I Ripped A Lot

 

It’s drizzling out there.  It was coming down stronger an hour ago.  It looked wet when I saw my older one walking up the yard from the rail trail after her jog.  She was walking in the rain.  I went to the guest bathroom and sure enough, there was a dry blue towel, which I pinched and walked out to meet her with.  Yes.  She confirmed.  It wasn’t wet under the canopy.  But walking up the yard was soggy. 

 

I ripped a lot of cardboard today.  We have our life’s worth of goods, out in the second garage.  They were recently shipped from China and we have been slowly unpacking things.  My role, for now, is to rip up empty cardboard boxes into small strips and stuff them into plastic bags, which can be stuffed into our garbage containers at the top of the driveway.   Three bags of cardboard strips will barely fit into the vessel.  Beyond that, you will annoy the sanitation workers who will invariably ignore your over-the-limit load if you continue on with additional bags of recyclables. 

 

I’m so glad to be reading Claude McKay’s autobiography, “A Long Way From Home.”  He writes commanding poetry.  I’ve enjoyed more than one of his novels.  But it is this savvy, centered, approachable voice, I first read in sections of this work in the “Harlem Renaissance Reader” that initially drew me to this exceptional Jamaican intellectual and now, having finally made my way “home,” I’m very glad to be reckoning with George Bernard Shaw and Max Eastman, and the criminals of Manhattan and the working stiffs of London with McKay’s steady, approachable narration. 

 

I will read more of his work, certainly.  There are at least two novels in print and an intriguing set of short stories entitled “My Green Hills Of Jamaica” which is out of print and demands $145.00 to secure on Amazon that are all of interest.  He’d be a wonderful person to have as a twenty-first-century mentor.  He seems so consistently trenchant, self-effacing, reliable, and one suspects he’d see through so much of today, so effortlessly.  But resurrections are tricky.  Claude was one man when he was close to the Soviet Comintern and quite another when he converted to Catholicism late in life.  I wonder if his advice would vary widely depending upon which vintage of Claude you summoned. 

 

 

 

Sunday 08/16/20