Yesterday I found a dog-eared copy of a New Yorker magazine at the car wash place with a piece on Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Adam Kirsch was reviewing the Hopkins biography by Paul Mariani, and since it doesn’t take them long to spruce up the Subaru, even after the snowgrime of winter, they were ready with the bill before I was quite done with the magazine.
Luckily I had cadged a pencil from the woman at the counter and noted the publication date, May 11, 2009.
Back home I took to the garage and the boxes of past New Yorkers, still too precious for the municipal landfill and, taking down the earliest box, found, on the second try, the furloughed copy in question.
Back inside I continued with the review and, this time, copied Mariani’s book to my wish list on the computer.
“Glory be to God for dappled things,” Hopkins once intoned. And for minor revelations, too, say I.
Your writing is always like a breath of fresh air. It always puts my mind in a different and more desirable place.
Thanks Jerome:always glad to hear from you.
Hope the missing fingerprints do not pose a big problem. I lost mine, as you may have guessed, pounding a typewriter/computer for years: yours may have vanished, more pleasurably, working your piano.
As you probably know, I had to drive to Holbroke, to a FBI outpost there, to have them use their laser device to locate my prints which, finally, they were able to do, freeing me to be trusted by the government to do census work.