This entry has been a tough one to write.* Here's the sentence I wanted to use to start off the whole thing:
Driving on the winding old highway along the shore of St. Margaret's Bay in a rented SUV, past the wharves and down the dirt roads where I spent my childhood, I became appalled at how parochial memories can be.
Not too thrilling. Informative, rhythmic and dense maybe, but overly stuffed with prepositions. It's the tacky old armchair of opening sentences. I realized that it sounded a bit too much like the far superior sentence that struck off my entry on Newfoundland:
Driving from St. John�s to St. Lawrence - up the Trans Canada over the tip of Placentia Bay and dribbling down from the town of Goobies along the Eastern edge of the Burin Peninsula - can really stretch your notions of time and duration.
Deceptively similar, but much better, especially since I'm not stretching for gravitas but simply squatting down for a bit of eloquent snark. Worst of all, the first sentence is a rip-off. I wanted to craft a sentence that would pay homage to the rock-em sock-em first line of William Kennedy's novel Ironweed:
Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settle down in neighborhoods.
Man. I cannot tell you how much I love that sentence. Every so often I open Ironweed just to read that first line. The rest of the paragraph ends a little disappointingly, but I can't really blame it. How can you hold up the architectural demands of that sentence? Hot damn. You read that sentence and you see exactly what Francis Phelan sees, feel the shakes in the spine, the soreness in his butt, the little star of pain in the small of his back. And you know that the piece of wisdom purchased at the sentence's end is wearily, perhaps even a little bitterly bought. And what's he doing, riding to a cemetery in the back of an old truck, if he himself is not already dead?
I suppose that some of the people who read my weblog would either not have read or not have remembered the first line of Ironweed, and therefore I could have easily have gotten away with installing my retrofit rip-off. It's likely that my Continental (and hopefully continent) friend Athena will send me an email to say that I needn't have tipped my hand, that my confession is more distraction than engagement, and Kennedy's sentence isn't that great anyway, so what am I going on about? Well, what I'm going on about is obviously a distraction from the main line of this entry, which is that this entry has been tough to write.** I'm stuck in one of those moments in which either my talent or imagination is failing me, or vice versa, and the memories that lay along route 329 - down from Hubbards through Fox Point (where I lived from ages 3 to 7, roughly) and on to Blandford - are having some trouble getting their due. If memories deserve some kind of due. That's the thing: I don't know. If I see a long low blue-and-white hotel across the road from a beach, and I know that I once spent the day there eating vanilla ice cream and digging out sand dollars with a group of kids who didn't like my first name and so insisted on calling me by my middle name, is that little packet of knowledge to be rewarded with some note of gratitude or reverence? I don't know. All I really know is that I was three or four, I didn't like those kids because they didn't like my name, but at the same time I was pleased to be given a different name for that one day at the beach, one that was still mine but not as distinctive, not as identifying as my first. For that peculiar reason I spent the afternoon with them anyway.
Let me be clear: visiting the place where I spent my childhood didn't resurrect any old memories. If anything, I was amazed at how much I didn't remember. At the turnoff to Kelly Drive - the dirt road off the highway that ended in my house - there were two cemeteries. I don't remember even one. Down by Shatford's Lobster Pound, which I remember clearly, there was a huge wharf, which makes perfect sense, but I have no memory at all of that wharf. I also remember a convenience store somewhere nearby, but now I'm fairly certain that my mind looted a Green Gables from some other place entirely and plunked it down near my chilhood home. The oddest moment, though, came when we drove up a hill just before the Kelly Drive turnoff. I had no conscious memory of the hill, but I see it my dreams all the time. For some reason, that hill functions as a subconscious shorthand for the country of my childhood. Whenever I'm on that hill I'm always lonely, and always lost, or just realizing that somewhere I've taken a wrong turn and now have no idea where I am.
*So far, though, that first line has been a breeze. Maybe it's not so tough after all. This footnote is a piece of cake.
**Once again, though, I should point out that this entry has been really easy to write. The easiest bit by far was the first line of Ironweed, which required absolutely no effort beyond opening the novel and typing out a line. I tell you, writing has got to be the easiest thing out there. Which is probably why it's my greatest ambition and favourite hobby, aside from watching cable television. Now that's a low-maintenance activity.
