Which leaves Glenn Barrett, who is the sort of man every place like this seems to have, a dogged denyer of fate and location, puttering endlessly in a fruitless quest to make of Pleasant Lake a Palm Beach. His house is sided in new hewn cedar and tinted solarium and his circle saw makes matins songs, and he plants gardens in terraced French beds bordering the road, although what the coons don’t eat the sun and flint soil wither.
He reminds me of ivy-class, working-league me the-Yalie. Someone never quite ever going to be there, but a firm believer in reupholstery, practical and philosophical. Yet whether you cover yourself in Spinoza, J Press, or cedar, it’s still the same structure and the elbows wear through.
Glenn's father owned a mountain farm where thistle wouldn't grow. But snow fell there in abundance, and so when Glenn Senior retired, Junior wisely turned the farm to a ski resort of an excuse for selling rum to Yuppies, and now he too doesn't have to work summers. Twice a summer I'm told old Glenn Senior navigates his honest to god '54 Studebaker here and alights for a day of hot dogs with the grandkids and swinging on the lawn swing which hangs halfdog from a rusting pipe frame in the yard of the roof-paper sided, forest green atrocity that neighbors Glenn Junior's and all his cedar cannot hide.
The Glenns Junior and Senior are situated four houses south from here, past Elmer and Elinore Umber, the Haspys, and an empty cottage resembling the elder Glenn's. The Umbers and the Haspys are weekenders, the empty cottage rots.