|
An English Major meeteth three Professors bidden to their classes, and detaineth one. |
Saturday, September 4, 1999 Rime of the English Major
| |
|
It is an English Major And he stoppeth one of three. -- "By thy long brown beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?"
He holds him with his skinny hand, He holds him with his glittering eye--
| ||
|
Well. I think that's enough to get the idea across. I've found myself feeling a bit like the Ancient Mariner myself over the past few days, condemned to wander the land telling everybody my tale whether they particularly want to hear it or not. Not that this is a particularly accurate feeling -- I've actually been fairly restrained on the matter, I think -- but repeating the story over and over has been more or less unavoidable. Especially when surrounded by acquaintances who all want to know how my summer was. What am I supposed to answer?
On the other hand, I should like to note that if somebody asks you how your summer was, and you reply that it was pretty good, except that you were in a serious car accident two weeks earlier, and she replies "That's great!"... well, it's probably a safe bet that you do, indeed, have a speech problem. In my case, it's that I speak way too quickly. Nice to get that verified, I suppose.
I now have my stuff back, or at least whatever stuff my brother was able to recover from the van on Wednesday. By now the van is supposed to be a block of crushed metal, so this is basically all I'm gonna get back. My knapsack made it through without a hitch, or even a blood stain, as far as I can tell. Then again, my knapsack was red in the first place, so it just might be prudent to get the thing cleaned. Unfortunately, the two main compartments of my knapsack were wide open at the time of the crash, so the contents were scattered hither and yon. With the result being that quite a bit was lost, although I still haven't figured out just how much yet. At the very least, I lost a bunch of cassettes. For that matter, my Walkman and my Discman were both totalled. (The Discman -- which had been at the bottom of the pack -- is still in one piece, but no longer works. The Walkman had been in my hand at the time. My brother could only find its back panel.) Also lost were some papers, but most of them weren't very important, and were still around only because I'm a pack rat. My W-2 forms were important, but those were recovered, albeit with a small bit of blood on one of them. Topping my personal list, however, were my notepad and pen, which had been resting on top of the knapsack at the time of the crash. Those, apparently, and not unexpectedly, are no more. The notepad contained pretty much every note I'd scribbled down all summer, including an eight-page journal entry I'd written on the train to Boston and had intended to upload here. The pen was a gold-plated one given to me by the Campers' Paradise at the end of last summer, when I'd thought I was retiring, and it had a great deal of sentimental value, even if it no longer closed properly. Oh, well. At least I have my health. Such as it is. Everything else pales in comparison.
Incidentally, don't think you're going to escape hearing the full story. I do intend to write about it, and the first draft is going to be right here, probably in the near future. Trust me.
So I was speaking to the brother who collected the stuff from the van, and pumping him for information on what he remembered about the crash. Unlike me, he remembers the whole thing, and he told me about it. And, yes, I was asking partly because I'm still trying to get a handle on the matter for my own peace of mind. But let's face it; I was really looking for details I could use when I wrote about the thing. Writers are vampires; there's no way around it.
Then again, I'm not the only writer in the family. Here's my sister's take on the crash. (For the record, the brother she mentions is the two-year-old, not myself, although the context is probably enough to get that across. He needed some surgery, but was discharged the next day and is okay now.)
In other news... my mother's been improving, and is now supposed to leave the hospital on Tuesday. From there, she'll be going to a rehab clinic in New Jersey. It's a step forward...
|
Contact Back Forth Archives Index |