7

My feet hurt, and my back never gives me a moment's peace. Writing is as I have found an activity draining, depleting, and infinitely interruptable. No sooner does a good sentence billow up to the mind's forefront, than some wretch appears at the door of my modest but comfortable retirement cottage in a sensible sector of Prince George's County. He is delivering an unwanted package, he is begging for food, he is looking for some phantom person represented by an illegible name scribbled on a dirty scrap of paper. I return to my desk, attempting to recapture the lost words, and the telephone goes off like an exploding shell. When I answer the demonic thing, a heavily accented voice inquires if I really do wish the delivery of twenty-four mushroom and anchovy pizzas.

And! At all hours a juvenile from the neighboring house, a once presentable house now gone sadly to seed, is likely to be throwing a tennis ball against the wall before my desk, retrieving the ball, hurling it again at my wall, so that a steady drumming of THUMP THUMP THUMP intercedes between me and my thoughts. The child's parents own no sense of decorum, duty, discipline, or neighborly feeling. On the one occasion I visited their pestiferous hovel, they greeted my complaints with jeers. It is, I am certain, from these pathetic folk that the pizza orders, etc, etc, originate. I hereby inscribe their name so that it may reverberate with shame: Dumky. Is this what we fought for, that a whey-faced, slat-sided, smudge-eyed spawn of the Dumkys is free to hurl a tennis ball at my modest dwelling? When a man is trying to write in here, a man already working against backache and sore feet, sweating over his words to make them memorable?

There it goes, the tennis ball. THUMP THUMP THUMP.