Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu

“Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.”

That’s how John Updike’s essay “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” begins. One of the best works of sports writing by someone not a sportswriter, it is also one of the most lasting and memorable 20th century essays. Yet until recently you had to look for it in the long-out-of-print collection Assorted Prose (or else online).

Chris Carduff, my good friend for more than thirty years, and a consulting editor at the Library of America, has brought out “Hub Fans” in a beautifully produced little volume of its own, and he writes about it in the Huffington Post. The book is a moving goodbye not only to its subject, Ted Williams, but to Updike himself, who died only days after writing the introduction.

Boston-area residents, Updike fans, baseball fans, and fans of good writing should all find something to enjoy in it, and with its modest price (no more than many paperbacks now sell for), it makes a fine present.

Frogs on Thoreau

There aren’t a lot of New Yorker cartoons about Thoreau, but a friend just sent me this gem. I’m sure that not all the woodland creatures appreciated being ”taken up” by Thoreau.

Silk Parachute by John McPhee

John McPhee made his reputation on the strength of short, elegant books on small subjects. Written with crystalline clarity, each book strove to live up to Flaubert’s dictum that an author should be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

For many years this has been a winning strategy for McPhee. Nearly everything he has written has appeared first in The New Yorker and then in a beautiful little edition from FSG. (He thus gets paid twice for everything he writes, a neat trick that must appeal to his Scottish nature—as it would to any author’s.)

It must seem strange to him, then, that his biggest bestseller, Coming into the Country, was his most sprawling book, devoted to his most unruly subject (Alaska). Equally odd is the fact that his most anthologized essay is one of his most uncharacteristic. “Silk Parachute,” the title piece in this new collection, is a tribute to his mother and a reminiscence of childhood—the sort of self-reflection that he very rarely allows himself.

McPhee looks back in several of the essays here: on his prep-school basketball career, on learning to canoe, and on his “life list” of prairie oysters, rattlesnakes, and other strange foods he has eaten in the line of duty. He spends time with his grandson in England and with his daughter as she and her partner create fantastically detailed photos with a Mathew Brady-style view camera. And he describes what it was like to work with the legendary fact checkers of The New Yorker and with the equally legendary William Shawn, the “iron mouse.”

It’s a little sad to see McPhee, now 79, apparently summing up his life’s work, but it’s clear to see that while giving pleasure to his readers over the years he has harvested a great deal for himself.

Woodchuck art

Grace, the young daughter of one of my colleagues, was in the office the other day, and before long she was going around asking each of us what our favorite animal was.

”Woodchuck," I said without much hesitation, and a few minutes later she was back with this charming sketch, the original of which is now decorating my refrigerator at home.

Hands Washing Water by Chris Abani

When it comes to contemporary poetry, I’m pretty hard to please. So it was a pleasant surprise to find how much I enjoyed Hands Washing Water by Chris Abani.

The last poem in the book was one of my favorites. It’s dedicated to Percival Everett, author of the novel Erasure.

Unfinished Symphony

The light this morning is an aria.
I turn back to the stirring of coffee.
A way to ground this time
between the hush and the turning. Outside
a hummingbird is spreading rumors
among flowers. Even now.
Even after all the wounds have healed,
I scratch around a phantom scab, avoiding
what lies beneath. When I open the window,
rosemary and thyme spill in.
Later I will work loam in the herb garden,
crumbling the dirt, whispering dirges,
spicing the plants with sharpness. For now,
there is Percival’s painted fire
and the coffee. Sometimes
it is enough.