Selling the House – Chapter 5 January 18, 2009
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Montpelier.Tags: closing, house sale
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We conclude the story…
We were the first to arrive at the bank, a little early perhaps, and our inquiring looks as we scanned the tellers and patrons went unreturned. No one in the small lobby was expecting us. The two bank officials important enough to have offices, but not trustworthy enough to have something more opaque than smoked glass for walls, sat behind desks in earnest conversation with suited clients. We deduced that the location had been chosen for the convenience of the buyer’s lawyer, and we would just have to await his arrival. So we sat and tried, unsuccessfully, to find diverting reading material. In comparison to the dog-eared, glossy magazines of a doctor’s office, the pamphlets on mortgages, money market accounts, and interest-free checking were rather dry.
I let Dawn have the only chair in the place while I chivalrously stood nearby, a hovering protecting spirit. As no good deed goes unpunished, it wasn’t long before she said, “Harry, go ask that teller if they have any more of those piggy banks. You know, the one Samuel dropped on Fourth of July?”
I knew. This was a small town that still held a rousing Fourth of July parade that drew an audience large than the town’s population. The bank had given out soft piggy banks, which Sam had loved and then subsequently dropped as Dawn carried him back to the car after dark, asleep on her shoulder.
I also knew my wife. She delights in asking me to do small favors she can do perfectly well herself. True, I was already standing and she was sitting, and it would have churlish to expect her to vacate the seat I had just insisted she take. But the truth is, she is shy of both phones and strangers, so the choice was between futile, boorish nagging or getting it done.
A coiffed tween behind the counter invited me forward from the line. “Oh, the piggy banks? Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said with a sad look, as if I just told her my dog had died. Her patronizing tone slid up and down by perfect fourths and bounced off the walls of the small lobby. “They were none left. We gave them all away during the parade. I mean, I could go look in the back, but I’m fairly sure their all gone.”
“No, don’t bother. Thank you anyway.” I scuttled through a gauntlet of indulgent smiles back to our neutral corner and, crouching by the chair, murmured to Dawn, “They’re all out.”
“So I heard,” she murmured back.
Our lawyer arrived, in a soft brown business suit adorned with reading glasses on a necklace of polished river stones. She ushered us into an unoccupied conference room with the same floor-to-ceiling, fish-bowl windows. The table was ample enough for a formal dinner party, but we all huddled together along one side, politely relinquishing the “seats of honor” at each end. Though the chairs seemed more “dutiful” than “honorable”. These were modern New England business chairs, deeply rooted in Puritan virtues of fortitude and stamina. No executive springs or wheels, no imitation leather or bulging lumbar support. A simple, square metal frame barely disguised by insufficient padding and gray fabric upholstery, with four no-frills, stainless steel legs, thick as rebar, that speared the carpet below. Such a chair did not turn or waver. Such a chair forced ethical choices. Sit up straight, keep all your feet on the floor, and decide once and for all which direction you were going to face.
There was nothing extraordinary about the business we were going to conduct, but our lawyer beamed quietly. And why shouldn’t she beam. She was a grandmother, with a distinguished local career, a large house with a paid mortgage, and a grown-up child in the family business. She handed us papers – legal documents, her final bill, disclaimers and declarations. We sauntered through the pile, signing our names and chattering in undertones like school children in the back pew at church.
The buyer soon entered, slender and ethereal and out of place. She looked around the room with a shy smile. She seemed embarrassed by how much space she took up, and she tried to shrink her five foot ten frame. She wished us a drawling Good Morning. This was the first time she had ever bought a house on her own. Her nose positively twitched her desire for acceptance and her shoulders shrugged disbelief. She sat across the table from us, oozing quiet enthusiasm and nervousness.
At last Finn, her lawyer, arrived, a clean-shaven, suited fellow, with a sufficient amount of gray hair and an ample chin and paunch reflecting his distinguished position as a pillar of the legal bar. He assumed the role of master-of-ceremonies and dispelled the archival hush with a endless flow of dry, cynical, good-natured talk. He began to go through papers with his client, much as we were doing, while asking questions, swapping stories, and reminiscing.
“Did you give her the lead paint disclosure?”
“Yes, here it is,” we answered. “We really have no knowledge of lead paint, but all the interior walls were repainted in the last five years.”
“What is this?” the buyer asked.
“A useless piece of paper that you are legally entitled to read and recycle.”
“Finn, did you hear about the new bill before the legislature? Introduced by our friend Mrs. C?” our lawyer asked.
“Oh God. What now?”
“Aside from lead, it would require all sellers to provide buyers with a complete disclosure of a dozen other substances, along with pamphlets describing in detail the various health and safety hazards associated with it.”
From their mutual noises of disgust, they clearly thought this a terrible idea, but as a layman and a consumer I could not understand why? This must have shown on my face. “It would triple the amount of paper work,” she added, turning to me and holding up the half inch stack we had already worked through, “most of which will end up unread, recycled or in the landfill.”
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” said Finn. “You know, when I was a kid, my dad use to keep a old jam jar full of mercury, and sometimes he’d give it to us to play with, just to get us kids out his hair.”
The buyer blinked, and then added, not without a self-mocking sense of caveat emptor, “Well, I guess that explains a lot about you.”
Having started earlier, we finished our pile of papers sooner and sat back to enjoy the show. Finn and the buyer worked their way through their stack, occasionally passing a document to us to countersign. Finn would explain a document’s purpose in clear prose, discuss the nitty gritty with our lawyer in their legal argot, and then entertain us with some histoire while the buyer signed. Not a bad way to make a living. When the next paper was revealed, he held onto it and switched to a more formal tone than before.
“OK, before you sign this, I have to ask this officially. And you have to say ‘yes’ to make this legal and official, you understand?”
She swallowed whatever witty statement was at the end of her tongue as she realized his tone was, if not serious, then at least not as careless as before.
“Do you sign this document of your own free will?”
Good God? Was he really allowed to ask her this at this late stage in the game? We had cancelled our insurance policy. We had given up our children’s slot at the Montessori school. We had missed the deadline for pre-buying heating fuel for the winter. This was not time for cold feet. Fortunately, I hardly had time to hold my breath, before she answered, “Yes.”
I blew out my breath. “Finn,” I said, “At this point in the process … I mean … does anyone ever say no?”
Finn slid his reading glasses to a well-worn slot on the end of his nose and turned to face me – not an easy trick in those particular chairs. But the twinkle in his eye told me the serious part was over.
“You know, about once every five years, someone does say No.”
He leaned back in his chair, and held up a finger. “I remember this one couple I was helping through the process, and there hadn’t been any indication of a problem or hitch the whole time, a very routine sale, until I said, ‘Do you sign this document of your own free will?’ And she yelled, ‘NO!’ and pointed at her husband with her thumb,” and he demonstrated with his own thumb.
At this point Finn mimicked an angry and bitter woman defaming her spouse. “‘We wouldn’t be here if Mr. Awnt-er-pen-ure here hadn’t had his great, never-fail business idea. And what you think that might be? Come on. Guess. No, don’t guess. You’ll never guess. A tire center! In Vermont! Isn’t that brilliant. Who would ever think to put up a tire center in Vermont! Would you think of that? Of course, you would. How many tire centers are there within twenty miles of here? Lots! But Noooo! Come on, honey, it’s a sure bet. He insisted. We’ll make a ton of money. We can’t lose. Argh! We owned that beautiful house outright and now we have to take out a mortgage just to pay off the losses. I could just SCREAM every time I think of it. And if you think you can…’
“On and on and on she went, while her husband sank in his seat and turned an odd shade of pale gray. I thought she wasn’t ever going to finish. I must have waited ten minutes for her to calm down, until finally she huffed in disgust, ‘Yes, I sign this document of my own free will.’ and then immediately turned to her husband and said, ‘I am NEVER going to let you live this down!’”
The paperwork was completed, and as we shook hands all round, Finn handed us the largest check I ever expect to see in my life. Outside the building, the buyer hugged us, thanked us, and wished us well, and we sincerely returned her emotions. In a couple of months, she would be sending us increasingly anxious and frustrated emails when the basement flooded in one of the wettest summers the state had seen in living memory. But at that moment, we were all pleased with the transaction and relieved it had come off smoothly. She walked off in high spirits, a great burden off her shoulders.
We were now legally homeless, and our future had enough uncertainty that we weren’t completely care-free, but it’s hard to be anxious with a five-digit check for in your hand. Or rather, it’s a different kind of anxiety.
“We need to deposit this RIGHT AWAY!” I insisted.
“OK gang. Let’s go!” Dawn said, in her best up-and-at-’em voice.
“Should we walk or take the car? It’s kind of a far walk, but we have a free parking spot right now.”
“Harry, look at the dollar amount on that check you are holding in your hand. And you’re trying to save yourself twenty-five cents in the parking meter?”
“I am my Mother’s son, but you’re right. Let’s drive.”
In retrospect, it’s embarassing to admit when you have lived a cliche, but at the time we laughed all the way to the bank.
Selling The House – Chapter 4 December 17, 2008
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Montpelier.Tags: disappointment, house sale
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And now for the reaction from the parents.
“So that’s when she told me she didn’t want to pay our asking price.”
“Wait. You were just about to sign the contract, and then she wants to negotiate a new price?”
“Yup.”
“That’s chutzpah.”
I was on the phone with my Dad. This is the weekly, grandparent update, formerly the weekly dutiful-son update until I had children. In the dutiful son years, Mom always answered the phone, but now Dad has retired, so he hears the news first.
Because he is my father and I his son, I unwittingly force the role of father confessor upon him. I am old enough to be past this phase of our relationship, but I still value his approval. It is a deeply ingrained habit, not a conscious choice. I tell him what we are doing with our lives, and if I fail to amuse him or make him laugh, I naturally assume he disapproves. Then I begin to make my justifications until he really does disapprove. That’s when he puts Mom on the phone.
This neurotic anxiety is pointless. For his part, my father has no tolerance for being a confessor. Having suffered a heart attack and survived triple bypass surgery, he is unwilling to jeopardize his blood pressure with the specific details of his grown-up children’s foolishness. Ignorance is longevity. Fortunately Mom is much healthier and has no such qualms.
“So, what did she offer you?”
I told him.
“But … wait … that’s not very different from what you asked.”
“No, it isn’t,” I agreed
“Hmm. OK. And what did you counter?”
“I didn’t counter.”
“What?”
“I didn’t counter. I accepted it.”
Really though, I almost did not accept the offer, but I didn’t tell Dad this. At the time, I was angry at being manipulated. But this anger was blunted by two considerations.
The first was that, for the first time, her voice lost that spiritual, unconcerned quality. It momentarily gained a harsh note of someone pressing an advantage that they are not sure truly exists, someone a little bit scared. It made her very human and vulnerable, and it reminded me that we didn’t have to sell the house. I could not be manipulated against my will. Plan B was simply to stay in New England, which we loved anyway, live on a tight budget, and send our children to public school instead of Montessori. As it turned out, Plan B was not economically feasible, but I didn’t know it at the time, because the national economic melt down was still months away.
The second consideration was that the price she offered was not very much less than the asking price. In fact, it was a very amateurish negotiation on her part, and it sealed her convincing role of a novice home buyer. My impression was this was a unconscious self-help maneuver whose only point was to bolster her faltering confidence. She wanted to prove to herself that she had some control and was not being taking advantage of by me. I was willing to forego some profit to buy some goodwill and smooth out the process, which turned out to be useful later. And in the big picture, the money was a only a very little skin off my considerable nose. Dad didn’t think so.
“You didn’t give a counter offer?”
“No, why would I do that?”
“You’re supposed to counter, to meet her half way. That’s how you negotiate.” Dad insisted.
“Well, it seemed kind of pointless to do so. It was still within the range Dawn and I agreed was what we wanted. Frankly we just want to …”
“Let me get your mother on the line. Ceci!”
One for one. Now to find something with which to disappoint Mom. The house sale wouldn’t do it, but she’s not thrilled about us moving in the first place so this shouldn’t be difficult. I could at least expect some unsolicited advice, or even better, a sigh and a parting shot like, “Well, it’s your life.”
Two thousand miles away, I heard my mother’s voice across the condo, “What?” It was a familiar voice from my childhood, a surprisingly effective roar from a small woman that developed while raising four boys and has since then been continually exercised by a husband who refuses to wear his $300 hearing aids.
“Get on the phone! It’s your son!”
“Which one?”
“The one in Vermont!”
I heard her footsteps echo on the reddish-brown hardwood floors. With the exception of the bathrooms, there was not a single door or ceiling on any of the walls in their condominium. “Harry! How are you?”
“Great Mom. We have a buyer for the house.”
“Oh that’s wonderful! Did you get what you wanted?”
“Yes,” and before she could ask how much, “A very nice woman, a friend of some neighbors, and she seems anxious to get all the legal work done quickly.”
“That’s great! When do you move?”
“We have a six weeks to pack.”
“And do you know where you’re going?”
“Still the Fort Wayne area.”
“I know that. Don’t you have a house there?”
“No, not yet. We want to rent for a year before we consider buying land.”
“Oh good. That’s smart. I was worried you were going to invest your money and then not be able to get out if you didn’t like it. And where will you rent?”
“Don’t know yet. We are going to take a UHaul and drive out there and look for a rental when we arrive.”
“You … You don’t know where you’re staying yet?”
“Um, no. I mean, yes. We have a place to stay for a week or two. It’s at the school actually, a sort of B&B, only they don’t serve breakfast, More like just a B. With a large kitchen. It’s only while we look for a rental.”
Silence. No Response. Have I succeeded? Clearly she is not pleased with this plan.
“But what will the children do in the meantime?”
“They’ll be with us. It’s summer vacation, they don’t have to be in school. And I do believe you offered to come up and keep an eye on them.”
“Well, yes, so you could unpack. You won’t be able to unpack until you find a rental.”
“You’re right, but what can we do? We don’t have to time or money to take an extra trip there, and we need to pack now.”
A silence. A sigh.
“Well, I suppose you know best.”
Selling The House – Chapter 3 December 17, 2008
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Montpelier.Tags: contract, house sale, negotiate, swim, tornado
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We continue our flashback series from Spring 2008, when we were selling our house.
A woman called and wanted to see the house. She happened to be just round the corner, visiting a friend of hers, a neighbor we met from time to time and whose property I had once trespassed upon the previous winter, driving a deep gash through their pristine snow. Yes, the house was still available. Yes, she could see it. No, tomorrow, not today.
In fact, the house was ready to receive visitors that day, but we were not. It was already the end of the day and there was nowhere for Dawn to take the children, even if we were inclined. She did not express any displeasure at the inconvenience, and said tomorrow would be fine, though she might drive by and look at the outside.
Her voice had a dreamy quality – rather more spiritual than hallucinogenic - but practical and down to earth. With a judicious use of pauses and inflection, she conveyed a broad range of feeling within a minimal register. As I soon learned, taking her on the now familiar tour of the premises, she was a school librarian and so was not easily flustered. Nothing phased her, not even my disclosure of the wet basement. She simply nodded her head, her thin arms crossed as she considered the foundation with a look that betray nothing - not understanding, not ignorance, not even interest. Like previous visitors, the rooms and windows delighted her, as did the location, and she soon came back for additional visits with her college-aged daughters and the requisite “friend who knew something about house construction.”
She liked the neighborhood, loved the house, agreed the price was reasonable, and despite not truly understanding the process of buying a For Sale By Owner home, she agreed to make an offer. We set a date to draft a purchase and sales agreement and get the process started. That night, Dawn and I ordered out for dinner.
The following afternoon I waited in the kitchen. The day was sticky and unreasonably hot for early June, and like many New England homes, we had no air conditioning. I was telepathically chivvying Samuel into his bathing suit and out the door with Rose and Dawn. They were going to cool off in the pool and leave me to negotiate the sales and purchase agreement in peace. A weak puff of air moved through the window screens, and I felt an impossible shiver as the sweat on the back of my neck cooled a degree. Dawn was gathering towels and goggles and sunscreen into a large, blue, net bag, and while she rummaged in the drawers, I said, “You know, I really shouldn’t complain. My family in Atlanta has been dealing with this heat and humidity for three months already.”
Dawn glanced in my direction with a sardonic expression. “Your family is suffering terribly in their air-conditioned fortresses.”
“Yes, poor devils.”
To be fair it had only been two days of unseasonable misery. A high pressure system lay over New England like a magnifying glass whose focal point rested twenty feet over our roof. Nighttime brought some relief, but not enough to sleep comfortably. One expected this in July, a week or two of sweat-soaked sheets, thin blankets tossed early to the floor, cranky children refusing to drink enough water, and several trips to the city pool and maple creemies. The human creature can withstand any amount of discomfort if it can be accepted in the natural order of things, a compromise or sacrifice for a perceived purpose. In our case, a week of misery in July is a small price to pay for living in New England, a price we could choose to pay in electric bills if we wanted to install an air conditioner. But four months of this was not part of the bargain.
Dawn and the children vanished to the pool before the buyer arrived. I offered her ice water which she gratefully sipped and held to her tanned, stretched skin, glistening with perspiration. We chatted for a bit, quickly digging down, as Americans will do, to an acceptable level of personal intrusion. I gave her the short account of our reasons for moving and life as an older parent of young children, while she summarized a divorce, an impending surgery, and an ill family member. We sipped our ice water and watch the sky darken with what promised to become a cooling thunderstorm. The wind rose outside and squeezed through the open windows to rustle the blank contract on the table. On cue, we picked it up and began the process of working our way through the legal language and filling in the blanks.
She asked questions about everything, and though she seemed to understand only fragments of the process, she listened attentively and without anxiety as I did my best to explain and decipher security deposits, inspection clauses, and financial pre-qualification. When she asked questions, they were pertinent, and I found her absolute calm unnerving.
A familiar sound outside brought my glance up from the contract. Out the front windows, I saw Dawn returning in the minivan, parking on the street rather than the garage. She must have forgotten something important at home, perhaps Rose’s epipen, and I imagined she would run in and out with no more than a hushed “don’t mind me” – guaranteed to make us do so – as she passed. But it was the children who came running in, flushed, excited. Rose was chattering. Samuel was in tears.
“There’s a tornado watch!” Rose said, loudly enough to heard across the length of the house, though she was only twelve inches from my ear. Samuel’s screams were louder yet, and as he clung to my leg, it took some time for me to understand his words.
“Papa. I’m scared of the tornado!”
Dawn was nowhere to be seen. She was not visible outside. She had not come in with the children, and they had no idea where she was. I comforted Samuel in my lap, shrugging and passing apologetic glances to our buyer, who did not seem in the least put out but stared vacantly into space. Rose chattered by the window. Eventually Samuel calmed down in my lap, and Rose started to read a book, so we continued to work down the contract. Dawn finally returned and stayed long enough to say, “Sorry! They said there’s a tornado warning …” but at this word, Samuel began to scream again – Papa I’m scared of the tornado! – and I almost missed the rest of Dawn’s words. “… so I wanted to come home and find out if the pool was even open, but when I got out of the car there was a woman at the end of the street in a wheelchair yelling ‘Call 911.’ So I did, and I’m waiting for the ambulance. Oh, there it comes now!”
Samuel jumped down from my lap, and Rose and he both jumped up on the couch to peer out the window. When I turned back, Dawn was gone. “Papa, there’s an ambulance!” said my son, master of the obvious, all trace of panic gone at the sight of the flashing lights.
In time Dawn returned and took the children into the farthest back bedroom and closed the door. The buyer gave me an indulgent smile, and we laughed over the foibles of children. We finished up the contract, and I asked her to review it for errors before we took copies to our respective lawyers, hers as yet hypothetical.
“It looks good except for one part,” she said with a practiced, off-hand air, and a hesitancy in her voice. Her indifference on contractual points was now over, and she was about to drop the bomb over the only point she had ever cared about.
“Yes?” I asked, as obsequiously as I could manage.
“The selling price.”
“Let’s see,” I replied, taking the document from her hand. “Here it is, at the top.”
“Yes, I know, but we never spoke about price.”
“But you said you thought the selling price was reasonable.”
“Reasonable, yes, but I never said that that was what I was offering.”
“Oh,” I replied. And then, again, “Oh.” I was alarmed and angry and at the same time unwilling to admit either. “Well, what exactly are you offering?”
She smiled. I hadn’t said no. It was the smile of a high diver who, having leaped into oblivion, has left her anxieties behind on the board and is enjoying the thrill of reckless abandonment, and she continued to smile as she offered me her price.
Selling the House – Chapter 2 December 17, 2008
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Montpelier.Tags: fire, house sale, wiring
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We continue our flashback series from Spring 2008, when we were selling our house.
We gave a local FSBO circular our blurb, our digital photos, and our money, several hundred dollars of it, and waited for the calls to come in. We did not know how long we should have to wait.
Our sense of our house’s desirability was balanced and counter-balanced by several factors: the sluggish national housing market, deflated by a sub-prime mortgage crisis in its infancy, lowered our expectations. The inoculation of New England real estate to national trends buoyed them. Our small town was upper middle class and white collar. Located in the mountains without a great deal of buildable land, housing in was generally scarce and expensive, even in a down market. Our particular house was a 3 bedroom, 1 bath house, in a market flooded with large, 4-6 bedroom Victorians. The national wisdom was that the buyer should have the pick of the litter, but this logic didn’t work locally where the litter was small. If you were looking for a house in our desirable little village, and you wanted to “size up,” then you had choices and room to bargain. But if you were a retiree, a a divorcee, a recently widowed or empty nester, if you were someone whom life had given a few kicks and you needed a smaller place to heal and start over, there weren’t a lot of options available in our market.
We intended to show the house on Sundays only, but the first caller abrasively shoved our faces against reality. In a tearing hurry, she made it clear that she had to see the house that very morning or not at all. We spent a furious hour cleaning the home, and then Dawn rushed the children down the stairs to the library as our prospective buyercame up the front steps. She spent ten minutes spent politely scanning the rooms before telling us that our home was well-priced but required more work that she was prepared to spend money on.
By the time indignation released its choking grasp on my wit, she was already in her car. I called out the front door, “You think it’s bad now, wait till you read the disclosure statement!” but my esprit d’escalier barely tarnished the chrome on her retreating bumper.
So it went. Random calls followed by frenetic, house-beautiful drills. Scrub the toilet and tub, wipe the toothpaste scum off the mirror and the dried urine off the back of the toilet where the three-year-old boy’s target practice failed, vacuum the carpets and remove any garbage, throw hundreds of small plastic, wood, metal, and paper toys into their appropriate boxes. Hustle the children off to a friend’s house, a sunny playground, or an air-conditioned library. The grand tour with a new set of strangers, lasting ten to thirty minutes, honing my patter and learning in time what to say and, more importantly, what not to say.
DO point out the hand-crafted built-in bookcase. DO point out the newly installed, energy-efficient oil furnace. Do NOT point out the couch on which your wife gave birth to your only son, nor regale them with the details of that particular story. People might buy a house with a dripping faucet, some peeling paint, even a vague, romantic ghost haunting on a full moon, but they do not want your physical and emotional baggage upstaging their mental revision of your home.
More people came by. Young professional unmarried couples, a single mother who had sold her home and needed a place within a month, a recently divorced gentleman able to pay cash but who eventually chose not to. No offers. I was pleased by the steady stream, but disappointed that the fish would not bite. We had had only one nibble, a single, retired woman who appreciated the large windows and quiet neighborhood and who envisioned blissful Sunday mornings spent with canvas and oil paints. But on a third visit, after wandering the premises with “the practical friend”, someone in the home construction line, doubts began to bubble up through the dreamy impressions. She stood in our front room at sunset and turned off the lights. The afternoon windows failed to light up the living room to a suitable level of Impressionistic splendor, and the love light in her eyes extinguished.
I had come to appreciate the brevity and candor of our very first visitor. She had been brutally candid, and once the stinging had subsided, I was able to see how valuable her critique had been. And she had only taken ten minutes of our time.
The landscaping grew shabbier. It rained every afternoon for days and days, so that the lawn was never dry enough to mow, but I took advantage of a dry weekend morning to climb on the roof with a steel-bristled painter’s scraper to remove lichen from the roof tiles on the shady side of the house. It was a slow, sweaty, uncomfortable job that ended before it was completed when there were no more steel bristles left on the brush. But the day remained dry, so the next afternoon I was outside with the mower and sheers, building up another cleansing sweat. The children cavorted outside, and Dawn took advantage of their absence to clean the highly-trafficked stairwell that connected the kitchen to the garage and doubled as a pantry. The walls were greasy and the stairs perpetually grimy from the tracked in dirt.
After an hour, Rose came running to find me behind the shade garden under the back yard trees adding trimmed branches to the brush pile.
“Mama wants you!” she called.
I heaved a sigh, hoisted my creaking frame, and pushed my glasses back up the bridge of my nose with the gloved back of my wrist. Trundling around to the front of the house, I left the shears on the rock wall and walked in the basement man door. The walls were damp and dripping, and Dawn was at the top of the stairs with a bucket of sudsy water and rubber gloves on, and her voice had the timbre of someone trying not to panic. “There are … um … sparks coming out of the light switches down there.” At the same time I saw the smoke.
The plate at the bottom of the stairs had three switches: one switch for the stairwell, one for the basement/garage, and one switch that had never done anything the whole time we lived in the house. Except for now. It lit up like a sparkler on the 4th of July, occasionally ejecting a narrow flame like the forked tongue of asnake flicking in and out.
Dawn grabbed the fire extinguisher and sprayed the light switch plate, which didn’t help because the fire was behind the plate. Fortunately the breaker box was around the corner, so I shut off the circuit, grabbed the extinguisher from her, and walked to the other side of the wall with the light switch. This was in the garage and there was no sheet rock on this wall. The switch box was exposed, and I put the nozzle right on an access hole in the switch box. I dowsed the inside until it filled with a noxious mustard yellow powder. In twenty seconds the sparking and fire was gone, leaving an acrid, gritty, musky stench in the air the settled on our tongues like a bad hangover.
Fortunately, the metal switch box had contained the fire inside itself. The walls had not burned, nor even taken any smoke damage.
We vacuumed out the powder, and I rewired the box, replacing the aged, faulty switch that had never done a lick of work in its life and had not cared for the soapy bath Dawn had given it when her washing water had dripped down the walls and into its casing. The air was still redolent of burnt wiring insulation. Gritty yellow powder clung to the sweat on our faces and the saliva on our teeth. But when I flipped the new switch, the outdoor flood lights lit up the driveway.
Selling the House – Chapter 1 December 17, 2008
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Montpelier.Tags: carpenter ants, disclaimer, house sale, Sleep
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Now that I have time to catch up on my blog, here are a few articles about the process of selling our house earlier this year.
The disclaimer form, required by law and painfully thorough, presented a long checklist of possible house defects observed within the past four years, with Yes, No, and Unknown checkboxes. And while “Unknown” was a possible answer to any question, it was not always the proper answer, either legally or morally. If the defect was known, if for example you had hired people to address the problem and then left behind a trail of signed contracts and payments by check, you ought to check Yes and explain yourself. There were only so many electricians and plumbers and pest control companies serving a town of 8,000, so you weren’t likely to hide the fact for long. Besides, the house was sixty years old, so a sheet stating no knowledge of any defects would have been highly suspicious. And we are honest people. Desperate to sell a house in a buyers market, true, but not so desperate as to prevaricate.
For example, we confessed that there had been carpenter ants. I wrote out a succinct account, a bare sentence or two, describing the removal of the rotting deck, the destruction of the nest by a professional exterminator, and the truthful, though admittedly unverifiable, fact that they had not been seen again since. I had fulfilled my legal and ethical requirements.
But that was not the complete story.
Four years earlier, soon after we moved in to the house, the foam ceiling tiles in the master bedroom began to loosen and fall off the ceiling. We removed them all and arranged for a carpenter to come and sheetrock the ceilings. He was not available for a month, so for weeks the dirty, gray attic insulation above our heads gave the room a disreputable air, but it was securely held up by clear plastic sheeting stapled to the ceiling joists which gently flapped up and down whenever a breeze whistled through the attic eaves. It was a temporary arrangement we were willing to live with.
Because we did not know about the carpenter ants. Because the previous owners did not disclose them (under pest issues on their disclaimer form, they had checked Unknown). It was late Spring and they were hatching in the rigid insulation of the outer walls. They are nocturnal, and at night they crawled into the house through convenient gaps in the plastic sheeting over our heads that we had provided. Hundreds of them.
A single ant is a symbol of insignificance, but a hundred ants exploring a house in the dead of night makes a sound to freeze your flesh and fill a lifetime of nightmares. The clicking of their mandibles as they prowled the house combined with an occasional nip on our legs or heads in bed lent a surreal horror to our now-insomnial nights. We kept all our food in tightly sealed containers and slept, huddled together, on couches in the living room, where they rarely ventured.
We could have doused the house with professionally-applied, chemical insecticide, and the ants would have been mostly gone in days, but our newborn Samuel spent much of his day indoors, and we did not like the idea of his developing brain tainted with poisonous petrochemicals. We opted instead for gel bait – a concentrated poison in gel form laced with sugar that the ants carry back to their nest. It is a safer and more effective than spraying, but it takes weeks to kill the entire nest. On the other hand, it does kill the entire nest, completely eradicating it, something the spray isn’t guaranteed to do. It had one other advantage over insecticide spray that we did not expect; carpenter ants cart off and eat their dead. As the dropped off one by one, the corpses disappeared almost as soon as they expired, leaving no mess for us to clean up. By the end of two weeks, the house was eerily, morbidly silent at night, and we moved back into our bedrooms, fatigue having overcome trepidation and loathing.
Four years later, when it came time to sell the house, there was not enough space on the disclaimer form to elaborate these supererogatory details.
Gunfire December 9, 2008
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Montpelier, Wolcottville.Tags: Ducks, Gunfire, Hunting, Sleep
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Saturday morning we woke to the sound of gunfire, a heavy explosive noise that somehow compressed and released the air in the room. Like a door slamming inches from your face, it was a sound that made you flinch and then take a inventory of your body parts for bruises and holes. It woke Sam, though he was probably already awake, lying on a small palette of pillows and sheets next to our bed. He is a night waker who seeks the comfort of our presence at two in the morning. He is also a twitcher and kicker whose has been banished numerous times from our bed, so the palette is a compromise. It allows him to sleep in the room with us when he needs to, but it does not require him to wake us. Unless of course, someone is firing a gun.
“Mama? What’s that noise? Mama, Papa. I heard something.”
He was reasonably calm, probably more calm than we were because he has little idea what it could be and because we hide our feelings better. It’s barely light outside, and soon Rose came in from the children’s bedroom too. She is six years old, which is an age of intellectual rebellion, a foretaste of adolescence, and as a late sleeper, she is usually surly most mornings having not yet discovered coffee. But not this morning. With a tinge of concern she was about to ask what that sound was, when suddenly we heard it again. Four loud explosions, two close together and two more staccato, that echo off the houses, garages, and trees. I was fully awake now. They did not appear to be directed at us, but they were close enough to rattle the windows on the far side of the house. Could they be coming from the lake?
Aloud, we suggested hunters and left unsaid any other possibilities that might upset the children and frighten ourselves. After all, this was rural Indiana. What other possible explanation was there? A couple of months earlier, we heard a single gunshot down the road while driving home that proved to be a neighbor ridding himself of a undesirable rodent, but unless this was a near-sighted octogenarian with a persistent and deaf ground hog, there were too many shots for that explanation. A domestic dispute was hardly likely, even among the few remaining tough retirees who chose not to migrate back to Fort Wayne for the winter. It was early December, too early for cabin fever – the weather had barked more than bitten. There was a meaningless dusting of snow still frosting the lawn and a thin sheen of ice had licked the edges of the lake. Gang warfare was out of the question. Most of the people beyond the lake were farmers, half of them Mennonites. And I was reminded of a joke.
Q. What is this? “Clip clop clip clop clip clop. BANG! BANG! Clip clop clip clop.”
A. An Amish drive-by shooting.
I kept this one to myself.
Dawn got out of bed and walked to the front of the house, meaning the side facing the lake, not the street. When you live on a small body of water, with houses crowding the shore in French long lots around the entire perimeter, the lake itself is the center of the community, not the various approach roads snaking about like veins. I was fully awake now and I followed but turned to the back of the house, because the front of our house was twenty feet from the water, and, product of the suburbs that I was, I could not conceive of someone swimming out into the water to fire a gun.
“It must be duck season,” I heard Dawn call from the other side of the house, and we all headed to the lake side parlor to watch a canoe paddler in camouflage green glide past our window. He slowed down and picked up a dead bird which he casually tossed, the feathers streaming an arc of lake water into the air, before landing on a large pile of fowl corpses in the front of the canoe. Scanning the 180 degree view, we spied a large collection of decoys at the south east corner of the lake, laid out in front of the cattails. The canoe headed slipped back into the cattails and disappeared behind a duck blind.
“Come on kids,” I said. “I’d like you to stay out of the lake room this morning.”
The lake room is the best room in the house, with a grand view, a CD player, the current peck of library books, and the most comfortable couches in the house, but the children made no fuss. Like me, they were paranoid of the unknown. The hunters weren’t aiming at the houses. Yet. I am a believer in not tempting fate.
I was also mildly peeved at the interruption to my sleep. Because of Jewish services and religious school, it we don’t get to sleep in really late on Saturday mornings, but at least we get an extra hour or two compared to the work week. Not that morning. And I liked the ducks, even though they pooped on the docks all summer, and I was sorry they were so near-sighted or love-sick or hungry or tired or just plain stupid to fly over Pretty Big Long Lake on a Saturday morning in duck season.
Anatomy June 22, 2008
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Montpelier.add a comment
Samuel was lying on the floor on his side, his head on his left arm, playing with two toy cars and singing one of my fiddle tunes. All I could make out was the meter of the tune. He had long since lost the melody, and his monotone, nasal la-la-la-ing altered only in dynamics. Louder when the tune pitched up, quieter when it pitched down. He had the rhythm of it, a somewhat unique meter, but having played it myself a half hour earlier, I recognized it. Normally, his singing is quite expressive for a three year old, but at that time it was not unlike that droning noise he makes when he is up past his bedtime.
He was tired and had been for a couple of hours, the result of a late night and a full day. Too tired to safely climb onto a couch, much less any climbing apparatus. Two hours earlier, he had mounted a vertical, three rung ladder at a playground – a feat he is more than capable of when well-rested – and then his feet slipped off and he plunged to the ground, his chin whistling past the metal ladder rails, narrowly avoiding an unexpected and unbudgeted trip to the emergency room by a centimeter. He lay on the ground without moving, waiting for the adrenaline haze to clear. By the time I had raced to him, he realized nothing was hurt at all and wrestled himself out of my arms and was running off again. Nevertheless, I revoked his pilot license and grounded him off the monkey bars for the rest of the afternoon.
Now the long day and previous late night were catching up with him.
“Sam, let’s go brush your teeth and get you in the bath.”
Like a light switch, he was vertical, on his feet, jumping excitedly. “Yes! Yes! I want to bring my train. Can I have Thomas in the bath?”
“Yes, Sam, Thomas is a bath toy.”
“Oh good! I want to play with her. Papa, will you brush my teeth in the tub?”
“No problem. Go pee on the toilet first.”
“But I just peed AND pooped.”
“That was an hour ago, and every time you get in this warm tub without using the toilet first, you always pee, at least a little bit. And I just don’t think washing you with pee would be very smart.”
“Good idea, Papa!”
He did his business on the toilet and got in the tub. I handed him the rubber-ducky Thomas the Train, a two-inch-long, flexible, plastic, hollow Thomas with a hole in its smokestack. He immediately dunked it underwater and started to drive it around. I gently held Samuel”s head while I brushed his teeth and while Thomas idled, half-submerged, about his knees. When we were done, Samuel slid over on his belly and began to push Thomas slowly across the surface of the water.
“Look, Papa! She can drive underwater!”
“Very cool. Hey, Sam, I forgot. Why is this Thomas a girl?”
“Because my other Thomas is a boy.”
“Oh, right. I remember now.” The other Thomas being the wooden one in his track set, one of the few painted pieces that wasn’t replaced in the recent lead paint recall. I watched him play, trying to fill Thomas and a squirt the water out. “Can I try to fill him up for you? I mean, her?”
“Sure, Papa.”
I submerged Thomas underwater and squeezed. A stream of noisy bubbles jetted from the smokestack, and Samuel giggled.
“That’s funny, Papa. Do it again!”
I did it again. Several times in fact, because in order to get all the air out of Thomas, I had to tip him … I mean, her … upside-down underwater and move the air trapped in his … her … tender over to the smoke stack. But as I squeezed the air out, some of the trapped air floated back into the tender. Several attempts and much giggling later, Thomas was now saturated, water-logged, and no longer floating. I picked him … her … it … up and flipped … her upside down, and squeezed. A long satisfying jet of water came out, spraying the sides of the tub, the spigot, and Samuel himself.
“Stop, Papa!” he shrieked, laughing. “Let me do it!”
I hand him Thomas and he starts squirting water into the tub, very pleased and excited. Much experimentation with fluid dynamics, the mathematics of parabolas, and parental patience, but his high spirits were kept in check by his general fatigue. Finally he squirted Thomas upside-down, and a light of recognition appeared in his eyes.
“Papa! Look. Her smokestack is a penis and she’s peeing out of her penis!”
(Aside)
The other day, while having an afternoon snack, I overheard Rose, six years old, in the dining room ask Dawn where babies come from.
I heard the drawn-out “Weeellll…”
I thought, “Good question. I wonder what the answer will be.”
Did I hop in and participate? Did I rescue Dawn from this dilemma? Of course not. First of all, I was working in my office and under deadline. Secondly Rose is a girl and Dawn is a girl, and though the timing was early, it would have been Dawn”s job anyway. And finally, Dawn is a physical therapist, trained in a medical school, with a background in biology as well, whereas I am a mathematician by training. Who would you want to explain the facts of like to your child?
Whereas I would have changed color and given any number of slightly inaccurate answers, avoiding the main point at all costs, Dawn would give an answer so medically complete, so biologically accurate, and so scientifically technical that Rose would want to change the subject as quickly as possible. Clearly Dawn was the man for the job.
And a fantastic job she did, explaining human anatomical development with the concise and accurate oration of a consulting family physician with whom you have already used up twenty of his allotted, HMO-dictated fifteen minutes. But my prediction was wrong. Rose followed all of this with the infernal attention span of a Montessori child and asked, “OK. But what I want to know is, how does the sperm get in there?”
The blood was pounding so hard in my ears, I’m not sure I heard the answer clearly, but it was factually correct and appropriately dissimulating at the same time – a true masterpiece of parental tact and medical fact that somehow still preserved our daughter’s innocent understanding of the world.
Five minutes later, Rose was done eating and back to playing fairy games with her Polly Pockets. Dawn came into my room, her forehead glistening, her face flush, her mouth dry. I praised her performance, assured her that with no preparation she had done extraordinarily well, and said I had no criticism to offer whatsoever. Not that I would have been so stupid as to offer criticism at that particular juncture.
(end aside)
“Say that again, Sam?”
“Her smokestack is a penis and she’s peeing out of her penis!”
“Uh, Sam…”
OK, Papa, whoa. Think about what you are going to say, before you say it.
“Actually, Sam, boys have penises and girls have vaginas. So if your Thomas is a girl, she probably doesn’t have a penis.”
“Oh. OK.” This seemed to puzzle him, but only for a moment. “OK, this is her anus. She’s peeing out of her anus!”
Using that tone reserved by parents for when their children assert the ridiculous and you want to show that you are “in” with the joke (whether or not the child is “in” yet), I said “Sam, do you pee out of your anus?”
“Nooo!” he said, laughing at his own silliness.
“Nooo. You poop out of your anus, right?”
“Right, but … but … but, she’s peeing AND pooping out of her anus.”
“Um … ok, but…”
“No, no, no, wait. The smokestack … is her scrotum…”
“Uh…”
“and she’s peeing and pooping into her scrotum!”
He looked so pleased with himself. For a moment I thought of Dawn, next door, reading a bedtime book to Rose, but even if she were available, I could not possibly have asked her for assistance.
“Uh, ok, Sam. Just … uh … just keep it inside the tub, ok?”
“OK, Papa.”
Stimulus Plan May 5, 2008
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Montpelier, Uncategorized.add a comment
Today I received two letters in the mail.
The first was from the United States Government, mailed in a low budget undersized envelope, informing me that my stimulus check for $1800 will deposited in my bank account no later than May 5, 2008.
The second was a bill from the hospital for $1768.38.
I suppose one could say that my ire has been stimulated.
Kauai April 30, 2008
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“OK, children. This is our last time on the escalators. We go up. We go down. And then we head back to the gate and wait with Mama.”
“OK, Papa,” agreed Rose.
“OK, Papa,” echoed Samuel.
We rose up out of the crowd of passengers in the Honolulu airport, mostly white mainlainders off of Flight #1 from Chicago, waiting for their vacation paradise to begin. They milled about in close quarters, stepping carefully around the wheeled handbags and carry-on purses, overstuffed and resembling panicked blowfish. As my children and I rose through the opening in the ceiling, the sunhats of the other passengers disappeared and we found ourselves on an upper level, surrounded by windows with a view across the tarmac to the metropolis beyond, and somewhere after that, the sapphire blue Pacific Ocean. There was not a soul on floor two except us and we weren’t staying long.
“Aloha!” commanded a disembodied voice over our heads. “Due to heightened airport security…”
“Come on Samuel!” Rose yelled and traced a semi-circle back onto the down escalator with Samuel right on her tail. I grabbed their hands as we entered the mass of humanity. Repeat ad nauseum.
Twenty minutes later, and twenty hours after we had rose from our predawn beds in Vermont, we handed the boarding passes to the agent for the last leg of our flight. Honolulu to Kauai. Crossing the threshold onto the plane, I was baptized in a cloud of condensing vapor falling from an overhead vent. Rose and I walked to the very back of the jet to our rigid seats that did not recline. She promptly fell asleep across my lap.
On a previous leg of our journey, the children were still “perky at thirteen o’clock,” but patient, excited, well-behaved, even as we waited for the Chicago bound passengers to deplane.
“We’re going to Hanayuyu!” Samuel told a soft-toned, bespectacled man in a business suit.
The man looked down at my three-year old and all the muscles in his middle-aged face resolved into an enormous grin. His second chin jutted out as he peered down at Samuel with an astonished, wide-open mouth.
“Hanayuyu?” he said, his voice full of glee. “How wonderful!”
Samuel smiled back, feeling instant pity and comradeship. “Would you like to go to Hanayuyu?”
“I would love to go to Hanayuyu!” he answered, he eyes squinting shut in imagined ecstasy as he drew out the verb.
“OK. Let’s go!” said Samuel. Practical boy, to the point. No more monkey business. Let’s get this show on the road.
“Harry?”
I snapped my eyes open. I was sitting upright against the back wall of the cabin, but my chin was digging a hole in my sternum through a wet patch of cotton T-shirt smelling of my own saliva. The back of my neck felt stretched and distended on the right side. Dawn was smiling down at me. “We’re here, hun. Can you wake up Rose?”
It turned out that I could not. She had been napping a bit on the flight from Chicago, but still had a strong sleep deficit to make up. I carried her across the Kauai airport for a good quarter mile before the jossling woke her.
*****
The buildings in Hawaii are topologically inside out, like a drawing by M.C. Escher. You could drive your gleaming, newly-washed, rental SUV into the tiled lobby of your resort without shattering wall or window and park it among the carpeting and paintings and statues. The door men, liveried in flowered shirts and knee-length shorts waiting with luggage trolleys behind their podiums, would scarcely glance in your direction. Within the lobby, glass doors lead to exotic spas, and there are corridors passing down rows and rows of hotel room doors, where small wren will land at your door and pick up a crumb of muffin off your discarded room service tray before flying away down the hall. If you walk further down the hall, the roof vanishes and a two hundred year old baobab tree is growing through a hole in the floor up through an atrium with no ceiling, and a little farther on, there is a waterfall with a swan swimming about.
*****
The first two days, Dawn took the children to markets, parks, and beaches, and when they wanted a break, they came back to the hotel and went down to the pool. It was shaped something like a lagoon with a beach made of large grain sand (or small grain pebbles), a water slide, a waterfall, and a couple of snaking canals hidden by landscaped islands and a coi pond. There were three sand-bottomed hot tubs, one set aside for children, which turned out to be useful when the clouds came through. We had the occasionally shower or storm, but the sun always came through eventually. The children were happy and easy to please and there was hardly any whining. Even for a child, it is hard to complain in Hawaii, and they tried to hold up their end with only minimal success.
I spent those days in meetings with my fellow employees, and I must say that they were meetings that definitely “didn’t suck.” We held them at restaurants in posh hotels, on a boulder strewn slope approachable only after wading a creek, under trees on sand covered cliff tops. Last year had been moderately successful, so this company retreat was sponsored by the company. You can do that sort of thing when you are the sole owner of a six-person company who happens to like tropical beaches, and that is what my boss is, God bless him.
One night, the teenage daughters of one employee offered to babysit the younger children of other employees so the adults could go out for dinner in a fancy restaurant. We brought Rose and Samuel to their room, only to find that a surprise birthday party had been arranged for Rose (it being her 6th birthday). There was cake and ice cream and balloons and cards, and we were able to slip out without a hint of separation anxiety. That was a fine evening.
*****
Quick geography lesson. Imagine smoke rings blowing from a tobacco pipe growing large and larger until they escape the bowl and float through the air where in time they slowly dissolve and vanish. Picture it from overhead, fill in the smoke rings, and you have a fairly good map of the islands of Hawaii. A vent deep in the earth pushed magma up until the growing volcano broke the surface of the ocean and became an island. Every so many years (whether hundreds, thousands, or millions, I don’t recall), the vent stopped to take a breath and the newly minted island was carried off northwestward by the floating continental plate. Over time, the rain and wind wore this island down, while a new island was created back in its original place by the same process. Eventually the first island eroded back into the ocean, leaving no visible trace. This is why there is a chain of Hawaiian islands, and why the ones farthest east are younger, larger, taller and craggier, while the islands to the west are generally older, flatter, decrepit, and covered with moss and foliage.
Kauai is the penultimate island to the west. Only Niihau is older, and erosion has left it more of an oversized sandbar than a proper volcanic island. There are older islands even farther west, but as they have eroded below the surface of the water, one can hardly call them islands anymore. Though old and worn, Kauai does not have these identity crises. Mt. Waialeale, at 5148 feet, is the visible and significant remains of the volcano that formed Kauai, and though it is extinct, in fact crumbling to pieces with a long tongue of canyon on the south west side like a breach in a siege, the mountain has the honor of boasting the rainiest spot on earth with over 460 inches of rain a year. The wind driving in from the west, having become saturated over thousands of miles of ocean, rushes up the canyon and up the inside wall of the former crater. The rise in altitude creates a drop in temperature and the water condenses and precipitates. The rain falls, further eroding the crater, and rushes back down the canyon where it came from. By the time the air has climbs the peak and flipped over the crater wall, all the moisture has been wrung out like a sponge, leaving an arid desert on the other side; one of the driest spots on earth right next to very wettest.
*****
No one rushes on Kauai. In fact, our guidebook warned us about several restaurants whose excellence in cuisine was surpassed only by the indifference of the service. But after all, it is an island. No matter how fast you move, you’re still here.
A single road winds around the outer edge of Kauai, connecting the series of coastal communities and towns, and it was the only road between our resort and the southern half of the island. During rush hour, the traffic on the two lane road would back up for miles behind the traffic light at the airport turnoff. There was no room, and even less inclination, to pass. So we sat, ducks in a row, waiting our turn to creep ahead ten feet, various radios competing over the hum of the coolant fans. One such pause gave us a leisurely view of the Kauai Penitentiary. Very closely. Even my sissy, geek arm could have thrown a stone from the car and broken a window in the warden’s office. But that would not have been necessary. I could have jumped the six foot gully, climbed the chain link fence, and opened his door myself. There was no barbed wire, no patrolling German shepherds, no observation towers or machine gun embankments pointing inwards. The few guards scattered about observed the prisoners with all the rapt attention of a underpaid middle school teacher on playground monitor duty. In fact, the resemblance of the facility to a blue collar neighborhood public school was uncanny. All it lacked was the broken playground set and graffiti.
A clique of prisoners smoking cigarettes in the shade of an awning watched us pass at a snail’s pace. I turned off the radio, rolled down the window, and asked them what they were discussing. They informed me that they were just planning their break out. It had been a work in progress for several months, but for sure it would happen “bumbye, mebbe next week.” But when I inquired, they could not satisfy me with an exact date. It wasn’t that they didn’t trust me with the information, but rather the plan had not fully coalesced. They had to work out details of precedence. Apparently certain prisoners felt it beneath their dignity to lace their fingers together and provide a boost over the fence for certain other prisoners. They agreed seniority should determine precedence, but they could not agree on what determined seniority. Some felt it should be based on how much time one had already served, though subfactions argued over whether one could count prior convictions. Others thought the length of the sentence mattered more than how much of it had been served. While those of a finer discrimination felt that the gravity of the crime should trump. Poaching pineapples from the governors private plantation might, through corruption of the justice system, result in a longer sentence but it hardly deserved precedence over honest manslaughter of one’s peers. That was the gist of the argument, and though it was hard at times to follow the local pidgin, they left long pauses between speakers in which I could puzzle out the meaning. When they reached a particularly sticky point, and the discussion threatened to raise the temperature of the already languid afternoon, a guard would come along and brokered peace, defusing the conversation with the polite dexterity of protocol officers arranging the procession to banquet hall.
I thought this madness, and told them so. Surely, I interrupted them, the fence and ditch presented no meaningful obstacle. At the time, only one guard was left in view, and he, gazing at his image reflected in the window and picking his teeth with a splinter of coconut husk, seemed suitably distracted, and, in any event, easily bribed. Why couldn’t they leave now?
“Aznuts“, they assured me. “We gotta stay brudders, else there’d be choke beef, and eriding go junk.” There was generally nodding of heads and some gave me the stink eye as to say that a law-abiding haole boy shouldn’t pretend to know mo bettah than they how things were down in Hawaii. And in the pause that followed, one sallow and philosophical member of the troupe who had been silent up until now, observed to no one in particular, “Nuff already. Where would we go, anyhow? It’s an f-in’ island.”
Dentist April 4, 2008
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Montpelier, Uncategorized.add a comment
Rough week at work. The kind of week that makes you wonder if you are in the right business. A persistent error message in a key bit of software I had written was proving very difficult to debug. How difficult?
Do you remember the game of Telephone? A group of people line up, and one whispers a complex sentence to another person, and then they whisper it by memory to the next, and so on. Then you compare the result at the end to the original message, and the joke is how different the result ends up from the original. It was something like that. I had a chain of programs talking to each other and after ten minutes of processing, the last one returned an error message that was completely meaningless and garbled by the time it got to me. Something like, “I on burp actual Have on blind expurgate turn on tusk heath.”
It wasn’t really that exact sentence. That sentence came from the latest Viagra spam mail in my InBox.
My boss called to express his concern about the mounting work load that was log-jammed behind getting this priority bug fixed. He reassured me that he believes in my smarts and talents and abilities, and could I possibly stop being a super-Dad and get a bit more support from my family in order to get enough sleep, get rid of my cold, and apply my best energies to the problem?
No dummy, my boss.
To be fair, Dawn has already been getting up five times a night when Samuel (from whom I got the cold) and Rose (who just got it from me) come in with fevers, nightmares, or just cheerful, perky, 5:00 AM warbling. I suppose I could ask Dawn to do more, but, you know, it’s that time of the month, and discretion is the better part of valor. No, the ugly truth is, I am simply not performing up to snuff. If I may paraphrase a popular bumper sticker, Lord help me to be the programmer my boss thinks I am.
So, I closed the door to my “office” and spent four hours assiduously working my way back up the telephone chain. Meanwhile, Dawn was in the kitchen trying to keep the house clean, prepare food, and entertain two children home from school with colds. Not easy, since Samuel has entered a delightful new phase where he has to touch every object he sees, whether or not it is sharp, hot, fragile, or his.
It was 2:00 in the afternoon, and I had just traced the Telephone message back to, “It was very kind of God to let Mr. Jones marry Mrs. Jones and thus make two people in the world miserable instead of four,” when a cheerful pop-up reminder flashed across my laptop screen.
“Dentist appointment: 0 minutes.”
“Augh! Dawn!” I yelled from my work desk, “What time are our dentist appointments?”
“Ohhhh ….”, Dawn spluttered, a desperate ejaculation on the tip of her tongue. She had forgotten, too. The temptation to swear was strong, but the children were right there, listening. Several helpful words, all of them inappropriate, vied for the honor of finishing her thought. Had Rose been paying attention, she could have easily read them out loud as they flitted about Dawn’s head, taking turns passing in and out of her reddening ears. Dawn held her tongue as long as she could, but she was never good with temptation. “The only way to get rid of temptation,” said Oscar Wilde, “is to yield to it.”
“Ohhh… bother!” she finally released.
Thank you, A.A. Milne.
I called the dentist’s office – “I’m on my way!” – and then dashed out the door. When I pulled up, my hygienist was chatting amiably with the staff by the front desk. She welcomed me directly into the chair. I lay back exhausted.
“Don’t forget the gloves and mask,” I reminded her. “I’m still getting over a cold.”
Usually when they go after the tartar on my teeth, there is a fair bit of scraping and tugging followed by copious bleeding from my receding gums and a deep, cold sensation in the roots of my teeth about as pleasant as claws on a chalkboard. But somehow, that did not happen this time. Perhaps I was too tired to notice. I closed my eyes, and did not open them until I heard an amused voice repeating, “Could you open a little wider? Excuse me. Hello! Could you open a little wider?”
“Huh?” I snorted, waking up. “Oh. Sowwy.”
The dentist came in later to examine my x-rays and teeth. Somehow we were all a bit punchy by that point, and we got on the subject of surgically opening and cleaning wounds, a task that my dentist derives particular satisfaction from. This is a perverse trait she shares with my wife. Medical people – honestly! Then she told me that the little piece of tissue that had grown over a flossing wound six months ago had shrunk, but not completely gone away, and she felt it ought to be removed.
“You are a picker!” I accused.
“In the worst way,” she confessed. “I can’t help it. Give me a good abscess to drain. I’ll do it for free.” She offered to do it for free? Seriously? How could I say no? We made a date. Something to look forward to. Don’t tell my wife.
I raced home so Dawn could press Pause on the domestic tasks, grab the car, and head back with Rose for their appointments.
Later that night, I sat down after the children were in bed and chipped away at my Telephone problem until I uncovered the original message. “Who put the bomp in the bomp-she-bomp-she-bomp?” At last! Success!
It was 2:00 in the morning, and I called it a night.
