Back to my hometown.
And back I came, not in glory or richness. The first person I ran into went,
“I thought you were dead!”
Uh-huh.
I went to my apartment and opened all the windows, like a sign proclaiming,
“Come all ye burglars and thieves.”
I was deeply conscious of the pup not being there. His treats and toys lay on the floor like abandoned prayer, joyless and futile. Opened the wardrobe to find
Brand-new Donegal tweed jacket with a note:
. . . If you ever come home
. . . Emily the deserted.
Tried on the jacket and it fitted like found money. Had patches on the elbows, giving me that worn John Cheever vibe, as if I were some underpaid elderly professor of lit at a hole-in-the-wall second-grade college. The kind of place where grammar still mattered.
And thinking of grammar
