Home Again and Shakespeare
May 6
When I came back to Missouri I expected a Canaan’s Land of lower prices, and was disappointed. The restaurant prices were lower, but not by much. My grocery bills seemed about the same size. The only significant financial difference, by my lazy and perhaps incorrect reckoning and recollection, was the cost of housing. When I bought my house (a year and a half after arrival), my monthly mortgage was around $1,300. My last rent in Brooklyn was, as I recall, $2,600. I think utilities here are about the same as there.
The two big financial gains have been 1) housing and 2) almost-steady employment. And these are huge. Not only is my mortgage half what my last rent was, it gets me equity, and it gets me a house instead of an apartment. Three or four times the amount of space, no neighbors 1-8 feet away, no landlords, no kow-towing to get the heat turned up or down, and so on. Of course, there are homeowner disadvantages, too (superintendent duties, cost of repairs). And Missouri lacks some thing one finds in a cosmopolitan city. But all things considered, the move has meant a dramatic increase in both quality of life and—to your question—money. I’m able to save now. If the billionaires don’t help themselves to my social security, I might be able to retire. Am aiming to go off the clock in either two years or three years.
Yes, it’s fascinating to think what our two bards were like as younger men. Have you seen the photos of Sam Clemens in his young-man years? He looks intimidating. Like someone who might be a brawler. And his eyes (in multiple photos from that time) look like they’re operating on the highest setting. My guess is that we would have found him surprisingly affable (not the scornful brawler we expected) and though not a lot smarter than us, more certainly destined for the big time. I think his mental force would have impressed us every time we saw him, at any time of day or night, like his mind had eight cylinders to our four, and never needed a rest. One day at the start of gym class us boys were tossing the football around. The LaPlant brothers suddently turned it into a game of keep-away, tossing the ball back and forth between themselves while running among the rest of us. No one could match them for speed. But Rick and Bob appeared to be hardly exerting themselves. The rest of us were in fourth gear while they were still in second, and running circles around us. Speed was effortless for them. I think Twains mind might have been like that. That although he might have been (as I imagine him) a sauntering walker, a deliberating talker,his mind would have been continuously working at high volume: inventing ideas and emitting them without much delay or changing of pace in perfect, fresh language. A conveyor belt and a stamping mechanism continuously dispensing finished prouct, one unprecedented joke or observation or description or opinioin after another.