Happy Wife from inside the bathroom this morning, “Would you hand me my phone?”
“What?”
“My phone. I want my phone.”
“But…you’re on the John. How long you going to be?” husband asks incredulously.
“Long enough to play a game of Word Mix.”
Husband fetches phone, cracks bathroom door, hands phone to wife.
It’s a simple little anagram game. She can play it for hours. Given the modern marvel of 3-D, interactive, multi-player, phantasmagoric games out there, Word Mix is to these what bloodletting is to surgery.
I’ve no excuse for the dearth of posts here lately, except to point out I’ve little time anymore to get my creative juices running during the day. Being as I am, once again, a single cog in the gear of economic progress.
I phoned my friend Dave who I haven’t talked to in quite a while. We exchange email, which is all fine and good, but as a means of communication it’s imperfect. There’s no substitute for the texture of a real human voice when it comes to conveying the nuance of experience. Dave lives in southern California. He retired last year, and his wife this year. We got caught up with the goings-on in our lives — his mom, my parents, distant friends, etc.. I was most interested envious in how he and his wife were able to retire so early (he’s my age). Especially since Happy Wife and I are — best guess — still five years out. I could hear it in his voice — he and his wife had had enough. Check, I thought, we’ve had enough too, but you’re only 56, what if you outlive your savings?
There was a pause in the conversation. Where a voice conveys nuance, a pause conveys doubt.
We promised to keep in touch. I’m encouraged; he told me his and his wife’s two favorite places to visit are New York and Alaska.
The next day, in the middle of her preparation for date night, I pulled Happy Wife over to look at a nice condo I saw online, new on the market. She liked it, but was not thrilled I was already looking to downsize our lives in preparation for Retirement. Her general concern being she wants to enjoy her years one at a time and not hasten their passage by fixating on the endpoint of the five-year plan. I conceded her point. Carpe diem.
Look, she said, it’s a beautiful day outside, we’re doing well, let’s enjoy what we have right now. Well, I said, agreed, it is a nice day, but it’s cold. It’s not so bad, she said, and to prove it, she took a break from her preparations to go outside for a moment of quiet contemplation on the backyard deck:
Some of you have asked how The Book is coming along. Okay, not a lot of you, but some of you. How many does it have to be to rise to some? Anyhoo…
Let’s just say it’s one more thing to laden the five-year plan with.
Some A couple of you have asked if I might post an excerpt, something I’ve resisted doing, but given this may never see the light of publication, what the heck.
To provide you a context for the excerpt without giving away what the book is about (and by about I mean what I think the book is about now, something any writer will tell you is subject to change. Especially early on in the writing process one may have an idea of where the story will go, but very often that can change. I am a firm believer that the story finds the writer more often than the writer writes the story), our protagonist (Russ Livengood) is approaching an austere building on a university campus when he glimpses its cornerstone. Here, there’s a brief pause in the forward action of the story to relate a bit of the building’s history:
——–Excerpt———-
He was stopped now in the shade of the Browner Tower building – a faded, weather-beaten brownstone. Her mortar joints were checked and crumbling, an oxide green patina coated the copper gutters and facets on the uppermost windows. Over the years it had bled down the uneven bricks, looking like dried tears of defeat. As Russ stared at those tears he could feel it welling up inside him, the one nagging insecurity he’d not been able to shake since deciding two years earlier to return to school: Could it be my best years are behind me, too? He glanced at the building’s cornerstone, 1930, and wondered how she must have looked then, nearly sixty years ago, this “Citadel of Academic Excellence.” Yes, that was it; he remembered it now, that bit of pomp he’d seen printed in his recruitment brochure: “Browner Science Tower – A Citadel of Academic Excellence.”
It was then, in 1930, that Dr. Seymour B. Browner, then eighty nine years old, once long-listed for the Nobel Prize, had been wheeled by his caretaker into position near the cornerstone of this eponymous tower to deliver its dedication. Enfeebled by decades of bending over a microscope to peer into the eye of the fruit fly – Drosophila melanogaster – the organism whose eyes he had worked tirelessly to mutate from red to white, Dr. Seymour, ever since his eventual retirement from academia in 1911, had been relegated to a wheelchair due to a debilitating form of scoliosis.
Once the caretaker locked the wheels of Dr. Browner’s wheelchair into place, he carefully placed a microphone in the doctor’s slight left hand. He helped him position it to permit the doctor to speak with ease, as the curvature of his spine no longer permitted him to sit upright. A throng of university supporters had assembled for the dedication – faculty (current and emeritus), noted alumni, Dean’s Level patrons, bankers and shop owners and other pillars of community, as well as proud fathers and mothers of gifted children, aspirants to scientific stardom. The caretaker handed the doctor a small card with the words of his dedication printed on it. He whispered to him that he may proceed when ready. Ever so feebly the doctor raised the hand that held the card to order the cessation of clapping. When his eye glasses slipped down the bridge of his nose the caretaker was quick to his aid. As the doctor began to read, his hands, wracked from forty years of working tweezers to separate Drosophila mutants in tiny glass dishes, trembled; his voice, impaired by a botched spinal surgery, quavered over the speaker. The crowd pressed in, anxious to bear witness to what this one time titan of science, now a disfigured elder of the community, had to say. Somebody stepped forward and lowered the volume to reduce feedback. The doctor spoke slowly, straining at times to read each of the august words printed on the card.
But no sooner had he started, it seemed, and he was finishing up. “And so it is with great –” he paused to clear phlegm “– pride that I dedicate this building. Bring us your young, the scientific leaders of tomorrow. Your truth suckers.“ As written it was seekers, but the crowd had understood, and was duly charmed. A hearty round of applause went up.
The caretaker retrieved the microphone from the doctor’s tremulous hand and carefully replaced it with a bottle of champagne. The crowd once again grew silent, expectant. The caretaker then stepped behind the doctor’s chair and turned it slightly, to position him very close to the cornerstone, such that even the feeblest swing would break the bottle. Surely it would.
“Dr. Seymour, sir, if you would please, look this way!” A crush of photographers had come forward. For years the scoliosis had forced his head to droop when he sat, but the doctor fought that now. He raised it slightly, his dim, gray eyes peering out from between his bushy white eyebrows and the rim of his glasses, which had once again slid down his nose. There he sat, dressed by his caretaker in a brown tweed jacket, a matching fedora with brown pants and oxford shoes, hunched but dignified, tired yet regal, a bottle of champagne – the cork expanding imperceptibly outward – dangling from his frail grip. Dozens of blue bulbs flashed to capture the salutatory moment.
When the photographers finished, the caretaker bent down to tell the doctor that he may “swing away when ready.” But as the doctor drew back the bottle in a sloth-like motion – the very bottle that had been jostling around in the rear tote of the wheelchair the entire time he was earlier rolled across campus – the cork exploded from the bottle. Gasps went up. The cameramen jumped backwards. Three women burst from the front of the crowd and rushed forward. The caretaker trumpeted, “Would somebody please get us a towel!” Handkerchiefs were deployed from pockets. In mere seconds a flurry of helping hands had descended on Dr. Seymour, frantically but gently dabbing at the sticky streams of Perrier-Jouët (vintage 1920, the year of the doctor’s Nobel mention) running down the deep creases of his withered cheeks and brow.
The story had been reported the next day in the Around Town section of the newspaper: “Browner Tower dedication – not the splash that was hoped for.”
——–/Excerpt———-
Breakfast this morning. Part of the five-year plan. One-egg, cheese omelet, bacon, Chilean blueberries
