Lapham Rising Read Online Free PDF

to try to check in atthe wrong airline at the wrong airport, or, failing all that, to board the wrong plane headed for the wrong destination.
    “I don’t suppose you have a seat on a flight to Buffalo late tonight,” I say to the lady from USAir who finally picks up after two minutes of automated responses.
    “Why do you put it that way?”
    “Because I really do not want to go to Buffalo. Tonight or any night.”
    “So why do it?” She sounds down-to-earth.
    “I’ve agreed to make the trip. A deal’s a deal.”
    “That’s honorable of you. I’m sure the people of Buffalo will appreciate it. Where are you now?”
    “In Quogue.”
    “The Hamptons. I’ve never been. It sounds exciting.”
    “Excitement plus,” I murmur.
    “All those parties!”
    “That appeals to you?”
    “I don’t know. But just reading about the Hamptons’ social life makes it seem like it goes on nonstop.”
    She is correct. A mathematician who visited the Springs section of East Hampton a couple of summers ago, and who evidently had no more pressing use for his years of training, decided to quantify the social activity of the Hamptons. In the hundred-day season covering the usual stretch from the end of May through the first week of September, he countedroughly 26,000 scheduled social events, for an average of 260 in any twenty-four-hour period. These included bona fide parties (brunch, lunch, dinner, private, club, birthday [surprise and non-surprise], anniversary, theme, and book), fund-raisers (political, medical, ecological, institutional), dances, artists’ shows, walkathons, boat races, softball games, wine tastings, official celebrations (Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day), and other, miscellaneous gatherings ranging from the poorly attended picnic held on July 9 to commemorate the halfway point between the Fourth and Bastille Day (at which guests gather to read the Declaration of Independence aloud in French) to the wildly popular re-creation of Moby-Dick (wherein an inflatable white plastic whale with happy eyes is floated in East Hampton’s Three Mile Harbor while participants attempt to harpoon it with broomsticks and holler, “He heaps me!”).
    The mathematician, who also happened to be clinically depressed, further calculated that the average Hamptons resident slept for approximately seven and a half hours a night, leaving sixteen and a half hours in which to accomplish everything else. Doing the math, he determined that per individual, some four hours a day were devoted to eating, and other bodily necessities, which left twelve and a half hours for “interpersonal activities.” Eventually, he went a bit overboard and attempted to inventory the kisses of greetingand departure bestowed on various occasions, breaking them down into one cheek and two, and then the number of times Tuscany was mentioned in a given week, also “gravitas,” “counterintuitive,” and “scenario.” But the amounts proved overwhelming. At the end of that summer, he found a different use for his own free time: he committed seppuku with a seafood shish-kebab skewer, standing next to a seven-thousand-dollar Viking outdoor grill offered for sale on the sidewalk outside the Loaves and Fishes culinary supplies store in Bridgehampton. Friends now gather for an annual cookout in his memory.
    Bang bang bang bang bang.
    “What’s that noise?” The USAir lady sounds alarmed. I tend to forget that what has become the soundtrack of my life may be shocking to others.
    “That noise is the reason I’m escaping.”
    “To Buffalo?” She is appropriately incredulous.
    “Chautauqua—I’m actually going to Chautauqua.”
    She seems to be considering something. “You don’t need to fly to Buffalo to get to Chautauqua. You could fly to Jamestown, New York. There’s a small airport there, and it’s much closer to where you’re headed.”
    “A small airport suggests planes that are also small,” I offer, more nervously than