The Missus – Page 12

When Appliances Weep

March 31, 2009 by John 11 Comments

In his standup-comedy days, forty-plus years ago, Woody Allen did a routine called “Mechanical Objects.”

It was a narrative about the highly mixed blessings of living at the tail end of the Machine Age, at the start of The Age of Electronicus. I found the following transcript of the routine on the Web; I can’t swear to its accuracy, but it conforms to what I remember:

I have never in my life had good relationships with mechanical objects of any sort. Anything that I can’t reason with or kiss or fondle, I get into trouble with.

I have a clock that runs counter-clockwise for some reason. My toaster pops up my toast and shakes it, burns it. I hate my shower. I’m taking a shower, and somebody in America uses his water. That’s it for me, y’know, I leap from the tub, scalded.

I have a tape recorder, I paid a hundred and fifty dollars for, and as I talk into it, it goes, “I know, I know.”

About three years ago I couldn’t stand it anymore. I was home one night. I called a meeting with my possessions. I got everything I owned into the living room. My toaster, my clock, my blender. They’d never been in the living room before. And I spoke to them.

I opened with a joke.

And then I said, “I know what’s going on, and cut it out!…”

And I spoke to each appliance. I was really articulate. Then I put them back, and I felt good.

Two nights later, I’m watching my portable television set, and [the picture on] the set begins to jump up and down, and I go up to it. And I always talk before I hit, and I said, “I thought we had discussed this — what’s the problem?” And the set kept going up and down, so I hit it, and it felt good hitting it, and I beat the hell out of it. I was really great, I tore off the antenna, and I felt very virile.

And two days later I go to my dentist in New York. (I had gone to my dentist, but I had a deep cavity, and he’d sent me to a chiropodist.) I’m going into a building in mid-town New York, and they have those elevators, and I hear a voice say, “Kindly call out your floors, please,” and I say, “Sixteen,” and the doors close and the elevator starts going up to sixteen.

And on the way up the elevator says to me, “Are you the guy that hit the television set?” I felt like an ass, y’know, and it took me up and down fast between floors, and it threw me off in the basement. It yelled out something that was anti-Semitic.

I thought of this story the other night while helping The Missus with a bit of the evening’s dinner preparations.

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A Hrooom of One’s Own

March 10, 2009 by John 15 Comments

I know a fellow I’ll call Guy, although that’s not his real name. (He’s no longer a Boy, but not yet — not consistently– a Man, either, except in the most literal and least important sense.)

Guy recently took a weekend trip with his wife. It was a long six-hour drive in a rented car, of a US make and model which Guy knew of but had never even ridden in, let alone driven. They finally arrived, with relief, at the hotel — a chain which he had never before patronized — and unpacked their stuff in the fourth-floor room before heading out for a bite to eat.

The restaurant to which they’d been directed was farther from the hotel than they’d been led to believe, and the traffic heavier, so he was behind the wheel another half-hour before he and his wife could sit at a table, have a couple of drinks, and relax over dinner with the fellow they were meeting.

Then it was back to the rental car, back to the hotel, back to their room, and time indeed to get ready for bed. Guy’s wife wasn’t tired, and she’d be involved in a conference over the next 24 hours so wanted to prepare some materials and wind down before going to bed. But Guy himself looked forward to it after all the driving. He thought he might read for no more than a half-hour before drifting off.

He was standing in the living area in the room as his wife flipped through the channels on the big flat-panel TV. He was unbuttoning the cuffs of his shirt sleeves before getting undressed, when he felt the floor vibrate, subtly, beneath his feet:

…hroooom…
…hroooom…
…hroooom…
…hroooom…

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Saving the Criminal Justice System from Itself

March 9, 2009 by John 6 Comments

The name of the fellow over there at the left is William (Bill) Dillon. At the time this picture was taken, in November, 2008, Dillon was 49 years old.

An unremarkable photo, really. A man in middle age, playing a guitar in what appears to be a kitchen of a suburban house or apartment somewhere.

But the circumstances surrounding that photo: remarkable indeed.

Until earlier on the day when that picture was taken, Bill Dillon had been imprisoned by the State of Florida for 27 years. His sentence, for the crime of murder in the first degree, had been life imprisonment.

Tsk, tsk, you may think. Once again, the bleeding-heart criminal justice system sets a murderer free to kill again. Perhaps you wonder how the people around Dillon could possibly seem so relaxed. They must be accomplices, you imagine.

Er, no.

For it turns out that Dillon did not commit — could not have committed — the crime for which he was convicted and imprisoned.

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*Glan Rhondda**

March 2, 2009 by John 5 Comments

In 1990, having finished the first (the blitz) draft of Crossed Wires — during whose composition I read mysteries almost exclusively — I stopped at a bookstore in South Jersey, hungry for something to read. My appetite of the moment was for a book, any book, which I’d been curious about for years but had never read. I wanted something substantial, preferably not overpowering (no Finnegan’s Wake, please). A classic, but one which I could carry in a hip pocket.

I departed the store with Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.

Many have had a similar chance encounter with the tales of King Arthur, and like me have said to themselves, “Hmm…,” and then gone on to investigate something more of the story, which leads them to more, and then even further to other related back alleys of myth and literature. The hobby seems so innocent at first, just a pleasant diversion — deluded (as such hapless folk are) into thinking it’s all “just” the story of Knights of Old, the Round Table, the Holy Grail, Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot…

Finally they emerge at the far end (if they ever do) blinking, as though they’ve just spent a week spelunking and emerged at high noon in the desert. (High noon, right. It wouldn’t much surprise us to be greeted by Gary Cooper, wielding a broadsword instead of a revolver: that’s how surrealistic the experience can feel.)

Suddenly they know more than they ever imagined knowing about odd stuff like metallurgy, pre-Roman Britain, the odd and quite mysterious turnings and mergings of one legend into another, medieval French Romances, ecclesiastical rumor and history, and… Wales.

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Dream Talk

February 15, 2009 by John 6 Comments

Somewhere around here we’ve got one of those little reference books to help you interpret your dreams. You know the ones — structured sort of like a thesaurus, so when you look up a word or phrase (“coffee,” say, or “horror movie” or “lava lamp”) you get an instant read on what that object or experience represents. Especially if you look up more than one dream-thing at a time, and combine the interpretations. (“You are concerned about sleeping too much” + “You need more Citizen Kane and less hockey-mask Jason in your life” + “You vaguely remember your life of 30-40 years ago” = “Dude…”)

I need to find it to look up my two most recent (remembered) dreams. At least they were on different days, so there’s no chance (is there?) that they’re related. Both had a curious visual quality to them — not quite animated, and not quite like viewed as an old scratchy film, but not not quite not animated or scratchy, either.

Sunday morning, minutes before waking

I dream that I am lying in bed, and that I am in that pleasant half-conscious state where one has the option of getting out of bed right that moment or drowsing a little longer. In the dream, I opt to get out of bed finally when I hear dream-voices.

In the dream’s master bathroom, our next-door neighbor (whom I will call Mrs. L) is discussing something with The Missus. Mrs. L has a clipboard in one hand, which she consults or annotates from time to time, and I get the distinct impression that Mrs. L is our landlady (although we don’t rent this house).

My dream-self gets out of bed. Uncharacteristically — so uncharacteristically that I know this must be a dream — I’m not self-conscious about standing there in my underwear. I kind of give the women a little finger-wave and then, because I obviously can’t use the master bathroom at the moment, I walk briskly down the short hall to the guest bathroom.

But you know, there’s something odd about this guest bathroom. Or rather, some things.

The tub is gone. There is no sign a tub ever occupied that part of the bathroom: the wall is blank, the tile floor extends right up to the wall. There is nothing at all in that roughly 3’x6′ area. Nothing hangs on the wall. It’s just… empty.

There is no toilet.

The vanity is lower, only about thigh-high or so, and not as broad as the real thing. It’s like a two-thirds-scale model vanity, in fact. No mirror is on the wall above it.

Everywhere — around the edges where the vanity meets the wall and floors, between the tiles — the grout is fresh.

“Uh, honey?” my dream-self calls. “What happened to the guest bathroom?”

The Missus materializes at my side. “Oh,” she explains, “the pipes were clogged.”

And that’s when I woke up.
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“Shoulda Thoughta That.” And the Worst. Songs. Evah.

January 27, 2009 by John 7 Comments

One of The Missus’s ongoing laments involves the infamous curve, which she seems forever ahead of. “Did you see,” she’ll say to me, “that [insert name of formerly unknown person] just made [insert some number which includes many zeroes and a currency symbol] from [insert random clever idea here]? I can’t believe it. That was my idea!”

Over at the Writing Well Is the Best Revenge blog, a recent post starts out by touching on a similar phenomenon: encountering ideas they’ve never had, but wish they did. Specifically, they talk about the Publisher’s Lunch e-newsletter, which provides reports of recent book deals. BIG book deals.

I know it’s, what, masochistic? Not because I begrudge anyone the fabulous deals they made–oh no way! If books are getting purchased and publishers are humming along, I’m all for it.

No–what’s masochistic is the constantly recurring thought that I am unable to suppress. And that is: oh–I should have thought of that.

Or worse: Oh, I COULD have thought of that.

We won’t even discuss “I DID think of that, years and years ago, but didn’t do anything about it” [Ed. note: viz., The Missus’s lament] because that way lies true madness. (Two little words: Animal Planet.)

Which leads them — gotta love it, someone else is easily distracted, too — to consider the announcement of the sale of Christopher Bowles’s book, Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart:

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The Satisfactions of the Small, Found in the Large

January 23, 2009 by John 5 Comments

From whiskey river:

Only horizon and sky are given up easily. Take the numbing distance in small doses and gorge on the little details that beckon.

(William Least Heat-Moon)

Not from whiskey river (one of The Missus’s favorite poems):

I Am Too Near

I am too near to be dreamt of by him.
I do not fly over him, do not escape from him
under the roots of a tree. I am too near.
Not in my voice sings the fish in the net,
not from my finger rolls the ring.
I am too near. A big house is on fire
without me, calling for help. Too near
for a bell dangling from my hair to chime.
Too near to enter as a guest
before whom walls glide apart by themselves.
Never again will I die so lightly,
so much beyond my flesh, so inadvertently
as once in his dream. Too near.
I taste the sound, I see the glittering husk of this word
as I lie immobile in his embrace. He sleeps,
more accessible now to her, seen but once,
a cashier of a wandering circus with one lion,
than to me, who am at his side.
For her now in him a valley grows,
rusty-leaved, closed by a snowy mountain
in the dark blue air. I am too near
to fall to him from the sky. My scream
could wake him up. Poor thing
I am, limited to my shape,
I who was a birch, who was a lizard,
who would come out of my cocoons
shimmering the colors of my skins. Who possessed
the grace of disappearing from astonished eyes,
which is a wealth of wealths. I am near,
too near for him to dream of me.
I slide my arm from under the sleeper’s had
and it is numb, full of swarming pins,
on the tip of each, waiting to be counted,
the fallen angels sit.

(Wislawa Szymborska;
translation by Czeslaw Milosz)

Finally, an undisputed master at the reverse: finding large things in the small (click Play button to start):

[audio:billcosbychickenheart.mp3|titles=’Chicken Heart’|artists=Bill Cosby]

A Cat’s Departure

January 22, 2009 by John 10 Comments

Cat nap, c. 1993

[With a cat — Dilly, I’m told, but to me the stripes
rather say, Nameless — sometime in 1993.]

Dilly first entered the life and home of The Missus-to-be sometime in the spring of 1993, shortly after I myself moved down here and some months before we moved in together.

As with her predecessor, Nameless, Dilly probably would have gone anonymous for a while — we’re notoriously indecisive about most things, singly and as a couple — except for one happy circumstance. She needed happy accidents at that point, too. She’d been in the animal shelter with her little brother; The Stepdaughter-to-be had gone there with a friend who was looking to adopt. The friend pointed the two little kittens out. (As I recall, the backstory to that point was that Dilly and her brother had been abandoned by the side of the road.) The Stepdaughter-to-be, on behalf of her mother, “adopted” Dilly. (To this day, she remains haunted by uncertainty about whether the little brother got adopted, too.)*

When she arrived at The Missus’s place, then, the kitten still had on one foreleg the ID bracelet from the shelter: D1L, it said, and voilà — with the substitution of a letter for a digit, she had a name.

(She acquired a couple nicknames over the years. Dillybutt, for one — a reference to the “elevator butt” that kicked in when you so much as approached with an about-to-pet-her hand, sometimes when you merely spoke her name. Later, there was Dilgoyle: the cat who’d be sitting on a windowsill, as if carved there, when we got home from work or a trip.)

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Extreme Ailurophilia

January 7, 2009 by John 15 Comments

Cats tend to push people to the outer limits of response; very few people I know can simply take ’em or leave ’em.

The Missus and I are squarely in the cat-loving circle. Except that she developed severe respiratory allergies to cat fur and dander in recent years, we’d probably still be hosting nine or ten of the little beasts instead of letting the supply, well, dwindle. (We’re down to two now.)

The current issue of a local magazine, though, has a story (not yet online) about someone who really cares about cats. His name is Craig Grant, and he’s the proprietor of something called Caboodle Ranch: a 30-acre chunk of the North Florida woods functioning as a sanctuary for feral or otherwise unwanted cats.

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“I Have un Gros Ventre.”

January 5, 2009 by John 5 Comments

I see Moonrat is dipping one of those little furry paws into the deep sparkling waters of Yiddish. Reminds me of one of my own forays into non-Englishdom…

When we first became acquainted, online, in 1991,The Missus and I decided for reasons that probably made sense at the time that we wouldn’t exchange photos until (and of course unless) we’d actually met already.

At the time, The Missus had written a short story whose protagonist, a woman named Alice, was taking French lessons and liked to try out new words and phrases by dropping them at random into conversation. As I recall, The Missus herself either was taking a course in French at the time, or had already taken one and was renewing her interest in the language.

I had never taken French (my high-school and college “foreign language” was Latin). But in my travels somewhere, I think at a bookstore on Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, I’d once picked up a reference book called Harrap’s Slang Dictionary: Anglais-Français/Français-Anglais.

Why that book?

Exhibit A: On the front cover, people at a cartoon cocktail party were saying, in English, things like “One for the road,” “Go jump in the lake,” “It’s my shout,” and “Up yours.”

Exhibit B: On the back cover appeared a mini-quiz, labeled “Test your English slang.” For each of the five English phrases, it offered three possible French phrases — from among which, one was supposed to choose the correct translation. But my eye was caught by the nature of the English phrases:

To get tanked up
Pull your finger out! (This one cracked me up right there in the bookstore. Loudly.)
The grapevine
To frame someone
A nice bit of stuff

In short: How could I have resisted it?

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