Page 53 - WTP Vol.VII #2

at the Mobil Mart from Tahoma, whose name, he said, means “with a cute personality.”
I once gave into the temptation to buy a lottery ticket for a $100 million prize.
“You think you’re going to win?” Tahoma asked.
He turned to the next in line, refusing to take my money.
Today, I drive into the lot and make Warner a present of a bottle of Old Crow because this is my last trip and I won’t be seeing him again until fall. He shows the label to his owl who does not respond.
“We are all strangers and
yet we are intimates.”
“What are your plans for the summer?” he asks. “I’ve got a ton of books to read,” I say.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Too much reading. You’ll end up talking to yourself.”
I drive off and kid my father, “That’s what I have you for, so I don’t have to talk to myself.”
“Isn’t talking to yourself what they call writing?” he says. “Why aren’t you writing?”
Sandwich is celebrated for its glass museum and work- ing grist mill in the center of town, but it was not ap- preciated by Thoreau, who found it “half a Sandwich at most, and that must have fallen on the buttered side.” A plaque honors the whaler Peleg Nye, born here in 1817 and famous for being knocked off his ship and down the throat of a sperm whale, which spat him out alive. The library offers a lecture series that includes a talk titled, “What Do Dolphins Mean in Dreams?”
Ashes to Ashes
I always feel cheered when I glance at the mill where people surround the pond feeding waterfowl, others carrying sacks of freshly ground corn. My dyslexic nephew sent a postcard to me from here, writing that he “fed dread to the bucks.” It turns out he was pre- scient, the ducks are fed dread, not by visitors, but by a snapping turtle who makes his home here, and who sends tourists away wondering why, when a mother duck glides across the pond with her ducklings, every so often one of them disappears, suddenly yanked beneath the surface.
The Sandwich Harbor holds the ashes of my mother and father. I poured their remains off the pier of this town they lived near in their last years. I park there
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