THE EIGHTH DEADLY SIN

Great Lakes Diary 43

Yesterday, while we were all at the office toiling away, a city boat came out to put out all the buoys for the summer swimmers. The first fishbilly of summer fished for his fishies off the pier. And this spring, glorious sea birds have been hanging on our beach, getting fresh with each other and flying high and diving straight down like meteors to catch fish and steal fishbilly bait. The dogs are having a ball eating rotten things that have washed up on shore, and then puking. Along the Chicago River, the bridges lift for rich-people yachts, the grinding and the signaling and the blinking, like soothing war machines from another planet. A neighbor said, as we watched the sun rise, “I’ve been listening to War of the Worlds read to me. Oddly, it calms me down.” Bacchanals by the lake are the most soothing bacchanals. I remember how my grandmother would listen to the Detroit Tigers games described on the radio: “And it’s a liiiine driiiive by Al Kaline to center field!" Exciting and calming all at once.

The beachcombers go swimming for bricks, sweeping their metal detectors looking for doubloons (they’ll find a broken toy and call it treasure), and filling bags of polished stone for their driveways. Mostly, there are the patient pokers for sea glass, little bits of bottles and jars ground down by sand and wave. I’ve done a little poking myself, but I am impatient, impatience being the 8th deadly sin, and I remember how my grandmother would sit for hours in her lawn looking for one four-leaf clover, seeking out the freak, when there I was all along, waving my hands, over here.

Tennyson thought of Ulysses, home at last, restless as hell, ready to head out again, soothing himself with a song of his own antsy-pantsy:

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

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