A couple of weeks before my John-Lennon-never-celebrated-this birthday, my baby sister and I were out walking our dogs on Dewey Beach in the early morning. We wore warm jackets over our pajamas; our frizzled gray heads were bare to the pale blue April sky, and her knitted slippers collected sand as we shuffled along. With us were three small dogs — as one passerby dubbed it, “Weiner Camp.” Her two, Tully and Jess, are eleven years old, and a bit too long in the leg to be purebred dachshunds; I suspect a beagle ancestor somewhere in their 23nMe.
My dog Wally and I were at the beach for the first two weeks of November. I stayed in the same little condo I have been renting for many years now, on Dewey Beach in Delaware. This late in the year, the beach itself was largely deserted and most of the shops on the strip closed, though you could still get a crabcake at Woody’s and a Bloody Mary at the Starboard, and down in Rehoboth things were lively — but deserted was what I came for. Though at certain hours, we were glad to find a few Dalmatians and spaniels and poodles ambling along the water’s edge, their people attached.
Sparing you from this month’s various ridiculous episodes — a bad experience buying an iPhone, anecdotes that would embarrass my dog or irritate my kids — I decided to try another glose, this one about aging. The glose is the poetic form where you quote four lines from another poet’s work, and those become the last lines of the four subsequent ten-line stanzas, with a rhyme in lines six, nine and ten. There have been several of these in this space. Here’s one inspired by T.S. Eliot’s so-called love song.
One Saturday morning my son called from Boston. We chatted briefly about this and that, and when we ran out of things to say, he asked, “So whatcha got goin’ today?”
The world has changed a lot in the past couple decades, as you’ve surely noticed, and especially since about 2015, with #metoo and Black Lives Matter and the introduction of “they” as a singular pronoun and so much more. If you watch a television show or movie from the nineties or aughts, it’s almost unbelievable what was considered acceptable then. West Wing, which I am slowly working my way through for the first time, seems like it comes from another era altogether, when hordes of white men benevolently ran the world, and the media kept them honest, and a tiny handful of attractive women and black people brought them coffee.
So far my high hopes for 2021 seem like major magical thinking, though I guess there is still a lot of year left. I only wish I felt like the captain of my destiny. I wish I could let go of everything that sucked about last year and start fresh in a completely different place. Like a remote beach in Thailand, perhaps.
