Word: abbeys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Brown and Chang defeated Brown's John Abbey and Jason Baker, 6-3, 7-6 (7-5), to take the "B" doubles title...
...takes seven days to complete its journey, which leaves plenty of time for passengers to disembark along the way and explore more closely the river's treasures. The monks of St. Wandrille may offer a tour of their abbey, an anthology of architecture that includes not only medieval ruins but also a 15th century barn moved onto the abbey grounds a few years ago from a nearby village. In another crook of the river is the Abbaye de Jumieges; William the Conqueror made a point of appearing for its consecration...
...author's nights to remember are less dramatic. Recalling his marathon coverage of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, Baker downplays the pageantry in favor of offstage vignettes, like long lines of colonial potentates in animal skins and gold braid forming to use Westminster Abbey's toilets. The Eisenhower White House produces little excitement, partly because there wasn't much, but mainly because Press Secretary James Hagerty ran a "tight, tight ship." Later there was the smothering style of Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson: "For you, Russ, I'd leak like a sieve...
Henry Lightcap, hero of the present novel, is a freestyle philosopher and romantic crank, madly in love with the West as it used to be and waitresses and barmaids as some of them still are. He shares Abbey's employment history, his age more or less (late middle), his marrying habit (Abbey's present wife is his fifth) and his sour gallantry. His position on beer-can tossing is the master's: the highway is an abomination, and thus the litter that sullies it is a blow for truth and beauty...
...folks, it's mournful country music that makes your blue eyes water. Call it the Sick-Dog Blues. Abbey, who must have written this on a banjo, not a typewriter, is feeling sorry for his hero and probably for himself too. What saves the book is that he is skilled enough to pull sympathetic readers into his own mood of regret, not just for long-gone youth and foolishness, but for small-town, big-sky Western life as it was before shopping malls and industrial parks ate the best...