Whiffs and gleams

LISTEN. What a fine Friday afternoon in June, in a pre-pandemic, quotidian-normal sort of way. If all the days are (or could be) gods, as Emerson said, yesterday was exceptional. Exalted. Crowning. 

It was highlighted first by the three-dimensional presence and unmediated, unmasked company of a good friend over lunch at M.L. Rose. We've zoomed often during the contagion, but conversing face-to-face for the first time since March 2020 was a gratifying reminder of why immediacy matters. 

Later, while he endured Nashville gridlock I had a pleasant swim and did not take it for granted. After Monday I'm prohibited by the protocols of surgery from immersing in H20.

And then we went out to a ballgame, wife and Younger Daughter and I. First live game with the crowd since Spring Training 2020 just before they cancelled it. William Carlos Williams was right, the crowd at the ballgame is moved by a spirit of uselessness which delights them ...

 

It did me, anyway.

And without benefit of ludicrously overpriced beer, which for me has always been practically synonymous with baseball. But I'm pre-op and allowing myself just one a day until Sunday, when I must go cold-turkey. I had my one at lunch, a very nice Bearded Iris Hazy IPA.

I'm sure I'll get back on the one-a-day malt wagon, once the painkilling drugs are gone. But I think my bump-and-beer habit may be history. And happily so. 

We spoke briefly at lunch of novelist Walker Percy, who understood something important about alcohol. It's the immediate experience of that first "bosky bite of Tennessee summertime" that triggers the good times some of us associate with those sorts of spirits. “The joy of Bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of C2H50H on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the nasopharynx…”

James understood something important, too, of those soaring moments that are all too often yoked to toxic degradation: "it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning."

Much better for me, I'm deciding, to gather my whiffs and gleams from Tennessee summertime and its natural accouterments-- good times with friends and in the crowd, and in the lingering light of old dead philosophers and novelists who've become a living and permanent presence in my life-- and not so much from C2H50H. That recurrent first instant of sunshine in the nasopharynx can be replicated from other materials, I'm sure. I hope... (LISTEN)