Grumbles from the Grave (22 page)

Editor's Note: Robert's health was somewhat fragile. From time to time he would be required to have various major and minor surgery. Although he was able to do extremely heavy work at times, illnesses such as influenza hit him hard, and it might take weeks for him to recover.

These illnesses fell into major and minor groupings. In his early days he had TB; recovery took about a year. In 1970, he had a perforated diverticulum, undiscovered for seventeen days; it took a long recovery period. Because of the shock to his system, he followed that with herpes Zoster. Because the doctors were afraid to remove his gall bladder at the time they operated for peritonitis, that operation had to be deferred until 1971, when he had recovered from shingles.

In 1978 in Moorea, he had a TIA [Transient Ischemic Attack, a temporary interference of blood to the brain], which resulted in his undergoing a carotid-bypass operation.

August 15, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Ginny is fretted and frustrated because she does not yet have water at the building site—badly needed to stabilize a very dusty excavation and to permit her to start ground cover for great, raw cuts that will wash away if not planted before the heavy rains. Someone warned us when we came here that Santa Cruz was very much a mañana place, with the leisurely attitude affecting even the gringos—and that person was so very right. We were promised a pumping system in two weeks; it has now been more than a month—if we don't have water in a few days, I am going to have to get very nasty with that subcontractor. Which I dread.

We can't pour concrete for the house until we have [a building] permit, but there are lots of other things to be done. I still hope and expect that we will be closed in by the rains and able to move in, even though the interior will still have to be finished—if Ginny and I both don't wind up in straitjackets before then.

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Heinlein with Elf of Bonny Doon.

September 4, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

We have (a) started the house, (b) acquired an unhousebroken kitten, and (c) had a houseguest on our hands for three days when we literally have no room nor facilities for an ill houseguest—so we are running in circles. . .

The kitten is a fine little girl cat who buzzes all the time . . . and craps right under this typewriter with healthy regularity . . . and gets herself lost under the house . . . and insists on sleeping
under
Ginny's head . . . and throws our tomcat into a bad state of nerves most of the time. Apparently she isn't old enough to smell like a girl cat to him; she is simply a monster who has invaded his home and who takes up entirely too much of Mama's and Papa's time. But she is another lame duck; Ginny rescued her when she was about to be sent to the pound. Oh, me. Once we get her housebroken and once she comes into heat I think she will turn out to be a most welcome addition to the household—right now she's a burr under the saddle.

I finally fired our silly architect and took over the job myself . . .

* * *

We have water now, on a temporary pump hookup from a temporary tank . . . The site is no longer the horrible dust desert that it was; [Ginny] has it watered down (endless shifting of the single sprinkler the temporary hookup will run) and little green shoots coming up to hold the soil against the coming rains. Between times she keeps coffee and lemonade and candy bars on the job and passes them around (very good for morale), and makes trips down to Santa Cruz as needed for almost anything—and keeps house and cooks and keeps books, and falls into bed dead beat each night. (But the extreme effort is going to get us into our house by the rainy season—we can hardly wait.)

* * *

. . . asking me to lecture. The fee is satisfactory and I have in mind an outline for an appropriate lecture. Will you take over from here and accept subject to the following conditions? Mr. Heinlein's terribly busy schedule (i.e., mixing concrete, carrying block, and pushing a shovel, which is none of his business) will not permit him to accept a date to lecture earlier than the first of the year, and also I would expect transportation, to wit, round trip by air from San Francisco to Chicago.

. . . I guess that is about all, and I've still got to do some electrical work tonight—calculate the maximum working loads for the whole house and try to see if I can use a four-wire, three-phase cable underground . . . This is just one of the hairy little jobs the architect left undone.

The new cat is out again and again under the house—no way to get under, but she manages. Ginny has just gone out in the dark with a dish of cat food and a flashlight, to try to lure her out. Never a dull moment around here—

November 21, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I enclose a picture taken last week of the state of the job. As you can see, the masonry walls are almost complete. Four courses of "bond beam" now go around the top of what you see (looks like all the other courses but has buried in it four half-inch steel bars, poured in place—this building is for all practical purposes a steel-reinforced monolith; there are hundreds and hundreds of pounds of steel concealed in it).

But we are having trouble: (a) the winter rains have started; (b) our mason is being childishly temperamental. The contractor is quite disgusted with him, and I have refrained from telling him off simply because I did not wish to joggle the contractor's elbow—he being a number one conscientious and mature person.

December 4, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

We are now building between raindrops, but thank God the masonry on the house is at last all finished. We still have two little masonry outbuildings to put up, a pump house and an electrical service housing, but these won't take long and are neither urgent nor difficult—even I could lay them up. We need about two weeks of dry weather to frame the roof and put on the roofing—but the winter rains have set in unusually early and unusually hard and it could very well be some time in January before we get the roof on. The contractor has decided that the job will work every dry day from now on, including Saturdays and Sundays. But dry days are scarce. There have been only two fairly dry days this week, it is storming right now and is supposed to rain even harder tomorrow. But I am not dismayed, as carpentry is not nearly as affected by weather as is masonry. Our worst problem is to get a long enough dry spell to permit us to put in the septic tank and to dig a 200-foot ditch for the services, water, electricity, telephone, and low-voltage messenger lines. This soil is getting very soggy for backhoe operations.

February 3, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

At the moment, [Ginny] is over at the house site swinging a paint brush . . . The job is still moving but very slowly; it looks from the outside much as it did in the last picture I sent you, but quite a lot has been accomplished inside. We are stalled by the glazing—still no firm date as to when our double-glazing units will arrive. It is not only a strain on us—Ginny in particular, since she has to put up with the primitive housekeeping and cooking facilities of this summer cabin—but also it has had a very bad effect on our general contractor; he's become moody and tempery, and unable to supervise other mechanics without chewing them out—which in my opinion is not the way to get the most out of a man.

(127)

Robert and Virginia tree planting at Bonny Doon.

February 17, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Building—we seem to be frozen in a nightmare. The glazing units still have not arrived—the manager won't even promise a firm date. The water closets and hand basins which were supposed to be in stock in San Jose (it now appears) do not even exist and we must wait until the factory again makes a run of that color. One of the soi-disant "mechanics" who loused up our water system is now suing us for "wages"—trial on the 24th. We have developed a great big bog of quicksand in our driveway, so it must now be rebuilt at God knows what expense. In the meantime, the wiring progresses at painful slowness . . .

But our house in Colorado is sold at last and at not too great a loss—not much immediate cash out of the deal after closing costs and commission, but nevertheless I am much relieved. Ginny continues to swing a paint brush daily while I am slowly getting back to the drawing board to finish the detailing of the cabinet work. We are in good health, we don't owe any bills we can't pay, and Ginny says we can stay out of the red despite all these problems. The weather is beautiful, the rainy season is almost over, and things don't look too bad.

June 27, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Nothing else of any real importance today. Ginny is working herself silly everyday on the woodwork finishing—bleaching and sanding and varnishing the mahogany; I'm still sweating over a hot drawing board on the last of the finish details; today I'm designing Ginny's office. The cabinetwork and paneling is about 80% finished now; then we have the floors, ceilings, fireplaces, permanent lighting fixtures, front steps, driveway, and some exterior painting to do—still lots but the end is a faint gleam in the distance.

(129)

Heinlein with the newly completed Bonny Doon.

July 10, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

This should be the last letter I'll have to write on a card table; Ginny has almost finished the bleaching and varnishing in my study. And today about half the cabinetwork arrived for her office; soon we will both be properly equipped for the first time in almost two years. Hallelujah! We'll be able at last to get our files straight and get caught up on correspondence and paperwork . . . and I am itching to reach the point where I can start in on new fiction.

Our soil is black loam on top of sand on top of hard pan. I think we can control this driveway situation simply by treating it as a permanent watercourse, accepting that and installing a slaunchwise steel-reinforced concrete ditch alongside. But I dunno. Yesterday my brother Rex told me of a friend of his, a professional soil engineer, who has a similar driveway problem and has not been able to solve it. (But I don't think ours is that bad.)

We stayed home on the Fourth of July and worked—did not even get to fire our cannon—can't get at it until the cabinetwork is finished and I can unpack the dining room. But we did go away to Palo Alto this weekend—heard some good music and saw a football game on television, wild excitement for the life we have been leading. In truth we had ourselves an awfully nice time and enjoyed getting away from here. (All but the cat, who thinks it is utterly unfair to cats to put him in a cage and take him to a kennel. But he needed the rest, too; he has been losing fights. I wish I could teach him to fight only smaller cats, or else Arabs—as the general with the eye patch says, it helps if you can arrange to fight Arabs.)

We are both in good health and in quite good spirits. It is still a long haul, but we can now see daylight at the end of the tunnel.

October 26, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

. . . Then your check arrived and all was sunshine. That check almost exactly pays for the driveway—quite a complex and expensive structure because of underground drains for that quicksand problem— and leaves money on hand and November and December royalties for taxes, finish work inside (ceilings and recessed light fixtures), and this and that. No sweat. Utter solvency. Joy. So we declared a holiday, went downtown and bought Ginny a new dress, got hold of friends, and had dinner out, avec mucho alcohol and joviality. Today I have a mild hangover but my morale has never been better.