Old Songs in a New Cafe by Robert James Waller Read Free Book Online Page B

your life, for she likes subtlety and low decibel counts.
    Excessive focus on detail and procedure at the expense of vision, of dreams, of reflection, is another good way to get rid
     of romance. We in the academic world have mastered this approach.
    Buy birthday cards, anniversary cards, and the like instead of making up your own. All of us are poets; some have just lost
     their voices for a while. As Ray Bradbury once said, about people in general, “And they were all, when their souls grew warm,
     poets.”
    Finally, the surest way to lose romance forever is to do things just for money, even though your cells tell you this is not
     what you should be doing.
    Now, in no particular order, here are some suggestions for keeping romance around you (or getting her back if she has flown):
    Read some poetry every day. For starters, try a little Yeats, then some Kipling (along with some of his stories). I know Kipling
     must be terribly out of fashion nowadays, but romantics never concern themselves with fashion anyhow.
    Set a new schedule for yourself and do your reading then. Try this: Instead of flopping around in bed, get up early—maybe
     4 A.M .—on a Sunday, in the winter, when a classic Iowa howler is blowing in from the Dako-tas. This works pretty well. Besides,
     you have the secret pleasure of being reasonably sure you are the only one in the Western Hemisphere reading Kipling at that
     very moment.
    Here’s another idea. Sometime in your life, build your own house or at least the most intimate parts of it. Design it, too,
     with lots of thought You will get endless pleasure and romance from walking through doorways and knowing you put the door
     there with your mind and your hands.
    Collect little things, like the old knife on your desk or the small box you had for keepsakes when you were a child. At a
     time in my life when I was just overcome with administrative burdens, and my face showed it, one of my faculty gave me a small
     wooden flute along with a note that said, “Don’t let your muse slip away.” I keep the flute where I can see it.
    Play a musical instrument. Something you can get out on those early mornings when reading is not the thing. Don’t tell me
     you are not musical and, for heaven’s sake, don’t tell me you are tone deaf. I simply, if you’ll pardon the expression, won’t
     hear of it. If all else fails, or even if it doesn’t, buy an Appalachian dulcimer. You can get warm, exotic sounds out of
     it right away without knowing anything formal about music at all. Try reading some ancient Chinese poetry while you strum
     the dulcimer. It works wonders.
    Travel is good for romance. But don’t just travel;
travel.
Here’s what you need: notebooks, a small compass, a pocket atlas of the world, and a spyglass for looking out of airplane
     windows or across the rooftops of Paris or far down the country lanes in England. A word of warning is needed here: If you
     are traveling with your boss and he or she is not a romantic, be careful. You may not want to be seen with your compass and
     a spyglass on an airplane. If you are a true romantic, however, it won’t matter much, because you will be good at what you
     do and your boss will just shake his or her head and mutter about what one has to put up with to get quality work these days.
    Keep good journals of your life and travels. This is vitally important. I delight in reading and re-reading my adventures
     in the old markets of Saudi Arabia, where I bargained for gold and silver to bring home, and my wild ride through the streets
     of Riyadh late at night with a Bedouin cab driver who played Arabic music on a tape deck and tried to give me a short course
     in his language, while the best I could do was teach him to say “Kleenex” by pointing to a box of it on his dashboard.
    I like knowing that I was in Richmond, Virginia, at 7:55 A.M . on June 7, 1981, or that I was in Paris in the snow in January 1982, or that I was once in Montego Bay,