Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

Nan’s son Raymond is another great kid. He has gotten deeply into music in the last few years. Nan seems to think that I might serve as a role model for him, which is completely wrong but flattering. He refused to do homework and he didn’t want to go to college, and instead he’s in his room making beats on a beat-making machine with square rubber pads. In the summer he works at Seacoast Nursery hauling around baby trees, and he spends his money on music equipment. A few years ago I heard him banging away on a drum set. Gradually he got better. He had a good rhythmic ear. Then I heard him playing the electric guitar — that was last year. Now I don’t hear him because he works with headphones on.

He reminds me a little of me in his single-mindedness, except that he’s doing pop music and I was doing classical music in high school. I barely passed Algebra II and I refused to write papers on King Lear , which I thought was an unbearable, false, vile jelly of a play with no beauty in it anywhere, and instead I read Aaron Copland’s book on music and Rimsky-Korsakov on orchestration. Rimsky-Korsakov really understood the bassoon — that’s why he gave it Scheherazade ’s D minor solo. In minor keys, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote, the bassoon has a “sad, ailing quality,” while in major keys it creates an “atmosphere of senile mockery.”

I read some of Stravinsky’s books, too, all written with the help of the overly allusive Robert Craft, including the one where he says, “I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.” And I read one of Paul Hindemith’s books. Hindemith, a composer, outraged me when he wrote that the bassoon, “with its clattering long levers and other obsolete features left in a somewhat fossil condition,” was due for a major overhaul. I had to admit, though, that the keys did make a lot of noise. There’s no way to play a fast passage without some extraneous clacking. Listen to Scheherazade —you’ll hear all kinds of precise metallic noises coming from the bassoonist.

I secretly wanted to be a composer, and when I wasn’t practicing bassoon I was at our old Chickering piano, plinking away, writing scraps of piano sonatas in a little stave-lined notebook that I still have. And then I read Keats’s sonnet and realized I wasn’t going to have any success as a composer. I went to Berkeley for a while, and then to France, where I discovered Rimbaud’s Illuminations —Rimbaud is a great sea poet — and while I was in Paris some Smith College students gave a party and I danced with two smiley girls, one in a skirt and one in sexy plaid pants, and I discovered that I enjoyed dancing with smiley Smith girls. When I got home to America, Saturday Night Fever was playing in movie theaters, and Elvis Costello was watching the detectives, and the Talking Heads were doing “Take Me to the River,” and I suddenly thought, I’ve missed the boat, I want to hear music I can dance to.

I’M IN THE PARKING LOT of Margarita’s, which is one strip mall over from Planet Fitness. I’ve been listening to a good songwriting podcast from England called Sodajerker while watching the latest developments in the Kardashian family saga on one of the Planet Fitness TVs. Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, the married couple who wrote “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” for the Animals, and many other hits, told the Sodajerker podcasters about how they sometimes wrote “slump songs” together — songs written just so they were writing something. And some of the slump songs became hits.

“You’re going to have to face it,” says Robert Palmer, “you’re addicted to love.” I’m debating whether I should go into Margarita’s and have dinner at the bar. You can order what’s called a Mexican Flag, which is three different enchiladas. I think I won’t, because when you eat at the bar you can’t read.

Here’s what happened at Quaker meeting. I listened to the clock, as I always do. Very few people spoke. A man I didn’t know stood almost at the end of meeting and said his wife had died. He was quite an old man, with strong cheekbones, thin, and he held his hands out for a moment before he spoke. He said, “My wife died in my arms last week. I was lucky enough to know her for almost ten years. We met in a drawing class and I remember being impressed by how intensely she concentrated while she was drawing. She drew a pear. We were all drawing pears, but her pear made sense. It sat on the plate. I told her how much I liked her drawing, and we became friends and it turned out we were both ready to love and we got married very soon after that. One of the last things she said to me before she stopped talking was—” And then he stopped. He said nothing for a long time. Then he said, “She said, ‘I’ll miss you.’”

This is the kind of thing that happens at meeting sometimes. In the silence that followed I thought of the man’s wife dying in his arms, and suddenly the long, complicated poem I’ve been struggling with, about how in 1951 Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who was a great Francophile, and his friend General de Lattre of France persuaded the American legislature to supply napalm and other arms to the French forces in Vietnam, seemed not worth doing. I don’t want to know about evil via poetry. I don’t want to spread the knowledge of evil. I just want to know about love. At the end of meeting, the clerk, Donna, said, “Do we have any visitors?” Someone from North Carolina said he was visiting from North Carolina. And then Donna said, “Okay, are there any almost messages?”

This is often my favorite part of meeting. An almost message is something somebody was on the verge of saying during silent meeting but for one reason or another didn’t say, but the pressure to say it is still there.

This time a young woman in a brown short-sleeved dress said, “I sat down here an hour ago and there was nothing in my mind. I’d rushed to get here and there was just a jumble of stuff in my head that I’m supposed to be doing, a little to-do list for Sunday. And then in the silence a word came to me, and the word was ‘unprepared.’ I turned it over in my mind. I wasn’t prepared for meeting. I had nothing to say. And then I thought, But isn’t this the essence of Quakerism? We’re not supposed be prepared. We’re supposed to sit here and wait for what’s true to come.”

She said some more things I don’t remember, and then she sat down, and I thought, She’s right, the key sometimes is not to be prepared. Wait and see. Don’t prepare for wars by having huge military bases all over the world, four hundred bases. Don’t prepare for terrorists by creating a homeland bureaucracy. Don’t expect people to hate one another. Wait and see what happens.

Then there were announcements. A film about sustainable agriculture was scheduled for Wednesday, and the knitting committee was going to be knitting blankets for sale, the proceeds to go for the furnace fund. They’re thinking ahead to winter. Then everyone went into the other room to eat and have coffee.

Afterward I drove to Planet Fitness listening to the song about Darfur, by Mattafix. It’s sung by a British man, Marlon Roudette, who has an extraordinary maple-sugar voice. At first I thought he was a woman. “Where others turn and sigh, you shall rise,” he says.

Chevron discovered oil in the Darfur region of Sudan in 1978. In 1979, the CIA installed a friendly governor in Darfur, and the Carter administration began sending weapons and money to Jaafar Nimeiry, Sudan’s president, who allowed the United States to build military bases in the country. Reagan sent more weapons and proclaimed that President Nimeiry, a murderous dictator, was a great friend to America — the CIA loved him because he was anti-Qaddafi. The result of our years of military assistance and meddling was a brutal civil war and a catastrophe of refugees and starvation. If you corrupt a government with money, weapons, and covert advisors, people are going to die. That’s why the CIA has to be abolished immediately. It takes no great insight to see this. “You don’t have to be extraordinary, just forgiving,” sings Marlon Roudette.