I made oak angels today at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire, on a day trip with my friend DG. I just dropped down in the duff and scribbled my limbs for a while. The oaks are the last to relent before stick season, their leaves so gone hard copper it is difficult to credit that they don’t clank or shatter when they hit the ground.
The sun was out, all day, and this is so unprecedented of late here that the digital signs on the New Hampshire highways warned: SUN GLARE POSSIBLE. Which was true, and I flipped visors restlessly on both the outbound and return-bound drive to staunch the migraine-encouraging tattoo of tree-tree-tree-tree-tree-tree shadows over the road from my left.
I can count on no fingers how many times I’ve been to Manchester, New Hampshire, before, and I got to fix that today, with D, my friend. It, Manchester, has alleys and wide thoroughfares like it believes it’s a metropolis. In this regard, it reminds me of the misplaced urban exuberance of Pittsfield, Mass. Signs in a park said NO DOG FOULING. Cold today, everything steaming, again like bigger cities.
We looked at Charles Sheeler’s perfect take on Manchester’s mill and canal district, ambiently eerie and emotionally distant, in the Currier Museum of Art. I got very emphatic and almost shouty when I spotted it from across the gallery; “The Charleses” (Sheeler and Demuth) are a pair of my favorite American painters, who, true story, almost inspired me to get a Master’s degree in art history, with a focus on 20th century painting between the Wars.
This day was a gift for driving, and my car has the dopamine feedback package that encourages one to give it the foot. Get it in the hammer lane, stomp it, and after the briefest holding-of-breath, agony-and-ecstasy pause, it grunts and f-ing goes and it is beyond my willpower not to do that again and again. Unfortunately, the most exhilarating BLAAAWRT happens around 83 MPH, not that I’d know, of course. The exhaust system is tuned for the sensibilities of a 19-year-old. It’s genius.
But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn’t been.
-- Robert Frost