Niece blogging

My youngest niece and I have just returned from a rather inefficient road trip that took us to Victoria BC and back. She made the ordeal a pleasure. The spousette and I promise that when next we conscript her for a vacation, it will be better planned.

Hell's Kitchen

When we acquired the Crumbling Manse™ a decade ago we were pleased that most of its craftsman details had survived over the ninety years since the house went up as part of the post-earthquake building boom. The wainscoting and box beams and the pocket door in the front of the house were all intact, and had escaped the inexplicable vogue for painting these features over that had apparently seized the popular imagination at some point during the past century. All to the good. Toward the rear of the house it was a different story. There had been...questionable remodeling decisions made. We would explain to guests that clearly the kitchen had been reconfigured in the 1980s, and that the "Home Depot look" had been initially essayed, but that the option had ultimately been discarded as too pretentious and upscale. The kitchen, a large room, had been done up with the cheapest, shoddiest available counters and cabinets, sink and fixtures, and the feng shui was no great shakes.

The kitchen floor always felt a bit dicey in spots, as though it lacked the confidence that, for example, a sentient sidewalk might feel about its mission. It consisted largely of tiles, and many of these had cracked. Accordingly when the Life's Companion approached me ten days ago on this issue she had little difficulty securing my consent to rip up the shabby fractured old tiles and replace these with handsome new ones. Easy!

And ten days later I feel as though I've invaded the Soviet Union.

I had some initial concerns about the expense. These have been, ah, relegated. The dicey floor was scarcely there, so aged was the wood. The perimeter foundation at the rear of the house had some issues, and needed significant reinforcement. The shoddy cabinets had remained upright more out of respect for custom than from any structural integrity, and largely fell apart as they were moved. And you know what?

I'll pay anything. I just need the disruption to cease. I realize now that I'd be no good in a refugee camp.

Mary Barnsdale has a birthday

We were briefly an item, back in the day. That it didn't work out was entirely due to my ongoing post-divorce nervous breakdown, which took the form of a sudden spasm of agoraphobia as the 1990s began. We have remained friends, and I've always looked back on our liaison as a providential meeting in exile of two citizens of a common country. My warmest wishes go out this evening...

This grand old man

Raised in a semi-bookish household I was vaguely aware of John Updike (1932-2009) as a wunderkind of American letters long before I ever got around to reading him. As a snotty undergraduate in the early 1970s, knowing nothing more detailed about him than the lurid reputation he'd gained from the publication of Couples, I remember loftily disparaging him as a mere chronicler of suburban adultery. That was almost four decades ago: I began to discover, upon actually encountering his work in the short story collection Museums and Women, that he was a chronicler of genius, and I was subsequently to learn to my enduring sorrow that suburban adultery is a more piquant and, ah, fraught subject than I understood at twenty.

I wanted to write novels and stories myself, back in the day; a portion of talent and a vaster degree of discipline proved in the event to be wanting. It did not help that I'd accumulated some ruinous literary influences along the way--not themselves bad writers, but terrible mutagens, most of them, from the standpoint of a wannabee's embryonic DNA. Updike's influence was alone beneficent, and the only decent short story I ever wrote owed its closing cadences to a confluence of the final sentences of "The Taste of Metal" and "Your Lover Just Called" from Museums and Women:

He reached forward slowly, as underwater, and gently pulled the pencil from her hair. Rising with surprising speed she flowed into the embrace whispering indistinctly, please, please, eclipsed by kisses as he sought, still somewhat hesitantly, the softness of her small breasts. He wondered, as the narrow fissure of indecision closed, whether in the longer run of things he would credit this to volition or destiny, but in the longer run of things the distinction never matters; nor was it troubling him by the time there came again from the bedroom, in oddly muffled but imperative peals, the strident summons of the telephone.

From the late seventies forward I had a vague intention to drop a note to JU, merely a "well done." The notion flickered again early this year, but I imagined that I had another ten years at least to get around to it. As it turns out...not.

Tonight's assignment: read "The Happiest I've Been," which closes out Updike's first short story collection The Same Door.

Better late than never

A roof over his woof

Pictured above is "Ravi," rescued from the lethal chamber in Hollister CA early this month and at present being fostered here in the Crumbling Manse. He's eighteen months old, gangly, goofy and about a head taller than the incomparable Napalm, who's the senior dog on these premises. The original deal was that we would look after him for ten days, after which he would proceed either to another foster home or to a permanent gig. In exchange for taking him in fresh from his reprieve (rescue organization A plucked him from the pound in Hollister, eighty miles south of here, and handed him off to Berkeley-based rescue organization B via a veterinarian in nearby Fremont, a Bay Area locus of the Southwest Asian diaspora—hence his name, bestowed by the vet, a grandson of the Raj—where the contents of his scrotal sac were extracted and discarded, who then fobbed the creature off on us that afternoon) we have first refusal on that gig. Heaven help me, I think I'm going to say yes. I'm looking around me at possessions—books, DVDs, clothing—knowing that some of these will perish in the coming months in consequence of my softheartedness. I will be distraught, wroth. Will I benefit, I wonder, from remembering that I entered into this doggie pact with my eyes open?

Let me say at once that this is an adorable dog. His disposition is sociable, affectionate and curious; he is obviously intelligent; understands and complies with "NO!", albeit with a vanishingly brief retention. I can't believe that he's spent his life feral: he must have had a human family to be so well socialized. I surmise that the hypothetical family permitted him free run of their beds, sofas and chairs, a privilege he will not enjoy here in the Crumbling Manse. Napalm (also a "shepherd mix"; sixteen in March; remarkably healthy for a dog of his size) is concerned that his alpha status not be questioned, and does much posturing and snarling, to which the younger responds "Oh! The alpha male deigns to growl at me! I am not worthy!", conveyed with appropriately submissive body language and much tail wagging. Napalm appears gratified by this. Yesterday we took them both to "Point Isabel," the largest of the local off-leash parks, and Ravi behaved himself very well, never copping an attitude toward dogs or people. When a couple of other canines tried a brutal dominance routine on him, he did not respond in snarling kind but rather removed himself from the fray with an air of puzzled surprise.

When he reached us that first Friday, separated forever from his human family, fresh off a fortnight in the pound with some hardened characters, emasculated just hours earlier, a clown-cone affixed to he head and confined to a big plastic cage for transport, he was thoroughly traumatized and frantic. Sprung from the plastic cage he was so obviously distraught by the cone (intended to keep his wandering tongue away from those fresh stitches) that we defied the guidelines promulgated by rescue org B and discarded the device just five minutes in. I think we must have seemed to him the first human beings since Veterans' Day who'd done anything right, and that we secured, in that moment of his deepest doggie despair, almost inexhaustible moral credit for the remainder of our association.

There are issues. Abandonment issues. Separation anxiety. Ravi does not like being left alone, and sublimates this tension in...scientific investigation of his surroundings. His approach to the world around him, which he indulges when left unsupervised for even a short time, appears to be: 1) Is it edible? 1a) If yes, eat it. If no, might it be edible on the inside? 1b) Investigate with teeth. 1c) If inedible, destroy and discard; look around for another candidate to subject to the scientific method. 2) Rinse and repeat. Casualties of this approach thus far include two sets of wooden mini-blinds and two dog pillows.

And yet, and yet...A sweeter-tempered creature you could not ask for. Affectionate, attentive, eager to please and physically easy on the eyes. I fear that I've bonded (Lina, of course, was always in the can). He's here for as long as he wants to be.

How cool is that?

I have not been as proud of my presidential vote since I cast it for the first time against Richard M. Nixon, whose toxic residues continue to sap and impurify our precious political fluids, on this night in 1972, and I'm far more pleased with the result this time out.

(The image is the work of NYC-based designer Marco Avedo, and reminds me of why it is that I'm an obscure in-house art director whose work (largely for in-house consumption) is routinely derivative. I wouldn't have come up with this in a year of trying. Avedo's original entry here.)