This is just wonderful, Fred.
The quiet fireworks of the language.
The story itself.
The ending that is a beginning.
I knew the dog would be back at the end, but how was unpredictable.

The one thing I'm not sure of is why bother with linebreaks in something
like this? In some writers' hands this type of thing would be a prose
poem.Would that be as effective, I wonder? Perhaps not -- the line breaks
slow the reader down, insist that we visualise everything in detail, not
skip over anything.

Janet

2008/5/14 Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Old Dog
>
>
> I liked the brothers.  The older, Sam,
> was a go-getter type but non-corporate,
> marking time at McGill; now it was summer and he could *earn.
> He lived in the basement.  The younger, Mel,
> moved there when visitors (as, now, my mother)
> took his room; I would bunk with the boys.
> The father was also named Sam,
> phlegmatic, small, and pleasant,
> a brooder rather than an actor-out
> according to my tacit, long-established
> typology of people's fathers.
> The mother, Minnie, predictably
> worried and nagged, but with humor.
> I had never met any of these cousins,
> but my mother was immediately wrapped
> in loud reminiscences.  I knew only
> one story, how in 1934,
> twelve years before me and twenty before
> the divorce, she had taken the train
> up here to stay with Minnie and make a decision.
> One day a knock at the door
> was my father, all cuffs and fedora,
> saying, "Stick with me, baby, and you'll be in diamonds!"
> … The dog, a Dalmatian, followed Mel, Sam, and me
> to the basement after pursuing our parents
> upstairs.  He barked, was hushed, barked,
> decided my strange American smell
> was OK; slept heavily, whining
> at a dream as I made up the sleeper-couch.
> Mel was a jock but not obnoxious.
> He and Sam explained hockey.  They seemed
> to admire me slightly, because
> I had just graduated Yale
> or perhaps because of some falsely confident
> line I spun about my plans and talent.
> I could have gone on talking, but wanted
> to get back to the kitchen and their sister.
> It was essential, in fact, that I do so,
> though we hadn't exchanged ten words before the phone rang.
> When I entered, she had just hung up.
> I rummaged the fridge for milk and the cupboard
> for cookies.  "Give me one," said Lisa. –
> "Problem?" I asked, nodding at the phone,
> projecting, or trying to, quiet concern.  In those days
> a certain set of looks
> drove every rational thought
> from my head: zaftig and pale, dark-haired, with dark,
> exploring eyes.  Her voice was scratchy and husky.
> "It was my fiancé.  Well
> he isn't my fiancé – we've just been seeing each other
> for years.  He'll be here tomorrow."
> "Staying *here?" I cried.  "Hardly," she laughed.
> "Then of course I had to talk to a girlfriend."
> "About your fiancé," I said. –
> "No, about philosophy." –
> "I'm an expert on existentialism,"
> I said.  She said she had to walk the dog;
> I was welcome to come along
> if I wanted, tell her about existentialism.
> We walked an hour beside square, ivied,
> winter-hardy houses.  The dog
> seemed pleased with the extra time.  I spoke
> in an unusual way for me, artlessly, briefly;
> told her, more clearly than I'd told myself,
> I was terrified of the future, had no idea
> how I'd live, wanted only to write …
> I didn't want my words for a single instant
> to distract myself or her from my desire.
> She mostly talked about her fiancé,
> brightly, objectively.  We kissed
> by a fence as the last television-light
> winked out on the street.  "This is so wrong,"
> she growled.  We kissed again;
> did as much as an old, spring-heavy maple
> could hide.  Hurried back to her yard.
> The lights of the second floor, where her parents
> and my mother lay, and of the basement,
> were out.  I'd visualized
> a slanting, convenient tree, but they were all
> quite upright.  At twenty-one, however,
> one can accomplish anything, even twice,
> with somebody's hand always holding the leash.
>
> The following day I met her boyfriend,
> Gordon.  The name was Jewish, he looked Jewish –
> nearsighted, a yeshivabocher –
> but wasn't.  From some grim farm
> in one of the western provinces,
> he was drawn, he later told me, to the warmth,
> openness etc. of Jews, represented
> by Lisa and her family.  We hit it off.
> For several days that week (the weather
> stayed bright and warm), they showed me
> the sights of Montreal, and the Expo.
> I remember especially the Cuban pavilion.
> Che Guevara was still alive
> (another five months), and pictures of him
> reading, orating, shooting off
> artillery at the Bay of Pigs, were among
> the flashing newsreel lightshow images
> of clinics, harvests, classes, battles
> bombarding our line as it shuffled
> through the low wooden building, accompanied
> by a soundtrack of machine-guns
> and machine-gun-like Spanish.  The severe
> girls in stewardess-like uniforms
> who stood by weren't beautiful but looked competent.
> I tried to signal I approved of them.
> We also watched an apartment
> being slotted into place
> by a huge crane at Safdie's Habitat,
> and roamed the gardens that were people's roofs.
> "It's so fucking *intelligent," said Lisa.
> The Soviet pavilion, like America's,
> seemed all about the moon and Mars –
> domed cities, of a sort I had imagined
> since childhood.  Over massive cheeseburgers,
> I told how I'd escaped the draft;
> assured them I hated not only the war
> but the System.  Gordon described
> his work with Indians, his admiration for their culture.
> When I said, however, that I preferred
> the future to the past, he said, "Who wouldn't,
> here ... "  I outlined the vast
> Dostoyevskian novel I planned to write.
> Which led to Lisa expounding R. D. Laing
> ("They won't mention his name in my classes!"), his theory
> of the schizogenic family and society,
> of which I hadn't heard, and which
> I spent the next year, off and on, pursuing …
> Once, when she was away, I said
> "You guys are great," and Gordon,
> his words tumbling over each other,
> said, "I never know what she's going to do!
> She's like Sophia Loren, an Earth-Goddess … I'm always
> afraid if she sweats, she'll *mop under her breasts*!"
> When she returned, she asked why we were laughing.
> Sam pedaled by in a rickshaw.
> By summer's end he owned a piece
> of several concessions.  (By thirty he was,
> as planned, a millionaire.  By forty
> he was dead of an aneurysm,
> which I didn't learn till many years later.)
> Except for those few hours, Gordon and Lisa
> were off with each other.  I did the bookstores,
> or saw the same sights with my mother.
>
> On Saturday Gordon left; we, Sunday morning.
> I've never been back.  Late Saturday,
> through a combination of luck
> and careful maneuvering, I managed
> to be alone with her again.
> We walked, sat on the porch;
> did quite a lot of talking but it all
> reduces in memory to a few ideas.
> She: "Thanks for not saying anything."
> I: "He's a good guy.  But you're not
> going to spend your life on some reservation,
> or whatever they call them here, compiling
> TB and alcoholism statistics."
> "I don't know," she said.  She was angry at that point.
> "Are you going to be a great writer?"
> I felt a return of the honesty
> with which I had spoken the first night,
> and the reason for it was the same.  "I don't know,"
> I said.  "I'm not satisfied
> with anything I've written yet.
> If it fails, I'll try something else."  I stood,
> approached her.  We were in the living room.
> Antiques.  She sat on a delicate loveseat.
> From upstairs, thunderous snoring.
> "I do know I want you.
> I haven't been able to think of anything else
> all week."  And went on in some detail.
> She stared at me unsmiling, muttered something
> about absolute insanity but didn't move.
> I wish I could say how good it felt,
> but that is so far out of literature
> it's almost outside time.
> We had to be careful, choking, red-faced, listening.
> The dog was in the room.  *Not sleeping,
> head up, ears perked, paws shifting
> uneasily.  Don't meet its gaze,
> I reminded myself.  I remember
> thinking how gray its muzzle was, how slowly
> it had moved on our walks,
> how deeply it sighed.  Don't bark, I thought.  Don't bark.
>



-- 
Janet Jackson <[log in to unmask]>
www.proximity.webhop.net (Poetry)
www.myspace.com/poetjj (Includes occasional arts & culture blog)

The Line Mine, bulletin board for Perth poetry & spoken word:
[log in to unmask]
groups.yahoo.com/group/thelinemine

Breastfeeding info & help: www.breastfeeding.asn.au