Wednesday morning found me in full hustle-bustle mode, wanting to make the family room pluperfect. Yet the old TV was deceptively heavy as I moved it outside to the trash; it's objectively heavy weight was coupled with, what, poor technique? A lack of bent knees? Age, heaven forfend? Afterwards I had plenty of time to try to figure out what I did wrong because it takes only a moment to ruin your day with a crippling pain in the lower back. Sin is like that too isn't it? For the rest of Wednesday and most of Thursday I would not be able to move without pain although the recovery time was shortened by Advil, ice packs and that a magnet belt I wore so tightly around my waste during that it acted like a tourniquet cutting off the blood flow. (I briefly worried about its longterm effect on...nevermind.) I used the injury as an excuse to read long and languidly of “Shadowplay” by Clare Asquith, the author having a particularly patrician-sounding name for one making the argument that Shakespeare was a recusant. (I'd always thought if Shakespeare was a Catholic it was beside the point since contemporary lit crits deem him a nihilist; Joseph Pearce sees reports of the Bard's nihilism a case of lit crits projecting their (lack of) belief on him.)
Thursday after breakfast we hit the road for a quick stop at Walmart and bought a replacement for the bathroom caddy that had ingloriously collapsed after 8 years. It had slowly rusted and for the past year had rested on a very slender reed indeed, a fraction of its former self. I thought it almost a miracle the way it hung on, something destined for Ripley's Believe it or Not! fame. Of course I was proud that I was alert enough to catch it when it fell and was glad it happened while on vacation with leisure to buy a new one. (One that won’t rust.) Then it was on to Barnes & Noble’s for a marathon session to determine which books to buy in lieu of the gift books I'd received but already had. Hours later I’d chosen "Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne" by David Starkey, “Paris to the Moon" by Adam Gopnik, and “The Politically Incorrect Guide to American & British Literature”. Back home on this sun-gilt day I worked on the new bathroom caddy after which we walked around the block a few times, my bad back semi-restored. I'd thought that my back pain was my "get-out-of-Bingo free" card, where bingo is synonymous with jail, but the team leader called with an emergency -- too many people wanted to throw away their money to too few people. That happens. So I went in, wishing I'd hurt my back on Thursday morn instead of Wednesday...
Friday came and I felt underread given the splendor of books surrounding me, yet I picked out a sleeper: “American Brew”, the story of American beer, and I read it outside, if you can believe it, outside in the warm sunshine of a Dec. 28th day. If this isn't global warming then it felt close enough for guvmint work. My wife and I had started the day with a simultaneous idea: let’s check out the new Donut shop. (Great minds...) And so we there we went and I was immediately disappointed. The cupboard was bare as old mother hubbard would say. We settled for what few donuts they had, which were uncommonly good. Bad donuts at this mom & pop were better than good donuts elsewhere. Or maybe I was just hungry. We had coffee as the owners told us of their struggle to make it a going concern. He’d been there since 10pm the previous night, which beggars the imagination and certainly puts the lack of donuts at 10am in perspective. One can’t fault the fact that someone who hand-makes every donut can’t have enough donuts at any given moment. He'd gone the corporate route before as an accountant and was distressed by the lack of interaction with other people; said that he could go two days without a phone call or visit. I thought that was…shall we say…less than horrific. I did find horrific, by contrast, the hours he works.
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It’s the 29th of December -- do you know where your Christmas lights are? Too many in our neighborhood have packed it in and called it a holiday. Apparently the “twelve days of Christmas” have been been truncated to four on account of I don’t know what. If our ancestors celebrated Christmas from the 24th into January it appears Americans tend to celebrate it Thanksgiving-to-Dec. 26.
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Having taken in most of the books recently print, I noticed Jonathon Franzen wrote a memoir. Isn’t that sort of like taking a full-page ad in the NY Times saying “I have writer’s block?”. I mean the guy hasn’t lived long enough for a memoir has he? This has the scent of fulfilling a book contract about it.
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I was reading a Bill White post regarding his superior odoration dectection skills and it prompted a recall of picking up Diane Ackerman’s “A Natural History of the Senses” but being unable to read it due to an inability to get past the fine scent of the pages and binding.
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