learning how different people manage to get from womb to tomb, even from day to day. Because for me itâs a real stinker, propelled by momentum and dumb hope, deriving sustenance from a Picasso here and a Beethoven there, or a passing cloud and a few hearty laughs now and then. Why do I go into all of this? Iâm really jollier than I sound.â
Less than a year later she was dead.
I put the letters into a correspondence file to send to Charlottesville. I shall probably never see them again. Although I have no photographs, the faces of those two friends are clearly present to me. I never found out who Robert OâNeil Bristow is, or Richard Bradford, for that matter, and I donât know to whom May Brodbeck gave her second set of concert tickets when I did not return to Iowa that year. These mysteries, like the end of Margaret Schlauchâs life, bother the novelist in me. But the friend I was is enriched even by my incomplete memories of them.
Sybil calls me from the shop. She sounds close to tears. We have been broken into, there are records, papers, books all over the floor, and our cash is gone. I abandon plans for a morning with the clipboard, throw on yesterdayâs clothes, and walk over, faster than I usually am able to travel.
This is our second break-in since June, the same month in which my car was stolen by the ânot badâ boy. The first time the robber came through an upstairs, barred window from the roof. This time he broke a front-window pane and squeezed through into the front of the shop. Two months ago, a thief cleaned out the cash box while Alan Bisbort, our manager, was putting books away at the back.
Sybil quickly becomes philosophical, after we have cleaned up, and after the police have come by to hear her story. They try to sustain her with tales of multitudinous break-ins in our area and beyond. This information seems to have the same effect as the statistics provided me by another policeman in June. A car is stolen every two minutes in the District of Columbia, I learned. This was told to me as consolation for the temporary loss of my beloved Toyota Cressida, named, by me, Troilus.
Sybil tells a detective who visits her later in the day that it would be good if Seventh Street were better patrolled by police cars. He agrees but reminds her that it is not possible for the already overstrained police force to monitor all the business streets. We smile at this. Two months ago we were visited by a city inspector. He gave us a five-hundred-dollar ticket. It seemed that our little A-frame, four-foot-high billboard placed outside our door within an iron-grated area, containing literary quotations, was a danger to public safety. Seventy customers voluntarily signed a statement addressed to the District of Columbia protesting the fine. They said the billboard was an asset to the street, the city, and to learning.
Sybil had to take an afternoon off to appeal the ticket. The judge was sympathetic and somewhat amused by the inspectorâs avidity. He reduced the fine to fifty dollars, but told her the sign would have to be removed. This she did, being afraid to court further bureaucratic action. At the same time she removed the small BOOKS sign that protruded a foot from the building and nailed it flat against the window frame. Today we decided to install a costly but necessary alarm system, and a grate for the front window.
My partner is far more philosophical than I, who tend to grow more and more paranoid as I live in the District and feel I can count on the city only for senseless harassment, not protection. She tells me my fears of attack and mugging are interior, without reference to exterior events, unjustified by the statistics on crime in our section of the city.
I smile as I listen to her, not reassured in the least. Interior? For some reason, disconnected from what has happened, but evoked by the word, I remember the time I went to a funeral home to order a coffin for
Less than a year later she was dead.
I put the letters into a correspondence file to send to Charlottesville. I shall probably never see them again. Although I have no photographs, the faces of those two friends are clearly present to me. I never found out who Robert OâNeil Bristow is, or Richard Bradford, for that matter, and I donât know to whom May Brodbeck gave her second set of concert tickets when I did not return to Iowa that year. These mysteries, like the end of Margaret Schlauchâs life, bother the novelist in me. But the friend I was is enriched even by my incomplete memories of them.
Sybil calls me from the shop. She sounds close to tears. We have been broken into, there are records, papers, books all over the floor, and our cash is gone. I abandon plans for a morning with the clipboard, throw on yesterdayâs clothes, and walk over, faster than I usually am able to travel.
This is our second break-in since June, the same month in which my car was stolen by the ânot badâ boy. The first time the robber came through an upstairs, barred window from the roof. This time he broke a front-window pane and squeezed through into the front of the shop. Two months ago, a thief cleaned out the cash box while Alan Bisbort, our manager, was putting books away at the back.
Sybil quickly becomes philosophical, after we have cleaned up, and after the police have come by to hear her story. They try to sustain her with tales of multitudinous break-ins in our area and beyond. This information seems to have the same effect as the statistics provided me by another policeman in June. A car is stolen every two minutes in the District of Columbia, I learned. This was told to me as consolation for the temporary loss of my beloved Toyota Cressida, named, by me, Troilus.
Sybil tells a detective who visits her later in the day that it would be good if Seventh Street were better patrolled by police cars. He agrees but reminds her that it is not possible for the already overstrained police force to monitor all the business streets. We smile at this. Two months ago we were visited by a city inspector. He gave us a five-hundred-dollar ticket. It seemed that our little A-frame, four-foot-high billboard placed outside our door within an iron-grated area, containing literary quotations, was a danger to public safety. Seventy customers voluntarily signed a statement addressed to the District of Columbia protesting the fine. They said the billboard was an asset to the street, the city, and to learning.
Sybil had to take an afternoon off to appeal the ticket. The judge was sympathetic and somewhat amused by the inspectorâs avidity. He reduced the fine to fifty dollars, but told her the sign would have to be removed. This she did, being afraid to court further bureaucratic action. At the same time she removed the small BOOKS sign that protruded a foot from the building and nailed it flat against the window frame. Today we decided to install a costly but necessary alarm system, and a grate for the front window.
My partner is far more philosophical than I, who tend to grow more and more paranoid as I live in the District and feel I can count on the city only for senseless harassment, not protection. She tells me my fears of attack and mugging are interior, without reference to exterior events, unjustified by the statistics on crime in our section of the city.
I smile as I listen to her, not reassured in the least. Interior? For some reason, disconnected from what has happened, but evoked by the word, I remember the time I went to a funeral home to order a coffin for
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