War is never there, it’s always here. There’s no such thing as murder in the third person.
Like you, I tried. Very hard. Too hard. Now I don’t try at all. But you need not believe any of it. You’re free to think that you and I are trying now.
Corn on the cob is something we have only when it’s ripe locally in the fall. I usually slice it off the cob and eat it plain along with whatever else is on my plate. It’s neater that way. But once a year, I proceed in the time-honored way, the way of my childhood, with the cob secure in my fingertips, tearing off the kernels with my teeth. Once, when I was a kid, a boy my age who lived on the farm west of ours was at our house for supper. When he saw we were having corn on the cob, he was so thrilled it broke my heart — Corn on the cob, he said, as if he’d been in jail at least half his young life. And maybe, in a way, he had.
Read the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth chapters of Middlemarch.
September 19, 2023.
.
[ 1872 ]
Categories: If It Had A Name
Tags: Childhood, Corn, Eating, Effort, George Eliot, Journals, Memory, Middlemarch, Our Old Farm, Reading, Richard Krause, The San Joaquin Valley, War
William Michaelian 