Assorted Prose Read Online Free Page B

have followed my advice up to now.” The reason I have outlined the procedure so meticulously is this: having come thus far without a blunder, you feel “clean” and possess the crispness to go on. Success succeeds. If I am wrong, see the chapter titled “There’s Many a Slip.”
    (1) Steam has ceased to arise from the liquid and you are certain it is cool enough to drink. Restore the spoon to the saucer, pinning it with the left thumb. Look around and make sure no one is about to jostle you, either in fun or by accident. The physical action of bringing food to the mouth is so ancient, so fundamental to Man, that a detailed description would be mere padding. The one ticklish procedure that remains is the Separation of Cup and Saucer.
    (2) The two possible extremes—leaving the saucer on the knee or bringing it with the cup all the way to the chin—are too contemptible to denounce, though I have seen both done. In fact, the problem is self-solving if, contrary to instinct, you pick up the saucer with the
left
hand, gripping the cup handle with the right. They begin the ascent together, but the inequality of their strengths soon tells; in the powerful yet delicate grasp of the right hand, the cup completes its flight to the lips, while the left hand weakly halts at the level of the sternum, where the saucer, braced against your necktie, acts as a tacit bib.
    (3) Be conscious that, as you consume the beverage, the weight of the cup diminishes; otherwise the right hand may snap it clear over your shoulder. Never hang on to an empty cup.
Get rid of it
. In replacing the unit on the table or tray presumably provided, a jaunty clatter need not be avoided, if it can be induced without force. When your hands are at last free, sigh and say, “That was delicious,” or “I needed that.”
    Congratulations. You have just drunk from a cup.
Appendix: Helpful Hints
    1. Don’t be tense.
    2. Don’t be “loose.”
    3. Think of yourself not as an assembly of hinged joints inflexiblyconnected by rods of calcium but as a plastic, pliant animal, capable of warmth, wit, and aspiration.
    4. Think of the cup-and-saucer complex, from the instant it is received into your hands to the instant it leaves, as a charge delivered to your care and toward which you feel the maternal emotions mentioned above (II.1). Imagine yourself “crooning” to it, recognizing hereditary resemblances to your own face in
its
face, etc.
    5. The angle made by the forearms should
never
exceed 110 degrees or fall below 72 degrees, assuming the room is at less than body temperature. If it is not, you need my companion work, “The Elements of Sipping Through a Straw.”

  ON THE SIDEWALK
    (After Reading, At Long Last, “On The Road,” by Jack Kerouac)
    I WAS just thinking around in my sad backyard, looking at those little drab careless starshaped clumps of crabgrass and beautiful chunks of some old bicycle crying out without words of the American Noon and half a newspaper with an ad about a lotion for people with dry skins and dry souls, when my mother opened our frantic banging screendoor and shouted, “Gogi Himmelman’s here.” She might have shouted the Archangel Gabriel was here, or Captain Easy or Baron Charlus in Proust’s great book: Gogi Himmelman of the tattered old greenasgrass knickers and wild teeth and the vastiest, most vortical, most insatiable wonderfilled eyes I have ever known. “Let’s go, Lee,” he sang out, and I could see he looked sadder than ever, his nose all rubbed raw by a cheap handkerchief and a dreary Bandaid unravelling off his thumb. “I know the WAY!” That was Gogi’s inimitable unintellectual method of putting it that he was on fire with the esoteric paradoxical Tao and there was no holding him when he was in that mood. I said, “I’m going, Mom,” and she said, “O.K.” and when I looked back at her hesitant in the pearly mystical UnitedStateshome light I felt absolutely sad, thinking of all the times she had