Old Folks cleaned house yesterday. Thursday.
It took him half a day, because he had skipped two weeks, for the family reunion
and for Ella's visit.
But today it was done, so he didn't have to do it on
Friday, as he liked to do, so the house would be clean for the weekend.
He
wrote until the mail was up, went to the post office and the bank, the library, ate
an early lunch at Popeye's chicken, and went to an early matinee, to see Mr. and
Mrs. Smith.
He got some good writing done.
He got no mail at
the post office. That's better than a rejection slip.
At the library, he
checked out 3 Nights in August, after a sports guy on the Imus show said,
"Who'd want to read a book about two baseball teams that aren't based in New
York?"
At Popeye's, he got spicy chicken, red beans and rice, dirty
rice and Cajun gravy, and banana pudding. It was good. Even the music was good. Fats
Domino, Louis Armstrong, Dr. John.
The movie he went to see was slow to get
started, and then it was nothing but car chases and shoot-outs.
He kept thinking,
Why didn't I go see Land of the Dead?
* * *
Old Folks thought if Thoreau was alive to day he'd have a web site called
Walden, after his best-selling book.
Walden didn't sell. Thoreau
had to self-publish it.
He said, "I have a library of a thousand books,
900 of which I wrote myself."
At his web site he would address the same
issues he addressed in Walden, in named sections that dealt with specific
topics. Like the chapters of Walden. He would also keep a journal at the web
site.
Thoreau's name was mud in New York publishing circles, but he had a
handful of steadfast readers who visited his web site every day, downloaded, printed
out, and read what he had written, thought about it, sometimes wrote him back, usually
didn't. This let Thoreau know he wasn't crazy, just surrounded by people leading
lives of quiet desperation.
He was writing for the tradition he belonged
to, that of writers like himself, whose work spoke to him.
If he had contemporary
readers, good.
If he didn't have very many of them, so what?
What
did he want to do--make movies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith?