DIPTYCH BEFORE DYING the opening of a long ago written short novel

This is the opening of a short novel which possibly in French might be considered a recite.  Two journeys I took with my father: to Newfoundland and Mexico City after his wife and my mother had died.  I think it might deserve to be in print.  But how?   Thomas McGonigle

                      DIPTYCH BEFORE   DYING

                         The Left Panel:  To Newfoundland

      My father and I went to Newfoundland in the summer of 1973. 

In the morning Dad had been up before me.  An empty beer can on the dining room table.  He had smoked a couple of cigarettes. He had changed out of his pajamas and   gone back to sleep in his day clothes.

                  [This is a transcription from that lousy source reality]

        

        I never met a person who knew him as a young man or even from the time he had met my mother in New York as the country was getting ready to be taken up by World War Two.  He is a solitary figure who exists in some pictures in a photo album where he is among people.  He is only a photographic representation that when I die the ability to identify him will disappear as my children will have very little interest as by way of their mother they do have grandparents who they knew and to whose funeral they will have gone, though neither of those people have a belief in such ceremonies. 

         Both of the children have been to my parent’s grave on Long Island.  For a few years when they were children Anna and I would take them along on Good Friday when we drove out to Long Island, went to the cemetery, brushed away the leaves and planted a couple of flower bulbs in front of the small tombstone and then later go to a diner near Patchogue, drive by the house where I had lived as a child, drove out on the Mascot Dock and usually stopped at a shopping mall on the way back to the city where they were delivered to their mother who lives five streets away from where I am typing this.

                                                      * 

         I heard him snoring.  His toothless mouth was open.  He clenched a light blanket to his body.  He lay in the bed where his wife, my mother had died seven months before.

His dream would be burying the miniature poodle that had to be put to sleep.  He took the newspaper wrapped body out to Sheepshead Bay and buried it in the sand, down deep where the fresh water began to run, he said.  The vet had taped the eyes shut and bound the lower jaw to snout   with buff colored twine.  As the parcel lay in the puddle at the bottom of the hole he thought he detected movement. He ripped it open and put his hand inside.  He pulled it out covered with fleas.

                                                      *

        

         Dad, come on, you got to get up.  It’s time to go. We have a lot of driving to do.

         I don’t want to go.  Your mother can’t come with us.

         She’d want you to go.  Have you packed the rest of your things?

         I don’t want to pack.

         I’ve packed most of your stuff.  See if there is anything missing.

         I don’t care.

         I’ll check, don’t worry.  Get your razor.

         To cut my throat.

         You can’t cut your throat with that.

         You think so.

         He goes from the bedroom to the kitchen and I hear a can of beer pop.

         I have most of the stuff in the car.  You gotta help a little.  You do want to go?

         No.

         I pack his fishing pole and equipment box.  He drinks the beer.

         You want one? He asks.  It’s cold. 

         As I am drinking the beer he brings the razor and soap brush in a little plastic bag.

         We are off.  Ice chest loaded with beer.  9W to the Thruway north from Saugerties.

         Dad sleeps in the backseat, wakes up drinks a can of beer, smokes a cigarette, goes back to sleep.

                                             *

         The New York City radio stations fade out.  Above Albany we stopped before crossing into Vermont so Dad could have a cup of coffee from a machine in the gas station.

         I was here once with your mother in Vermont.  The car broke down.  It was just before the war.

         Didn’t that car break down on your honeymoon?

         Yes, in Virginia.  It didn’t when we went to visit that wife of yours in Virginia.  How is she?

         Okay, she lives in the city now. 

         Good for her.  In Virginia, yes, we almost made it to North Carolina.  That is where we wanted to go. I wanted to play golf.  I had been there with fellows from work.  But this was another time.  Your mother and I drove up to Vermont, to see the leaves changing or something.  Your mother liked to do things like that.  I don’t know.  We couldn’t understand what people were saying. We had a nice time even though the car broke down.  Not like that time in the Catskills when they thought we were Jews, do you remember that?  I loved Marion, your mother.  She was such a good woman.

         O, Dad, please.

         But I did, Tom, I loved her very much and she loved me.  I’d have done anything for her.

         You can’t do anything for her now.  Maybe have a good time.

         How can I have a good time without your mother?

         He gave me his glasses and went back to sleep, cupped the side of his head in his hand and slept.

         Sentences:  He could not look at me too long as he knew I held him responsible

                           I held myself responsible in some way for her death.

                           She lived out her life for other people, she said.

                           She never really cared for herself, more selfish than any of us because she wanted us to be left with the knowledge--- you did so little for me, I gave up my life for you, I couldn’t even read the magazines, there was always too much dust… I always put all of you before myself.

                                    *

         We were off to Canada, just the two of us: me and the old man.  I resisted the expression, the old man:  the old man got me this, the old man got me that, the old man was drunk last night, the old man is quite a guy.

                                    *

         In the hospital she seemed like a pink stain on the white linen. 

         Go away, she said.  Go away.  I don’t want to see you… is my hair messed up… my fingers are so ugly… how can anyone… your father…

                                             *

         All the time I had been with Dad since Mom died I kept saying to myself:  I have nothing to say.  What can I say?

                                             *

         He sent me to Italy and Bulgaria a month ago.  I had been in Sofia on May 24 for the day of the language           

                                                     

                                                      *

         (photo missing in this version)

         Across Vermont and stopping at a small motel and cabins within sight of Mt. Washington.

         New Hampshire was where Carol Lynley came from in RETURN TO PEYTON PLACE.  She had written a novel and gone to New York City and come back home to meet the townspeople.

                                             *

         There had been floods, the guy in the motel said, keeps people away.  Back from the road were big houses at the end of drives.  The unabridged Webster’s dictionary is on a stand in the library of the house.  The mountain was green going to black into a darkening sky behind a sign selling souvenirs.

                                             *

         Dad and I sat at a little table in front of the cabin drinking beer the owner had brought for us.  Each of the six bottles was on its own little napkin. 

         Tom, I’m going to sleep early.  Okay?  You don’t want me to go out with you, do you?

         No, it’s okay.  I might drive into the town, look around, see what’s going on.

         So go on then, I don’t want to keep you. 

                                             *

         A concert was breaking up at the pavilion in the village park.  I wrote but do not know what I meant:  the first bar was vinyl.  I saw a woman with blue hair who had a tooth pick at the corner of her mouth.  I recorded this song lyric:       

                           I’m just an hour of time

                           And a six pack away

                           From forgetting you.

         Right here: stopped. 

                                             *

         Do I recount a conversation in another bar, part of a big resort, where I went, go into a crowd and being told it was a party for the employees and asking if I could stay, seems like the people are having fun, and being asked what I was doing and saying I was going to Newfoundland with my father.

         Distraction   in November we gathered at my mother’s hospital bed.  She could not eat.  She did not want to eat.  Don’t let the food go to waste.  I’ve never had Thanksgiving dinner out.   The next Sunday I had to cook a Turkey.  Dad took a sip of Mogen David wine.  She was just in for tests, really.  Maybe she could try to eat some cranberry sauce and some of the white meat.  It hurt too much.  When she got home… yes, she had gotten home.  Everything was going to be okay.  It had always been like that.  The Fanellis next door left her cut flowers in a vase with a statue of the Infant of Prague attached to it. [gathered= a linguistic attempt to avoid reality]

                                                      *

                  I heard a bottle cap come off a beer.  Dad was shaving and drinking.  How do you feel, he asks.

         Fine.

         You got in late, I heard you.

         So…

         You can drive he told me and I asked if he could help me and he said, maybe.

         The intake of the smoke and then the sip of beer.

                                             *      

         We didn’t talk during the rest of the day.  Drove into the Maine.  Didn’t see anyone around and not a lot of traffic.  Forest on either side of the road.  An occasional church on a hillside and tombstones around it.

         Stopped at a crossroads store and got two six-packs and a bag of ice.  He didn’t want an infrared ham sandwich even though they had the hot mustard he liked.

         Across the border at St. Stephen.  Just waved us through.  On to St. John.  Union Jacks in the breeze.  Easy to love England with an ocean between.  To the Loyalist City.

                                             *

         Another day—as is always sometimes said.

        

                                             *

         Benedict Arnold tried to make a go of this imitation Glasgow, from my experience.  We had a drink in a nice bar.

         I’m tried, he says.  Let’s find a place for the night and you can come back later if you want.

         But you slept all the way

         I’m not as young as you are.

         A little less beer.

         Let’s find a place

         The motel with a newspaper.

                HUSBAND KILLS WIFE AND THREE LOVERS IN ST. JOHN MOTEL ROOM

            Do you need anything, Dad?

         I’ll be okay.  Go into the city and have a nice time.      

                                             *

         I transcribe my first version of what happened next in town:  “There are no good times in this city.  At night the bar where we had been won’t let you in unless you have a tuxedo on.  Walk around and find a bar.  A big room with a couple of old men sitting in chairs watching the television.  An ante-room to a flop house.  I walk across the room and there is a smaller carpeted room.  Again a television but at least there are some women to look at.

         You can’t sit here.  The waiter is standing next to me,  He has a beard and jeans on. 

         Why?

         You have to have a woman with you to sit here.

         What?

         It’s the law.  Now no trouble now, you know the law.

         Where can I sit

         Outside with the men.”

                                                      *

         Found in a plastic bar [ plastic, a slang word whose meaning is obscure but which it seems everyone had a definition for it] near the motel.

                           GANGLAND SHOOT OUT

                                    THREE WOMEN DIE

                                             TEN YEAR OLD BOY HELD

         Drink a little of that protestant Moosehead beer.  Two bottles make you sick and swear to give up the drink for an hour of faithful resolve. 

                                             *

         Dad was sleeping.  I have  FOR MEN ONLY to read and a new novel ALL THE LONELY YEARS and from St. John we went to Moncton to Sydney in Nova Scotia for the ferry to Port aux Basques, Newfoundland.

                                             *

         However, in the morning:  slice of well-done bacon, scrambled eggs, coffee, no orange juice, just two eggs sunny side up, whole wheat toast with butter, a glass of milk

         The history museum:

                           men go down to the seas in ships

                           drown

         My brother, Dad says, was a ships radio operator and president of the Wireless Operator’s Association

Yeah. I remember that funeral and knowing he drank himself to death and I  saw kids tearing  apart the mourning wreaths at the grave a few over to collect the metal frames, a sort of deposit on each one.

         I’ll drive a bit, Dad says

         Up a long hill

         A far river drinking a bottle of Pepsi

         I’ll have a 7UP, Dad says.

                                                      *

         A cabin outside Moncton

         Lot of French people around here.

         Let’s go to the movies.

       CLASS OF ‘44

              the Dad dies

                  kid sees the old man’s shoes in the closet

                  his empty eye-glasses case

                  I don’t even know what he looked like

                  his girl was waiting for him

                  silly happy ending…

         It was pretty accurate, Dad says. Made me sad.    That’s the way it was.

         We have a drink in the bar in the mall where we saw the movie.

        

Picture missing in this version

                                                      *

         We stop at another bar off the road to the motel.  Rock being read from the music sheets in front of the muscians.  Dad smiles at the waitresses.  We drink cognac and beer.  Dad has a cognac over the rocks. Likes the place

         The waitresses smile at the old man. He must have some sort of secret

         See maybe the emptiness in the heart, my heart, a sewer for a heart

         Dad has a love of some sort

         I went out and threw up in the bushes.  Dad was worried, should I do the driving?  No, I’ll be okay.  I sat in the car and he went back into the bar. Came back in an hour.  I liked that place.  Good to get out but your mother woudn’t have liked that place.  Something like the bowling alley in Times Square that the CANCO used to use on Monday nights… a long time ago,

         So you’re set for Newfoundland, he says and I say, I am.

IF YOU WOULD WANT TO READ MORE PLEASE COMMENT AND I WILL ADD MORE PAGES IN A FUTURE POST.  THE BOOK HAS BEEN FINISHED FOR MANY YEARS.

                                             

        Copyrighted 2020 Thomas McGonigle

Read a Good New Book: ARTFORUM by CESAR AIRA

A review of ARTFORUM by Cesar Aira, New Directions.

 ==To begin by quoting from my review in the LA Times:  March 1, 2009--- a near pre-historic time in the now present rapidly aging digital age--- Cesar Aira's Ghosts,  "A final reviewer's sigh: the charm (if that word is still meaningful) of this scene [in the novel]-- so refreshing.  And what a gift: to look forward to reading a new Aira novel from New Directions every year for the rest of one's life."

==To begin to write-- in this moment of social distancing, while sitting in front of house in a semi-rural part of New Jersey, just up from a large lake reservoir: bird song, a machine somewhere doing something--- a review of the most recent novel of Aira, ARTFORUM, 82 pages from New Direction which the mailman delivered as an Amazon purchase.

==Yes, the novel is named after the art magazine, still published in New York, though some may be very happy to know that the guy in the novel never opens the magazine, never quotes from it which if you have glanced at it, is probably a reason to read the novel, a minor reason to be sure. 

==ARTFORUM is not noted for its accessibility even to the well-educated.  It makes medieval theological debates seem as if written with the clarity of a Hemingway sentence.

==This review in some tiny way mirrors the method of Aira, which is probably obvious if you have read any of the more than 16 of his novels that have been translated.

==The novel opens: " I WOKE UP LATE, BLESSED BY THE SOUND OF rain, so merciful this oppressive summer;"

==The novel concludes: "Adam heard the very first birdsong."

==What comes in between... ah, those 3 dots... yeah, you all know, Celine was proud of them but Celine and his dots do not appear in Aira's novel but they do appear in this review of Aira's novel or would it be better to say: in this notice of Aira's novel.

==It is not by accident that I singled out that opening sentence which includes the word rain.

==I am not giving away any of the plot if I write that rain being water is not something you, I or the narrator would want to come into contact with paper. 

===Sadly, this catastrophe is visited upon the narrator of the novel and has happened to the writer of this notice.  But I was more fortunate in that I could blame catastrophe on my wife, who in a moment of over-conscientious cleaning of our apartment on East First Street in Manhattan, contrived to drop Paul Valery's LEONARDO POE MALLARME (a volume from the incredibly beautiful Bollingen Series of the collected Valery.)  That book is now next to the machine where this review is being typed. The wrinkled pages and cover whose wavy sort of condition almost would make, with a tiny grain of imagination, one to becomesea-sick--- something many---including the writer  of this review experienced many times, while trying to distract one's self by reading a book when crossing the English Channel and why I am sure that experience will return in Purgatory as the perfect punishment as I will see two screens: myself forever--- unless someone thinks to include my soul in their prayers--- seasick nauseous and on the other screen my subsequent going first class on the Eurostar from London to Paris.

===The narrator of the novel discovered his rain soaked ARTFORUM and I will quote some teasing lines: To my great dismay, on top of the pile of magazines was a ball, a sphere was a ball a sphere the size of a soccer ball .. whose layout... the ball was the ARTFORUM...I touched it... it was cold to the touch... as for the perfectly round form... Artforum's  peculiar, almost square, format... Can an object love a man?

===All readers know that the word waiting is always and forever now associated with Samuel Beckett and while Beckett's name does not appear in this novel at least this reader was thinking of a Beckett sort of waiting as the narrator eventually decides to subscribe to ARTFORUM. The problems which such an action creates can well be imagine if like me you, thanks to this temporary visiting of a plague, has interrupted the postal delivery of the TLS... in my case it is being held in the post office in Manhattan which I am due to collect it on April 24... such a visit, if the post office is open, seems as essential and necessary as the visit last week to plague infested Manhattan to receive an eye injection... trying to imagine and Aira so well describes this waiting, the distance from New York to Buenos Aires, the post offices at both end of the journey---- the light fingered employees in the Argentinien postal system--- something I am not worried about in the New York post office but I did once know an armed P.O. officer  whose duties allowed him to carry a concealed gun even when was taking refreshments in a bar on West 14th Street... he touched the holster a bit as he was too frequently easy to take offense...

===There is no violence in ARTFORUM, unlike the violence in the actual magazine... I must urge any who read this writing to order it from wherever you want. You might include Ghosts and an earlier novel An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.

===The day in which I typed this review has begun to get chilly, though the sun is out, and I was listening to John Foxx singing... the road curves away to my right , a tulip has burst open to my left... there are now many birds singing in the trees over-head... the leaf buds have begun to glow lightly green...

A POST PARAGRAPH.  I opened my still battered LEONARDO POE MALLARME and noticed that much of the book was translated by Malcolm Cowley, a man I knew during the year 1969-70 when he was teaching at Hollins College... there is this wonderful quote from an essay by Valery on what sort of book he was interested in reading: "I derive little or nothing from a book unless it resists"

                                       "To demand that the reader should be intellectually alert; to forbid him the privilege of completely possessing a text except at the cost of a somewhat painful effort; to insist on transforming him from the passive spectator that he would prefer to be into a partial creator--- all this was an affront to custom, indolence, and every form of mental inadequacy."

SOLITUDE IN THE GLARE OF....

Today, I went looking at art as I sometimes do on Wednesday afternoon. I discovered in Andrew Edlin Gallery the drawings of Pearl Blauvelt.  

Here I quote from the handout:  Blauvelt’s Dutch ancestors settled in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City, and helped found the First Dutch Reformed Church in that region in the late 1600s. At some point in the early decades of the 20th century, the artist moved with her father to a house in a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania that was heated by a coal stove and had a pump in the kitchen that supplied water from a well in the backyard. This is where she spent most of her adult life. In the 1970s, she was moved to a mental facility outside of Scranton where she continued to draw until her death in 1987.

I took photographs of these three pictures.(my photographs probably fail in reproducing the solitude, the loneliness that is depicted: the life and the desire to leave some sort of memento... rarely is such depicted and no wonder as it is finally just too close to the fate of each human being... if for a moment one is given the moment to understand this as in the phrase of Unamuno's book: THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE...

Across the Bowery, in Sperone Westwater Gallery, in its own austere modern building, I looked at the art of Susan Rothenberg: well known, famous, on display in all the major world museums... hailed as one of the most important artists of the moment but  how frivolous they seem, how crude of me to say something like that...

Yet, how crude seems the crude packaging of Blauvelt by the gallery which of course has put a price tag on each of these shards of ...  and my lack of graditude for their efforts... and my inability to escape all the contradictions that my sentences so glaringly reveal... A self-taught American artist of Dutch ancestry, Pearl Blauvelt’s entire body of work — a remarkable cache of drawings in graphite and colored pencil on ruled notebook paper — was discovered years after her death in a wooden box in her abandoned former home in northeastern Pennsylvania. Now regarded as an emblematic outsider artist, Blauvelt’s images of people strolling along country lanes, horse-drawn carriages, railways tracks, banknotes, houses, furniture, and women’s undergarments, which she often labeled with precision and care, serve as the imaginative recollections of a woman who lived a humble life on the margins of mainstream society.

THE FATE OF THE BOOK

In the West, I again found the fate of the book:  we stopped at Quartzite, Arizona... probably the largest temporary place in the US to which thousands upon thousands of RVs and every imaginable vehicle come--mostly in the winter--though it is still busy in the summer---there are ads for dental tourism in Mexico--- there were some very beautiful guns for sale at other temporary shops... DVDs: if I said a hundred thousand of them... movies and such being even more temporary than books..

Over the years we have stopped at this bookstore: at one time packed with books, many wrapped in plastic...but the heaps and heaps... now the store is slowly being stripped of its books and no new stock being added: I found these three paperbacks on the 3 for $1 table... the books were unread...and by listing and showing the covers: from the early 70s..the American Review was the most recent then of an attempt to publish a mass market literary journal...WORKS IN PROGRESS came from the Literary Guild and was available in bookstores...

I wish I had the energy to talk about these writers... many once famous and others... many I knew and was jealous of... but the desert is a good place to think... and to really know: this blog, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter have even less of a chance of being remembered... and while the READER'S OASIS BOOKS will also surely disappear... and knowing one's own books will also surely disappear... all... yet, one goes on... as even in such places one did see a younger person reading and in places like Ajo, in Douglas, in Tombstone one did talk about real books... and do I... maybe another day to talk about the woman I met who had been married six times and her husband had been married four times... a couple of hours of conversation: probably more interesting than these dusty books...

SILENCE IN SHAKESPEARE WHILE IN A YOUTH HOSTEL IN FLENSBURG GERMANY 24 DECEMBER 1964

2- This painting by the Danish painter Carl Vilhelm Holsoe at the Shin Gallery on Orchard Street sent me to or brought me to 55 years ago:

3- In the autumn of 1964 I was a student at University College Dublin and heard Denis Donoghue lecture on silence in Shakespeare hearing in particular the line Cordelia says in King Lear: I cannot heave/ my heart into my mouth.

4- In December I took the boat train from Dublin to London and stayed in the household of Ted Kavanagh, an Australian anarchist, whose name had been given to me by Jim Missey back in the US.  Ted ran a small anarchist bookshop, The Wooden Shoe off Charing Cross Road and I also met Sid Parker at that time in a pub that had been frequented by Dryden.  Sid was an individualist anarchist who eventually had a little magazine MINUS ONE.  

8- I learned, staying in Putney with Ted and his woman friend, of how the anarchists were imprisoned in London during World War Two and how American bombers for the most part were told not to bomb factories in Germany that had been owned by American firms... and I was told, you know, the only reason England had been at war was to protect its over-seas empire and of course the terrible things the English did in India to hold on to that place...

5- I did not stay in London for the whole holiday as I had a student flight to Copenhagen where I hoped to meet her.  

            I knew she would have blonde hair and I would...

I no longer remember how I ended up in a Lutheran student hostel in the center of Copenhagen and as this was in the days before Christmas: all the museums were closed, student restaurants were closed and I walked around for two days  and saw the mermaid near some sort of water... 

I did not know a word of Danish and decided I should go somewhere else.  I hitched out of Copenhagen, as such things were done, ending up in Kolding on the 23rd and was told the hostel was closing so I hitched a ride to the German-Danish border and walked across it on Christmas Eve to Flensburg where I found a bed in a hostel but again was told I could only stay that night as they were closing for Christmas.  

I got an orange and a bottle of Coca Cola from some sort of vending machine and read in The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald in a Penguin edition bought in London... that feeling of emptiness, alone in a building meant for hundreds... I wish now, so many years later, that I had read at the same time the essay by E. M. Cioran, "Fitzgerald The Pascalian Experience of an American Novelist."  

Only now    in 2019     do I link Donoghue's lecture to my being in that room.

Only now   in 2019       do I think that moment of aloneness sent me....       was it no accident meeting Sid Parker with whom I talked about Max Stirner whose phrase: the creative nothingness out of which everything is possible is a certain refrain within my life.

I have tried to imagine my falling asleep in that large empty room: I tried to convince myself that I heard dogs barking... but I heard nothing...


9-  The next morning, Christmas Day: bright sunlight and walking shoveled paths through big heaps of snow I went to a hotel and then to Mass at a Catholic church but the Mass was in German: a visceral real end of that distinctive use of Latin--- the end of the church universal... there were only feelings, but feelings that remained silent as no shared language... echoing later as I learned T. S. Eliot had written so many years before...

11- On the 27th I took the train to Hamburg and then on to, by way of more trains and ferries,  back in Dublin, at the Opperman's in Orwell Park Rathgar where I had a room... 

15- I was in front of Christ Church for New Year's and made my way to Rathgar on foot as the buses did not run that late ...did I have some chips at the Italian chip shop just before the village shops, I do not remember... I know I did not stop at The Manhattan as that became a stopping place later....


14- When I went back to Patchogue in early June I would have my first date with her--- the first her--- and we went to the movies and saw THE TRAIN starring Burt Lancaster at the Patchogue Theatre and in a little street before Hewlett Avenue I kissed her and heard my wrist watch ticking as I still can hear it to this moment of typing this on a very cold day in Manhattan.  This woman lives in northern Maine with her third husband and it is seven degrees there while it is 25 degrees here on East First Street. I wish I could say I heard my watch ticking in that youth hostel...

But the present moment  (already now a few days ago)

 15- The person with whom I can overcome the silence has to work late tonight at her office up in Spanish Harlem and the drive later out to Milltown to look after her 98 year old mother 

16- This essay will be finished after Midnight Mass at Presentation over on East Third Street in the early hours of the 25th. I will be there with myself, as she is in New Jersey attending to her mother and earlier in the evening I would have gone to Grace Church as they do "a beautiful celebration of carols"... but it is not a religious moment... all the words are perfectly spoken, the sermon will be witty attending to current events, money will be collected for the poor and people will be going off to fancy dinner parties afterward... After Midnight Mass, but remembering the priest's sermon centered upon the darkness of the night Jesus was born and the light that he represented... a few shops were open on Avenue A, even the dollar pizza place, but the guy in that was reciting something in Arabic and said no regular slices and went back to reciting something...

This morning is bright and sunny.