theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
How to clear out a one-bedroom apartment — with fifteen years of loving/living in it — in only six days: it helps to have worked a few theater strikes. Just because a 6-inch chunk of 2×4 with two screws broken off in it is a perfectly good piece of lumber is not a good reason to keep it.
It’s also essential that you get yourself a cousin who is an absolute mensch. I couldn’t have done it without you, Rita.
When you’re shopping for an assisted living facility for yourself, check the fine print in the house rules and regulations to make sure that you can have a glass of wine in your own dang room.
When you’re cleaning out the apartment of someone who can’t do it for herself, and you’re standing in the trash bags aisle of Longs Drugs on a Sunday evening, spend the extra coin and get the ones with a drawstring top.
Lots of little tasks accomplished today; the sad thing is, none of them are actually written down on a to-do list. This is just dealing with little piles of stuff all over the house.
I rotated a couple of volumes to a backlog shelf to make room for some new fiction coming in. I’m reading my way through the Updike Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy about as fast as he published them. The Queneau is a re-read: someone pointed out that even though it’s published as a novel, it’s laid out like a play, or perhaps a screenplay, so I’m wondering whether it’s actually stageworthy.
A scent of hot dust, and some recollections are triggered. A sense memory that I’ve been meaning to write up for a while.
When I lived with my grandparents in Piqua, Ohio, in the mid 1960s, the Piqua Baptist Church sat at the northwest corner of Broadway and Greene Street. Dark, deep maroon-colored brick. Side entrance on Greene, which is where I usually entered. A Congregationalist church catercorner (no one could explain what was different about their faith), and another church (Catholic? Methodist?) up the block.
My grandparents were members, and one of my grandfather’s stewardship roles was non-resident caretaker of the facility. I think he preferred the term “custodian,” but frankly a lot of the work was janitorial. He was notorious for making the building a priority over everything else in his life; we had a tiff at my college graduation because he was anxious to get back home to check on the church. My grandmother helped him in his caretaking duties, and while I lived with them, I did, too. It was a painless way to earn my allowance.
Mostly what I did was to empty wastebaskets once a week. So I would make a circuit through the building, stopping in all the Sunday school rooms, the minister’s office, all around. Trash containers rank with stale lilies, used tissues, hardened chewing gum. The classrooms were arranged in a gallery along three sides of the basement multi-purpose room, with a kitchen at the other end. Walls faced with painted board and batten paneling. For the brief period of time that I was in Boy Scouts, our troop meetings were here. Stairways up to the rest of the church, and at the far end, a short flight to the furnace room, a convenient short cut back to the rest of the building.
The building was heated with a coal-fired furnace (hence my grandfather’s frequent trips to check on things). The furnace room was dark, but neither frightening nor particularly cosy. Just black dusty. From time to time, we all have the dream of moving through a familiar building, passing through rooms we’ve never seen before; for me, that dream usually begins in the church furnace room, where back in a corner is a door I’ve never seen before, that leads to someplace behind the baptistry, and on.
Back upstairs, facing the altar from the sanctuary, the baptistry was at the right, the minister’s office off left. The choir stood behind the altar. I don’t remember an organ, but there must have been one. Behind, and on the second story, were two rooms open to the sanctuary. I believe these were rooms set aside for mothers with infants, so that they could participate as much as possible without neglecting their babies. In one of these upper rooms I once found a booklet of devotions. The authors/editors were apparently holdouts from the Chicago Tribune’s spelling modernization plan, because each passage ended with a thot to be pondered.
Once I was finished with my chores, I would sit in the office, at the minister’s desk, and read whatever was available. Generally the calendars and addresses preserved under the glass desktop. I would play solitaire—that is, until my grandmother got wind of this. She didn’t actually call it “the Devil’s picture book,” but she made her feelings clear. (My grandfather, who would sometimes take me to play pool at his lodge, didn’t seem to mind.)
Each week my grandparents would dust the pews with ratty gray rags and fragrant polish. Once, I helped with a special project. In this church, communion wine was taken in individual glasses, in the pews. There were racks for the used glasses in the pew backs, on either side of the hymnal racks. I seem to recall three holes per rack. It seems that the clatter of all those cordial glasses being racked at the same time got to bothering someone, so one week I helped put rubber gaskets in the racks. Much quieter.
The church has since moved to a new building. The Broadway and Greene site is a parking lot.
I don’t think that my shelf of books on deck to be read has been this short in years—maybe not since I started doing theater. There are a couple of things here that I’ve started and put aside, and a couple of titles that I may bail on. Watson is a promotional copy, and Nagel and Newman is a re-read from graduate school days. I thought I was done with the Carter until I realized that I apparently had never read The Bloody Chamber, one of the volumes collected in Burning Your Boats.
Good thing that there is a box of books on its way from my bookseller!
I’ve covered a bit more ground on foot, comparatively, than I have driving or flying this year.
Not too much time or money for traveling this year, so the list of out-of-town places I overnighted in this year is short:
(In response to Via Negativa’s Offers.)
I’ve been offered a job several times, and most of them I have accepted. Before I started writing software full-time, I was offered a number-crunching job by a federal agency on a January 19. The next administration came in the next day and froze hiring.
I was offered the opportunity to join Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. I didn’t.
Bill offered me a ride home on the back of his moped. It was something like six blocks down Lake Street in Minneapolis. I was such the dare-devil, riding without a helmet.
Sarah and Casey offered me leads and advice on getting work doing voice-overs.
Because market rates had fallen so much, my mortgage holder offered me a no-cost, no-strings re-fi—all I had to do was show up at closing. This was a long time ago.
A mediocre university, one of my safety schools, offered me a full scholarship. I turned them down.
Cheryl offered to teach me guitar, and even gave me her old instrument to encourage me to practice.
Over the last twenty years, many directors and producers have called to offer me parts in plays. I think some of us do theater just because we like getting the phone call and the chance to say, “I would be happy to.”
Senior year, G. asked me if I was interested in helping him cheat on an exam. I ended the conversation before he had the chance to offer me something in return.
There’s something to be said for going to the polls in the middle of the day. I was in and out in ten minutes, even with a stop to talk to Vivien. My precinct was offering the choice of machine or paper ballots. I went with the high-tech option.
At my local Whole Foods, by the check stands, there are six banners hung at their corners from the ceiling, sort of like the championshop banners at Boston Garden. By a quirk of the HVAC in the building, one of the middle banners (third from the right) is perpetually caught in the air flow, swinging back and forth from side to side, looking like it’s having much more fun than the rest of us.
I’ve just returned from a family business trip that consisted of mostly sorting paper, so I am all fired up to do more of the same here at home. I’m going to deal with the crew of dust nubbins under my monitor; I’m going to ask myself, Do you really need this stack of paper? When I threw out my stack of utility bills from Northern States Power (the electricity company for the Twin Cities) several years ago, I never missed them.
Meanwhile, my connectivity at home is sluggish, especially weekday evenings. My wireless connection to the router cuts out for five seconds at a time, and even wired, I’m seeing timeouts. Maybe the internet has too much clutter in it.
Well, the team-building exercise part of the trip didn’t turn out to be much, but my director’s unit from the office (software engineering, QA, documentation, and network operations) spent an enjoyable sail on Chesapeake Bay on the Woodwind II out of Annapolis—at least most of us had a good time.
The Woodwind II is a schooner, fitted with two masts and four sails: aft to fore, mainsail, staysail, fisherman’s, and jib. According to lore, the fisherman’s sail evolved from the practice of hanging fishing nets in the area above the staysail on the mainmast and aft of the jib sail at the bow: sailors found that the nets caught some extra wind, and so this space was filled with another sail.
The idea of the team-building exercise was that we would split into four teams, two on yards controlling sails, one at the helm, and one navigating. Captain Duncan and his crew would teach each team the elements of the station, and then the teams would rotate around and we would teach each other. This didn’t work out so well in practice, but it did mean that most of us got a turn at the wheel as well as duty pulling rope. The crew were very good-natured about leading a group of clumsy office workers through the necessary tasks, along with fetching blown-away hats. And it probably didn’t hurt that one of us was an experienced sailor (Jody); there was lots of time on this 4-1/2 tour to kick back and swap stories. Captain Duncan kept up a good patter of historical lore (how Bloody Point got its name, for instance), bad jokes, and “tips” like “a stationary object [like a bridge piling] always has the right of way.”
We sailed as far south as Bloody Point light (at left), which marks the shoals at the southern tip of Kent Island, up and down the South River, then a turn at Thomas Point light (at right) and back into port. On my turn at the wheel, I was beginning to get the feel of steering to trim as opposed to steering to course (or to a landmark) as we moved up the South River. I think it was when we crossed a stretch where a scattering of crab pots were set that crew member Rachel took over for me.
Into the bus and over the Susquehanna and Delaware with a group of volunteers from the Washington Unit to visit the National Headquarters of Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic in Princeton, N.J. The satellite radio in the bus kept kicking out as we passed under bridges (just as well, ’cause the vocal standards station that our driver chose had far too much Sinatra for my taste), and we spent a few minutes driving around an adjacent office park before we found our building, but getting anywhere in the Northeast Corridor in three hours is a blessing. The one-story building is between U.S. 1 (Brunswick Pike) and the main Amtrak line, on the other side of the Pike from the main university campus.
We were greeted by John Kelly, CEO, and Tom Butler Duncan (Thanks, Kathryn!) and then toured the facility, pretty much every place except the payroll department. John noted that vision-impaired borrowers continue to decline in proportionate numbers: 80% of new registrants are learning-disabled (in other words, somewhere along the broad continuum of characteristics known as dyslexia). The organization’s ambitious goal is to reach 1 million of the estimated 2 million Americans who could benefit from audio-assisted learning.
The textbooks that RFB&D records aren’t retained afterward, so the only books to be found were in this corner of Library Services, the acquisitions department, if you will. White stickers on the spines identify each book by a five-character shelf number. The org acquires two copies of each title, one for the reader and one for the director/quality monitor.
All new recordings are direct to digital, but there is a sizable collection of legacy analog recordings. This storage room (left) was at one time filled with master tapes, but now it’s being cleared out as the tapes are converted to digital format in this area (right). What used to be a big room with analog tape duplication equipment is now largely empty, being backfilled with desks from staffers who had been located elsewhere. Alas, my snaps of the digital production facilities, including four CD duplication machines, are not release-worthy. The data center is onsite, and surprisingly small. But then again, audio doesn’t eat storage the way video does.
More chat back in the conference room before we hopped on the bus for home. The organization will soon be piloting a program of web-based distribution (to augment the current CD mailings) with the possibility of downloads to MP3 players: borrowers are clamoring for this. Volunteers, in the past only used for production, are now being sought for outreach as well. Teachers are especially wanted to help follow up with members to make sure they’re getting all they can out of the program. And I came away with an idea or two to perhaps follow up on.