Lost Art

This morning, half an hour before sunrise, I heard two mourning doves: one across the street, calling from the neighbor’s fir tree; the other on the street south of ours, from the dense pine in front of a house sold a year or two ago by the elderly couple who used to live there. Early morning. Birds. Trees. And so the note I wrote August 1, 2018, already has that much in common with the one I’m writing now, and to which I will add a title when I know what else it’s about. It could be about Thoreau, for instance, or John Muir; each wrote about such things countless times in detail, and their notes remain fresh to this day. It could be about the little lamp I bought many years ago at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store for two dollars and ninety-five cents, and is still in daily use. It could be about the typesetter at the small weekly newspaper for which my mother wrote back in the Sixties in our hometown, a man not terribly gifted in language, who broke words at ends of sentences in convenient but not always orthodox ways, with or without a hyphen, names, vowels, and consonants appearing in strange, abrupt combinations. I remember his disorganized, inky cases of type. It wasn’t as if the owners, a husband and wife well beyond retirement age, could simply fire him and find someone else; how many old-school typesetters could there have been in our small farming town, especially sober ones? And what of his apron? It should never have been thrown away, for it was a monument to what is now a nearly lost art. Speaking of which, when I see birds on a power line, all facing the same way, there are two things I think of: musical notes, and lines of type. A flutter and they’re gone. One must be alert to read them, and quick to write them down.

[ 2015 ]