The Geographer's Library

The father thereof is the Sun,
the mother the Moon.
The next morning, from the newsroom window, Lake Massapaug
gleamed still and deep like an opal in the late-autumn sun. No boats
or bathers or fishermen disturbed the surface. No phones rang in
the office, and neither Art nor I was talking. It was a little after nine, so Austell
hadn’t arrived yet, and Nancy was on vacation. A calm breeze gently scalloped
the lake’s surface at the edges and scraped the nearly bare branches
across the newsroom roof. We were sitting in Art’s office, him with a cigarette
and coffee and me with a newspaper. The morning hadn’t yet begun to shape
itself into a day.
I had spent the night before watching one of those dire midweek football
shows on an all-sports public-access station. Around this time of the year,
most Jets fans develop a case of heartburn that never really goes away. My
brother, Victor, describes their strategy as “suck, then hang on for dear life”:
after losing four games they should have won in September and October,
84