The City & the Country no.73 – March 5 2015

My Dad’s 107th birthday – or would have been! Means that I’ve reached 71 (two weeks ago now), and that my son Samuel Carey will be 35 this year: just as my Dad (like me: Reginald Carey) was 36 when I was born, so I was 36 when Sam was born, which gives me – looking back – a fairly exact sense of just how relatively ancient I must seem to Sam, as the years go by. And how relatively ancient Sam will seem to his son, my grandson Sorley, born last year.

This past week, as before: snow & ice, teaching bobbing along. Claire hard at work painting, Chiara at college work – I see her Sunday after my swim at her college pool, with Trey. Dr. Cicero summer books being sent out with their press releases and newly assembled quotes. Ashley sends her fifth novel almost page by page, wonderful poetic work in progress. And Robert and Charlotte treated me to a birthday lunch at Jean-Jacques’ sumptuous Canard Enchainé restaurant (photos courtesy of Charlotte), where a week earlier I had my birthday lunch en famille.

My forthcoming novel, ‘Dog’s Mercury,’ features a cover image drawn from the same huge painting – by the great Manuel Zardaìn – that has provided covers for the two preceding novels, as it will provide them for the remainder of the sequence, which was completed in one year. This week I took a few photos of various corners of the painting, looking for the covers yet to come. When the books are all published, the last one should perhaps contain, in the endpapers, an image of the entire painting, with each of the covers identified in a rectangle to show their relation to the whole. Just as for me the sequence is a litter, the painting has come to symbolize the litter’s unity-in-diversity (or more exactly vice versa).