Hello, Halley’s Comet

Another year.

Proceed.

Muffled Serenity

We had a lot of snow this winter. One of the things I enjoy most about snow is the morning after. Going outside to shovel the walk and around my car, there are moments when I stop to take a breath and it’s like I have earmuffs on. It’s as if the volume of the world is turned down except for the crush sound of shovels plunging into snow punctuated by sharp intakes of breath. It’s peaceful. I wish I had more moments like that.

Leave Of That Voice

No, said Tobin. The gifts of the Almighty are weighed and parceled out in a scale peculiar to himself. It’s no fair accountin and I dont doubt but what he’d be the first to admit it and you put the query to him boldface.

Who?

The Almighty, the Almighty. The expriest shook his head.

[...]

Oh it may be the Lord’s way of showin how little store he sets by the learned. Whatever could it mean to one who knows all? He’s an uncommon love for the common man and godly wisdom resides in the least of things so that it may well be that the voice of the Almighty speaks more profoundly in such beings as lives in silences themselves.

He watched the kid.

For let it go how it will, he said, God speaks in the least of creatures.

The kid thought him to mean the birds or things that crawl but the expriest, watching, his head slightly cocked, said: No man is give leave of that voice.

The kid spat into the fire and bent to his work.

I aint heard no voice, he said.

When it stops, said Tobin, you’ll know you’ve heard it all your life.

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

Domenico DeMarco

I was in New York over the weekend. For lunch on Saturday, my friend and I took the Q train out to Brooklyn (way out, almost at Coney Island) to get pizza at Di Fara. First things first, Di Fara is incredible pizza; the best I’ve had anywhere. What actually makes Di Fara particularly remarkable is the man (pictured above), Dom DeMarco. Dom’s been running the place since 1959. He’s 69. He’s been there since he was 19 making great pizzas by hand for 50 years and his, I believe, are the only hands to touch the pizza before they go in the oven.

Di Fara is a small, unassuming corner shop on Avenue J in Midwood. It’s crowded and there’s little seating. Most people are happy to stand and wait, watching while DeMarco works his deceptively simple craft with hands that must have rolled out tens of thousands of pies. I got there a little bit after they opened and still waited about an hour. Waits during rushes would be unbearable to non-enthusiasts, but people wait. I think that’s as much testament to the respect DeMarco’s earned as it is to the quality of the pie.

How much does a man have to love his work to do it, day in and day out, for 50 years? While wildly popular, he can’t be doing it for the money. He’s pushing 70, in and out of the hospital, and still at it. I’ll count myself lucky if I find something to love half as much as Dom loves his work.

Their Wondrous, Fragile Life

In Memoriam, J.F.K.

This bullet is an old one.

In 1897, it was fired at the president of Uruguay by a young man from Montivideo, Avelino Arredondo, who had spent long weeks without seeing anyone so that the world might know that he acted alone. Thirty years earlier, Lincoln had been murdered by that same ball, by the criminal or magical hand of an actor transformed by the words of Shakespeare into Marcus Brutus, Caesar’s murderer. In the mid-seventeenth century, vengeance had employed it for the assassination of Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus, in the midst of the public hecatomb of a battle.

In earlier times, the bullet had been other things, because Pythagorean metempsychosis is not reserved for humankind alone. It was the silken cord given to viziers in the East, the rifles and bayonets that cut down the defenders of the Alamo, the triangular blade that slit a queen’s throat, the wood of the Cross and the dark nails that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer, the poison kept by the Carthaginian chief in an iron ring on his finger, the serene goblet that Socrates drank down one evening.

In the dawn of time it was the stone that Cain hurled at Abel, and in the future it shall be many things that we cannot even imagine today, but that will be able to put an end to men and their wondrous, fragile life.

Jorge Luis Borges