Archives for 2004

I was awakened on Thursday by the sound of clanking and hammering in the basement. It seems that one of my mother’s half-century-old pipes picked the middle of the Great Blizzard of 2004 as the perfect time to spring a leak. Fortunately, my brother had the day off, discovered the leak by chance, and fixed it with minimal fuss. He can do that kind of thing, as well as every other kind of thing in the world that requires mechanical skill, whereas I can’t do much of anything beyond hanging and rehanging the pictures in the Teachout Museum. My poor father did his best to teach me how to fend for myself in the world of inanimate objects, but my brother scooped up all the relevant chromosomes, forcing me to live by my wits. Not that he’s short on wits, but he’s the strong, silent type (which didn’t stop him from winning a seat on the Smalltown City Council–he’s the family pol!), and as a rule he prefers doing things to discussing them. Our common ground is narrow–Westerns and family matters pretty much cover it–but we’re very close, especially for two such dissimilar folk, and if I were to find myself in the kind of jam that required bail or a getaway car, I’d call him first.

The blizzard is over, by the way, and though there’s just short of a foot of snow on the ground, life in Smalltown is slowly returning to normal. My brother and I took care of the day’s errands, after which I spent the afternoon working on my Washington Post column and reading one of the books I brought home to prepare for my next Commentary essay. I haven’t heard from Our Girl, but the Mutant has re-established contact via e-mail, and other holiday-related news is trickling into my mailbox from New York and Washington: it seems that one of my blogfriends is en route to an ashram in California, while another is headed for a dentist’s chair. I also learned, much to my delight, that Rachel Howard, the West Coast dance critic-blogger, praised All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine in the San Francisco Chronicle. (This link will take you there.) That’s my kind of Christmas present!

Alas, it turns out that our plans for Friday have been derailed by the weatherman. The surviving members of my mother’s family, plus such children and grandchildren as are within reach, have been getting together on Christmas Eve since time immemorial. My mother didn’t feel up to cooking for the whole clan this year, though, so we decided to eat out instead, and El Bracero being the only restaurant in Smalltown that’s open tonight, we figured on having chimichangas for Christmas. That was the plan, anyway, but the highways aren’t yet clear enough to allow the older siblings to drive with confidence, so our Christmas-eve family dinner has been cancelled. Sad news, to be sure, but my mother and I mean to make the most of it. Instead of slipping and sliding along the snow-covered streets of Smalltown, we’ll stay home, bake a turkey roll, watch Miracle on 34th Street (which I’ve never seen, believe it or not), and be grateful that we’re in the same place at the same time.

I don’t expect to be posting again until next week. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing between now and then, may it lift up your hearts as high as being with my family has lifted mine.

Merry Christmas!

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past,

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird”

As of this moment, Smalltown is covered with ten inches of snow, and more is supposed to come before morning. My brother spent the better part of the day skidding around southeast Missouri in a truck. Not me. I went outside just once, trudging to the end of the driveway to collect today’s Smalltown Standard Democrat (no hyphen, please). Though my mother begged me to pull on a pair of my late father’s boots first, I ventured forth into the winter night without even bothering to don a coat. I’m pretty sure she wanted to spank me when I came back in, but instead she settled for giving me a lecture about the dangers of catching cold. That done, we ate dinner, watched the weather on TV, then switched over to The Blues Brothers on AMC. I don’t expect there’ll be any more trips to the video store until Sunday, meaning that we’ve got to make the four movies I rented yesterday last until then.

For those of you who just joined us, I’m home for the holidays, and “About Last Night” is emanating from a rickety old card table set up in the middle of the guest bedroom of my mother’s house in Smalltown, U.S.A., located midway between St. Louis and Memphis. Smalltown is dialup country, meaning that it takes forever for me to tap my blogmail (thanks to all of you who wrote about my recent postings, by the way!), while most of my preferred blogs and Web sites load even more slowly. On the other hand, it’s not entirely unpleasant to be semi-detached from the outside world, and I can always count on the Standard Democrat to take care of my urgent news-related needs. Here are some of Wednesday’s headlines: Races Heating Up for School Boards. Hefty Fine Is Handed Down. Post Office Working Overtime. Holiday Drivers Must Take Extra Precautions. Casket Truck Driver Busted. Party Planned.

Needless to say, my mother and I haven’t been seeing many people since the snow started falling, but we did run into Mrs. Yeakey, my former babysitter, in Wal-Mart on Tuesday afternooon, just before we went home to hunker down for the big blow. Improbable as it may seem, the woman who took care of me four decades ago whenever my parents felt the need for a night on the town is alive, well, and as spry-looking as ever. (She’d attained a certain age even then, meaning that she must be eighty or so now.) Nobody ever gets very far away from his past in a small town–there’s always somebody just around the corner who knew you when you were in kneepants, and has at least one embarrassing story to tell.

I called Our Girl in Chicago in Detroit (she’s visiting her own family for the holidays) and the Mutant in New York (she isn’t) earlier this evening. Neither one was home, though, so my mother and I decided to live dangerously and raid our dwindling video stash for a second feature, Napoleon Dynamite. You might not think a seventy-four-year-old woman from Smalltown would find such fare amusing, but she’s always been receptive to off-center comedies, this one included.

We said goodnight after the credits rolled, and I set the thermostat and withdrew to my bedroom, there to check my e-mail one last time and choose a book with which to read myself to sleep. I looked out the window a moment ago and saw that the footprints I made when I picked up the Standard Democrat have vanished beneath a fresh layer of snow. I can’t see any tire tracks, either, which isn’t surprising. It’s been hours since anyone drove down our street. The only sounds I hear are the muffled whirr of the winter wind, the rumble of the downstairs furnace, and the unsure buzz of the ancient alarm clock on my nightstand that would wake me up if I needed to be anywhere on time come morning, which I don’t. Maybe I’ll do a little work on one of my unfinished pieces tomorrow–or maybe not. I haven’t yet tired of the exquisite privilege of having nothing to do.

Sleepwalking through the all-night drugstore

Baptized in fluorescent light

I found religion in the greeting-card aisle

Now I know Hallmark was right

And every pop song on the radio

Is suddenly speaking to me

Art may imitate life

But life imitates TV.

Ani DiFranco, “Superhero”

After trying in vain to make some headway on my Washington Post column, I decided to clear my head by taking an afternoon nap. I’d been reading earlier in the day about how the young Gustav Mahler played the first movement of his Second Symphony on the piano for Hans von B

“Let your characters talk a little longer about a little less.”

True Boardman (quoted in Leonard Maltin, The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio’s Golden Age)

A friend writes:

How is it to be home? What do your days consist of? Tell me tell me.

My days are for the most part happily uneventful. I always sleep late. I usually take my mother out to lunch (nowhere fancy–there aren’t any fancy places to take her in Smalltown!), after which we run whatever errands may need running. I brought home a couple of unfinished pieces that require my attention, but I haven’t yet started working on them. My brother and his family, who live three blocks away, frequently poke their heads in after dinner; otherwise, my mother and I do the dishes, watch a little TV or a movie, and chat contentedly about old times, local gossip, and whatever I may have been up to since my last visit home. She goes to bed around ten-thirty, after which I surf the Web, answer the day’s e-mail, blog a bit, and read myself to sleep. I packed four new books, David Thomson’s The Whole Equation, Ada Louise Huxtable’s brief life of Frank Lloyd Wright, the new Willem de Kooning biography, and the galleys of Doug Ramsey’s biography of Paul Desmond–more than I needed, but I’ve always been overambitious when it comes to holiday reading.

That’s normally about the size of it, but yesterday was different. We’d been talking about driving to Cape Girardeau to polish off our Christmas shopping, and when the weatherman told us on Monday that it was going to snow on Wednesday, we figured we’d better stop procrastinating and get the rest of it done while we still could. It happened that my mother’s boss was buying lunch in Cape on Tuesday for all the girls in the office (my septuagenarian mother, who continues to work in the mornings, finds it highly gratifying to be thought of as “one of the girls”), so I joined the party, and after lunch we got in my rental car and whizzed around town, keeping an eye on the cloud-filled sky in between stops. Once we’d worked our way to the bottom of the checklist, we turned around and headed for home. I popped a Louis Armstrong album into the CD player and told stories about Louis’ New Orleans childhood as we listened to “Blues in the Night” and “Just One of Those Things” and watched the clouds grow thicker.

Back in Smalltown, we picked up some just-in-case groceries, filled a prescription, bought one last present at Wal-Mart, and rented four videos that I thought my mother might enjoy seeing, The Secret Lives of Dentists, Napoleon Dynamite, Open Range (she likes Westerns), and Stuck on You. We got home just in time to catch the five o’clock weather on TV. It started raining around ten, right on time, and I went to bed with the benign glow of achievement that comes from knowing that you’re as ready as you can possibly be for a two-day blow.

I woke before sunrise, looked out my bedroom window, and saw at least two inches of snow glittering beneath the streetlights of Hickory Drive. Content at last, I got back in bed and returned to my mundane dreams.

– To pick up on the theme of an earlier posting, my newest friend is in the same key as I am–or, to use a metaphor drawn from a different realm, we’re on the same page, and we realized it almost as soon as we met. A person who knows us both well told me that she thought we were “long-lost siblings, separated at birth and finally together again.” Such intense and immediate rapport is a gift akin to grace, and thus never to be taken lightly, not least because it is so rare.

Only yesterday, she ended an e-mail to me with the following sentence: “Hoping your dreams entertain–let me know if any good ones grant you the luck of remembering.” As I read it, I asked myself, What part of my destiny is to be made manifest by my having found a friend capable of saying such a thing to me within days of our first meeting?

– Being a writer is a strange business: you have an experience, and right in the middle of it words start taking shape in your head. The trick, I suppose, is not to let the words get between you and the experience. I’m usually pretty good about that, but I can recall more than one occasion in my life when I found myself thinking coolly detached thoughts in the least likely and least appropriate of circumstances, from intimate moments to deathbed scenes. I can’t think of many traits that are less attractive, since the point of life is to live it while it’s happening, but the writer in me is always on duty, and though he frequently nods off at his post, it doesn’t take much to wake him up.

– I don’t often surprise Our Girl in Chicago, but I brought the trick off the other day when I mentioned in passing that I’d never in my life asked a woman out simply because I thought she was cute. Our Girl was astonished to hear this, and told me so.