A Page from DOCTOR HOBART
It was a stygian evening pregnant with Poe and precipitation. A billowing belly of black cloud pushed unrelentingly against the dusky western hills. The hills pushed back. I was at home, sitting quietly in the Buddha's garden, listening to foreign insects whispering; to land-locked crustaceans chattering; to myopic underground rodents rattling on and on and on about their summer schedule: the mapped offensives against my garden (how best to capture the Scarlet Nantes Carrots was at the head of the list, followed by garlic and parsley and other forbs.) My ears tingled to hear; seemed ready to turn themselves inside out with the effort, when Doctor Hobart wandered by, his weathered head nodding to a rhythm only he could hear. He paused on the wooden bridge, turned toward me and said, in his magnificent old dry oloroso-sherry voice: "Remember, a year has departed, slipped like a noxious weed through an agricultural checkpoint; has slipped silently and unobtrusively into the history book penned by Chronos, never to grace again these barren slopes with its wild, unpleasant splendor." I was confused, but Doctor Hobart continued: "Look, the new year has already outgrown its khaki, knee-pants and is enjoying a glorious adolescence. I caught it only yesterday behind the barn, smoking a Camel cigarette, its trembling hand on March's virgin thigh. Believe me, if sideburns are sprouting above the mouth of May can pubic hair be far behind? And what might the rest of the Gregorian calendar bring us? The previous 365 days have been reduced to less than a cipher. 365 days. WAIT! Did I say 365 days? It seems I speak again in round numbers with my circular mouth." The doctor walked contemplatively (or was that contemptuously?) toward me. l opened my book by Xenophanes and tried to ignore him.
"Why there are many ways to describe a year," he continued. “There is the sidereal year - 365.26 days, or 365 days 6 hours 9 minutes 10 seconds, the true revolution period of the Earth. Or, the tropical year - 365.24 days, or 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes 45 seconds, the time-interval between successive passages of the Sun across the First Point of Aries. (The First Point being not quite stationary due to precession shifts, which is why the tropical year is approximately twenty minutes shorter than the sidereal year.) The anomalistic year -365.26 days, or 365 days 6 hours 13 minutes 53 seconds - the interval between one perihelion passage and the next. (It is slightly longer than the sidereal year because the position of the Earth's perihelion in its orbit moves by about 11 seconds of arc annually.) And, the calendar year -365.24 days, or 365 days 5 hours 49 minutes 12 seconds - the mean length of the year according to the Gregorian calendar." The Doctor seemed excited. I read on, immersed in Greek, oblivious to Hobart’s agitation.
If cattle and horses, or lions, had hands, or were able to draw with their feet and produce the works which men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make the gods; bodies the same shape as their own.
Doctor Hobart paused, both his speech and walk, and then, as if he had nonchalantly picked up his ’shooter’ in a schoolyard game of marbles, cleared his throat, and furrowing his thin gray hair with a harrow of bony fingers said: "Isn't it time we think about the Tea Party?"
An additional silence flooded the garden like an oil sheen on Prince William Sound. All molecular motion seemed to cease. Maple leaves held their chlorophyll-rich breath as worried insects slammed shut their spiracles. I closed the Anabasis.
"Yes, by George, you're right, for a change, Doctor Hobart, we must indeed give our undivided attention to the Tea Party."
