So swerving to avoid the dining-room chair this morning, I stepped on the battery-powered airplane. I felt it for breakage, but I think it’s all right — Henry had fortified it with more masking tape after its snow crash. Then, hurrying to be in here by five — not running but moving with a distinct sense of hurry — I felt a need to let out some private gas before I sat down, and because I didn’t want to make any noise I paused for a moment and pulled on one side of my bottom—backside perhaps is a more delicate term — to allow the release to proceed without fanfare. Then I came in here and set up.
I wish I were a better photographer. Many family moments are going by and I’m missing most of them. At least I got a few shots last month when we had that very soft white snowfall that ticked against the window all night. It was an unusual snow, almost like Styrofoam in its consistency in some of the deep places, and when you dug in it, the light that it let through was an interesting sapphire blue — perhaps different prevailing temperatures during snowflake-growth result in a different shape of crystal, which absorbs and allows passage to different wavelengths of light. That Saturday Henry and I dug a tunnel through the snowplow pile. The duck became interested in our project — companionably she climbed to the top, beaking around in it for bits of frozen mud. When both of her feet got cold at the same time she sat down in the snow for a while to warm them. Once or twice she levitated, flapping hard. She didn’t much want to walk through the tunnel, and we didn’t make her.
Towards the end of the tunneling I got the camera and took two pictures of Henry looking out, with his hood on and his nose red from cold. Then I was out of film. My pictures used to be better than they are now. About ten years ago I bought a Fuji camera that took fantastic pictures. It was a simple point-and-shoot machine, but the lens was good. Then a few years ago, I was packing our car for a trip. I was holding several things in my left hand — the Fuji by its strap, my battered briefcase, and a shopping bag full of presents — and I was concentrating on my right hand, in which I was holding a suitcase and a coat, but also reaching through the handle of the suitcase to open the back hatch of the car. As I put the things in the car, my overspecialized fingers, forgetting that some of them were doing double duty, relaxed their hold on the camera strap when they released the handle of the shopping bag, so that the camera fell, not in a broken, lurched-after tumble, but straight down, freely released, onto the street. It worked after that for a while, but it rattled in a very un-Japanese sort of way, and finally it stopped focusing. The camera store said they couldn’t repair it, so I bought a new camera, more expensive, waterproof, to replace it, but the pictures it takes are not as good, or else my skill has declined.
These unintentional droppings of held objects have occurred to me at least twenty times in my life. Trouble ensues, for instance, when I have a heavy load from the dry cleaners hanging on coat hangers in a hand that is also holding something else. You can hook a lot of coat hangers onto two fingers, but they pull back the fingers and dig into the skin of the inside fingerjoints, and those heavy coat-hanger sensations are powerful enough to distract from the sensation of whatever other thing those fingers may be responsible for — the mail, say, which falls in the slush. I’m prone to other absentminded acts as well. I once pulled a bag of garbage from the kitchen can, tied it, and hung it on a hook in the hall closet. “Did you just hang up that bag of garbage in the closet?” Claire asked me. “I believe I did,” I said, thinking back. Another time I was standing in a kitchen talking to my mother-in law and drinking a cup of tea. Admiring the teacup, I asked her whether it was Hollerbee china, knowing that she had gone to the Hollerbee outlet with Claire several times and bought things. My mother-in-law said she wasn’t sure where it came from. I turned it over to see if it had the Hollerbee logo on the underside, and it did. But I’d forgotten that there was tea in the cup.
I suppose if I taught at a college I would gradually drift into the role of the absent-minded professor. One of Claire’s history teachers in college showed up late to class one morning with his wife’s bra clinging to the back of his sweater. Another morning, lighting a pipe near a longhaired student, he gestured with a match. A smell of hot hair filled the room; the professor, not noticing, continued his lecture.
Once I lost a key. I spent a day looking for it before I gave up; a week later Claire found it frozen to the bottom of a piece of raw meat that she took out of the freezer. I don’t know how it got there.
21
Good morning, it’s 5:25 a.m., and last night was less good from the point of view of sleep. I had to pull out some of my old suicide fantasies — like the one where I’m the only passenger on a roller coaster that is fitted out with a horizontal blade at the top of one of its turns. I swoop up towards the high turn and the switchblade flips out into my path, chopping off my head. Released from my body, I tumble placidly through space, closing my eyes. Another one I tried was my self-filling grave idea, a mainstay in high school. If you kill yourself, you are being inconsiderate, because others must deal with the distasteful mess of your corpse. The self-filling grave solved that. You dig for a long time, mounding all the dirt on a sheet of plywood by the hole, and when you’ve gotten the grave just the way you want it, with the roots neatly trimmed off and a layer of soft, cool, fertile dirt in the bottom and no stones, you put a chair in the grave — not one of any value — and you clamp a revolver to the back of the chair pointing diagonally out and fitted with a remote-control trigger; and then you arrange a complicated system of pulleys and weights so that when you shoot yourself fatally and fall into the soft cool fertile earth, your fall will cross a tripwire that pulls away a prop and allows the load of dirt to slide in after you. The dumping of the dirt in turn triggers the flapping down of a large piece of biodegradable two-ply fabric, between the layers of which you have sprinkled grass seed, wildflower seed, and weed seed, in the proper proportions. After a few months, if all goes well, nobody will know where you are buried — except that the tilted sheet of plywood attached to the system of ropes and counterweights may occasion curiosity. I never end up actually dead in these fantasies. I can’t die: I have to be able to check whether, for example, the proportion of wildflowers to grass seed is too rich and must be adjusted down.