downsides as things that demand compromise — I simply don’t purchase what doesn’t please me. Why should picking out a mate be any different?

Given my coworkers’ comments, I can’t help wondering if women don’t automatically turn into hydras after three or so years of marriage. My coworkers seem to be smart, by and large reasonable, people, after all, and I don’t mean to suggest that they weren’t as diligent as I was in vetting their wives or that I was more rational about it (and thus somehow superior). It just seems odd that so many people see marriage as a sort of trap or unpleasant obligation, while I see mine as a partnership characterized by mutual respect with benefits to both parties. Maybe I’m just lucky.

Some of the negative perception of marriage has to do, I suspect, with the fact that men are supposed to roll their eyes about their wives, much as women are supposed to nag their husbands. There is definitely a ’50s atmosphere at my work. Most of the men, I get the feeling, go home each night to rest with a beer in front of the TV while their wives, many of whom have also worked a full day, cook dinner. I overheard one woman say the other day that her husband didn’t allow her to watch a particular show because he didn’t agree with some of its content. It’s not at all uncommon for me to hear comments about women’s driving (”Boy, look at that dent in Larry’s car. He must have let his wife drive it”) as if I’m expected to chuckle in agreement. And then there’s the fact that women from several departments have been trained to spell our receptionist when she needs breaks; no men have been recruited because that job is perceived as women’s work (were I not terrified of the phone, I might volunteer, just to shake things up a bit). I’m at times a little surprised that women are allowed to wear slacks to work rather than skirts or dresses.

So it really shouldn’t surprise me too much that my coworkers, raised in a man’s world and working in what is very much a man’s company (and one filled with conservatives, at that), are inclined to toss off comments about what burdens their wives are. I think a lot of it is just talk, and what I’m ultimately trying to get around to here isn’t that these guys should be condemned for indulging in this sort of male-bonding talk, but is rather that it’s a shame that we haven’t come far enough yet that chauvenism and good-ole-boyism are still considered worth a slap on the back from a coworker.

I’ve often thought of celebrities as being much larger than me. It’s probably because I’ve most often seen celebrities on the big screen where they’re ten feet tall in long shots and large enough in closeups that I’d easily fit in their nostrils (and I’m sort of a burly guy) or on TV, which is sort of an extension of the big screen.

Take Julia Roberts, for example. At a reported 5 feet, 9 inches, she’s got me by about an inch, but I can’t help imagining her as being less than about a foot taller than me. Or Jeff Goldblum, who seems very tall. He’s got to be at least 8 feet tall, right? I just have a great deal of trouble imagining these people being my size or smaller, or within a foot or two of my size. I don’t think they’re 20 feet tall — just 7 feet tall. Am I alone here?

I don’t think it’s that I idealize these people, that I elevate them emotionally in some way that colors my view of their physical stature. I think I’m just fooled spatially by the movie screen. I think I’d be disappointed in a way to see one of the apparently larger movie stars in person and discover that s/he wasn’t a head or two taller than me.

I did see Robin Williams up close and personal once, but I knew in advance that he was sort of short. The film Patch Adams was being shot at my university. It was actually pretty neat, as I got to see a false front added to a building next to the one in which I worked. I also happened to be walking back to my dorm one night and was routed around some scene or another being filmed. I believe it involved a bicycle. I also remember that fake ivy was strung up all over the place, thin nets strewn lightly with fake ivy leaves; the movie was set at an ivy league school, I believe. The crew overtook one small building entirely. I never had occasion during the four hallowed years of my college education to go into the building, but it was pretty ramshackle outside, which probably meant that it was one of the buildings dating back to the time of James Polk and company.

There was a little campus convenience store next to this building at which, most mornings, I purchased a pair of foil-wrapped chocolate Pop-Tarts and a Mountain Dew. At lunchtime, I’d traipse back over to the store (skirting the aforementioned false-fronted building) to purchase a sandwich in a plastic triangle-shaped pack and usually some Fritos. The store had a main entrance with a shabby little lobby, in which I often ate my lunch and read a paper. The lobby then had a door to the store proper. I think the building/store was called the Ram’s Head. One day during filming, as I was going into the store to get my lunch, I held my half of the double-door open for the person coming out, which person happened to be Robin Williams. He was a good bit shorter than me.

Not wanting to put him on the spot, I just nodded at him as I would have at any person for whom I was holding the door open and went on in to buy my chicken salad sandwich. It must be trying to be a famous person always being asked for an autograph or being Hey-aren’t-you-Robin-Williamsed, so I figured it’d be a small relief for him if I didn’t make a big deal of pointing him out. It must be even more trying to be in such a position if you’re not six feet taller than the people bugging you.

When I took the dog out for his nightly 10 p.m. walk tonight, I had a clear view of the big and little dippers, Orion, and the north star, all among the most recognizable stars in the sky. I wasn’t sure about the little dipper until I remembered that the two stars that form the front edge of its cup point vaguely toward the north star, which reminded me, as I followed a path from the north star to the big dipper, that the little dipper pours into the big dipper. And sure enough, when I had traced a path back to the big dipper from the north star, there the little guy was, apparently having spilled its inky contents over the peaceful dome of the night.

I remember these intersections of the constellations from my childhood. My parents were really into star gazing and took us out for all the would-be remarkable astronomical events. There was Haley’s Comet, for example, probably about 20 years ago. This was a big deal for my parents because the comet only appears about every 76 years, so this was their only shot at getting a good look at it. I remember going way out in the country in the middle of the night, stopping by corn fields (on a snowy evening?), and passing the binoculars around among the four of us. As I recall, the comet was very disappointing, looking at best like a white blur rather than the spectacular flame-tailed hurtling mass I had been expecting. In spite of the let-down of the comet itself (more of a let-down for my mom, I’m sure, as I’ll have a chance to see the comet again when they pull me out of my cryogenic storage tank and thaw me in another 55 or so years), I can’t help remembering this short period fondly. There’s something special to a kid about being not only allowed, but encouraged, to creep about in the dark six hours past bedtime. And there’s something that seems very right, very lucky, to an adult, about having had parents who fostered in him a sense of curiosity about his surroundings, whether or not he rewarded it by going on to hang a dozen Nobel prizes on their mantle.

My primary memory of Orion has to do with my having been really sort of socially inept and lost in the 50s (30 years too late) as a kid. A childhood friend and I were at some church function — a lock-in, maybe, something that has us at the church at night. Maybe we were there after choir practice. We looked up at the sky and I happened to see Orion. I believe I had been watching a lot of The Andy Griffith Show at the time. And I believe there had been an episode recently in which Andy had said “I see X,” where “X” was either Orion or some person he was happy to see. Whether or not this was the case, I have the distinct impression that I was either impersonating that warm, toothy greeting or that I afterward thought I had sounded rather like Andy Griffith as I crooned “I see Or-eye-uhhhn.” The friend laughed at me. This was the same friend — the sort of friend to whom, in later years, I was a buddy when we were alone but a marginal sort of footstool figure when other of his friends were around — who insisted that I be Daisy when we were playing The Dukes of Hazzard and there were enough of the more important friends around to fill the roles of Beau and Luke, Uncle Jesse, Boss Hawg, and Roscoe P. Coltrane. (Or Roscoe Picole Train, as I always sort of thought it was based on the character’s own pronunciation.)

I like the word “Orion.” It packs a wallop if you break it down and reassemble it in various ways. It contains the distinct words “or,” “rio,” “ion,” and “on,” for example. And if you read it from right to left (as I automatically do with many words, such as TUMS, which chalky antacid tablets I could eat by the gross but which name bothers me because I see SMUT almost before I see the actual product name), you get that lovely French word “noir.” I suspect that if you tried hard enough, you could come up with a pretty good palindrome about Orion in the (French) black night sky.

This all (in a roundabout way) puts me in mind of a couple of poems I reencountered recently when revisiting Hardy:

Shut Out That Moon

Close up the casement, draw the blind,
Shut out that stealing moon,
She wears too much the guise she wore
Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
On a white stone were hewn.

Step not out on the dew-dashed lawn
To view the Lady’s Chair,
Immense Orion’s glittering form,
The Less and Greater Bear:
Stay in; to such sights we were drawn
When faded ones were fair.

Brush not the bough for midnight scents
That come forth lingeringly,
And wake the same sweet sentiments
They breathed to you and me
When living seemed a laugh, and love
All it was said to be.

Within the common lamp-lit room
Prison my eyes and thought;
Let dingy details crudely loom,
Mechanic speech be wrought:
Too frangrant was Life’s early bloom,
Too tart the fruit it brought.

I Look Up from My Writing

I looked up from my writing,
And gave a start to see,
As if rapt in my inditing,
The moon’s full gaze on me.

Her meditative misty head
Was spectral in its air,
And I involuntarily said,
“What are you doing there?”

“Oh, I’ve been scanning pond and hole
And waterway hereabout
For the body of one with a sunken soul
Who has put his life-light out.

“Did you hear his frenzied rattle?
It was sorrow for his son
Who is slain in brutish battle,
Though he has injured none.

“And now I am curious to look
Into the blinkered mind
Of one who wants to write a book
In a world of such a kind.”

Her temper overwrought me,
And I edged to shun her view,
For I felt assured she thought me
One who should drown him too.

Hardy’s view of the evening sky is somewhat gloomier than what I’ve had called to mind tonight. He was 69 and 77 when he wrote these poems and had been through a bunch of wives and several wars (of which the current one was World War I). I hope his bitterness is a function of his personality and not of age in general.

I couldn’t close an entry entitled “Star Gazing” without mention of one Hollywood star or another. Tonight I cast my net toward Paris Hilton, not out of any especial fascination with her or her naughtiness, but because of others’ fascination with her. It appears that my referer logs (the logs that tell me what sites people click from to get here) are being spammed with links to various sites peddling promises of Paris Hilton’s home video. It’s not that I generate enough sordid content that my site is of high relevance to those in search of Paris (but then, neither are my compositions to be found in the old Norton anthology alongside Hardy’s) but that people are faking referers to my site so that their links will be visible to my reader, or both of them.

When we bought our house nearly two years ago, we had already looked at one house in the subdivision and marked it off our list on the basis that the subdivision seemed awfully far away from everything and that it overlooked some railroad tracks. When I say that the rejected house overlooked some railroad tracks, I mean that if you looked out the back window, you looked across a public street at the raised tracks maybe 100 feet away. I have the distinct feeling that if a fast-moving train derailed, its cars buckling against one another and ratcheting out from the sides of the track, this house would be obliterated.

We finally did decide on a house a little further up in the subdivision. It would take a fast-moving train indeed to reach us. It turns out that we’re not as far from everything else in town as we had thought we were — we’re just oriented differently than what we were accustomed to. We’re not right on top of everything, but we’re within 5 - 15 minutes of everything. This is a good thing. We love our house and our location. The only occasionally objectionable thing about where we live is the train, which backs up traffic in our area every once in a while, inevitably when one of us is on the way home and in a hurry to get to the bathroom or head right back out for an appointment.

There’s something intriguing — sort of old-fashioned and rural and dangerous — about living near trains. Train tracks make me think of gravelly-voiced hoboes. I can’t help remembering the older neighborhood kids where I grew up showing off the elongated pennies they had harvested from the tracks. Or the movies (Stand By Me perhaps most notably) that portray some of the danger associated with trains. And I can’t help thinking back to the numerous train track ghost stories I heard as a kid. There’s a moderately famous story that originated not too far from where I grew up known as “The Maco Light.” Versions of the story differ, but it goes basically that the rear cars of a train decoupled from the fore cars, naturally losing velocity and becoming a hazard for trains using the same track later. The lone engineer manning the caboose spots such an oncoming train and begins signalling furiously with his lantern to try to save the lives of the crew on the oncoming train. Whether he leaps from the caboose at the last minute or whether the caboose is stricken and he’s thrown off is up for debate, but the uncontested detail is that he’s separated from his head. Thenceforth, visitors to the site could see an odd light panning and bobbing around the area, and the explanation is of course that the engineer’s ghost remains, ever looking about for his lost head.

Occasionally, it occurs to me that it’d be cool to get the car up to speed and jump the tracks. My mental image of the daredevilry puts me landing the car with a whump and a vegetative crunch 100 feet beyond the peak of the hill in the landscaping that marks the entrance to my subdivision. In my mental image, I don’t toss my head back and let out rebel yell, but if my personality type were a little different, I suspect my mental me would find in himself a yeehaw that would make even the Dukes of Hazzard green with envy.

Many people seem to think that the sounds of the train might be bothersome. I believe it’s in the movie Se7en that the apartment rented by Brad Pitt’s character is assaulted by the rumblings (ok, the dish-breaking seizures) of a train that proves most disturbing. I don’t mind the train, though. In fact, I even like it a little. Maybe I’d feel differently if I lived just across the street with no substantial sound buffer between my bedroom window and the tracks.

I like to try to guess the speed of the trains from their sounds, though my guesses are usually way off. Sometimes, it’ll sound like the very apocalypse swallowing up my neighborhood, and I figure based on the roar that the train must be going about a million miles per hour, but it turns out that it’s just sitting at the intersection, apparently revving its engine. Other times, I’ll think the quiet train must be gliding slowly by, but I look and find that the graffiti on the cars is too blurred to read or that the cars are barely even distinguishable as single units. I’m not sure why, but I find the sounds of the trains comforting. The creative weenie in me wants to suggest that it has to do with emulated sounds of a heartbeat or of the womb, but that’s probably a stretch. I suppose it’s also possible that my appreciation for industry and achievement (trains are really pretty amazing, after all) instills in me a feeling, when I hear the trains, something like “the world’s still here; things are happening.” That too is probably a stretch, overthought. Most likely, it’s just white noise, an aural phenomenon I’ve come to identify with home.

The trains do make me apprehensive sometimes, though. But my own apprehension is rooted in nothing so silly (if entertaining) as a ghost story. I live in a rural area whose winding roads cross the winding tracks many times. The intersection with the outlet from my neighborhood is a favorite stopping place for trains. There are two sets of rails side by side, and my theory is that trains can’t be travelling on both sets at the same time (in either the same or opposite directions) because trains rock from side to side as they move. I imagine they’d bump one another with catastrophic results. So it’s not uncommon to see one train sitting while another’s going by, seemingly with only inches to spare between the two. It’s also not uncommon to see one train just sitting. The angle of approach to the hill the tracks sit on prevents you from seeing idling trains until you’re pretty much already on the tracks, and my heart has more than once leapt into my throat as I looked to my right only to see what momentarily appeared to be a train bearing down on me. I know rationally that the intersection is safe, but the involuntary adrenaline burst puts me on edge.

I saw an archaism as I crossed the tracks the other day. I would as readily have expected to see prospecters on a seesaw car as see what I did. A train was stopped to my right in broad daylight, its cyclopsian eye aglow. Off to the left, a man stood as if directing the train. This was odd enough, as trains use modern navigational systems now, probably tied in with GPS and fancy satellite scheduling programs. But what was really strange was that he was holding an old-fashioned lantern, red with a glass globe, and striking a pose straight out of a 19th century photograph. His head was intact, so my assessment of the Maco Light and similar stories stands. But I couldn’t help shivering a little at the idea of this unusual tableau vivant almost as a ceremony, a commemoration of some long past wreck, or as an ephemeral warning seen perhaps only by me, arisen out of the various fears and comforts I attach to the train tracks: Proceed with caution always. Look both ways. Accidents happen.