Topical Guide 297
Mark Dorset
Studebakers
IT TOOK MORE than two months for Herb to dispose of the coarse goods Ben gave him, develop eleven new couples (and how he yearned for Lorna while he worked, how much his imagination was enlarged by thinking of her), sell his list of Five-Foot-Shelf customers, sell his old Studebaker Four, and buy a new-to-him Studebaker Series 19 “Light Six.”
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 8
Disappointment: Expectations Unrealized
HERB AND LORNA arrived in Babbington on a cold and rainy Sunday night. The town looked deserted. Main Street was nearly dark; the only light came from night lights in a few shops, from the streetlamps at the intersection of Bolotomy and Main, from the police station, and from a garage across the street from the police station. Of these, the first that Lorna and Herb saw, coming into town from the west, were those at the police station and the garage.
“Well,” said Herb, “it’s not quite what I’d imagined.”
“How can you tell?” asked Lorna. “I can’t see a thing.”
“That’s what I mean. I had imagined a clear night, a moon, moonlight on the ocean, something like that.”
“Sounds like the night we burned the ballroom,” said Lorna.Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 8
How many times in the course of my life had I been disappointed by reality because, at the time I was observing it, my imagination, the only organ with which I could enjoy beauty, was not able to function, by virtue of the inexorable law which decrees that only that which is absent can be imagined.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, The Past Recaptured, “The Princesse de Guermantes Receives” (translated by Frederick A. Blossom)
Obituaries
Dan, startled, sat up straight, shook himself awake, and rubbed his eyes.
“Say, I didn’t startle you, did I?” asked Herb.
“Me?” asked Dan. “Heck no. You just kind of surprised me. I was pretty intent on what I was reading here, that’s all.”
“What’s that?” asked Herb.
“Obits,” said Dan.
“Uh-oh,” said Herb. “Nobody close to you, I hope.”
“Hm? Oh, no. Not anybody special. Well, there is a cousin in here today, kind of a distant one, though. Couple of other people I knew enough to say hello to. I read ’em all, though. Don’t matter to me who they are. It’s kind of a study with me, a study of human nature. You find out a lot about people this way. ’Course, you have to know how to read between the lines sometimes, but it’s funny how much you don’t know about somebody till he’s dead.”Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 8
After the cards had been randomized, Guppa would spend evenings during the next month going through them and reconsidering each one. As soon as I was able to print neatly enough to satisfy Guppa, I got even more responsibility: Guppa would save the birth announcements and obituary notices from the Babbington Reporter, and I made out cards for new-born Babbingtonians and drew black borders around the cards of the deceased. Guppa didn’t discard the dead prospects’ cards, however. He used them to warm up before he got down to serious pigeonholing, pulling a card or two from the stack of black-bordered ones and thinking about what he might have done to snare the pigeon before he or she had dropped off. Now and then during these warmups, he would heave a sigh and his eyes would mist over if the sense of loss or of lost opportunity became too great.
Little Follies, “The Static of the Spheres”
See also: Studebakers, TG 12, TG 132; Disappointment TG 87, TG 113; Anticipation, Disappointment TG 98
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