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Saturday Night in Northern New England, 1972
for Susan and Tony Hunt
I could go up to Skowhegan to catch
the triple horror show at the drive-in:
Last House on the Left, Creature with
the Blued Hand, Night of the Living Dead or
I could go downtown to Dunkin Donut
and buy a dozen doughnuts: 3 Honey
Dip 3 Bavarian Kreme 2 Old-Fashioned
Raised 2 Apple and Spice
I Chocolate Glazed I Cider Mill
and a box of holes for the kids or
I could listen to the Bruins game
or music from the top of Mount Washington
or to Bernstein on Bix on PBS or
I could dip into the Norton Reader
and finish ³Examsmanship and the Liberal
Arts; A Study in Educational Epistemology²
about Harvard student Metzger who got an
A- on an exam without taking the course
proving that bull is better than cow:
cow (pure) data, however relevant, without relevancies;
bull (pure) relevancies, however relevant, with data or
Maybe I should resume reading Proust
the beginning of Within a Budding Grove
where the narrator, apropos M. de Norpois:
I sometimes regret that I have not kept any
literal record simply of the things I
have heard him say. I should thus have obtained
an effect of old-fashioned courtesy by the same
process and at as little expense as that actor
at the Palais Royale who, when asked where on earth
he managed to find his astonishing hats, answered,
ŒI do not find my hats I keep them.¹²
I think I¹ll take out my journal
and write down that dream I had
the other night about my grandfather.
I was a good dream because
I felt good when I woke up.
I met my grandfather who died in 1957
standing on a subway platform.
He had a long blade of grass in his mouth.
He offered me a piece, smiling like he had
something else up his Neapolitan sleeve.
I put the grass in my mouth and smiled back,
but I couldn¹t get the grass out.
It stuck between my teeth.
Get it?
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