Cape Cod

Brian's family owns a well-windowed House in Cape cod whose roof is an acute triangle that terminates about twenty five feet above the front door.

It's always interesting to meet the families of your friends. One soon gets the impression that one's friend is at once one of a breed that is like him and, at the same time, a completely original creation who is critically different even from those closest and most like him.

Brian's father is an older and perhaps more reserved version of Doyle himself. with stockier legs, a grayer and substantially more recessed hairline, and smoother skin. His legs remind me a little bit of Mr. Harkey's legs in Boy Scouts, a well-muscled pair with a huge, protrusive, distended, distracting varicose vein spangling its left calf. Purple and green, it strained and filled with each crunching step in front of me. As a former Russian teacher [following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, funding and interest dropped in Russian programs nationwide, and many programs actually didn't get renewed], Mr. Doyle is very well-educated and is an academic sort through and through. Chiefly, I know this because he notices my unintentional puns.

An small, old metal boat that people on Cape Cod leave lying on the beach during the wintertime is called a sunfish. Presumably it brings great pleasure in the summertime, but today, in October, we had the duty and the honor to place it face down in a weeded place off the beaten path where it will remain for the next six months.

Brian's aunt Mary took the group of us out on the boat. Here, the pronounce "aunt" like I presume the British must, but very much unlike the Midwesterners I grew up among. Down at the pier, a truck with a towing hook-up extended four hyrdaulic metal feet from its outer corners out to the dock below. They were taking down the mast.

Welcome

The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand.

The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the busy hill,
I peeringly view them from the top.

The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen.

The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow balls,
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous'd mobs,
The flap of the curtained litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd,
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
What groans of over-fred or half-starv'd who fall sunstruck or in fits,
What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain'd by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the show or resonance of them--I come and I depart.

-Walt Whitman