I Went to the Woods...

“I went to the woods to live deliberately...” That's Henry David Thoreau in the opening pages of Walden, the little book he wrote after two years of living in the cabin he built on the shores of Walden Pond, just two miles from the town of Concord where Nathaniel Hawthorne briefly lived. Where Bronson Alcott lived too, with his high-minded ways and raised up the dark-eyed talented Louisa. Where, most of all in my mind anyway, Ralph Waldo Emerson lived, with his big nose and his kind face; Emerson, who helped support his far younger friend Henry, lending him the use of that patch of land by the pond, and even taking him into his house to live with his family and tutor his children..Around these parts we all know Walden Pond over there in Concord.I know it's just ten miles from my house. I know it was formed by the retreating glacier a mere 10 or 12 thousand years ago. I know, or learned much later, it's the place where my teen children went night-swimming with their pals behind all our backs and all in defiance of many laws.I have read Thoreau’s Walden so many times that the things he says there and facts of his life come constantly into my mind, and I wonder always how he managed after losing his brother to John to lockjaw. It was about their trip down the Concord and Merrimack rivers that he was trying to write when he lived in that little cabin. I always assumed he was trying to bring his brother close again in the writing, as I have been trying to do with my sister Nan who, much to my dismay, moved to faraway Florida in the late '70s and has been there ever since.This week my man and I are away from our house that lies so close to Concord. Life chugs along without us there however, since four adults and an infant are living with us this summer - which means that I the worrier am free from worry over who will bring in the mail and papers. Free from worry over what lights we’ll leave on to fool those robbers in their cartoon robber-masks who we somehow picture making their nightly rounds, trying doors, as faithful as lamplighters of old ....This week I'm free from all such worry. Free to hike and swim and read Walden in these soft New Hampshire hills, where we mean to spend our time.Here’s something I read there just now, upon rising from my bed:

One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

Food for thought all right. I wonder: should it be crisp broccoli, rich butternut squash and good dark beans for our supper tonight?

On Fitting In

It was a big week for me culture-wise. I not only read a book about Louisa May Alcott I also went to a lecture about her pops Bronson, one of the most ineffectual men ever to draw breath. This lecture was held in a place I have gone to before, not just to hear talks but to sit in that one leather chair by the window and think long thoughts. (The graveyard on the other side of the glass helps with that.)Anyway, throngs of people came to hear about old Bronson who never did an honest day's work after about age 37. And yet he loved himself always. (His Concord neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that he was always feeling about his shoulders to see if wings had sprouted.)  And he didn’t just keep his wife and four girls in poverty; he made them subsist entirely on a diet of raw fruits and vegetables. He also thought sex put a crimp in the life of the spirit so he denied his wife that as well. He wouldn’t eat any dairy or wear any wool  - didn’t believe in the servitude of animals  - and the one year Fruitlands was up and running he wandered off with his crackpot pals to New York for all of August instead of bringing in such harvest as they would have had. (He didn't believe in the use of manure - again too exploitative of Bessy and Elmer.)But folks are fascinated by a nutcase so the place was SRO - and I guess that's why the  man at the front desk sort of lost it. His job: to be sure no one ever brings in any kind of bag in which s/he can stash and make off with any rare and precious objects.I have never minded taking out my laptop, hanging my power cord around my neck, and stuffing all my books and notebook into the little see-through bag they give you but I didn’t expect to be yelled at three times in 20 minutes. Yup, yelled at. First for trying to bring the laptop into the Reading Room  (Ma'am! Excuse me, Ma’am!”), then for trying to pull its rolling laptop bag around the man's desk rather than hoisting it over the top. (He thought I was attempting to take it inside) and finally for using my phone to take this picture which act almost got me wrestled to the ground by a short young lady in sensible shoes.It was this picture, of the Marquis De Lafayette looking pretty above-it-all himself which is certainly how the guy at the desk came across. I know he was just doing his job and probably hates having to speak to people but still. It was a good reminder to me of how it feels to be a newcomer in a culture you don’t know you way around in. “There are many rules here but they are all unspoken.”  We say that in all but words to people new to our shores and, I mean really, how fair is that? It's like when Steve Martin used to suggest in his early stand-up routines that we should teach babies to talk wrong so as to have the fun of mocking them later.