Every Third Thought by John Barth Read Free Book Online Page A

ride back to Bridgetown, amid the back-seat/front-seat banter and more talk of solstices and equinoxes, “Just remember what the Good Book tells us,” Mr. Prosper mock-solemnly bids all hands: “ To every thing there is a season .”
    “Ecclesiastes Three,” footnotes his wife, who teaches kids’ Sunday School at Bridgetown Methodist-Protestant Southern.

2
    winter
    A ND THERE ENDED “Gee’s” Solstitial Illumination of Post-Equinoctial Vision #1 , as he seems to have dubbed his first-drafting thereof. No green flash at its close, either—when with gratified relief he transferred it from loose-leaf binder to desktop computer, editing as he typed—but an afterglow of further associated memories, not all of them warm. Such a contrast between his old pal Ned’s family life and his own! (“Now wasn’t that nice ,” Mom Newett granted, scarcely looking up from her dinner plate of Smithfield ham, steamed kale, and mashed potatoes while he recounted his adventure; and Dad once again disdained such “three-initial make-works” as CCC and WPA: “We Piss Anywhere,” he would sniff at the sight of road- and bridge-builders standing about.) That last line of Ned’s birthday song, When the winter is through , reminded G. now not only of the heavy literal winters of his childhood—snow forts and snowmen and snowball fights under the leafless maples of Bridge Street; the creeks and rivers frozen hard
enough for ice-skating, and even the Bay itself ice-locked at times from shore to shore, as almost never happens nowadays; coal bins and coal furnaces in those years before most folks switched to oil or gas; even free-standing wood- and coal-stoves in the houses still without central heating—but also of the long economic winter of the Great Depression, more burdensome to his parents, he came to understand, than to Ned and Ruth’s, who were on the state payroll. As Fred Newett more than once dryly observed, “Schoolteachers mightn’t get paid much , but at least they get paid regular .”
    “And that means something,” G.’s mother would agree, characteristically not troubling to explain to her son just what, in fact, it meant: the security of knowing that however much the family might have to scrimp and save while FDR’s New Deal gradually improved the nation’s general welfare, at least they wouldn’t likely be standing in breadlines or squatting in “Hoovervilles” like so many of their less fortunate countrymen.
    “Et cetera,” G. concluded now to his wife, who supposed she was lucky to have been born twelve years after her spouse—just in time for World War Two?
    “Another grim season,” her husband granted, although he could still hear his father declaring (probably over Chesapeake crabcakes, coleslaw, and iced tea, another favorite Newett family menu) that it sure put the country’s economy back on its feet, their domestic one included, despite wartime shortages and rationing: his insurance business up; people eager to buy new cars—or better used ones, as war production raised
farm and factory incomes but curtailed production of nonessential goods.
    “ Seasons ,” Mandy echoed. We happened likewise to be enjoying crabcakes, made however with blue-crab meat imported from who knew where, the local crabbing season having ended in the fall; and instead of iced tea we sipped jug Chablis and mineral water. “You seem to be hooked on that particular motif lately.”
    Netted by , he guessed he’d say, rather than hooked on , the accompanying victuals being crustaceans rather than fish. But, “I reckon I am: hooked in spades, to mix another metaphor.” Because the more he mused it—which is what he mainly did with his mornings through that January and February and into March, while Senator John McCain won the Republican presidential primaries, and Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battled each other for the Democratic nomination, and things dragged bloodily on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the