Dee Mack & the Syndics

Cover art from "The Very Best of Dee Mack"

February 28, 2011

From the journals – Dee Mack & the Syndics 

sing their hit single “Home, Running Away from Home”

Officially “home sick” but really “home hiding.”

Hiding can suggest fear − hiding from something; or it can suggest discretion − hiding out for a purpose. There’s also hide-and-seek, hiding willy-nilly as part of a game. Holing up is one way of hiding out, trying not to be found while while engaged in this or that − addressing a family crisis in the economic Trinity, or catching up on one’s reading.

          It’s said to be possible to hide in plain sight (like the purloined letter), as if someone might catch a glimpse of you but when he rushes to catch up, turning the corner he can barely make you out − you are so far away as to be barely visible.

          Unavailable. He catches up to you but can’t make himself seen or heard. He can try all he wants, it’s to no avail.

There are days you want to be better than hidden, more than unavailable. You want to have gotten away and have managed to take something valuable with you. Running away and getting away with − something valuable, a silver candlestick or the Holy Spirit (by good fortune solving that Family crisis). Then, you are in the wind.

I’d planned to play golf this morning, but it was too windy.

          So I hid my nose in the book Amazon got away with selling me, Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity. But it’s just too much; it smells of expensive perfume too lavishly applied. I can’t get my breath; I fade into sleep. I wake up with a great name for a band “Dee Mack & the Syndics,” a Dutch Gladys Knight and her Pips.

Pip − someone whose escape is admired. “He’s a pip, ain’t he.”

n

Find out about Maxine Kumin at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/maxine-w-kumin.