RR


 

Whenever I’ve run out of reading material and can’t sleep, I pull out 

Updike’s 1500 pages Rabbit tetralogy. Its the great 20th century American novel. Sometimes I pick a page at random. Sometimes I compare opening or closing sentences. For example:  


Rabbit Run  

Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. 


Rabbit Redux  

Men emerge from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.


Rabbit is Rich 

Running out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty windows of the Springer Motors display room watching the traffic go by on Route 111, traffic somehow thin and scared compared to what it used to be. 


Rabbit at Rest 

Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a sudden funny feeling that what he has come to meet, whats floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominously and intimately his: his own death shaped vaguely like an airplane.   









Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

easter

Image
my lovely niece never misses an opportunity to turn out and up big time when it comes to holiday celebrations ... a fine repast was had by all while some of the kids played in the backyard
Read more

Papa Dearest and ...

Image
  Have been indulging in all things mid century Roman lately - reading about the beginnings of neo-realism, Pucci fashion papparazzi. Watched A Special Day last night on Youtube - a very special movie. Sophia and Marcello are skyrocket superb. The script is, too. At one point while she’s making coffee, prettying up for him in front of the bathroom mirror and dealing with an old nosey neighbor - he looks at an album of Mussolini fotos he assumes is one of her six childrens. It's hers - a scrapbook of her savior and sex symbol. Brilliant.   Watch a ’77 Cavett interview with SL and MM on the Tube. It affirms you don’t have to be skinny and blond and twenty to emit  heart stopping sex appeal.  
Read more

Buck

Image
My friends and I are so old everything reverberates. My lovely lifelong friend Mrs Johnson sends me a birthday greeting that encourages me to go buck wild but not too buck wild .  When I was around ten, I thought my name was too plain. My large family was upstate in the country on vacation.  There was a neighbor dog named Mitsy. I saw him one evening in our yard and forgot that on the other side of our large screened in porch, my family was finishing dinner. I felt like I was alone and commanded the dog - Mitsy come to Buck. Big howling ensued from inside the house. It became intergenerational family lore and I recalled it today when I opened the card from my dear companion. 
Read more