Surely not six years since?

I think of it, always, at Easter. Of course. Retrospectively, our Ups and Downs of being the Ironic and Unwitting Gatsbys of Nowhere. What did our vaingloriousness out there? But the parties – oh what a bunch of parties! My childhood reads like a memoir in party-planning, we the people for whom “Halloween” was a verb.

From this bully pulpit I’d like to shout out to Oreo the cow, Oreo finally. Knowing neither the bovine lifespan nor the raise-and-slaughter proclivities of the owners, I don’t know where he’s reading from (chewing gently, the soft fleshy white and yolk exploding attractively on his haunches). Becoming peculiar happens gradually, and for us his complicity was essential and freely given. I mean to thank him.

Point the second: the slingshot. When the elastic severed (violently, unexpectedly), the juvenile eyes proximate its fissure were mercifully spared. Consider, then, the relative success of parties as a direct correlative of their likelihood to cause guest injury. What more I learned: of good parties, that they will have wine, art, exploitative capitalism. Of synchronized swimming, to do it often. Of partying in the middle of nowhere – put on a show, they’ll never stop arriving. Or haven’t they yet?

(I didn’t have to buy flowers this year, because Ivana in Helsinki is having a workshop and I arranged my own. What’s coincidence?)

Now, I have boiled an egg and I am going to fling it as hard as I can into the Baltic Sea.

couldn’t be more personal, or reveal him more completely, he. goes through every one of them, even when the Muse of Absolute joy is sitting on his back, without spilling a single really autobiographical bean. The which, I suggest, though possibly not to everyone’s taste, is highly literate vaudeville – a traditional first act, a man balancing words, emotions, a golden cornet on his chin, instead of the usual evening cane, chromium table, and champagne glass filled with water. But I have something far more explicit and leading to tell you than that. I’ve been waiting for it: In Brisbane, in 1922, when Seymour and I were five and three, Les and Bessie played on the same bill for a couple of weeks with Joe Jackson – the redoubtable Joe Jackson of the nickel-plated trick bicycle that shone like something better than platinum to the very last row of the theater. A good many years later, not long after the outbreak of the Second World War, when Seymour and I had just recently moved into a small New York apartment of our own, our father – Les, as he’ll be called hereafter – dropped in on us one evening on his way home from a pinochle game. He quite apparently had held very bad cards all afternoon. He came in, at any rate, rigidly predisposed to keep his overcoat on. He sat. He scowled at the furnishings. He turned my hand over to check for cigarette-tar stains on my fingers, then asked Seymour how many cigarettes he smoked a day. He thought he found a fly in his highball. At length, when the conversation – in my view, at least – was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been newly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would have found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at once, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les – as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in his life. He said he wasn’t sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson’s beautiful bicycle. And aside from its enormous sentimental value to my father personally, this answer, in a great many ways, was true, true, true.

– J. D. Salinger, Seymour – An Introduction

Dispatches from 60 North, 25 East:

To celebrate Holy Week, the world’s most secular country shutters its city life and heads to cottage. University takes an inscrutable Wednesday-Wednesday break, which Laurie and I kicked off at splendid Musta Kissa in Kallio. There we found ourselves in the middle of a Sagolik set, whose combination of Finnish warbling and cello thwaping I find utterly irresistible (is ‘thwaping’ the word? Does it matter?). Their recordings do them little justice* – they own the room, with more character and poetry than most things I hear, or read, or say. The girl has a powerful voice.

Musta Kissa (‘black cat’) is managed by some amiable Frenchmen – which, according to Laurie, accounts for the tolerability of the house wine. This was the night of ‘Maundy Thursday’ – has any North American ever used this phrase for Holy Thursday? Because I was well enough made the fool not knowing what it was. When I first saw it printed on the Nordea door, blithely refusing me bank service until Tuesday, I thought it a comical error in translation (picture, Godfather-accent: “Maundy, Thursday, Tuesday, Wednesday!”). I privately laughed at this joke, while cooler heads informed me “maundy” is the liturgical washing of the feet. How could seven years of parochial school have failed me so badly?

The following night was Good Friday, which meant the city turned out to Via Crucis, Finland’s pre-Eastertide answer to the Pageant of the Masters. I couldn’t be prevailed upon to stay for long, but the uncommon spectacle of lights-out in Kruununhaka was lovely indeed. (As was what Finnish I caught of the production – namely, the unintentionally hilarious ‘Jesus Nazaritilainen’). Moreover the day was wet and cold; I had bad need of a maundy (am I saying it right?).

The rest of the holiday passed in amiable quiet; Robert was visiting, always a thrill to see old Chapman pals! I felt badly that the city of Helsinki was on its pseudo-religious hiatus, but we enjoyed playing the tourist nonetheless. Now regular programming recommences.

*I could say the same of French Films, who for the simplicity of their sound on recording totally entertains when live. They’re fine performers.