8
Good morning, it’s 4:50 a.m. — I just took such a deep bite of red apple that it pushed my lower lip all the way down to where the lip joins up with the chin. There is a clonk point there, and a good apple can do that, push your lower lip down to its clonk point. Sometimes you think for a moment that you’re going to get stuck in the apple because you can’t bite down any farther. But all you have to do is push the apple a little to the left — or pull it to the right — and let the half-bitten chunk break off in your mouth. If you do it slowly, it sounds like a tree falling in the forest. Then start chewing.
Phoebe said something yesterday on the way to school that I thought was very true. While I was finishing feeding the duck, she came out in her perfectly ironed blue jeans, carrying a piece of toast in her mittens and crouching like a Sherpa beneath the load of her backpack. She’s fourteen. We both got in the car, and I turned the heater on full. It roared and hurled out a blast of icy air. Phoebe held a mitten over her mouth and nose and said, “It’s cold, Dad, it’s cold.” I said, “You’re not kidding it’s cold — it’s really cold.”
As I took hold of the steering wheel, I made an exaggeratedly convulsive noise of frozenness, and Phoebe looked over and saw that I was hatless. Then she noticed that my hat — a tweed hat with a silk inner band — was stuffed down near the hand brake. It had been in the car all night, cooling down. She reached for it, and in that abrupt way that people have when they’re trying to conserve warmth, she held it out to me. “Put this on,” she said.
The thick tweed looked tempting, but I knew better and I said, “If I put this on I’m going to freeze.”
She took the hat back from me and held it over the heater vents for a few seconds. “Try it now,” she said.
The heater, as it turned out, had not warmed the hat to any perceptible degree: the silk inner band was a ring of ice and my head recoiled at the chill. I said: “Yow, yes, that’s going to be better.”
“You’ve got to get cold to get warm,” Phoebe said.
Now that is the truth. That is so true about so many things. You learn it first with sheets and blankets: that the initial touch of the smooth sheets will send you shivering, but their warming works fast, and you must experience the discomfort to find the later contentment. It’s true with money and love, too. You’ve got to save to have something to spend. Think of how hard it is to ask out a person you like. In my case, Claire asked me to go on a date to the cash machine, so I didn’t actually have to ask her. Still, her lips were cold, but her tongue was warm.
By the time I dropped Phoebe off and gave her a dollar for a snack, my hat was as comfortably situated on my head as if it had hung on the coat tree all night.
Henry was building a Mars city when I got home from work. He went upstairs and came out of his room with an enormous Rubbermaid storage container full of Lego. It seemed bigger than he could handle. Each Lego piece is as light as a raisin, but they become heavy in the aggregate.
“Do you need some help with that?” I asked him.
“No, thanks, I think I can do it,” said Henry.
“That’s certainly a lot of Lego,” I said.
“Dad, you should see how I get it up the stairs. It takes me about an hour.” He stepped down each step very slowly, his heels treading on the edges of his too long sweatpants. “Sometimes I get in hard situations where I’m balanced on one toe. It’s not very pleasant.”
I’ve turned the top half-log over — it looks like a glowing side of beef now.
9
Good morning, it’s 4:23 a.m. — I have this ability to use bad dreams to wake myself up when I need to be up. I can just tell myself a time and a bad dream will come and get me just when I need it to. For instance, what woke me this morning at four o’clock was a dream about a low, bullish sort of pig that grunted around. When the pig lifted its head from the grass and saw me, it went very still and changed color from brown to a dark purple. I got up and peed and got back into bed, but I knew I was up for the morning then. I have a general theory about bad dreams which I think is revolutionary. My theory is that they are most often simply the result of the body’s need to wake up the mind using the only tools it has available, most often in order to pee. The mind is unconscious, in a near coma, but the body has received reports of a substantial accumulation of hot urine belowdecks. The body is getting insistent calls and memos describing the gravity of the hot urine situation, and passing it up to the low-brain, and the low-brain is putting in calls to the high-brain, but the high-brain’s phone is unplugged because it is asleep. What is the low-brain to do? It has three options: laughter, arousal, or fear. All three will elevate the heart rate, but laughter and arousal are, especially if the high-brain really wants to keep sleeping for a last ten or fifteen minutes, less dependable. Fear it must be, then. The low-brain looks on the monitor at the images that float by in an unstoppable stream of coolant. They are, as always, absurd and pointless. Any one of them will do. He seizes one at random — it happens to be of a small faun-colored pig in the yard — and he injects a special fear-chemical into it and lets it go, and suddenly it is a frightening dark-purple pig with murderous eyes. And if that doesn’t work, then there will be gray zombies hiding in tree stumps, glossy-green tidal waves, stairways that narrow down and drip mud, suffocating sweaters that you knit yourself and can’t escape from, tough Eskimos who want to kidnap your children, and so on, all coming at the end of sequences of mindless innocence — and the breathing elevates, the heart begins to pound, the eyes snap open. My contention is that the simple need to pee accounts for over half of the bad dreams that human beings experience, and it certainly accounts for my pig dream this morning.
The fire had some trouble today. I balled up six sheets of the News Herald and laid over them two torn-off flaps from a cardboard box, with a crumpled Cheez-Its container laid over that, and at first the fire was healthy — so healthy was it in fact that I burned my sock when I looked away for a moment. Not my toe — just the white sock, which now has a rough black charred area at the tip. When the fire died down I stuffed a paper-towel tube deep into the orange otherworldly cavern between two lower logs: quantities of gray smoke issued from one end of the tube as the other end burned. But then it all died down again. This happens sometimes. When it does, you must take a moment to appreciate the unburning fire. It’s still hot — it still has the means of its own regeneration. Blow on it several times, long steady gulf-streams of oxygen, and a flame sprat will pop up again somewhere. Then adjust the logs slightly to give that flame some encouragement, and the fire is loping off on its own again.
So now let me say a little about this room, our living room. It looks like a real living room, I must say, and I like sitting in here because it is clean. My office is filled with my junk. I can’t think about anything but work in there, and I don’t want to think about work. Here there are five windows with thin white curtains, and each window has twelve panes of glass. The muntins — those little wooden pieces that hold the panes — look narrow and fragile, but they’ve been there for a long time. The room has looked more or less like this, with molding going around the wall three feet off the floor and warped pine planks, for over two hundred years, which is a long time. We have been here only three years, though. There is a couch in the room, and a triangular corner cupboard, and various chairs — nothing in the room is new, everything has been glued or repaired at some time in its life. Some of it is from Claire’s family, some from mine. The oriental rug came from my parents, who bought it for four hundred dollars around 1970. My parents were then big fans of oriental rugs — less so now because their interests have changed. Their most extravagant acquisition was a tiger rug — an oriental rug with a life-size hieratic tiger lifting its paw in the middle and incomprehensible designs running around the edge. They bought it for nine hundred dollars. It was too valuable to have on the floor: it hung on the wall in the front hall. One day when I was twelve or so, we were doing a family housecleaning, and I got interested in the idea of beating all the rugs. I took the little rugs out and hit them with a broom handle, and then I beat the tiger rug, imagining that the dust particles that poofed out had magical powers — and when I was done I hung it out over the railing on the front porch. I said to myself that I was hanging it there because I wanted it to “air out,” but really it was that I wanted people on our street to see that we had this very unusual and expensive rug. Towards dusk I heard an odd clink. I went out on the front porch. A car with a rusty trunk was driving off. The rug was gone, stolen. My mother wept. She would have it now if I hadn’t wanted to watch the dust puff out of it.