Short Circuits (18 page)

I was rather surprised by just how this really minor incident seemed to throw the whole day into chaos, sending me figuratively running around in circles (ruts, anyone?) wringing my hands and muttering “Oh, my! Oh, my!”

Every morning put the coffee on, turn on the
Today Show
at 7 a.m., have a glass of V8 juice, a cup (well, half a cup, since I never, ever finish it) of coffee, and a chocolate covered donut. Why don't I have cereal? Or an English muffin? Or fix an egg? Or make a pancake? Because I have a glass of V8, a cup of coffee, and a donut, that's why. I tell myself it's because of the 350 calories in the donut....something an English muffin wouldn't provide. It is a rut I have dug from which I cannot climb out.

I write most of the day, with frequent and prolonged interruptions for emails and other distractions, so the time between 7:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. is relatively rut-free. And I realize with mild horror, that it is the only time of my life that is.

At 5:30 each night I watch the evening news, then a series of TV programs which takes me until bedtime. I almost never go out at night. (Go out on a Thursday evening and miss
Supernatural
?? Unthinkable! Stop for dinner after leaving work Sunday at 6 and miss
60 Minutes
?? Impossible!)

We reach the point where we take comfort in our ruts, and this is definitely not a good thing. I have got to break mine. I've got to! Maybe I'll go to a movie tonight. Yes! I will! (But wait…
NCIS
is on at 7. Well, I'll go tomorrow for sure.)

* * *

NAPS

The nap is purported by many of my friends (admittedly, all over the age of 50) to be one of life's little pleasures. Their benefits escape me, however. I've never been one to take naps. When at the age of five I was in the hospital recovering from a broken leg, I remember the nurses coming into the children's ward (yes, most patients recovered in wards back then; private and semi-private rooms, if they had them, were a luxury my parents could not afford) every afternoon, pulling the shades/blinds, turning off the lights for half an hour or so and leaving us to our naps. I never napped, even then. I considered them then, as I do now, to be a monumental waste of precious time. So I would lie there, excruciatingly bored, waiting and waiting and waiting for the nurses to return and bring back the light.

Recovering from my bout of cancer in 2003, I did sleep frequently during the day, but I did not consider these periods to be naps, but more the body's need to quietly go about the business of repairing itself. When having P.E.T. or C.A.T. scans during my subsequent follow-up visits to Mayo, part of the process involves being injected with a radioactive dye, and lying as still as possible for an hour. They don't want you to read or watch TV or to have any distractions, apparently to facilitate the circulation of the dye throughout the body. They put you in a small curtained room and turn off the lights. Nap time. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. But when I do, it's reluctantly.

Occasionally now, when I take a break from writing and play computer solitaire, I'll find my mind numbing to the point where I consider lying down for a few minutes. This blog entry is, as a matter of fact, a response to such an urge. But I find when I give in to it, I tend to wake up feeling as though someone had spiked my grog…hmmm, I wonder if that is where the word “groggy” comes from? (Digression, anyone?) Anyway, I awake more tired than when I'd laid down, and feeling strongly as though someone had slipped another day in there, somehow.

I love sleep. But sleep requires time to be fully appreciated. A nap is an unwelcome teaser for the night to come. If I want to sleep, I want to feel as though I've gotten my money's worth.

A friend in Los Angeles had a ritual. As soon as he got home from work each night, he would lie down for 20 minutes…no more, no less…and wake up feeling as chipper as a bluejay. I never could understand how he could do that. Two of my Chicago friends schedule one or more naps a day and seem to be perfectly fine with it. I chalk it up to just one more thing in life that is beyond my ability to comprehend.

Certain well-known historical figures substituted frequent naps for the need to sleep more than a couple hours a night. Thomas Edison, I believe, was one. Small wonder he would invent devices (the electric light, the phonograph) that would tend to keep him awake.

For those who take naps, I admit a certain degree of grudging admiration for doing something I cannot understand, and curiosity as to why and how naps become not only pleasurable but necessary. Maybe it's a form of addiction.

Time for a cup of coffee.

* * *

REVISITING NAPS

I took a short nap the other day. I don't like taking naps. I see them as either a form of cheating myself out of time I could be better spending on something productive, or as of a sign of weakness or, more frightening, as a concession to the advancing years, whose storm-troopers-on-the-march footsteps echo loudly through the cobblestoned canyons of my mind.

When I first got out of Mayo following my radiation treatment and subsequent neck surgery, I took naps rather frequently, but considered them more of a recuperative necessity under the circumstances and was simply too drained to try to resist even if I wanted to.

I have friends who nap regularly—one of whom then inevitably complains of not being able to sleep when he goes to bed that night. Another lies down for fifteen minutes each day after work, then pops up like a piece of warm toast and picks up his day as though he'd never even lain down. (Okay, okay…please no “tsk-tsks” over the “lay/laid/lain” issue. I like “lain.” I used it. Live with it.) Whenever I do take a nap, I tend to get up more tired than I was when I laid (sic.) down, and go through the next few hours feeling as though I'd been drugged.

I've never liked naps, even when I was a child. I was always sure I was missing out on something. There were always far too many fascinating things to do to waste it on sleeping during the daytime. That's what night was for. I distinctly remember when I was in the hospital following my broken leg when I was five, nurses would come into the children's ward at a specific time every afternoon to draw all the blinds and turn off the lights for “nap time.” I loathed “nap time” with a passion. I would just lie there, totally miserable and totally bored, waiting for them to come back and turn on the lights and open the blinds. No one else seemed to mind, but I did.

I'm not quite sure what the motivation was for my most recent nap, but I suspect it was largely due to a combination of the heat and humidity Chicago has been having of late. Plus I'd spent a great deal of time staring at the computer monitor, re-reading my next book
,
looking for errors (and, of course, finding tons of them) before submitting it to the publisher. Staring at the computer screen in other than a creative capacity can cause my mind and eyes to glaze over.

Obviously the ability and the need to nap varies widely from person to person. I'm trying to think of one very famous person—Edison?—who only slept a few hours every night, but napped frequently during the day. I can't imagine ever doing that, but then I am not famous, either.

Naps are not conducive, to me at any rate, to dream-level sleep, and one of my major objectives in sleep is to dream. I delight in dreams. Nap dreams, if any, are more like annoying 30-second TV ads. Dreamless sleep and dreamless naps are as close as we come, I think, to the condition we know as death, and there is plenty of time for that later. For right now, when I close my eyes to sleep, I want Cecil B. DeMille or Busby Berkeley (remember them?) production numbers with a cast of thousands. Bring on the dancing elephants!

Naps? Eh.

* * *

DOMESTICITY YET AGAIN

Robert Benchley, talking of an overseas trip, mentions a quaint little Spanish town, whose residents he describes as “simple, childish people, to whom cleanliness is next to a broken hip.” And oh, Lord, I identify with those people!

I'm not talking personal cleanliness…I am not a stranger to soap, water, a toothbrush, or a comb…but to my living conditions. I've touched on this subject before but was reminded of it yet again this morning when I was wondering where to install the feeding trough when I saw just what a pigsty my bathroom floor is. It is a very small bathroom: I can stand in the center of it and easily touch all four walls just by raising one arm not quite 90 degrees. It has a tile floor, and I do have a small throw rug. The cat litter box is under the sink. And I try to keep it clean. Really, I do. I have gotten on my hands and knees with a scrub brush and pail of water with Spic and Span, and Pine-Sol, and Soft Scrub and God knows what else. I have scrubbed until my arms feel about to fall off. But trying to clean in the tight confines around the toilet bowl (especially when I cannot raise my head to see what I'm doing) is a total effort in futility. When I finish, apart from having removed various spots and smudges, it is still a mess.

The entire apartment has the same tile floor—the exposed square footage of tile in the entry, the kitchen, and the bedroom are each only slightly larger than the bathroom. I mentioned earlier, I think, having been conned into buying a spray-cleaner Swiffer, which like all things advertised on TV looks like the best thing since sliced bread. Swish-swish, put on sunglasses to protect your eyes from the glare of the gleaming, spotless floors. Right. The button to release the spray is conveniently located right under your thumb, so that when you push or pull the mop, your thumb cannot avoid hitting the button, and you end up spraying far more than you intended.

Each time I am foolish enough to use it—stubbornly refusing to remember the fiasco of the last time I used it—the only real difference I can tell between “before” and “after” is that my feet stick to the floor when I try to walk on it.

God knows when I last dusted. I simply am not aware of it. I never think of it. Every waking hour is filled with something, and dusting not only is not high on my list of things that must be done, it isn't even in the footnotes. When I do dust, resenting having to take time away from more important things, within ten minutes I've forgotten that I've done it, and the next time I look, everything's dusty again.

Living alone helps, I'm sure, as does having no visitors. My friend Gary comes up for coffee every now and again, but clean-freak though he is, he bears his disgust in silence. Had I someone to be domestic for, perhaps my attitudes might change, but I doubt it. When, in the past, I have lived with someone, I was generally lucky enough to have the other person be far more aware of such things and willing to take on the responsibilities. I have, regrettably, aged myself out of the likelihood of ever being so lucky again. Perhaps I could consider hiring a cleaning person, but I could not expect them to do much about the floors, which I see as a lost cause under any circumstances.

I really don't enjoy being a slob. Truly I don't. And I sincerely am ashamed of myself for being one. But it is easier to be ashamed of myself than to do much about it. Each of us must set his or her own priorities, and I have set mine. Cleaning my apartment is not one of them. Sorry about that.

PLACES IN THE HEART

FAIRDALE

It's human nature, when hearing someone considerably older than one's self tell tales of how different distant yesterdays were from today, to roll our eyes and sigh heavily. It never occurs to us that the older have the advantage of having experienced both “then” and “now” whereas the young have only the “now” and the relatively recent past. It's difficult to comprehend just what a different world it was when the teller of stories—a parent or grandparent, usually—was younger than the listener.

The problem with “now” is that we are too close to it to see it clearly. But the fact is that each of us grows up in a world different from that of our parents and grandparents—just as our world today will be equally different from the world of our children.

And thus the subject of this blog.

I was thinking yesterday—as always, with me, for absolutely no reason—of my own distant yesterdays and a town called Fairdale.

In the mid-to-late 1930s my grandfather and his wife owned and lived in a combination bar and gas station in Fairdale, Illinois, one of those tiny unincorporated hamlets quaintly but often accurately referred to as a “wide spot in the road.” It was located on far-from-busy Hwy 72, which connected with the far busier Hwy 51. It was probably less than 25 miles from my hometown of Rockford, but seemed like hundreds of miles from anywhere.

I first checked Google to see if Fairdale still exists (surprisingly, it does), and then sought a map for its exact location. I see it has a total of three very short, one-or-two-block-long streets, though the only one I can remember is the one that had once served as the town's “main street.” It ran north and south between Hwy 72 and the railroad tracks—perhaps two blocks. Clustered along the end nearest the railroad tracks were perhaps three or four even-then-long-abandoned 2-story once-commercial buildings, but as I recall, Grandpa's bar/gas station was the only business in the town.

The bar, too, was old even then, a typical small farm-town bar which smelled of cigarette and cigar smoke and spilled beer and whiskey. Once, when I was “helping” Grandpa sweep up in the morning before the bar opened, I found a $5 bill someone had dropped. A $5 bill in the mid-to-late 1930s was a very great amount of money, indeed, and when no one returned to claim it, Grandpa let me keep it.

Neither the bar nor the gas station made much money. This was a very rural area, and the effects of the Great Depression still bore heavily on all aspects of the lives of average people.

Just west of Grandpa's place, on the highway, was a one-room school, which I remember primarily because its playground had one of those metal self-propelled “merry-go-rounds” you can still occasionally find today, which kids would start by pushing it in one direction, running faster and faster until they could jump on and go round and round until the centrifugal force died and it slowed to a halt. Then you jumped off and started the process over again.

Across the street was a large farm with what appeared to me, as a 5 year old kid, to be a huge barn. I can still close my eyes and smell the hay. The family that owned it had a couple of kids around my age, and we would sneak into the barn, climb up into the hayloft, and then ascend a ladder to a small platform almost to the barn's rafters. It seemed like a very great height, but was probably eight feet at most. We would then jump down into the hay, shrieking with laughter and the sense of excitement such courage warranted.

It was, indeed, a different time and a different world, with different values and attitudes, and the more harsh realities of life at the time gradually grow less distinct as the fog of time closes in. Sharper edges dim and soften, and nostalgia paints memories in softer colors, making the past often more appealing than the “now.”

But man is a creature which craves comfort, and if memories of a tiny town long ago can provide me with some comfort, I'll savor it like a fine, vintage wine.

* * *

THE HOUSE ON BLACKHAWK AVENUE

I came across a photo of the house in which my parents and I lived for several years when I was a kid, and as I looked at it closely, the memories started flooding back.

It was the first house my parents ever owned. I think they paid $2,500 for it, probably in 1943. It was tiny…a small living room whose main feature was an oil stove which heated the entire house, my parents' bedroom, my bedroom (which was so small it became the bathroom when dad built on a larger room for me), and the kitchen. At the time we moved in, the house had no bathroom. There was an outhouse at the back of the lot. There was also a small, one-car garage behind which was kept the fuel tank for the oil stove. Our water came from our own well, and the electric pump that brought it into the house was constantly breaking down, necessitating Dad's frequent descent into the covered hole which held it.

Looking back on it now, I have a mixture of emotions: a very small degree of embarrassment to realize how very close we were to the bottom rung of the “middle class,” but primarily a sense of warmth and attachment, and a realization of the fact that no matter what the conditions are in which a child lives, to him/her, it is totally accepted. It is the way things are, and children have nothing, really, to compare it to.

We lived there for six years, from the time I was in third grade through eighth grade. I remember about a year after we moved in, I planted a tiny tree on one side of the yard, which I was charged with mowing—a chore I hated, since it seemed I never did so to my dad's satisfaction.

And, I just this instant remembered, my beloved Lucky, shown in another of the photoblog pictures, was with us the entire time. I still truly agonize over what I still can't help but think of as my dad's betrayal in sending him away when we moved into our larger, 2-family house on Hutchins Avenue (of which, incidentally, I do not think I have a single photograph).

The Blackhawk Avenue house sat far back from the street, next to an empty lot in which all the neighbor kids would play. On the street behind us there was a small grocery store to which my mom would regularly send me. I distinctly remember one time her giving me a $5 bill (a fortune to me at that time and not a tiny sum for my family) and sending me to buy something. Somewhere between the house and the store, I lost the $5. I have no idea where or how…how can one lose something walking less than a block through an empty lot and in a straight line?…but I managed. My parents were less than happy, but I don't recall being punished for it.

My Dad, never in my entire life, laid a hand on me, though I am sure he was tempted, and he certainly had ample and frequent cause. Mom would whack me on the behind, and the embarrassment and mental anguish far outweighed the pain.

But I see I am wandering, as you may have noticed I'm wont to do. We moved to Hutchins Avenue the summer before I began ninth grade, and the Blackhawk Avenue house was rented to my maternal grandmother, Gertrude, and her fourth husband, Albert Ameely, who lived there for several years.

After Dad's death, mom sold the house to a man named Washington, and before he paid off the mortgage, which I think Mom held, the house was gutted by fire. Today it is an empty lot but, last time I passed by there several years ago, the tree, now very tall, was still standing. And of all the billions of people in the world, who but me knows I planted it? Well, now there's you.

* * *

HOMES

Though it never occurred to me until much later in life, my family was what used to be known as “lower middle class,” a term seldom if ever heard any more. It applied to financial status, but I never cared for its other connotations. Both my parents worked very hard all their lives and despite the fact that neither of them graduated from high school, they did their very best to see to it that I never wanted for anything that was really important in a child's life.

The first home I remember was the 14-foot trailer in which we lived in Gary, Indiana during the time I had my broken leg, and which I described in an earlier entry. Imagine if you will two adults and a five year old boy, in a full body cast from just under his armpits to below his knees, living in a total area of about 114 square feet. Oh, yes, and we had a dog. As I have mentioned before, the smell of kerosene still pulls me back in time and I see my mom priming the stove with a small hand pump to get the kerosene flowing. I can still hear the hiss of the gas and the “pop” of when the kerosene ignited.

The next home I remember was, in fact, a converted garage in Loves Park, Illinois, a suburb of Rockford. The bathroom was a small wooden 5'x5'x7' (if that) rectangle in the back of the property. We lived there during my first two years of school. The school was less than a block away, and I have fond memories of, in spring, using a flat piece of plywood to skim across the water-filled empty lot between our house and the school.

The one-block-long, dead end street on which we lived was named “Loves Court” and it was here I had my first introductions to sex: playing “you show me yours” with a girl classmate in an overturned outhouse—which, as I've said elsewhere, totally revolted me and slammed the door firmly on however remote a chance there might have been that I could ever have been straight. The same game with a male classmate, on the other hand confirmed what I already knew. I liked boys, not girls.

From Loves Court we moved to 328 Blackhawk Avenue, on Rockford's south side. A tiny, four-room structure, it was still another step up in my parents' march through life. It was set far back on a nice lot with a dirt driveway, a sagging garage of its own, and another outhouse, from the roof of which I one time fell while playing, getting my pants caught on a nail on the way down and hanging there, upside down, until my mother came—as she always did—to my rescue.

Our next real home was a two-story duplex, at 2012 Hutchins Avenue, on Rockford's east side. It had at one time had a grocery store on the ground floor with an apartment above, and it sat nearly on the sidewalk. It had a none-too-stable one-car garage which, like the house, had a flat roof. It also had a very nice back yard with a cherry tree and a fish pond my dad and I built.

When Uncle Buck died, Aunt Thyra moved from the Fearn family home (in which my mother was born and my grandmother had died) at 1720 School Street on Rockford's west side, and my parents bought it. It was the only “real” house that we had ever lived in.

I was in college at that time, and went off on my own. When I moved to Los Angeles, after sharing a house on Tareco Drive with Uncle Bob, I bought my first home, on Troost St. in North Hollywood. My parents had to cosign for it because, incredible as it sounds, banks would not give home loans to single men.

It was a great house, and I loved it. A swimming pool, a beautiful patio with a huge avocado tree and a flowering bush I never did find the name of, which, when in bloom, smelled like crushed bananas.

I was there about five or six years before buying an even larger home at the edge of the Angelus National Forest. It backed up on the steep foothills which attracted coyotes and rattlesnakes. It was by far the nicest of the homes in which I've lived.

I then moved to Pence, Wisconsin, for reasons which will be the subject of a future entry, and had two houses there, which will best be left also for another entry.

“Good Lord, Roger!” I hear Dorien asking: “Of what interest can this be to anyone?”

He has a point.

* * *

THE LAKES

We began going to Lake Koshkonong in southern Wisconsin, about 70 miles from our home in Rockford sometime during World War II. Some friends of my parents from the Moose Club, the Olsons, had a cottage there which they rented out. We subsequently spent several summer vacations there, in a small compound of four lakeside cottages all owned by people from Rockford.

Lake Koshkonong is formed by the Rock River. It is about 2 miles wide and 9 miles long and very shallow…perhaps 20 feet deep at its very deepest point. We could wade out from in front of the cottage for a good block and a half without the water reaching our shoulders (and I was not very tall at the time). The bottom was also very, very muddy, and the water was muddy brown.

It could also be deadly. Being so shallow, the winds could quickly whip it into a froth of whitecaps. The last cottage in the row of four belonged to the Skinner family, whom we knew well. One evening, they and a group of friends decided to go across the lake for a fish fry. Nine people crowded into the 16-foot boat, and on the way back the winds rose, the boat was swamped, and seven of the passengers drowned. Their cottage was sold shortly thereafter to the Fines, a very nice elderly couple from Chicago.

When the cottage between the Olsons and the Fines also went up for sale, my parents bought it. It was small…only two small bedrooms…but it was jerry-built pleasant and had a lovely curved stone fireplace. The people who built the place had carefully gone all around the lake collecting different colored stones for it. And somewhere along the way, someone then painted it white.

While I was in college, my “gang” of friends would frequently come up for weekends, during which we'd sing college songs all the way up and back, water ski and sunbathe during the day while we were there, and play charades, cards, and board games at night. And thinking of those days as I write, I feel the sweet ache of intense nostalgia.

One of these weekend excursions was during rehearsals for a play, and several of the cast members came up, ostensibly to rehearse our lines. When we returned, David, one of the guys who couldn't make it asked how it went, and with the spontaneity of college kids, a tale developed—with each of us who'd gone contributing a piece of the story—of a weekend from hell. My parents, David was told, were religious fanatics of the most fundamental sort. My mother, he was told, had spent the entire weekend doing nothing but quoting scripture and tatting an altar cloth. My father had insisted on loading us all into our boat and taking us around the lake to distribute religious pamphlets. It wasn't fair to David, of course, but it was great fun.