The Experiment: Day One

23 May 12

Now here's an interesting experiment: Take a rather solitary fellow, used to typing or striking it out on his own, make a family man of him – a full convert, doting dad and happy hubby – and then pull his wife and daughter away from him for a few weeks and see what becomes of him in the wake. A contented reversion to his original hermitic self? Or an eddying emptying soul unable to make up his mind if he should scramble eggs for dinner or rake the leaves in spring or type love-sick sonnets on the old Royal gathering dust in the toolshed?

Day One: driving away from the airport, wistful visions of Ada blowing me kisses from Anna's arms as they mill into the crowd of the loading dock; arriving at home, dumbfounded by the silence of the house, the placid order of things, no random toys underfoot to twist an ankle, no wild bawling or screeching or laughing to echo the walls and swirl the mind. A sparrow chirping in the yard, it's call sharp as glass in the quiet. What to do? And what for? Sit down to write a novel in the 18 days I've got to myself? In one go put down all the stories I've had pent up inside by the flurrying demands of family life?

Or put on the game? One game. Relax a little in the void. So I watched the second half of the Timber's versus Chicago soccer match, then, needing to move or sink entirely into oblivian, I bicycled to the gym, shot around, did a round of weights, then returned home and with a sad plate of dinner on my lap (reheated pasta, pan-fried Italian sausages, garlic-stuffed olives and strips of nori for “salad”, nothing that took any kind of effort, of course – oh, the great force required to pop a Peroni!) watched the Sounders match interspersed with runs of the Sixers-Celtics playoff game. When it was all pathetically over I showered and fell asleep reading Dos Passo's Adventures of a Young Man.

And that's who I was again, a young man. An older man idling in a younger man's track and the course was unsatisfying, boring as hell, in fact. Sports as filler? Books do so much more than fill, but still even reading seemed a prop against the vast lonesomess hanging like a Hokusai wave over the bead. I dreamt weirdly of Christopher Hitchen's voice, reading from an essay on his literary influences while rows of shelved dusty books flew by my nose.