Free Samuel Johnson Is Indignant by Lydia Davis Page B

she is.
    Since the dentist’s wife now has her degree, she is no longer studying with my husband, but I do not remember what she is doing, though I was told, probably by my husband.
    We have been eating the tomatoes from our garden, though the harvest is not as good as it has been in other years. A woodchuck has dug a hole down under the fence and up among the tomato plants and has been eating the tomatoes as they ripen. My husband puts heavy stones in the hole, but during the night the woodchuck moves them.
    I thought this was the end of it, that I would hear no more about the dentist and the results of the season’s planting. I thought there was a slight embarrassment all around. But last week my husband came home from his three-month cleaning with a bag of onions and told me that the issue had been tacitly resolved, that he and the dentist had talked about the long dry spells coming at the wrong times and how the summer had been a poor one for tomatoes. Even the dentist’s plants had not done well. And yesterday, during the insertion of my bonded filling, the dentist told me how he makes grape jelly. I am relieved that there are apparently no hard feelings. The dentist’s onions are pretty, small and fresh. I will want to think of some way of preparing them so that they will be particularly noticeable as we eat them.
    My heart seems to be beating a little faster now. If it is true that I have been thinking more slowly, I have still been able to learn new things and remember them, in the past few months. I forget what we actually gave to our sailor friend, and there are other things I know I have forgotten, and still others that I must have forgotten, but I have learned the history of the word embarrassment and many other word histories, I have been introduced to the corkscrew willow, I have learned the term bonded filling , and many other new definitions from the dictionaries, for instance that the verb flense means to cut up a whale , and that the adjective next is the superlative of nigh . I have learned two new terms for familiar things: in music, the Alberti bass , and in grammar, the Oxford comma . I have had new thoughts about the westward expansion of the United States. I have heard the expression dead soldiers twice in two days and learned that it means empty bottles. Maybe it also means anything that is no more use to anyone, since I first heard it from a woman at a plant nursery who was looking through a bin of gourds and tossing out the rotten ones. I learned from the dentist that if I make grape jelly I should heat the sugar in the oven before adding it to the grape juice. I have learned more about the Kennedy family and particularly Edward Kennedy from a magazine in the dentist’s office. I had no trouble, after a few minutes, recognizing Dvoák’s “New World Symphony” on the radio while I was having my bonded filling put in. After reading the introduction again, having read it years ago and forgotten what I learned from it, I have learned yet again how Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast came to be written, that when Dana was a student at Harvard he fell ill and could not continue his studies, went to sea to recover his health, and subsequently wrote about his experiences, so that it is the book of a young man, whereas I had thought of it as the book of an older man just because it has been a classic for so many decades. What I don’t know yet is why I see it so often in secondhand bookstores and at library sales.

Information from the North Concerning the Ice:
    Each seal uses many blowholes and each blowhole is used by many seals.

Murder in Bohemia
    In the city of Frydlant in Bohemia where all the people are anyway pale as ghosts and dressed in dark winter clothes, an old woman was unable any longer to bear the inevitable falling of her life into destitution and disgrace, and went mad and murdered out of pity her husband, her two sons, and her daughter,