To Flick That Thing

 

Just sat and worked from early till late.  A dull sense of accomplishment as the cabal of to-dos assembled before you are laid low, one by one.  But there are reinforcements and just as your day is ending those folks on the other side of the planet are suddenly responding to all the things you tossed them earlier in your day. 

 

I was glad, therefore to welcome Ryan to the house.  In the middle of a long slog it was my wife who notified me that someone was at the door.  Portly, bald with a beard and benighted with confidence and some ability to gab, Ryan introduced himself, said “no thank you” to coffee twice and lead the way with me in-tow down to basement.  Once again I was there, confronting the array of copper tubes that resembled the subway map of a large metropolis. 

Ryan looked around.  Felt different pipes.  Asked me a few questions, some of which I could answer.  He asked if our water had a lot of calcium.  I knew our water had stuff and that we had things to try to adjust this.  He flicked a the lever on a little diamond shaped hub and flicked it again.  “There you go.  You hear that?  The warm water’s flowing.  That ought to trip the boiler.”  Sure enough, the furnace kicked on.  “Yeah.  That’s the water feeder.  You just have to flick that thing to loosen the calcium build-up.”  Huh.  Cool. 

 

Certainly, one and then another pipe seemed to be getting warmer.  He also counseled me schedule an annual cleaning wherein they’d replace my low-water-cut-off device which was dripping.  But this was a not a pressing emergency.  I also needed to cut out and install a “T” to purge the system of the errant air that was in there, confusing the system into thinking all was sufficiently warm. 

 

Learned a lot from Ryan.  Including where it was he lived, which is up in the Catskills.  Raised in Hyde Park, he’d moved up and out to the Catskill Mountains.  He kept referring to where we were as “down here” and I began to consider it from his perspective.   “You know where the Neversink Reservoir is?”  I hadn’t.  He names a few other towns that I cannot place and my mind’s map can only extend from 55 out towards Ashokan Reservoir and he is describing something in between which I can only generally surmise.  But he speaks about them all with brio and he makes me curious as to why I don’t already know about these places.   Ryan keeps talking out in our driveway.  He doesn’t seem to want to go.  We learn about his high school experience.  And I sort of don’t mind as I know what’s waiting for me once he’s off and on his way.

 

 

 

Wednesday, 10/14/20

 

Her Room Is Freezing

 

It’s not good when your kid’s cold.  I didn’t need to be taught that this was so.   The house has heat, but her room doesn’t.  And, standing in front of the thermostat in her bathrobe and bare feet today she loudly made clear that this was so.  I checked.  She’s right.  Her room is freezing.  And I vowed to do something.  And insisted she throw on some socks.

I turned first to my father, who reminded me of things like thermostat manuals that might be inside of those binders the former owner’s had kindly left behind for us.  And while there is a wealth of material inside, I didn’t find anything I could use.  I searched online and downloaded the manual in question, fiddled accordingly and stimulated no new heat.  My dad recommended our old neighbor who knows the place well.  I haven’t seen him since the virus began and when I called him today, we caught up on much and he graciously suggested he’d by in a few hours.

 

There’s a lot of copper piping down there.  Shame I never met my granddad who was a plumber.  He probably could have taught me something but as it is I'm befuddled.  My neighbor less so.  This is cold.  That ones hot.  If I flick this switch, they all start to get warmer.  Where does this one lead to?  What about this one?  We keep going up and returning, trying to discern if anything is having an impact.  Nothing is. 

He counsels me to call the fuel company.  Because you have a maintenance agreement with them, they will make a visit right away, I am told.  This never mattered much to me when I was living elsewhere during the winter.  The girls had already eaten and I was fasting, but my wife offered and our neighbor obliged to join us for a meal, and we talked about the neighborhood and then the election.  Everyone seems convinced that Biden will win and that Trump will not leave.

 

 

 

Tuesday, 10/13/20

 

Soggy Porch Chair Cushions

 

Empathized a bit with the pandemic youth out there.  The youth who take all their classes on-line.  A training, I had.   Trainings are good.  In a corporate setting they can be for a day or two or longer.  But on Zoom they are very difficult to concentrate on, aren’t they?  Sitting at a computer with access to everything and the ability to step away, one labors to concentrate and be genuine. 

 

It's Monday.  It’s raining.  It’s Columbus Day, Indigenous People’s Day and the schools are closed.  I won’t be driving my daughter over to school this morning.  But I’m only one of a few people in the U.S. on this call and the holiday has no relevance.  It’s raining.  We can always use some rain.  But it effects the mood and I’m sullen.  I bring the training with me and set it up in the vestibule dutifully turned up high, and with my shoes, dog-heeled down I slosh out on the porch and lug the soggy porch chair cushions inside, one by one.

A new book.  A second ‘western’ in a row.  Read Sebastian Barry’s “Days Without End” over the weekend, which was an oddly intimate invitation to Irish immigrant innocence and soldierly evil as narrated by the young Thomas McNulty. But I wasn’t invested and I found it a quick read.  This morning’s western has also been up on my shelf since I’d impulse grabbed it after seeing it referred to the other reading-man’s western on the back of John William’s “Butcher’s Crossing.”  “Warlock” has been reprinted by (read: unimpeachably legitimized by) the New York Review of Books.  Dense, dusty, conversational, it’s a slower read and soon I’m wondering about just how it was small western communities established law and kept the peace. 

 

It’s still raining.  I can’t move things up from the garage and I can’t go for a bike ride if it’s raining.  But it stops in the early afternoon and I get a cloudy ride in.  I wheelbarrow of books up here into this room.  The colors, I’ll confess, are accentuated in the wet.  And while it feels like nothing could be more natural than these colors it is apparently the case that all this land was covered by yellowy chestnuts that died off in a blight and allowed room for these hickories and oaks and maples to flourish. Every day now a bit more denuded.

 

 

 

Monday, 10/12/20

 

A Can of Scungili

 

My dad and I had talked about a bike ride up to the Coppersea Distillery this morning.  It’s precisely the point to which I bike every other day or so anyway where the trail crosses the Wallkill River and Springtown Road.  I read a message quickly yesterday where he appeared to cancel, but instead, today he clarified that he still hoped to meet.  But he’d drive, rather than bike.  I invited the Mrs. to join and was assured with a definitive maybe that she ought to be along later.

Columbus Day weekend, the trail was full of people and I wondered if our destination might not be mobbed.  He got there first.  He always does.  I biked along the road and caught him standing there near the head of the parking lot.  I directed him towards the barn in the back where they serve these remarkable sour whiskey slushies.  One woman was before us and a couple came behind, that was it.  We had the back yard where they’ve thrown out some big deck chairs in the field all to ourselves.  And up in the distance, across the meadow and the canopy was a distinct section of the Gunk cliff face. Every once-and-a-while I looked back towards to the parking lot to see if my wife hadn’t surprised me and actually shown up. 

 

I got back home, and settled my bike back the garage.  My wife asked if I was home already and I confirmed that I was.  “I was just about to head out to see you guys.”  We moved furniture instead.  There is life’s load container’s worth of goods in our garage and we are slowly bringing them up to the house.  A big green chair nearly overwhelmed us but by twisting and rotating we finally anchored it there in the living room.  I move books up by the wheel barrow full and I’m perplexed because we’ll fill these shelves up before long and I’m convinced a forth shelf is somehow missing.

 

I tried to make a soup with barley this evening. Two soups, really, as one is for the vegan lass.   I should remember to go easy on barley.  It’s a soup, sorta grain and its chewy and pleasant but it expands and it seemed to take over the main broth to which I’d committed two thirds of the dry barley I had.  At the fish market they had a can of scungili.  That is such a remarkable word, that I bought the can in part so I had a reason to use the word over and over again.  It means conch in Italian, though it sounds like a body part you shouldn't say aloud.  The scungili and the frozen octopus and the stock all tasted good.  But there was too much of that puffed-up barley.

Sunday, 10/11/20

Trees, Deliberate and Commanding

 

I know I’ve gone on and on about the one, Claude McKay.  Saturday morning, up early in spite of myself and I lay around as a sunny day appeared and finished the biography I’d been working on: “Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in Harlem,” by Wayne F. Cooper.   Mr. Cooper does a good job of filling in the many gaps that McKay’s own autobiography, or the more recent biography by Gary Holcomb, which only covers a subset of his life.  The theme he traces is McKay’s search for a mentor / father figure throughout his life, from his older brother, to Mr. Jekyll in Jamaica, Frank Harris and later Max Eastman in New York.  This searching seemingly culminates during his final years with a conversion to Catholicism.

 

Not for the first time do you read about a historical figure of such dignity struggling, unrecognized and want to reach out across the century and encourage Claude McKay to keep writing, to take care of himself.  He was, as Cooper suggests giving an early voice for ‘black power’ and no one around him was quite ready for it, in the way he was offering it.  He wrote to get paid.  His first effort was a best-seller. The subsequent works were even better but sold poorly.  Eventually no one would publish his work.  How excruciating to have had to sell one’s craft during the Great Depression.  How demoralizing for him at fifty to have to take a job as a riveter during the war, at some factory in New Jersey, where pushed himself to the point of suffering a stroke.  The black intelligentsia didn’t want him, the communists, aligned with Stalin, considered him an enemy.  And he was often his own worst foe. 

 

We drove down to the City today.  My older one had a friend from college who was doing an internship there in town.  She wanted a chance to meet up with another human, in person.  None of these guys understand much of New York’s geography and my gal innocently suggested we drop them off near Chelsea, drive up to the New York Botanical Garden for a look around, return downtown and pick them up so we could head over to Flushing for a proper Chinese dinner.  No one is comfortable in subways or Ubers during Covid and, well, OK, let’s try to do the itinerary as you've suggested. 

 

Down the throughway to the Palisades Parkway, over the GW and down the FDR to drop her off over near Twentieth and Sixth.  The little one was going to get some ramen on her own, then they’d rendezvous and we’d meet them back down here in about two hours so we weren’t late for our Haidilao dinner reservation.  Sunny day, heading up Sixth Avenue, just my wife and I now we got a call around Fifty Seventh Street suggesting we’d dropped them off in the wrong part of town.  She needed to be taken to Sixtieth and Second.  I groaned but eventually mastered myself.  Fortunately someone thought to push the restaurant reservation out by thirty minutes and in about that time we were once again finally heading to the Bronx.

The New York Botanical Garden is a place I never thought to visit when I lived in New York.  Stunning and perfectly aligned with my renewed interest in identifying trees, I marveled at the beautiful unencumbered maturation of two and three-hundred-year-old trees.  Before a large Victorian building in the center of the grounds was a row of mature Tulip Trees, deliberate and commanding.   But we only had twenty eight minutes or so to enjoy the grounds before concurring we’d need to leave now if we were to rendezvous and make out reservation.  We did, and the dinner was the best Chinese food we’d had in a restaurant in over a year.  Won’t be able to eat outside like that for much longer.

Saturday, 10/10/20

Assume A Granite Throne

 

Reveling yesterday in a walk up to the top of the Trapps cliff face.  I’d been up here once, when I was seventeen or so but have no proper recollection.   At that time I certainly might have noticed but wouldn’t have paid much attention to the foliage.  Having been up here a few times in recent weeks, I’ve become attuned to how the tree cover shifts.  There are many trees that proliferate up here that don’t show up much down in the valley.  In particular the chestnut oaks with their long saw tooth leaves, the big floppy, bear oak and the supersized leaves of the stripped maple.  They are everywhere up here and I’ve a mind to replant a sapling down at our house.

 

Remembered, where I usually do not, to bring the pair of binoculars I have on my desk and which I generally use to look up this way.   Unsurprisingly I cannot see our house.  I can’t see these cliffs either behind the big maple trees that are standing in the way down toward the trail. I can spot the tall dorms of the university and the compound where my dad lives is clear to the both of us.  But I can barely trace the road out of town.  Where is that large field with the cows just up the trail?  I had thought I would be better at this having spent this last year in the area.

 

My dad asks me to go ahead.  I do.  He doesn’t want to feel pressure from behind.  I’m fine to head on up the steep rock shelf.  But of course, I worry as well.  What if he should slip and fall?  Brave, he needs to take his time on the slanted shelf, covered in white pine needles.  Afford him the dignity he requests, I decide and make my way on to the next remarkable bluff, where I assume a granite throne and consider all below, once again. 

 

We walked along the ledge for a while.  My dad knew the way, but he became increasingly agitated.  Where is that turn?  It’s off to the right up here?  Could we have passed it?  I have a call coming up on the hour.  There will be no reception here.  “When do you suppose we’ll be back to the parking lot.”  Looks like and indeed I do in fact, get to the parking lot just as the call is starting.  Fortunately, I’ve warned everyone that I’ll need an additional five minutes.  I drive down to the scenic overlook where there has to be good reception and do my best to kick off this conf call way up above the Hudson Valley.

 

 

 

Friday, 10/09/20

 

Haul It Up And

 

Started the long process of bringing thousands of books up from the second garage into this building and up on the shelves. Selections that had a certain order:  All the books about Burma.  Here are a few of them.  And they’re piled up on top of books about Korea and two or three selections of Joseph Brodsky’s work.  I see D.H. Lawrence.  Pausing to consider why I’d thought to read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” when I did. I remembered that there is a scene in Venice and it must have been part of some preparation for a visit to that city a few years ago. 

 

There was once an entire bookshelf with nothing but China titles.  There was a row of nothing but Lonely Planets.  Why do I keep those?  I imagine that a twenty-year-old guide to Thailand might have some nugget of memory embedded, it might be useful in recalling the name of some site, or evoke that time when we were there.  Though it is rather unlikely that most of them will ever be opened again. 

 

Agitated, dealing with a “service provider” who isn’t providing much service.  Emails that didn’t make sense. Phone calls that were not returned in a timely manner.  Excuses.  “I have so many emails.”  Why would you think it appropriate to tell me that?  I try very hard not to be rude.  Rewrite messages to soften the tone.  Breathe before responding.  But this person has repeatedly wasted my time by not being clear.  By not being professional.

 

And, then for the first time in months, I fired up our push mower.   The landscaping group we used earlier in the summer were also wanting in basic service levels.  Inexpensive but unreliable.  Rather than call them, I figured I’d do the last mow of the season.  The yard has leaves all over it.  But the grass, which isn’t growing much anymore certainly needs to be cut, once last time.  And though I usually go for a long bike ride every day, I enjoy the trek around the yard.  It’s a clunky, older mower and it takes work to haul it up and around.  Once and then twice it conks out after I chew up a rock.  Later, after I refill it with the bottom of the old gas canister in the garage, some of the fluid that pours in looks coagulated and dark, unlike the clear petrol.  I got the mower to start again.  But then, when it puttered out, it would no longer start.  I didn’t have the energy to do any more mower diagnostics, though I assume this bad gas may be the culprit.

 

 

 

Thursday, 10/08/20