The Wordsmith's Forge

Because it was closer on Route 2 than the Wachusett Reservoir and farther out than Concord, I spent the later afternoon wandering with spatch around downtown Maynard, where he had done contract work for DEC in the run-up to Y2K. By six o'clock we were sitting on a park bench across the rust-colored canal-thread of the Assabet River from the brown industrial bricks of the former woolen mill whose clock tower chimed the hours as we ate our mango and orange sherbets from the Fine Arts Theatre. The mill buildings themselves have been through multiple commercial cycles since their antebellum textile days and now seem to function as an unpredictably inhabited office park. Walking around the mill pond with its sculling mallards and reef-reflected clouds, we found a thread of bright sky between the steel girders of a garage and nineteenth-century granite sills, a derelict parking lot whose white-lined spaces had been redrawn by a conflagration of weeds, the black spidering iron of fire escapes over windows that held nothing but cracked shadows in one row and all the usual in-office paraphenalia another. We could see the beams and the interior brick. The chimney looked as though it should have had a steeplejack atop it providing color commentary. It was just the right angle before sunset for all the panes to turn to a contact sheet of mirrors. By the time we retrieved the car, a band was tuning up for an open-air performance in the park with the oversized chess set, with plenty of woodwinds and a tuba. We ate incredibly late, but satisfyingly, in that no second meal remains of my khao soi with salmon. Earlier in the afternoon I had called Rob from Porter Square Books because as I walked in to pick up my mother's order, I realized they were playing "9 to 5" (1980).