The Alibi Breakfast

One

The Great Chain
of Being-and-Nothingness

It's early, a soft midsummer morning in the Pennsylvania countryside, and so quiet you can isolate every sound, this bird in that tree. But my daughter Sadie is coming to visit, and quiet does not tend to enfold Sadie. She has got someone's car, moreover, (poor someone) and I can hear the engine's surge minglejangled with the clatter of loose metal plus an irregular Beethoven riff on the horn (da da da but no daaaa) and soon enough the dustswathed jalopy comes bobbling down the grassy hill to the barn and I see the alarming heart-attacking placard: JUST MARRIED!

Migawd. It's enough to know the child has brought a boyfriend back from Paris; enough to know (for one does know, really) the child is sleeping with the boyfriend -- but married? Homme et femme? It deals a weakness to the knees fielding this little missile from Sadie in just her twentieth year to heaven, a fine catch to be sure but now? And to this reedy, dark-haired, totally unknown Parisian trailing along behind her?

Racing over the familiar glistening grass to hug me, Sadie looks just fine. She looks flushed, gorgeous -- marriage has apparently suited her -- and yet how can she have gone and done it after all the enlightenment we have heaped upon her head and shoulders?

"This is Daniel," she says. "Daniel, this is my father. Sorry about the horn, Dad."

"It is a jozz horn," Don-yell confides in pretty fair English. I render him phonetically lest you pronounce him like the one in the lion's den, or D. Boon kilt a bar. Don-yell.

He lurches over my proffered handshake and throws his face past mine, one cheek and then the other, like Charles de Gaulle.

"Right," says Sadie. "Free form. Improv. Ornette Coleman or something."

"Roland Kirk," says Don-yell, only he pronounces it Roll On, as in deodorant. These young marrieds can speak of nothing but their noisy horn and I can speak of nothing at all just yet, though I will soon get over that, as you may have cause to know.

"People always think we're honking for like a reason? But it's real expensive to fix -- pull the wheel, he said, and stuff? -- so we figured it was the cheap way out."

"What was?"

"The JUST MARRIED thingie. So now the horn goes off, you wave and smile -- and they do too!"

"It makes them feel hoppy instead of ongry," adds Don-yell, and I can get behind such clarification as this: me too, happy instead of angry. I have always been a hair slow to get a joke that is not my own but hell, I'm pretty sure I've got this one now.

"So!" I posit. "You aren't married after all."

"Married? Are you serious, Dad?"

"Not yet married," says Don-yell, which earns him what we call The Look from my daughter. Sturdier than he appears, the lad manages to remain standing. And now that the JUST ANNULLED bells are gaily chiming in my head, I can even sympathize a bit. The Look can be tough.

"Where is everybody? Where are my brotherboys, and where's Kim, I thought she'd be here by now. God, I can't believe the summer's half over. What's been happenin, Dad?"

"A lot, actually. But I'm afraid it would take a whole book to tell you about it."

"Oh no."

Oh no indeed, gentle reader, for I never intended to try telling Sadie the story of my forty-eighth summer (summer of my second death) and common courtesy would normally forbid my telling it to you. Only in an extreme moment would I, Maurice Locksley, again be guilty of the ultimate faux pas, a writer writing about a writer, that is himself.

Let me, though, enter this plea: that the story of my long hot summer is not about a writer writing (quite the reverse in fact) though it is not about "writer's block" either, God help us, for a writer not writing is no different than anyone else who is not doing something. Not selling johnnycakes; not digging clams; not coaching the girls' swim team. You don't hear a lot about clammer's block, do you, or coach's block? Not writing is just another random link in the great chain of being-and-nothingness, one more small corner stall in the vast democracy of inaction.

Eventually, I did realize a book was gathering around me, sort of like weather; that the many fragments of family consciousness I was collecting willy-nilly were becoming a kind of Locksley collage, sheltering under a single narrative roof some few stray paragraphs from young Ben's novel-in-process, from his half-brother Will's post-collegiate private diary, and from the often nightly bicoastal phone connection with Kim, my wife sojourning in San Francisco. Toss in a sketch or two from Sadie (sojourning curbside Gay Paree) and we might have had it, a fresh dispatch from the foxhole of bourgeois America, spinning off the hamster-wheel of life.

It would have been nice doing business that way, not just because you tire of me, but because I tire of me too -- I'm human. Unfortunately, it didn't quite add up, it sorely wanted the old narrative unity. Notwithstanding the inclusion of the above-referenced documentation (diary bits, letters, sketches) it needed me telling you what to think every second, lest you get a wrong idea.

So here we go again. And traditionalist to the end, I will now begin at the beginning (unless you nitpickingly count this terribly concise apologia against me), begin in fact on the very first calendar day of summer, as I lie in bed with a case of reclining pneumonia....