Three Days Late

Once as a thirteen-year-old, I was walking home from stacking firewood with some neighbors. Two older boys had been there - I'd never seen them before. The taller one had sort of shaggy long hair that seemed so daring - the shorter of the two was clean-cut in a socialist sort of way. They were perhaps seventeen, and the tall was reading passionately out loud as they walked. I quickened my step to catch up to them, all shy and obvious, and as I got closer I could hear the words come and go...

"Emerald and black and russet and olive...Where was his boyhood now?"

As I approached, I began to realize that something special was transpiring. Actually, it was clearly larger in scope than a small girl's nervous admiration. The boy had noticed me listening - they slowed their pace as he continued to read, now performing for an impressionable young stranger. He was describing a girl standing on the ocean's edge. "She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird." His voice grew awed as he told us of her bare legs, pure but for where an emerald trail of seaweed fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh, of the faint flame that trembled there on her cheek, of a cry from the soul.

The name of the book was a string of words put together in a way that didn't make sense to me. They bumped around in my head clumsily, and I liked to listen to myself say them: "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Knowing about this was surely something to be proud of - to incorporate into my Identity. James Joyce was born on a February the second. He claimed to be wondering if the photographer would lend him a quid.