by the book

The instructions were clear and precise: insert piece A into gap B, tighten with Phillips head screw driver, taking care not to over-tighten and strip head. The diagram which accompanied the instructions was a carefully rendered outline of the schematics of the kit, depicted in a manner which was probably hand drawn, but not by an illustrator with any pretensions to the avant garde or abstract expressionism. The diagram seemed almost cheerful, optimistic, as if piece A and gap B had been dancing a samba together in the moonlight, and were excited to be a part of the kit. While the instructions themselves didn't have any particular subtext or narrative sense (aside from a brusque delivery of the pertinent facts, resulting in the successful installation of the piece), the overall effect was one of optimistic accomplishment, in the take charge manner of the do it yourself pioneer.

The problem with constructing a life by constructing a project is that the best kit in the world can't compensate for operator error. So let's not blame the kit; it was designed and engineered to be a confidence building project, and every piece was labeled and color coded and matched the schematic and lined up with the instructions. When blaming the operator -- even when one is merely accepting the blame as the failed technician -- it is traditional to offer the socially accepted apologies and excuses. There's dyslexia, and being uncoordinated, and being distraught, and not having the tools, and losing key pieces. Any and all of these personal depictions of excusable failures I could lay claim to and be instantly absolved for my sin of incompletion. All of these choices are laid out for me, stories loose in the air, ripe for incorporating into why the project never materialized.

If only, alas!, they were true, I would tell you a tale of school woodshop classes littered with surreal birdhouses whose pieces never fit; of maps and directions unreadable because of the most basic philosophical consideration, what is right? and what is left?; of the heartbreak of losing a house to fire or flood or the apocalyptic horrors of losing a series of houses to fires and floods; of having a mind distracted by terminally ill parents and a dog with an inflamed heart; and with any of these considerations, thus, the unfinished project, merely an attempt to alter the nature of the universe, doomed from the start, and so no harm done.

Yet in good conscience I know none of these things are true, I know it would be taking advantage of your generous nature to claim any of them. The fault clearly, distinctly, lay within the relationship between my intentions and my actions, and the inability for the brain to coordinate between the eyes and the hand, the utter failure of cognition upon demand. There were the instructions, pages 1, 2, 3, front and back, helpful cheerful diagrams, pieces labeled, color coded, and then, me. Phillips head screwdriver, wood glue, carpenter's tape, ruler, pencil; all to the fore. And then, at the moment of commencement, of reintroducing the pieces to one another, I thought of you.

I don't know why this happened, you were never surrounded by the parts of a project, these were not your tools. You have been absent for so many waxings and wanings of the moon that I can almost forget how we would stay out in the evenings, waiting for the moon to rise, on cold, moonless nights walking for miles, hats pulled down over our ears, scarves wrapped around faces, hands scrunched deeply into pockets, waiting until the wee hours and the early arrival of daylight to illuminate the place in the sky from which the moon was absent, then returning to hot chocolate, the newspaper, toast, marmalade, soft boiled eggs, the day passed in the arid haze of the exhausted.

The depictions of the pieces that accompanied the instructions: there was something in the angle of piece A that reminded me of how you would hold your head, just so, inquiring: did I really say what you thought I just said? Was my theory reasonable given the current known laws of the universe? And then your eyebrows would dray together, ever so slightly, and you would withdraw into yourself, absently tap a finger against a coffee cup or the table or the cat, who never complained, sometimes not speaking for hours, suddenly grasping a piece of colored chalk and writing or sketching on the wall or the table or the ceiling until whatever thought you had completed was illustrated in symbols and sketches that became smudged and incomprehensible an hour or two later.

My walls now are clean. There is no chalk dust in the air. The ceiling is not covered in impenetrable hieroglyphs which only you could understand, and then only in moments of the deepest grace, when the hand of god revealed itself to you. The cat gazes into space, just as cats always everywhere do, and seems to see you, or to feel you tapping your finger as you used to, but cats are strange creatures, perceive things we cannot even imagine, much less comprehend, you always claimed. Maybe. Maybe there are just mice in the walls of this old house, scurrying between nests and food stores, and the cat, grown less agile with time, spends greater effort listening to the almost silent maneuvers of the mice.

Once I am thinking of the tapping and the chalk and the diagrams that covered every surface, it is almost that it is winter again, another desolate walk waiting for the moon, watching the tides crash against the cliffs in the earliest light of day, and I remember what you would always say, there, just at the point when the sun hit the water and before it outlined the ghost of the moon: Patience. Watch. Those were the only words that ever accompanied those nighttime searches for what wasn't there, repeated as a catechism at the last moment of the meditation on the unknowable absurdities of life. I never understood what you were trying to say, why those were the words that had to be said, how I could match the patterns that coalesced in your mind and baffled my most dedicated attempts to unravel. Patience. Watch.

And so, with pieces of the kit all spread across the floor, I sit back, stare into the middle distance, mirror the cat, listen for sounds that aren't there, sights that never materialize. Sometimes I think there is something tingling, just on the edge of my vision, then I blink and it is gone. The room has grown darker with the passage of the afternoon sun, the kit in disarray, and without glancing at a calendar I am aware, as I have always been aware, that this is the night of the new moon.

How long has it been since I have walked through the night? How long has it been since you held your head at just that angle, and retreated into the machinations of your head? How many projects have I assembled in a space free of chalk dust, old newspapers, lingering silences, in the space that has grown between when I knew you and when I knew you not?

Yet it is the new moon. The kit will never be completed, for there is too much now of you in it, and I reach for my coat, the same coat, the same hat, the same muffler, the same gloves, and I walk, and walk, and patiently watch, and wait. I have entered your story again, the story of the unseeable and unknowable, and the world I have built for myself of carefully assembled pieces designed and manufactured and shipped some assembly required tools needed instructions enclosed is suddenly no longer there for me. It is not that I had a breakdown, or suffered a stroke, but that so easily somehow you pulled me from the world of the concrete into the world of the symbol and the suggestion, without ever being here.

So I forsake my accomplishments, my kits, my narrative progressions to completion, and prepare to walk into the darkness, knowing you won't be there, but having patience. I will watch, without instructions or diagrams, with only the memory of the chalk sketches and symbols covering every surface to guide my next steps into the universe.

---

reading
finally finally finally went to the Museum of Natural History. Meteorites are cool. Dinosaurs are cool. What fun indeed, plus two newly found bookshops!

weather
we've had tornadoes, which is crazy

piping plovers

The grasses on the dunes, bent down from the winds, the only part of the hurricane to make it this far up the coast. The wind blows up from the south, full of the remembered smells of shrimp boats and palm trees and the sounds of metal drums, and with it the air is filled with the melancholy fatalism of living always in the path of the storm. And so the grasses bend, the sand kicks up from the dunes, not quite with enough momentum to reshape the coast line, but enough to justify sunglasses, a bandana when venturing out.

There is no storm to accompany the winds, no rain, no thunder or lightening, just clouds, the knowledge that the barometer has shifted, the potential threat of a migraine or a twinge of arthritis. The shore has yet to fill with adventurers and vacationers; it is not as popular a destination as it was once, the season starts much later, restaurants which once provided lobster rolls now feature hot dogs. A few early arrivals, the old station wagon or the minivan indicating family without commitments to graduations or between summer jobs, but most of the camps remain quiet, awaiting clothes lines, yellow labs, sunburns, insect repellent.

Out in the water are fishing boats, none looking proud of their catch, but all stubbornly anchored in promising patches of coast line, watching the sun rise and feeling the boat toss on the wind. I was out, yesterday, checking lobster traps, enduring the eerie calm of the water before the winds arrived, listening to the tales of woe from the lobstermen. Government interference be damned, they cursed. Bloody empty ocean, a lobster has just as much retail value as it ever did, but there just aren't any hereabouts. Go either direction, cross into international waters, there's lobsters galore, but here, empty.

Some of the grizzled old fishermen, faces covered in scraggly beard, teeth stained from tobacco, clothes encrusted with spray and bleached by sun, they talk about lobsters developing another sense, an instinct for where the protected waters are, and they send rejects from their protected lobster colonies into the fishing waters. It's their equivalent of a judicial system and a penal code, they say, expulsion from the family, certain death outside. No one listens to the old men, brains preserved by years' worth of pickling in gin, stories ever more preposterous, only listened to by the youngest grandchildren, by age six they push the smelly old men away and don't believe the stories, even though they still fantasize about castles.

I listened, though. I've been listening to these old men tell their tales of golden beds of crustaceans for several years now. It started as a joke, a toast with a bottle of beer before a lobster roll, a falsely husky voice giving thanks to the great crustacean of the sea, a prayer for the continued health of those upon whom we were about to feast. Then one year, depressed by the job market and up late helping a bottle of vodka realize its full potential, I submitted the same grant to every single grant awarding body that was listed in the catalog that was in the library discard pile: Grants for Artists, Writers, Historians, and Sociologists, all compiled by The Institute in 1988.

I didn't expect any of my grant proposals to reach their destination, much less be read. Most non-profit grant awarding bodies from over twenty years ago have either run out of money or gone on to do bigger and better things, so the envelope covered in official stamps and the letter on heavy embossed paper surprised me as much as anyone else. They were fascinated by my narrative study of the beliefs and mythology of the New England lobserman, my proposed publication of the folklore of the sea by the men who live at its mercy, and while they apologized for the meager size of the stipend, they assured me that the occupancy of the cottage could occur at my earliest convenience, and extend for precisely one year. Any groceries which I purchased at the local Co-op would be subsidized by 20%, and they eagerly anticipated my response.

It was a town I had never heard of, that hadn't made it on to any of the GPS map systems. Finally I consulted the keeper of the rare book room at the public library, asked for coastal maps going back to the Revolutionary War, and began the needle in a haystack search for the township that was to become my temporary home. It took two weeks of eye crossing cross-referencing, but there it was, a seaside town that appeared in the official state atlas in 1874, and then was no longer mentioned or located after 1902. I wondered if there had been some change of staff, if the cartographer who first included it was making a joke, or a reference to an informal family camp, or if it was a town included as an orphan, a false location for copyright purposes, or if there had been a hurricane or storm in 1902 that eradicated the population.

Regardless, I packed up the hiccuping old Chevy and headed up the coast, there wasn't any reason to stay behind, since an empty bottle of vodka isn't very good company. It took an extra three days of traveling than I had scheduled, what with the Chevy being temperamental and then none of the roads being paved; three days after passing the sign that proclaimed 'County Road Maintenance ends at mile marker 139.6', then mile marker 139, then the worst potholes I've ever encountered in North America. Two days later and the air began to smell of the sea, of salt and dead fish and diesel engines, but it wasn't until the third day, the Chevy bumping along and running on fumes, that I laid eyes on the ocean, the cove, the village.

The cottage promised by The Foundation had running water and a wood stove, the town had the Co-op, a gas station, and the hot dog stand, and it transpired that most of the summer visitors arrived by private boat, barring the minivans and station wagons in various stages of decrepitude that managed on the rough roads. Private boat in this sense didn't mean cigarette boat or even Sunfish; over the course of that season there were mostly arrivals by heavy aluminum canoes, weighted down by children and provisions and pets, powered by weary, fierce looking women and sometimes quietly depressed men. The fishermen and lobstermen had motor boats, jury-rigged old tubs that leaked diesel out and water in, and were always being tinkered with and never quite breaking down.

How the Co-op remained provisioned was a mystery to me; I never saw a truck making deliveries, nor a boat, but there was always fresh milk and vegetables, and they never ran out of toilet paper. My research grant was for the lobstermen, and so I didn't waste too much thought over the mysteries of the grocery, but the lobstermen weren't forthcoming in their affections. Maybe they resented The Foundation, or they resented outsiders, or they just didn't like the way I smelled or walked. But I had arrived in late March, thinking a year would turn me into a fully fledged alcoholic loner academic outcast with a manuscript no one would read, and by early June I began to doubt if the manuscript would ever become manifest; of the other traits, I was well on my way to success.

Somewhat about the solstice, though, things changed. Who knows how or why village elders choose to bestow their graces? My routine hadn't varied, my nights in the local bar were met with a cursory polite glance and a cold shoulder, but then one of the barnacles decided to return my greeting. His 'Evening' was two syllables more than any of the men had spoken to me in three months, and I matched it promptly by buying a round of drinks, which were fully and finally accepted by the other patrons. Not that there were many of them; the local bar was an old prefab shed, with four card tables set around by mismatched chairs and a bar that was standing only, bottles only, and on busy nights there might be fifteen of us, on quiet nights, it was me, a Bud Light, and the bartender, who never spoke a word and was missing half his teeth.

By the end of August I was allowed on the boats, and the old man who first welcomed me started to tell their stories, stories of the ocean, of the colonies of lobsters, of the rules of the aquatic kingdom, so imperfectly mirrored in our own human society. He wouldn't allow me to record his stories or to take notes; history and politics are all storytelling, he would insist, and the moment you write a story down it isn't true anymore. So every night, half drunk myself or further gone, I would stumble home by moonlight and write until my memory ran dry or I fell asleep at the table, my cheek stained with ink and my breath smelling of stale beer and chips.

His stories changed, grew, were edited to exclude anecdotes or to include new characters, and the more I wrote the more the story changed. Still he kept talking, deep into the early dark nights of winter yet to come, but always beginning where he had on that first day, the day the winds arrived but not the storm, when the history of the deep ocean colonies was first revealed. No one else had patience for or interest in his tales, but they were not merely the core of my funding, they became guidelines for my own life, there in the cottage by the sea.

---

reading
Miss Hargreaves / Frank Baker
The little prince / written and illustrated by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

weather
hot hot July hot, all in!

absenteeism

My dear Sir,

Preparations have all been made per your instructions, which were followed to every degree, even when such was not in the traditional expectations of logic. We understand that you have picked up some new ways of conducting operations during your time abroad, and likewise wish for the foreign approach to be applied henceforth to all domestic and business affairs, with which it is our pleasure to comply.

As you will note, the time pieces and clocks throughout your properties have been reset to Greenwich Mean Time, barometers have been placed by all major entrances, and arrangements are being made with the local neighborhood commission with regards to the morning and evening twelve gun salutes. It was our intention that this matutinal tradition would be firmly established well before your arrival, but certain impediments in the form of the widowed sisters next door have arisen, and a full local council hearing was necessarily scheduled. You will be pleased to know, however, that these hearings are only the barest formalities, as the full council has been made well aware of the circumstances in which you find yourself, and they are more than eager to assist your homecoming in whatever way possible.

It is also perhaps worth noting here that there has been the minutest of delays concerning the installation of the crocodile pit, whose designs and blueprints you were so good as to include with your most recent report. A builder and architect fitting your specifications have been retained; unfortunately, however, there is some concern from the local animal welfare trust as concerns the legality of such enclosures in the district that you so clearly specified for the unit to be constructed. The historic committee has fully approved the design of the outbuildings and enclosures, and was so kind in their notification letter as to specifically praise your inclusions of local architectural styles and building materials, specifically in regards to the crocodile pool and fenced enclosure, all to be built of hand cut granite from the local quarry, in a mid-Victorian style with nods to Jacobean influences. Likewise, the local water board received the plans for the diversion, treatment, use, purification, and return of the local waterway and irrigation system, and voted unanimously to approve the construction of the byway you requested.

We confess that the difficulties with the animal cruelty board may be of our own making, for we did not pursue the license requirements thereto related until after the approvals of the historic oversight board and the water use authority were already granted, and we inadvertently stepped on several toes by relegating them to lower importance, especially as the chair of the animal cruelty committee is the sister of the exwife of the chair of the water use authority, a personnel difficulty we had not foreseen. It may be understood that steps have been taken to fully rectify this embarrassing oversight.

You will find very little has changed in the vicinity since your last visit; although it has been several decades, this area is well aware of their reliance upon your patronage and goodwill, and every effort has been put forth in the intervening years to maintain the facilities as you last saw them. We must unfortunately remind you of the sad passing eight years ago of the retired Colonel, whom you specifically requested meeting with upon your return. Following established custom, after a year's grieving period, a thorough interview process was held with a selection of Colonels, in the hopes of procuring a replacement of similar temperament and experience; the new retired Colonel has been performing his duties to the highest standards, and reassures us that he has made the former retired Colonel's logbooks a source of daily study, so any reminiscences you once shared with his predecessor will be able to continue without too drastic an interruption in the narration.

From the charter documents we consulted and many hours of discussions with local residents, it was unclear if the wife of the former retired Colonel was to remain, therefore providing further narrative continuity, or if the wife of the replacement retired Colonel was permitted to accompany him. As bigamy is, at present, strongly discouraged by the local magistrate, we felt that a decision had to be made, but in the course of our deliberations a most unfortunate event took place, in that the former wife and the replacement wife both found new soulmates in other locales, leaving the replacement retired Colonel in the unfortunate position of bachelorhood, at his advanced age. He has requested that we undertake the responsibility of locating a new wife for him, trusting that our specifications will meet with his approval, and the chosen lady's arrival will coincide almost precisely with your return. It is to be hoped that this transition period in no way inconveniences you; the situation has been quite delicate.

The majority of the main residence hall has been preserved as it was at your last visit, within the very clear written guidelines of the contract, although certain small alterations may be noticeable due to circumstances quite beyond our control. The source of the fire which destroyed much of the main house was traced to a squirrel's nest built into the walls of the house, and while we were able to reconstruct the vast majority of the furnishings and decorative objects, the shades of the brickwork and limestones which are worked into the flooring and masonry throughout the building are ever so slightly tinged with an orange cast, but we trust this variation in the color scheme will not be offensive. The lamps, oil paintings, knick-knacks, and books were all perfectly matched using the cross-referenced library and archive housed in the fire safe stored off site, and photograph albums and scrapbooks were meticulously reconstructed.

There was a discussion as to whether the inclusion of the squirrel's nest was to be considered part of the essence of the structure, in which case it was imperative to replace the squirrels regardless of potential fire risk, or whether the squirrels were not a materially significant component of the building, in which case every effort would be made to exclude them. The final decision was that the presence of the squirrels reflected the landscaping and construction methods of the residence, and that while it was not necessary to reintroduce a breeding pair into the walls, it would be impertinent in the extreme to create a structure which thoroughly excluded the possibility of squirrel habitation, and in this way a happy medium was reached.

We have one final report to share with you concerning the house and grounds prior to your return; it touches on a matter of some delicacy, and is not addressed at all in the charter documents or in any of your very detailed missives. It has unfortunately come to our attention that your brief marriage some years ago to a Flamenco dancer met whilst in the Amazon resulted in a claim of legitimate issue; the offspring has been in residence now for six and a half years, and every effort has been made to ensure that the young man in no way intrudes on the operations of the system. He reassures us that he is quite eager to make your acquaintance after all these years, and that his poor mother, now residing in Australia, holds no animosity towards the union, and wishes her son to know his father.

In all other respects no local circumstances have been altered in the slightest, and we look forward to your imminent return.

Very sincerely yours,

---

reading
Lost and found : three by Shaun Tan.

weather
swimming! kayaking! full July moon!

imperial pint

A simple summary of my story would be woefully insufficient. That might be all you have time for; in a rush, always in a rush, always being someplace other than where you are. That's okay, time and speed are for the young, and you've years enough ahead of you to spin a story of your own. But here -- have a pint? Smoke? No, that's right, it's a filthy habit, but you reach a point where filthy habits are the only ones that are really worthwhile anymore.

Now that's a beer, well poured, and there was a time when men would come to this here pub -- oh, it's a dive, now, but once it was the place to be of an evening. The young kids and the old men and the workers and even the priests and politicians would all come here, on account of the beer being so much more lively than at the other pubs, but with the changes in bottling and distribution and the retirement of the old publican to Spain after his poor wife died, well, the beer's never really recovered its former glory. Still quite nice, though you wouldn't think it by the way the rest of this place has gone to seed.

No, you're quite right, it wasn't all in the secret arm of the publican: there are reports that the basements link to old smuggling caves on the coast, and when the tunnels were closed up officially after the war it changed the way the beer sat in the basement. There used to right enough be music and dancing most nights, then the bands started skipping our town and heading just to the cities, which was well and good for them and for the cities, but not so good for us. We've still kept up a pretty good team roster for darts, of course, and come the World Cup plenty of locals will stop in to see the action on the big screen, but it's rare indeed to have youngsters like yourself stop in.

Now I've been coming here since before the previous (now retired) publican arrived on the scene, back when his dad was the man in charge, not just of the pub, but he kept toying with becoming an M.P. He had plenty of opinions, thought if we replaced those lazy louts with some good honest citizens this place would be a damn sight better for it, but in spite of all his republican sentiments he wasn't above some under the table deals, himself.

There were stories that he personally widened and re-opened the underground tunnels, knowing that cellars could profitably hold more than just ale. Most of us didn't mind his political passions or his underground explorations, but I know it could be difficult for the local police chief, the two of them having been lads together, but the law's the law, even in a place like this. So there was a sigh of relief here and there when the old man died, and that sigh was both that he died of natural causes and that it looked like his son was going to take over the place, and he was a different sort altogether.

The son -- that's the one who's in Spain these days -- well, of course we had our doubts. No one wants their publican to be a boy still in his twenties, wet behind the ears and open to influence, but it worked out. He went and married a Methodist, which we were all certain was going to be the end of things, but rather than try and turn us out of the pub and into the world or our homes or to god, she decided it would be easier to bring our homes and the world to the pub.

And that woman was a firecracker, and when she brought the world into her fold, the world came a-callin'. I wouldn't have given a Methodist that much credit, either for being such a go-getter or for knowing such an assortment. She had an old school friend who was married to a music producer in Dublin, and that friend convinced her husband to send all his newly signed performers through our old town, perched here, out of the way on the coast. And when young performers show up, they inevitably bring friends and young women, and before you know it, kids were making the drive to us just to hear these new bands. They weren't all good bands; most of them were verging on the awful side of things, to be honest, but everyone likes something new now and again, and new these kids were.

Then she went to work on our wives, knowing that it's easier to get a woman into a pub than to get a man out. She started up a Ladies Auxiliary, even though we didn't have a clue what they were an auxiliary of, and I reckon the women themselves would have been hard pressed to identify the actual legitimate sponsor of the group. But that's all well and good, you can't put three women in a room anyhow without them organizing a group to visit the sick, a group to knit for the Red Cross, a group to beautify downtown, and a new fundraising campaign for the local school, and with all these groups to run while drinking their tea in the Ladies Parlour, they were happy enough to leave us men to our own devices.

Her husband was more than competent with the brew; probably because his attention wasn't so diverted by the tunnels he paid more attention to the care of the barrels in his basement, and maybe there really is something to be said for the underground air in these parts, because that pint you're having now, while perfectly respectable beer, is nothing to what this place used to serve.

The food was never much; for years we had a woman who could organize anything but served the toughest mutton that has ever graced a plate. Things improved a bit when there was so much business on account of the new visitors that they had to hire some extra help, but it took years of not-so-subtle suggestions before that woman would leave the kitchen for more competent hands. Finally, though -- and this took a good long time -- their eldest decided that if they were going to operate a real pub, they needed to serve real food. I'll never know how that boy got those ideas, growing up with a Methodist mother who made pot pie with pastry that could sink a ship, but when he was sixteen he took a boat to Paris, with firm opinions about how to chop an onion and not a word of French in his head.

What was even more surprising was when he showed up four years later, without a word of warning and with a heavily pregnant young French wife, and he just pushed his mother out of the kitchen and installed himself in it. No one knew what had happened -- four years and he had never written a letter, never called, never visited. How had he learned the secrets of the kitchen? When had he married? Did she speak anything other than French? Did he speak any French at all?

His mother recovered from the shock of being a grandparent to a Catholic infant and to the loss of her kitchens, and the food improved immediately. It was never going to be one of those new-fangled gastro-pubs, and it would never earn a Michelin star, but it was nice enough that a man could take his best girl out for a bite, and between the food and the music this spot became quite a hub of activity.

The new wife didn't ever have much to do with the place; she may have spoken something other than French, but none of us ever heard a word. Poor girl died in childbirth with their second, just as the first was about to start school, and things were never quite the same afterwards.

There are plenty of other reasons, too, of course, tastes change in music and we were too out of the way for bands to keep visiting. The music producer moved to London and so there wasn't anything except the reputation of the place for acts to want to book here, and kids here just wanted to get to the city as soon as they could. The bottling technology changed, so that the special conditions of the cellar didn't make much of a difference one way or another, and the Ladies Auxiliary members grew older, never replenishing their ranks with the young wives and mothers, now busy working and parenting and less interested in knitting for the Red Cross. Us menfolk still stopped in for a pint or two, out of habit and affection for the old place, but the son and his child left to go work for a hotel in a resort town, and the kitchen was scaled back first to Sunday dinners, then just to cellophane wrapped egg salad sandwiches.

That's just progress, they say, places like this have their run of luck, but it's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time, and when times change, it's over. You'll hear this story right enough at most of these small towns on the coast. Maybe the smuggling made sense, a way to balance out the finances of a family enterprise, or maybe we all just suddenly grew old.

The new owner, oh, he has plans, of a sort. The place was sold out of the family when the Methodist wife died, the eldest son still nowhere to be seen and the other children never interested in the first place. It was bought by some American who ready too many novels and had an inheritance. You know the type, a brain rotted out with words and booze, thinks a dark pub is romantic and atmospheric without having the ambition to make something more of the place. But who knows? Maybe he'll marry a local girl, a Methodist, even, and this place could get some of its old sparkle back.

---

weather
steaming summer rain on asphalt

reading
no more gothic novels before bedtime