Read Online Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker - Free Book Online

keys did make a lot of noise. There’s no way to play a fast passage without some extraneous clacking. Listen to
Scheherazade
—you’ll hear all kinds of precise metallic noises coming from the bassoonist.
    I secretly wanted to be a composer, and when I wasn’t practicing bassoon I was at our old Chickering piano, plinking away, writing scraps of piano sonatas in a little stave-lined notebook that I still have. And then I read Keats’s sonnet and realized I wasn’t going to have any success as a composer. I went to Berkeley for a while, and then to France, where I discovered Rimbaud’s
Illuminations
—Rimbaud is a great sea poet—and while I was in Paris some Smith College students gave a party and I danced with two smiley girls, one in a skirt and one in sexy plaid pants, and I discovered that I enjoyed dancing with smiley Smith girls. When I got home to America,
Saturday Night Fever
was playing in movie theaters, and Elvis Costello was watching the detectives, and the Talking Heads were doing “Take Me to the River,” and I suddenly thought, I’ve missed the boat, I want to hear music I can dance to.

Eight
    I ’M IN THE PARKING LOT of Margarita’s, which is one strip mall over from Planet Fitness. I’ve been listening to a good songwriting podcast from England called
Sodajerker
while watching the latest developments in the Kardashian family saga on one of the Planet Fitness TVs. Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, the married couple who wrote “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” for the Animals, and many other hits, told the
Sodajerker
podcasters about how they sometimes wrote “slump songs” together—songs written just so they were writing something. And some of the slump songs became hits.
    â€œYou’re going to have to face it,” says Robert Palmer, “you’re addicted to love.” I’m debating whether I should go into Margarita’s and have dinner at the bar. You can order what’s called a Mexican Flag, which is three different enchiladas. I think I won’t, because when you eat at the bar you can’t read.
    Here’s what happened at Quaker meeting. I listened to the clock, as I always do. Very few people spoke. A man I didn’t know stood almost at the end of meeting and said his wife had died. He was quite an old man, with strong cheekbones, thin, and he held his hands out for a moment before he spoke. He said, “My wife died in my arms last week. I was lucky enough to know her for almost ten years. We met in a drawing class and I remember being impressed by how intensely she concentrated while she was drawing. She drew a pear. We were all drawing pears, but her pear made sense. It sat on the plate. I told her how much I liked her drawing, and we became friends and it turned out we were both ready to love and we got married very soon after that. One of the last things she said to me before she stopped talking was—” And then he stopped. He said nothing for a long time. Then he said, “She said, ‘I’ll miss you.’”
    This is the kind of thing that happens at meeting sometimes. In the silence that followed I thought of the man’s wife dying in his arms, and suddenly the long, complicated poem I’ve been struggling with, about how in 1951 Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who was a great Francophile, and his friend General de Lattre of France persuaded the American legislature to supply napalm and other arms to the French forces in Vietnam, seemed not worth doing. I don’t want to know about evil via poetry. I don’t want to spread the knowledge of evil. I just want to know about love. At the end of meeting, the clerk, Donna, said, “Do we have any visitors?” Someone from North Carolina said he was visiting from North Carolina. And then Donna said, “Okay, are there any almost messages?”
    This is often my favorite part of meeting. An almost message