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In addition to the recent Where the Wild Things Are renaissance, Daddy has particularly enjoyed Ken Stark’s Oh Brother! (the artwork so gorgeous and evocative of my own country childhood that it gives me happy heartache) the gorgeous, haunting, heartwarming blend of story and illustration that is Night Driving, and revisiting Katy McKy’s Pumpkin Town! (my older daughter ate up Katy’s new one, Wolf Camp).  I also note the Pout-Pout Fish circulates through the stack regularly.

As far as books without pictures, thank you to the jolly good gentleman who recently gifted me with The Uncommon Reader.  Most satisfying.  Last night I was working on The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (apologies, Oprah, it took me a while).  Finally getting to McCullers and also Flannery O’Connor.  Bought a copy of this in Seattle while I was on book tour, and also this.

Glad to know my mention of Eric Taylor led to someone else listening.  Neat clip, too, Eric joining his ex-wife Nanci Griffith in song.  I have an eight-inch-tall stack of Nanci Griffith CDs.  She was one of the first to introduce me to the singer/songwriter genre.

Whenever I wrap up a book tour or even one of my shorter road stretches, I find I’ve accumulated a collection of disparate gifts and mementos.  Books, notes, green-shelled eggs, tomato plants, snickerdoodles, funky magnets, a fine pair of slippers with cow appliques (those were actually mailed — thanks T!), t-shirts, rooster sweatshirts, inexplicable hoodies, fire department patches, truck mirrors (yep, you bet)…each thoughtfully presented by a reader somewhere out there.  During book tour – especially if I am flying and traveling light – I often have to box them up and mail them home, so they’re waiting for me here in my office upon my return.  When I’m driving myself, I keep a box or two in the back of the car and pile the goods in there.

After a couple of months of heavier touring I still have a few of those boxes to sort.  I thought it might be fun to show you a photo of an item I just dug out, and how it represents (in this case, literally) a story.

This was the gift (when someone hands me something that says “International,” it’s a pretty good bet they’ve read Truck):

And here was the note accompanying (click to expand).

The references to asphalt mileage and “never been shifted into third after 1943″ are terrific.

The thoughtfulness I encounter so regularly is the greatest gift of all.  Please consider this my thank-you in general.  I will say that gratitude notwithstanding, one has only so much shelf and floorspace (don’t get me started on the pole barn!), so at some point there may need to be a charity auction, but I’d never do that without announcing it first.  The snickerdoodles are long gone, by the way.

Early morning easy listening: Bloodletting, by Concrete Blonde.  I like the name songs: “Caroline” and “Joey“.

Later, for balance, some Dallas Wayne.

Which might make me dig out this guy (he once got me into big trouble while live on the air at a radio station, a story that requires some time lapse before the retelling) (he wasn’t actually there at the time).

Turned the pigs into some new territory late last night.  They wouldn’t cross the old electric fence line.  But this morning they had overcome their fear and the new patch looked like it had been attacked by organic bulldozers which in fact it had.  Back when I was off on book tour, the neighbor plowed us a patch and my wife scatter-sowed rape and rye.  The patch is thick green and luscious now and those pigs love that rape.  So do the ducks.  They hit it with their beaks all a-clatter.

Drove up to New Auburn with the kids yesterday, to a get-together on one of the lakes.  Right through town, out Highway M, “Jabowski’s” corner, Highway 40, into the lakeshore area where you meet a lot of Minnesota and Illinois plates heading home Sunday afternoon.  So lush there, it’s that thick green time of year, and man, it was saudade like sixty.  One memory after another.  The joy of being in a pocket of country that is like a pocket of my heart, mixed with the longing to spin the odometer backward 30 years just so I could have one more childhood afternoon, see the place when it was mostly farms few and far between and everyone was some sort of grownup hero character.  And yet I love the place in the present as well, tattered trailers, new driveways, the abandoned or repurposed buildings, signs of wear, old overgrown patches, changed, sure, but a living, evolving picture growing layer on layer over the place it always was.

I always feel vaguely embarrassed discussing saudade.  There are all the questions of what happens when reminiscence and sentimentality mingle.  Harmless enough now and then, the occasional lazy dog-paddle through it all is peaceful enough, but in the end one attempts to be firm with oneself and return to the shores of the present, where there is work to be done (more to the point: diapers to be changed).  It is also impossible, when drifting along this way, to think of the blind privilege these memories represent.  In a word: freedom.

My favorite view of the day: Halfway through  Jabowski’s corner, looking north out across the big swamp, the tamarack tips more blue than green in the haze, the great primordial breadth of it giving you just a hint of what this place was before anybody two-footed showed up.