John McPhee

I have always had a soft spot for John McPhee, which I of course share with many others. The idea of this extraordinarily curious and erudite guy willing to follow just about any thread or adventure out to its logical conclusion and then write about it cleverly and naturally is extremely appealing. If something by him appears in The New Yorker, which it has been doing for almost six decades now, I tend to read it.

But sometimes the picture of Hilary floats before me when McPhee came up in conversation sometime over the last couple of decades. She screwed up her face in clear disapproval and perhaps even said "ugh". Of course I mostly don't care and I keep reading him, but I remember it nonetheless. And of course I shouldn't give a rat's ass what she thinks, since we haven't been going out for well over three decades and I've raised children to young adulthood with someone else.

But it brings back the weight her judgment had those many decades ago, when I was a young buck from the south and she was a New York intellectual pure and simple, with a book-filled apartment on the Upper East Side who summered at Chilmark, where her mom hung out with William and Rose Styron. It flattered my ego that she liked me enough to be my girlfriend, but I also pretty strongly craved her intellectual approval, something that still kinda sticks with me, if kinda not too. But not enough to dissuade me from reading McPhee.