Fall for the Book

Responding to a desperate email, I met the lovely Katy for a reading at the Johnson Center at George Mason. As part of Fall for the Book, Four writers, all graduates of Mason's MFA program in writing were reading excerpts from their work. I enjoyed it. We arrived late and missed the first reading. The second reading was a group of poems inspired by ancient anatomical art. Some of it was really good. Finally, two novelists, Andrew Wingfield and Steve Amick read from their novels. Good Stuff.

Bennett Elliott and Camila Jones were at the reading. It was good to hang out with writers. There we were, a third of our ENGL 497: Advanced Nonfiction Class. The conversation started with literature and writing, but soon digressed to Lewis Grizzard's UGA joke, and a riff on the Yngwie Malmsteen of the washboard.

We also saw a friend who was back at school taking a the single class he needed to graduate. It seems the undergraduate advisor miscounted his upper level English Credits. Can you say that sucks?

"That dog will bite you."

Nutter’s

Another weekend, albeit one that was unusual for being mundane. For the first time since the end of June, the Jones family was together with no planes to take or meet, no holidays, or no family visits.

Saturday was filled with standard suburban rituals including multiple trips to Home Depot to buy the things we need to make our lives sweeter while enhancing our investment. Cherie bought flowers while I picked up a dandy new fluorescent light fixture for the laundry room. "Choose DIY and wake-up wondering who the fuck you are on a Saturday morning."” I am incapable of going to Home Depot without Rent's "Choose Life” spiel from Trainspotting. It is either on my lips or on my mind. On my mind is better; it leaves Cherie less annoyed.

Now for the sublime: After supper, we drove out to Sharpsburg, Maryland for ice cream from Nutter’s, a fine establishment that provides huge servings of ice cream for extremely reasonable prices. A small cone costs about a buck and a half and provides more than enough ice cream. The price isn't the point though. Nutter's is special because it inhabits a world far apart from our urban/suburban sprawl and crawl.

The store is on a side street behind city hall and across from a defunct Mason'’s lodge now serving as a "“Dance Academy." The building looks to be a hundred years old. The worn wood floor creaks in places. The decor seems to reflect three themes: 1. Someone'’s idea of what an ice cream parlor should be with twisted-iron tables and chairs, 2. Local crafts and antiques on the walls, and 3. Pictures of stock cars proudly displaying the Nutter’s banner along with trophies won running hard at the dirt track up in Hagerstown.

The lines are usually long in the summer. Customers cover the spectrums of age and social status. Sharpsburg provides few alternatives to Nutter's. It is a place to take the kids, a date, or grandma.

Most folks are obviously local. Many of us are obviously not. No one seems to have a great problem with out-of-towners. The locals seem used to it. The Joneses's little invasion of their ice-cream parlor is nothing compared to the day a hundred and forty-three years ago when two armies, one hundred and forty thousand men, fought one the nastiest one day battle of the Civil War. Those armies left four thousand dead men behind. The Union soldiers are buried on the hill beyond the Lutheran Cemetery.

Yeah, the people of Sharpsburg are accustomed to living with strangers