I’m burning a bunch of little pinecones now that I gathered on the walk. One of the joys of life, I think, is trying to decipher the name on a gravestone as it is transmitted through the dense foliage of blue-green gravestone lichen. Some people clean off the grave-growths with chemicals and wire brushes, a mistake.
Where have I seen that interesting blue-green lichen color recently? Yesterday morning it was — no, day before yesterday — when I opened the hood of our Mazda minivan in order to replenish the tank of windshield-washer fluid. I’d turned on the car to warm it up, and I’d pressed the button that activates the rear-window heater — a stave of long wires elegantly arranged like the plectrum of a hardboiled-egg slicer, buried in the glass, which melts the ice with surprising efficiency — and then I pulled the hood release and heard the hood spring free. I propped it up on its cold rod. The windshield fluid is stored in an L-shaped tank that has a representation of a windshield wiper’s swath molded into it. It was down to the dregs, squirted dry. That’s not safe. When the trucks salt the roads, the white smear of salt solution on the windshield sometimes catches the glare of the risen sun and obscures the road entirely, forcing me to poke my head out the window to see where we’re going. The plastic was cold and inflexible, its edges slightly painful to the fingers. I poured the pink liquid in. The engine, idling, trembled its hoses. When the tank was full, I snapped the lid back on and pulled the hood prop from its oval hole and, lowering it, pushed it into the metal prongs that wait in the gutterish area where the hood’s shape fits. And then, just before I let the hood drop shut, I noticed that the battery had grown some lovely turquoise exudate, electrical lichen, around one of its poles.
It isn’t clear to me why I grew up to be someone who can spell rhinoentomophthoromycosis, and yet whose knowledge of car repair extends only as far as replenishing the windshield-wiper fluid. When I was a teenager, I took off and put back on as much of my ten-speed bicycle as I could, soaking the wheel bearings in gasoline overnight and then packing them back in their tracks with fresh, pale grease. Ah, what a keen pleasure it is to glide ticking down a leafy street with fresh grease on one’s wheel bearings. But I’ve never taken the next step and begun tinkering with cars.
Come to think of it, the bicycle was the beginning of my end-of-the-earth thoughts: I’d be on a trip down a long straight road, and the road would become steeper and steeper until finally it was plunging vertically down and the stars would come out around me, and I’d fall past the strata, and then somewhere along the way a road would form on the side of the cliff and I would land on it and begin bicycling as hard as I could up what became a very steep hill, and when I finally crested the top of the hill I would be in the underworld.
14
Good morning, it’s 5:25 a.m. — once I told a doctor from France that I was able to wake myself up at a preset time with the help of nightmares, and he said that his father had been a soldier who had taught him that if you want to wake up at, say, five in the morning, you simply bang your head five times on the pillow before you close your eyes, and you will wake up at five. “But how do you manage five-thirty?” I asked the doctor with a crafty look. He said that in order to wake at five-thirty you just had to do something else with your head, like jut your chin a little, to signify the added fraction, and your sleeping self would do the math for you. I’ve tried it and it works except that it’s much harder to go to sleep because your head has just been hit repeatedly against the pillow.
Incredible: I’m forty-four years old. What’s incredible about it is that my children are eight and fourteen years old, still here living with us. I’m driving Phoebe to her school every morning, after she irons her blue jeans. Only a few months ago I realized that when my father was the age I am now he had already lost me — that is, I’d already gone off to college and moved away. My parents were twenty-three when I was born, which would mean that my father drove down with me to college and bought me my first typewriter when he was only forty-one. What did it feel like to lose me? Maybe not so bad. Maybe by the time it happens you’re used to the idea.
The Olivetti electric typewriter that my father bought me was designed — this was in the seventies — in the high-Italian way, like a Bugatti from that era, very clean, no sharp corners but no unnecessary aerodynamicism either. It made a fine swatting sound when one of its keys hit the paper. A week after I got it, I masked over all the letters with black electrician’s tape, and that was how I learned to type. I took it with me to France and typed French papers there with it. Six years later it was stolen from Claire’s apartment, when thieves came in through the fire escape. They stole her miniature TV and her roommate’s speakers, too. I find it remarkable that my father was buying me a farewell typewriter when he was younger than I am now.
Last night I washed my son’s hair, thinking what I always think: How many years will be left before I have no child young enough to wash his or her hair? Phoebe takes long showers now and of course washes her own hair. The loss is enough to make you lose composure — I’m not kidding. The dawn sky is now visible: the snow is a very light blue rather than grey. Yes, grey with an e—that’s one of those English spellings that I accept (aeroplane isn’t bad either), and not just because I learned to read it on the boxes of Earl Grey tea that my mother had. When spelled with an e, grey half hides the wide, crude sound of the a behind the obscuring mists of the e. It’s rare for a one-syllable word to have so much going on.
I once saw the earl of Grey on The Merv Griffin Show, an afternoon program hosted by the always cheerful and always tanned Merv Griffin. The earl of Grey had three things to say: one, that you can’t make good tea in a microwave; two, that the water shouldn’t be boiling but just on the verge; and three, that he wished that Twinings had trademarked the phrase Earl Grey, which was used by everyone. The poor man had lost his name.
And it was on The Merv Griffin Show, as well, that I watched a father-and-son act in which the son, who was about seven or eight, climbed up a ladder and got into a small chair welded to the top of a long pole. The father balanced this pole on his hand, his foot, and then lifted it and placed it on his chin. But here something went wrong. The father had never been on TV before, one suspects, and he was nervous, and the lights onstage were brighter and hotter than the lights that he had rehearsed under, and he knew that he had a shorter time than usual, only two or three minutes, to do his act, before they cut away to the commercial. So his face was sweating more than it normally did — it was in fact dripping. He and his son were both wearing leopard-pattern caveman outfits — crazy looking getups with belts and shoulder straps as I remember. Perhaps the wife, who made the costumes, thought it was cute.