“The silence is too loud,” James tells his mother. “No car alarms, no late-night drunken singers, I can’t sleep.” He pauses. “It’s actually worse than that, it’s not silence, it’s crickets, all night, like some kind of engine.”
“That’s the hymn of suburbia,” Mr. Hardy, the plumber, chimes in from under the sink. “The earth is alive. I’ve got a friend into orthoptera. She talks about the sound as though it were music—calls it ‘conspicuous stridulation.’ You’re all tightened up”—he comes out from under—“but be careful with the toilet in the half bath, the lady who lived here before used to flush bones down . . .”
He tucked the wodge of brochures under his arm and headed out the door of the travel agents, looking down as he walked. Campaign posters lined the street, every telephone pole and lamppost swathed in them.
“Ah, James, how are ya?”
He glanced up. Patsy Lenihan lumbered toward him, listing heavily, panting like an old dog. There was no way around the man without stepping off the pavement, such was the broad beam of him.
“Patsy, how are you?” James said.
“Ah, I’m not so bad, I suppose, but this getting old is no craic at all.” . . .
The skull of the adult male elephant can easily weigh 150 pounds. That’s not counting the tusks, which often add another 100—though not in my case, since I have only one. The skull of my dead friend, Gargantua the Great, the grandest of our kind (Elephas maximus) on these watery, wooded shores, weighed, without its tusks, 197.5 pounds. I know because my former owner, Edward “Excellent Ed” O’Brien, an auctioneer turned animal handler and would-be actor, had me take it out of storage and hoist it onto a tobacco scale in a western Maryland rail yard one rainy morning in March of 1867 . . .