A good place to find some solitude is Cox Arboretum on a Sunday morning.

My first stop today was the Butterly House. I’d visited last month shortly after it opened for the season but that was a bust—tons of kids, both of the lepidopteran and human kinds, but hardly any butterflies and no peace or quiet. This morning was kid-free, and there were lots of butterflies.

Next was the Tree Tower, which is just beyond the Butterfly House. The tower is a new addition to the arboretum. A couple of ladies were descending as I arrived, but then I had the tower to myself. Pleasant breeze, nice views, good place to clear one’s mind.

I didn’t have a specific destination in mind after I left the tower, but I did decide to veer off the pathways and walk on the grass through the trees. I’m glad I did because I was able to get the nice shot of the tower that you see to the left.

My final stop was the south pond, or to be more specific a bench in the shade by the pond. A few walkers passed and one couple jogging but otherwise it was surprisingly quiet. A perfect place to spend an hour reading. I finished one book and started another.

The book I finished was Stephen Fry’s memoir, Moab is My Washpot, about his years growing up away from home at boarding schools. Fry’s making the news right now for having written an open letter calling on British Prime Minister David Cameron to get the 2014 Winter Olympics moved from homophobic Russia. I’d heard of Fry before this, at least vaguely (oh, yeah, he played Mycroft in the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes), but I didn’t know he’d written any books. This one’s ten years old.

Part of why I liked Moab is that I’m a bit of an anglophile. I grew up reading Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. I don’t know why would an American kid from the Midwest would enjoy learning about an English way of life that doesn’t exist any more, but there are plenty of Americans who like the royals and watch Downton Abbey. Part of Fry’s vocabulary is like a foreign language, not all of which is available in dictionaries or online. It’s easy enough to figure out Heinz Salad Cream and buttons A and B and tuck shops, but what’s with dividend tea?

I also liked Moab because different though Fry’s life is from mine, I understand much of what he went through as an adolescent. He hated gym and sports (or in British, games and sport). He had to deal with kids at school calling him queer. He had an obsessive crush on a cute boy. And he loved to read, seeking out books that explained who he was:

Today the gay boy in every section of society has a world of gay music, dance and television to endorse his identity. … They don’t need a parcel of old poofs historically sequestered in Capri and Tangier to tell them who they are and where they come from and whether or not they have the right to hold their heads up high. I did need them, however. I needed them desperately and without them I am not sure what I would have done to myself.

I needed them too, although I didn’t discover that some of the old poofs like Auden and Forster were in fact old poofs until after I was out of high school.

Although his story is rather serious at times, what with growing up gay and a thief (finally hitting rock bottom at 18 and going to jail for his thieving), Fry’s a great story teller, taking a path connecting incidents in what at first may seem meandering but in fact works to keep our attention and hit all the points Fry wants to touch. I enjoyed it so much that I’ll be getting Fry’s novel The Liar (parts of which, Fry explains in Moab, are based on Fry’s life) and his second autobiography The Fry Chronicles.

The book I started today was Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, an account of her year of grief after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died unexpectedly. I haven’t gotten far enough into it to say much about it, although already something Didion quoted has got me to thinking. Thinking about grief, Didion quotes from a letter a priest sent her after her mother died:

The death of a parent, he wrote, “despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago.”

Perhaps why this struck me is that yesterday and today I’ve been thinking about my biological father and about my uncle Bill.

Yesterday, googling myself (sounds naughty, but don’t we all do it?), I discovered my father’s grave (on Find a Grave). Well actually it’s not his grave. I know where my father’s remains are, and they’re not where this tombstone is. I guess it’s rather fitting that he’s not there, because he was certainly not in my life when I was looking for him. I never mourned my father’s death—he wasn’t capable of being a father really—but it’s true that even now, thinking of him “cut[s] free memories and feelings that [I] had thought gone to ground long ago.”

I had a father figure whose death I did grieve, however, and that was my uncle Bill. His birthday’s this month, so I was already thinking of him, but this morning I happened to check my website’s log and saw that some Internet visitor had been on my page about my uncle. I pulled it up myself and re-read the eulogy I gave five years ago. It made me cry again. Uncle Bill was someone I could talk to about books, and I miss him.

Although I’ve been lax in updating the “What I’m reading” section of my website, I have, in fact, continued to read quite a bit, most recently a fun book by Michael Arditti, The Enemy of the Good — read my mini-review of it.

Dayton Metro Library doesn’t have a big gay section, at least not in the sense of a section of shelving where one can go and physically browse through gay books, but through the miracle of technology it has something almost as good. Go to the online catalog, click advanced, enter “gay fiction” as the subject keywords, and you get a nice list of all the gay novels or short story collections Dayton Metro Library has in all its locations. Sort by publication date to see what’s new. Click on “Request first available copy” and they’ll send it to whichever branch you specify. Sometimes it takes a while since, although Dayton Metro Library does have a fairly wide range of gay titles, it usually has only one copy of each. That can make for a pleasant surprise, though, when a few weeks later you get a by-then unexpected e-mail to tell you a book you’d been wanting to read is ready for pick-up.

Why this little advertisement for the library? Because this week I’ve been feeling a bit down for various reasons, but I got one of those unexpected e-mails. I have plenty of stuff to read for school, including Hegel, Marx, Dilthey, Nietsche, Becher, Zwerenz, Bilke, Havemann, Bierrmann, Ulbricht (notice a German pattern here?), Joyce (one class is all Joyce), Dürrenmatt, Frayne, Rulfo, Borges, Cortazar, Garcia Marquez, Vidal (Virginia, not Gore), and Coloane (notice a Latin American pattern here? These are in translation though).

I was bad, though, and set all these other authors aside for a few hours Tuesday and Wednesday nights for Timothy James Beck’s newest (okay, published last year, but new to me) book, He's the One. You can read what I thought about it on my books page. It’s just the thing for a brief escape from the real world.