Monday, August 20, 2007

Jack and Mary Lillian on trip east

I've been thinking about my father today. This is a picture from the time when there weren't very many pictures, but some of them were quite spectacular! This one sat in its frame on our livingroom bookcase all the time I was growing up. I can almost feel the bookcase underneath it with the set of Nathaniel Hawthorne in blue bindings, striped with red, stamped with gold, and not of very good quality, kind of flimsy. One summer I read them all and decided that Hawthorne was not a great prose stylist, although some of the stories were OK. This was the summer I feel in love with Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke, which my mother got from a book club that selected plays. I decided that my cool hands would sooth the fevered brow of my beloved like the cool hands of Miss Alma. . .

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