Archives for November 24, 2004

Alas, the time stamp on this posting is all too accurate: I just finished writing a Commentary essay on Haydn and still have to knock off another piece before I can pack my bag and make ready to fly back to Smalltown, U.S.A., where I’ll be spending Thanksgiving with my family. The car comes for me at 9:15, and I’ll be picking up a rental car of my own at the far end of my flight, there to drive two hours south to the house where I grew up. Seeing as how I don’t expect to spend much time in bed tonight, I’m likely to get a little sleepy on the way to Smalltown, and I’ve promised my mother that I’ll pull off the highway whenever I feel the telltale signs of somnolence. I will, too: I can’t think of anything much dumber than falling asleep at the wheel on your way home for Thanksgiving.

Quite a few of you wrote to tell me that I made you cry
yesterday, so I’m happy to report that I’m in a much better frame of mind this evening (or, rather, this morning). My mother got a good report from her doctor earlier today, and a half-hour after I talked to her, I got a call from a friend who just landed a job for which she’d been longing with all her heart. Even without those two pieces of news, I would have been properly thankful for my myriad blessings, but now I can go home with a genuinely cheerful heart, sleep or no sleep.

You’ll have to do without me until next Tuesday: I’ve decided to be sensible and leave my iBook in Manhattan, where it belongs. Fortunately, Our Girl, who is out of town but not computer-free, just wrote to tell me that she plans to post a bit this week, so you won’t be entirely alone.

I should mention before I go that I count all of you among my blessings. I love this blog and I love your e-mail, some of which I actually managed to answer a few hours ago! I’m almost over the flu, too–I even made it to the gym on Tuesday morning, though I felt like a vampire who’d just crawled out of his coffin of native earth after an exceptionally long stay. Be that as it may, I’m out of the woods, for which still more thanks.

Now I have to get back to work. My car will be arriving eight hours from now (it’d better, anyway!), and my guess is that I’ll need most of that time to get ready, if not all of it. I guess I’ll sleep in Smalltown. Meanwhile, like the Stage Manager says, you get a good rest, too. Good night.

“One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: ‘Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?’ and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

“When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

“That’s my Middle West–not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all–Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby