Slept poorly all this week. I have given some consideration to becoming nocturnal. The nights though still cold are merely bracing rather than truly frigid, at least to one whose blood was early thickened by Pennsylvania winters and a father’s parsimony in matters of hearth-fuel, and I find the nocturnal company at least as enjoyable as any available during the day — increasingly so as the weather warms, for each year about this time the tree frogs emerge from hibernation. The first half-teaspoonful of spring awakens their amphibian yearnings, as I suppose it would have mine in earlier decades, and they spend the quickening nights chirping lustily at one another. Read on

I was going to write something utterly brilliant this past weekend, but I caught some sort of walking flu and wasn’t up to the task. Great-Uncle William will have to speak for me.

Mrs. Jacobs next door has learned of my illness — how, I cannot imagine, for I told no one except the department secretary whom I instructed to cancel my classes. But my neighbor seems to know all of little consequence that occurs within ten minutes’ brisk walk; were there profit in front-porch chatter and back-fence whispers she would be renting rooms to the Dukes. So prolific is she in the casual exchange of the commonplace that she must take inspiration from one of those lesser muses the Greeks never mentioned but of whose existence I am nonetheless certain: Phluaronia, perhaps, who having arrived late to the table of creativity found the feast already ravished by her more famous sisters and so can spur her victims only to bubble continually with nonsense. Her statues, had any been made, were fountains spewing water from their mouths into a pool which their feet, submerged therein, drank up anew as if from sparkling subterranean springs. A kind woman, Mrs. Jacobs, but — Good God.

At nine-thirty this morning she knocked upon my door and when I answered, unwashed, unshaven and unshod, she said with a mother bird’s sympathy and a schoolmarm’s assessing eye, “Oh Mister Warmkessel, I understand you have taken ill.” Read on

The Olsens had me to Thanksgiving dinner, an unsurprisingly sorry affair that I preferred only to dining alone or braving the faculty lounge. The talk was all of politics, Olsen expressing poignant regret that with Roosevelt’s election our best hope for socialist ascendency has passed; I, trying to console him (for his grief really was quite touching — and his adherence to principle admirable if faintly ludicrous — to say even now that “things must get worse before they get better”…!) pointed out that there was as yet no firm evidence, indeed no ready and apparent reason to expect, that “things” would improve in the near future, or indeed ever, and Olsen, well as I know him, took some comfort in that knowledge, but another of Olsen’s guests, a sociologist from Chapel Hill who until today I knew only by repute, took my repartee for genuine interest and buttonholed me to ask my opinion of the President-elect’s plans. When, to the contrary, all I wanted was a good fire, a good drink, and a decent meal, of which I had one, and that a somewhat resinous and smokey one, Olsen having given his servant the day off and being himself unschooled in the manly art of firewood selection. Read on

From my great-uncle William Warmkessel’s journal, one very hot day in August 1928.

Olsen accosted me outside my office and informed me with steady voice and calm countenance that so great was the heat this afternoon that a dog had spontaneously burst into flame in the middle of Broad Street. I knew immediately that he had been drinking, because Olsen is capable of maintaining a steady voice and calm countenance only when thoroughly intoxicated. Ignoring his state I inquired what breed of dog, and he replied that it had been a coonhound: whereupon I determined that Olsen was not only a drunk but a liar, because no self-respecting hound dog would emerge on such a day from the shadow of his master’s porch.

But I cannot blame Olsen, for either the drinking or the lies. No self-respecting hound dog would don a suit of any cloth or weight and trudge the mile or more to his office to inspect rolls for the upcoming fall term, either, and those of us doomed to civilzation must comfort ourselves as best we can. Besides, Olsen is my only source of decent whiskey in these foul times. This double drought — no rain and Prohibition — surely is God’s curse upon the land. For what He has cursed us I haven’t yet conclusively determined, although I suspect it to have been the Wilson presidency. At least in His infinite mercy (as the Rev. Fenstermacher back in Oley would say) He has provided us with bathtubs and the homemade stills of mountain men. And Cyrus Olsen’s lower desk drawer. Hope remains.

My great-uncle William Warmkessel returns from the grave to apologize to my readers and the Muses for my lack of creative output.

I woke this morning with hopes for the day, but the afternoon skittered away like mice, and with daylight waning I find myself scrabbling at the disappearing tails of the hours. It is typical of me to burn the butt-end of the useful day penning unread complaints of wasted time in my diary, but these long evenings of latter May are too pleasant to spend shut in an upper room laboring at a book which despite its pretense to respectability will draw no more readers than these lonely pages.

It is no wonder the South lost the Civil War — I hasten to note that more than a few of my neighbors and colleagues would dispute here that the South lost the war at all, but I believe the historical record to be firmly in support of my thesis. I repeat, then, that it is no wonder the South lost the war: The region damns the industry of its inhabitants with too many luscious days such as today when work seems not only uncalled for but indeed irresponsible. Read on