Where You Are

This is a reread of Where You Are by George Constable, but so worth it for the mood I was in. Lake Stevenson is a tidy young old man. I have no idea how old he's supposed to be-late 20s, mid-thirties?-- but he seems perfectly content with his vaguely bacheloresque life. Content, it seems, until an elderly aunt dies and bequeaths him a stately house in the fancy part of town. Okay, that's normal enough, but there's a catch. The catch is Randall, the aunt's beloved springer who comes with the house and must remain in said house for the remainder of his days (and he's still relatively young).

Ah, dilemma, what's a tidy soul to do? Lake loves his apartment, loves his life, thinks he loves his girlfriend...Then again, accidents happen. Maybe they happen especially to small dogs whose brains appear pretty tiny.

I think I want Lake's problems even though he himself is not very likeable. He's a little prone to lying, though he claims not to do it on purpose, this embellishing--like telling someone his name is Luke Stephenson instead of Lake Stevenson. A bit awkward later when he has to confess. So, I don't want his flaws, necessarily, but I don't mind having to deal with a wealthy woman's bequeathal, even if it involves some moral quandaries (In spite of appearances and suggestions, no harm comes to any dogs in the telling of this story).

I definitely want Lake's job. He has started his own company whose sole purpose is to make directions user-friendly. Just the sort of neat and tidy job that a neat and tidy oldish young man might excel at. In my case, I just think it's an amusing line of work. There are some entertaining before and after exercises on manuals his company is redoing, but I love this scene when Lake is trying to forget his dog/house/old aunt/girlfriend troubles by immersing himself in work. Lake devoted half an hour to analyzing a booklet on worker safty in a lumberyard. It had been produced by someone in the lumber company and was riddled with problems--cryptic warnings, a blaming tone, afterthoughts. At one point a phrase seemd to link higher pay to faster work. A plaintiff's lawyer would love it.
This reminded me of the farmer I worked for a couple of years. His wife, thank goodness, ran the farm stand, because if Jake had been left to it, he would never have made money. He once put up such a dire, hand scrawled sign about the evils of peeling back his corn without first purchasing it, that we had to rip it down in the dawn hours lest he get arrested for threatening bodily harm on the wealthy customers innocently hoping for produce. Some people simply shouldn't try to explain things in writing. Or they should hire Lake Stevenson to do it for them.

In Where You Are, Lake kind of bumbles along, making mistakes of the non-written variety, failing at this and that in his personal life, offending people left and right, but you know in the end, that he will do the right thing. Whatever that may turn out to be.