This Is No Time To Be Sitting On Your Can! Get Moving!

Working on bookish things with my dear friend, Caitlin

So I did and will! 

But first, please allow me add an un-welcomed and too, necessary impetus. And as much as I love books, this driver came from a set of pages, the likes of which I hope to never encounter again.

Earlier this week, I flew up to Philadelphia, rented a car and headed some 40 miles down south of Philly to a Main Line mainstay, Kennett Square. KS is, oh by the way, the ‘Mushroom Capital of the World’. There are mushroom farms everywhere. The land is gloriously green. 

It was but a two night stay and I packed light, carrying but one book, a ‘new’ one, just received, the ordering of which was stimulated by a glowing review in the Wall Street Journal.

Titled ‘Parade’s End’ by Ford Madox Ford (a contrived name if I’ve ever run across one), it’s proclaimed to be ‘The Finest English Novel About The Great War’ by the The Guardian. Excitedly, I started to dig into it on the flight up but got pleasantly sidetracked talking with my seatmate who was in a conundrum of a domestic prison with her warden who happened to be her estranged husband of twelve years. The fellow would not move out of the house; just stayed on one side of it. Talk about a set of handcuffs!

By time we touched down in Philly, we had solved nothing save for the offering of sympathetic suggestions and avuncular kindness. She seemed like a very nice gal and my warning advisory was I was not practicing law any longer and had not practiced domestic law since the first eight years of my practice-thirty-seven!! years ago-but too, I have been divorced thrice and do know the ins and outs of moving in and out.

Got my rental car, a tiny red low-riding Toyota- I looked like a bear on a bicycle-and GPS’d my way down to The Hilton garden Inn in Kennett Square.

Nice enough so let’s do some new reading before I go meet my friend Caitlin for early drinks and dinner at a good spot in a strip center away called Two Stones.

Read about 4-5 pages and felt I was eye swimming in quicksand. Surely the pace would gain momentum. Read  little more. It became more ponderous. Now, I’m feeling like ‘maybe it’s me’. Maybe travel fatigue has bent me a bit. I put it down for a while and cat napped. I picked it up again. No dice. Closed it up and randomly opened it a hundred pages in. It was still gruesomely thick and verbose and self-important and flatulent.

I said to Hell With It-maybe after some good food and few drinks, it’ll get better. I went to meet Caitlin who was the point of the spear for my travel.

The purpose of my visit was to confer with Caitlin about the plot structure of my next book and to ask lots of questions about how things work in the world of equine. And also, to see her training operation. She is a young super star in the world of Dressage and Eventing and a real whiz bang of a rider and trainer. Happily accomplished all that. And I got to visit up close and personal with her baby of babies, beautiful big tall eventing horse named Ally K G O. I own a share of Ally and have seen her take her courses and she is strong and sure and has an easy fifth and sixth gear. Impressive.  Caitlin was kind enough to take time out of her always incredibly busy days to teach and learn me up and helped clarify much of the mush between my ear…So lots of good business taken care of over the brief span of 36 hours and the land up there is magnificent so that was a bonus as well. 

When I returned to my room the second afternoon, I tried the book again. It was still awful, even more awful than before. The book had taken on the stench of an overripe literary death. It was suffocating me and I laid it down for good. Sometimes, so great is my need to read, I search for anything that might fill that bill. I went looking for the Gideon’s Bible and the local telephone book. Not to be found. I presume Covid has gotten those two regulars pulled. I finally went to the lobby and picked up a couple of local visitor tout magazines. They were boring buy nothing like that utterly horrible book ‘Parade’s End’.

So, it was a great, short travel, full of information and expansive thinking and learning. And as I had a very early flight out of Philly, I was up at 4:30 a.m. and on the road by 5. And my last act as I left the hotel was to take that fat, ugly, preposterous tome and toss it in a trashcan. That felt good.

Now I’m home and will start ‘OK, I’ve Seen Enough’ later this afternoon.

And there is a ‘warning’ P.S. to this brief tale of literary deceit and dismay.

I order books all the time so it is never a surprise when the nice folks at the UPS store hand me a box or a package and as is par for the course, they did again the day after my return.

Surprise! Surprise! It was another copy of that lousy ‘Parade’s End’. I must have hit the ‘buy’ button twice. I started to toss it away but paused and have now decided to keep it where I can always see it in my den.

It is now an albatross that screeches, “Not all that glitters is gold.”