Free Extra Innings by Doris Grumbach Page A

graffiti with the mainstream culture of our time.
    Mailer saw in graffiti the desperate expression of disenfranchised young persons putting their mark on cities. For our time this may be true. I always feel a pang of sorrow when I pass a great rock formation at the edge of a city and see painted on it something like ROB LOVES LUCY. JUNE 1953. Did they marry? If they did, does he love her still? I think (with my usual misanthropy), probably not. If they didn’t, and if Rob is still alive, does he look back with longing to that June graduation night almost forty years ago when, full of beer and high spirits, he climbed a steep cliff and immortalized himself and his high school sweetheart with red paint on white rock? However it all turned out, there is always an unexplainable grief for me in the sight of such graffiti.
    People stop me in Blue Hill to say they too are planning to write their memoirs. Some write to say they have led a truly fascinating life, and surely I would like to hear about it and then commit it to writing for them.
    Of course, it is true: everyone who has lived for a while has within them wonderful memories, events that only they are privy to. But often the expressed desire is followed by the sentence: ‘I would write it myself, if only I had the time.’ To them, the writer is someone who is not doing something more important, like them, and therefore has the time.
    Simon & Schuster sends me its new catalogue. Dutifully I read through all such mailings to see if there is something of interest to me that I should watch for in the months ahead. I am stopped halfway through the announcements of new hardback books by a title: A Look Back from the End Zone . This turns out to be a genuine sports memoir about fathers and sons, football and competition, a book that didn’t borrow the idea for a metaphor, the way I did.

November
    The time on either side of now stands fast .
    â€” Maxine Kumin

Rain today, and a light coating of frost over everything. The Cove has taken on the look of steady menace. Blue water is gone, turned to grey, and no longer extends a shining welcome to the visits of birds, boats, or swimmers. At six this morning when it was fifty-eight degrees in my study, I had trouble starting a fire in the woodstove. After much futile paper-shredding and smoke I gave up, and resignedly turned on the furnace. It caught with a roar, echoing my own fury at having to burn expensive oil.
    Failure with the stove repeats itself at the clipboard. There I am working on a novel which I have called, as a convenient joke (after the title in the contract), Unnamed . Nothing comes. I go to the computer on which I edit the work of yesterday, for this memoir. Nothing works. I walk aimlessly about the house, stowing things which do not need putting away in already jammed kitchen cabinets. Desperate, I decide to change the location of pictures on the walls.
    I am of the opinion that doing this brings them back to life. They are dissolving into oblivion, I reason, when they stay too long on one wall, in one place. They seem to sink into it. Changed, replaced, they rise up and out, demanding that ‘attention must be paid,’ as Willy Loman’s wife required for her husband.
    So I put The Prophet where Three Sirens on a Rocking Horse hung. The Sirens are a pen-drawing acquisition from New Orleans last winter. Funny and startling as the three nude ladies are, especially astride the horse and stared at by a lascivious, mustachioed gentleman in the bushes, I have not really seen them for a long time. Perhaps, in their new location …
    I go back to my study (now warmed), sit at my desk, and stare out at a red squirrel busily engaged in digging up the bulbs we have just planted in the rock garden. By now, too indolent to consider going onto the cold deck to chase him, I dial Helen Yglesias’s number, feeling guilty because this is Helen’s writing time too. There is no answer. Then I