From college I once sent my grandmother what I thought was a good letter. She sent a chatty letter back, but at the top there was an arrow pointing to the date, and she had written, in larger handwriting, “By the by, always date your letters.” Her flaw-finding note hurt my feelings, but she was right, and from that moment on I became extremely date conscious. I date every piece of children’s art that we keep (on the back, in tiny lettering), and I made sure that the Fuji camera had a “date-back” feature: it burned the date, year first, in orange fiery letters on the lower right-hand side of every picture.
In the last letter my grandmother wrote us, when she asked for another picture of Phoebe to brighten the front of her refrigerator, she didn’t date the letter. No date anywhere. I had to note it on the letter myself, referring to the canceled stamp. I should have known then that she was letting go.
I took the plane down the day after she’d broken her back. My grandfather was downstairs playing his Chopin prelude. I called an ambulance; she cried out with a terrible pain-cry when they moved her a certain way on the stretcher, which they had trouble maneuvering around the hallway to her room. But she got better. She didn’t believe in the dishwasher; she stored cans of soup in its top rack. While she was in the hospital, I taught my grandfather how to heat up a can of tomato soup, and how to put a load of laundry in the washing machine.
For years she’d written (not just typed, but written) all of his scientific correspondence, and yet he insisted on moving to new universities and research centers, where he would attempt to carry on. When my grandmother was angriest at him — over the oblivious playing of the Chopin while her back was broken — she said to me in a whisper that the three fungal diseases he was known for were partly hand-me-downs from one of his teachers at Yale. What really bothered her was his autobiography. He had given it to her to edit. In the third chapter, he wrote that he proposed to her one afternoon, and then hurried back to his microscope to examine some interesting slides of coccidioidomycosis, prepared with a new kind of stain — and that was the last mention of her. “He is, I think, an affectionate person,” she said, “but he takes after his mother.” His mother was a self-absorbed and difficult birdwatcher who moved in soon after my grandparents were married and then grew vague and quarrelsome. My grandmother said, “There was one time, Emmett, when I was out for a drive, just on some errand, and there was a steep slope on one side of the road, and it was everything I could do to keep myself from driving right off the edge.” I said that I was very sorry it had been so difficult. “I’m really letting my hair down,” she said. I’d never heard that idiom before. Her hair was white with many gentle curls; it could not be let down.
She loved her four children, though, and was good to them, and I do believe that it made her happy to be a grandmother. Also she liked that she knew where everything was in her house, and that she could list all the books of the Old Testament at high speed. She gave Claire a bag of rags, for polishing things, when we were engaged; one of her aunts had given her a bag of rags and she’d much appreciated it. Always date your letters, she taught me. Thank goodness for that Fuji camera.
22
Good morning, it’s 5:33 a.m. and I’m feeling better about my beard. Yesterday I was going through a box of clothes and I found a dark blue sweater that I’d forgotten about. It has a silvery white pattern of small shapes in it, and these bring out the silver in my beard or at least make it look less unintentional.
We’ve run out of apples, so I’ve brought in a pear. I’ve held it up to the fire to read the label, which says “#4418 Forelle,” and then, around that, in capitals in a green border, RIPE WHEN YIELDS TO GENTLE PRESSURE. I woke up at 5:15, shivering. I could feel each shiver system with more detail, more precision, than normal. It began in my torso and then rose, vibrating, up my spine until I could feel the muscles in the back of my neck participating, and then it was gone. The duck sometimes shivers. I was glad to learn when I was a child that shivering serves a useful purpose, and is not simply a signal of cryothermic distress, although it clearly is a sign of that as well, since it feels bad. You know that if you’re shivering you must go inside or put on something warmer and you want to do that because the sensation of the shivering is unpleasant. But for some animals, who don’t have any warm places to go to, the shivering may be a neutral or even a pleasurable sensation, a way of passing the time.
I’ve thrown my eaten pear into the fire. Phoebe cleaned her room yesterday and found two lost pairs of scissors there, one of which I am going to use to clip my mustache so that when I go out for lunch today I won’t get salad dressing on it and have to use my tongue to draw some of the mustache into my mouth and suck the lunch off. My beard has gotten long enough that it can become sleep-squashed on one side and flared-out on the other. Sometimes on the weekend I don’t take a shower until late in the afternoon, and then if I go to the store I have to fluff my beard into symmetry in the rearview mirror. People seldom give me strange looks, though, so I must not seem too eccentric.
My pear had bird’s-egg specklings of a delicacy I’d never before seen on a pear, and seldom on a bird’s egg, either. It wasn’t quite ripe, though; it didn’t have that superb grittiness of skin, when the flesh dissolves and the disintegrating skin grinds against your molars. Apple skin must be chewed heavily and steadily, and even so its slick, sharp-cornered surfaces survive a lot of molaring. But eating a ripe pear is similar to cutting a piece of paper with a pair of scissors: you feel the grit of the cut paper transmitted back through the blades to your fingers, you can sense that fulcrumed point of sharp intersection. Scissors are one of the many products that have gotten better in my lifetime. They used to become loose and wobbly at the hinge, and when they wobbled they would fold the paper between the blades instead of cutting it. But if you pushed the thumb-handle in the opposite direction to the larger loop of the finger-handle as you closed the two loops, even loose blades could be made to cut fairly well.
When I was a kid nobody cut (as many do now) wrapping paper by steering the scissors through the paper without moving the blades — that was a later discovery, or else it depended on a certain kind of soft wrapping paper or a certain level of scissor sharpness. I bought the scissors in San Diego — they are made in China, and they have red plastic handles.
I don’t feel so good.
Another machine we had in San Diego was a hose organizer — a machine you cranked, winding the hose up like a piece of thread. There was a hose-guide that slid so that you could coil the hose evenly on its spool. When we moved away, we gave the hose organizer to our next-door neighbors; they seemed to want it. When you coil a hose manually after watering with it you have to slide the whole thing through your left hand, which guides it into a series of lassoing circles by the faucet. The hose is wet when you wind it, so that as you drag it back it collects bits of mulchy things, which then get on your hands, and snail slime, whereas if you have a hose organizer you feel like a crew member on a merchant vessel, hoisting the anchor or squaring the mainsail.
23
Good morning, it’s 5:20 a.m. — I thought the shivering was just from cold, but yesterday at work I began to have feverish feelings, and now I’m weak and the smell of the flaring match makes me feel very ill. I’ve tasted an apple from a brand-new bag of apples, but what I want to do is lie down on the floor. The blizzard yesterday was lost on me, and I spent all night with little delusional half-thoughts.