A Notebook – Since 2007
Sketches from the edges of notebooks, nine images under a thematic title.
This week’s theme, cafes, is taken from Hemingway’s short story titled “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in which two waiters, one younger and complaining, the other older and empathetic, wait to go home while a lone customer, an old man, lingers on, drinking.
Click anywhere in the gallery for scroll and captions.
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
There’s a full moon this week, the daytime temps near 100, so we’ve been out walking late, out for some cooler air, the house so hot. A while back I made a playlist of songs with the word moon in the title:
It’s Only a Paper Moon, Moonlight in Vermont, Moon River, Fly Me to the Moon, Moonglow, Paper Moon, Moondance, Moonlight in Vermont, Havanna Moon, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Blue Moon, Polka Dots and Moonbeams, The Moon Song, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Moonlight Serendade, Moonlight Becomes You, No Moon at All, Oh You Crazy Moon, Shame on the Moon, Walking on the Moon, How High the Moon, When My Moon Turns to Gold Again, Au Clair de la lune, The Stars the Night the Moon, Shine on Harvest Moon, Harvest Moon, Moonlight (Claro de Luna).
When we got back from our walk I played a few of the moon songs on the acoustic guitar. Still later, still unable to sleep, I got out of bed and from the open window took a photo of the moon. There’s nothing special about that photo, taken with my cell phone, of the moon over the fir trees over the old they say extinct volcano in the city.
“Ah, they’ll never ever reach the moon, at least not the one we’re after,” sang Leonard Cohen, in “Sing Another Song, Boys” (1971), which doesn’t have the word moon in its title, so it didn’t make the playlist.
Things appear different at night, are different. There are so many distractions during the day, chores, reels, but it’s different at night.
“It’s easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing,” says Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, in “The Sun Also Rises,” from 1926.
But a full moon can take the edge off of things at night, soften the heat. Draws you up. And besides, unlike Hemingway’s Jake, lately I’ve been looking forward to the night, a book waiting on the nightstand, moonlight streaming through the open window, lucky to have Susan by my side, not having Jake’s problem, my playlist of songs with moon in the title streaming in the kitchen earlier while I put together something cold for dinner, playing in my memory. Memories of the Moon. Moon Momentoes.
And you don’t want to go getting too literal about it, so-called science of the thing, the light of the silvery moon, how it’s dead, and it doesn’t really have its own light, but is simply reflecting the sun. The mechanics of the thing. There you go again. See, you’ve ruined another night. The moon is a cartoon.
Midnight likes to hang out all night long
with a puss in boots on every block flight
finally comes home climbs the fire escape
out back: good morning, Midnight.
There’s a noisy argument over in Flat 3
Midnight’s up reading “The Life and
Adventures of a Cat” (1760) about some
tomfool caterwauling tom-tom tomcat.
Now in the Cat, there
THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF A CAT.
appears the utmoſt auſterity, with
the greateſt levity. ‘ A rake and a
ſenator are moſt wonderfully com
pounded. Who can analize theſe
differing ingredients, fo demure
a puritan on ſudden,
verted into the moſt abfolute de
bauche ? One time ſitting for four
or five hours in the attitude of ſo
lemnity, and then on a ſudden break
out into the moſt diffolute feſtivity .
Theſe qualities, ſo diffonant, ſo ve
ry oppoſite to each other, muſt in
dicate ſomething ſuperior in the
animal, whoſe hiſtory wewe are at
preſent writing, and we think we
have proved this ſuperiority of the Cat.
LONDON: Printed for WILLOUGHBY MYNORS,
in Middle- Row, Holborn. M DCC LX.
Just so, we find ourself at odds
with our other selves at times as
docile as the doe in the meadow
the morning dews and sunup
rough-hews the tousled covers
the well worn silver curls one
dare not come near at this late
hour the abode dark and quiet.
Then again after a rest resumes
the sounds that do attract
the rooster in the cat to come
closer claws retracted mewing.
Thus we speak of night and day
and the contraries of our natures
the desire to lose ourselves we
so deliciously have cultivated.
Those words that come at night wash
swim the room like pieces of litter
flowing down a gutter in rainfall
cooling the street and gloom.
Then come the slow-moving
two-wheeled wheelbarrows
pulled by a pair of worker
words pulling like tugs
the barges of raw sense:
to to wit
to to whom
to to why
to to reason
of of love
in in fear
two by two
far and near.
Day ends with a walk to sleep,
ends again in the sober reality
of celestial shade, one awakes
in the dark and quiet, too early
to get out of bed, too late
to start some new episode
on the television or telephone,
and this is when one turns
to paper and words seep
out shy and uncertain fearful
like little furry animals searching
the brambles for food and drink
day’s fire now cool ashen,
and while certainly somewhere
in the city of night madness
drones on, an asocial tinnitus,
here in the paper we find
we can hear the pencil’s breeze
and feel the bluish-gray lead lighten.
We squiggled and danced around
and the radio and the romance
until all the songs blew fuses
and the whole night crashed down.
We could hear that dark fall coming
down in the valley and up on the hill
whistles and the steel rail humming
buttered popcorn and bubble water.
At the Centinela drive-in theatre
in my ’56 Chevy hoping it would start
up again when the twiddle ended
under surveillance during the draft.
The Coming of the Toads 