Peter Halloran

I want to be careful here because I am not angry and people will want me to be angry. Twenty-seven years. I rebuilt a seawall. I would do it again.

What wore me out was the language. Everything at River had a phrase attached to it. You did not miss your turn, your turn was carried. You were not upset with somebody, there was a matter between you. You did not leave, you became no longer continuous. And every one of those phrases is defensible — I could defend all of them, I used to — but you put four hundred of them together and you have a place where nobody can say a plain thing without translating it first.

I noticed I had started speaking that way at home. My wife said something about it. Not a row, she just said, you are talking like a form. And I thought: that is twenty-seven years of very careful wording doing exactly what careful wording does, which is get into you.

They will tell you the words are precise and that precision is a kindness. It is, mostly. It is also a way of never being caught saying anything, and an institution that is never caught saying anything is one you cannot argue with. You cannot get hold of it. You raise something and it is received, and referred, and entered beside, and then it is February.

I still go to the meal. I go every Thursday. I just do not want the vocabulary any more, and there is no way to have the one without the other, and I asked, and they were very nice about it, and that is the whole problem in one sentence.