Monday,
February 17, 2003
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a big dream I keep waking up and going back to sleep. FFP is up, I know. Maybe gone for a workout. I smell coffee. I hear him let the dog out. But I'm dreaming. I'm in a big house. There are lots of other people. The backyard is huge. Maybe there is a creek between the yard and the next yard. Anyway, there are lots of things happening across the way there in the other yard. I'm looking down on it and can see everything. First, there is a woman weaving. Her loom attaches to a tree. She has woven scores of feet of a very wide cloth. She dismantles all this and goes inside. I think I must ask her if she would like the weaving stuff that Mom had. Then all the people are gone from this other yard. (There were others, doing stuff besides weaving but I've forgotten what.) Now they let animals out, two by two. Rhinos! (I think I saw some rhinos on TV last night.) Then something prehistoric. Some dinosaurs. Then (still in my dream) I'm visiting someone in the hospital and they tell me that someone else I know is there. Then I'm driving these people in a car somewhere. There was more, I think. It was a big dream and summed up a lot of what has been going on with me. I'm up by 7:30, getting my coffee, pulling on my sweats. But I spend time on the journal and some email. And I finish the book I'm reading (Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted.) This means that I have to choose another book to take to the club. I've been cleaning off the shelves in my office and have turned up some possibilities. And, in the guest room, I have a whole shelf I designated 'read me.' It still seems like a big choice, a big decision.
When FFP comes back from the club, he has roses. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would get the flowers herself," he says. He asks me to help trim and such. He points out that there is no bank, no mail today. President's Day. Other people get holidays? Hrummph. I'm a curmugeon retired person who expects everyone else to work every day. Not really. He also tells me he's having a meeting here Thursday morning.
I go to the club. It's cool out, but the day is beaming. Really bright sunshine contrasting with the days that had started with gloom. The lake is filling up and, on the TVs, there is a fishing show interleaved with threats of war, a Chicago nightclub stampede, snow and more snow and a program on some basketball player. I hope the snow abates before our trip to New York. There is time for it to melt. I hope it does. A little snow, OK. Paralyzing snow, not good. I do my 45 minutes on the bike and much sweating while starting Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh. Yes, I've picked non-fiction. Mathematics is as far from fiction as it is possible to get. Of course, this is a story about mathematics and a mathematical quest not really a book of mathematics. The writer tries to keep the math simple. And, given my rustiness, it's hard to make it too simple for me. I was once capable of doing fairly high level math, creating proofs of fairly complex problems even. Not anymore. I run through my leg exercises. I consider hitting some tennis balls. (The day is bright and cool.) But I don't. I go home. FFP is having lunch, eating a bowl of the tuna salad I made. "Thanks for making this tuna salad, it's good." I finish off the tuna, make a green salad with various stuff, microwave two pieces of bacon and eat them, drink some water. All while reading The New York Times Art Section. With my first bite of tuna, Dad calls to 'check in' and tells me he is having dinner tonight with friends. "I'm taking my first bite of lunch," I say. I work the puzzle in The Times. Because it's Monday and I can work it. FFP comes in and asks, "Are you working the Jumble yet?" Little joke. About Schmidt, retirement. I think he's joking. I feel lost. So many things I should be doing. I decide to take a shower and try to get a new lease on life. After my shower, I decide that I'm going to get rid of all the newspapers lying around. Just do it. At one point I go outside to read a few sections in the chaise lounge. It is almost too cold, though. So I sit in the big room, going through the stack there, reading bits, putting them in sacks for recycling. With Emma playing on the TV screen and some jazz music.
FFP knocks off fairly early and makes Salmon with lemon and capers and heats up some field peas and jalapenos. It's good. We finish off some leftover wine. We open a 1993 Burgundy but it is gone. We open a 1995 Rhone and it is good and gets better. I stick a VacuVin in it after a bit to finish off another day. I ignore Joe Millionaire and read and sort the papers while FFP sleeps through it. We watch CSI: Miami. I haven't finished the papers. Sigh. Tomorrow.
I spoke yesterday about wanting an inside glimpse at the material world of the rich (and not necessarily famous). There's another world that I always wanted to be a part of...the world of intellect. People who grew up in homes crammed with books, who had writers and artists for parents, I envied them. My reading now is an attempt to go back and recapture my lost education, the education I could have had but didn't because I was swamped with hormones and the need to make a living and to have material things. And because it isn't where I grew up? The educaton I dabbled at but failed to get. Did I also mention that I wish I was a fly on the wall (or Dorothy Parker's drinking buddy) during the formative years of The New Yorker? We want lots of things we can't have and I've gotten more than almost anyone I know of what I was after. Still. There is always something. I am still young and healthy and I have lots of time. What will I make of it? Now that I spend more time at home during the day, I find myself seeing things here that I'd failed to take note of. Oh sure, sorting through and cleaning out brings one face to face with assorted 'stuff' and it's meaning (or lack thereof). But just spending more time in the house, also makes me notice things I've walked right by for years. Not that we haven't cleaned out things in the twenty-five plus years we've lived here. Every remodel brought a wave of cleaning and discarding. Every need for bringing stuff home from an office...including FFP's move out and back into the house with his business, brought on these waves of discards. Still, things linger. Get pushed first here and there. Sometimes, while I worked, I'd go on a tear cleaning and discarding but it was always limited. Hopefully, I get a little closer every day to streamlining our existence here. But I get impatient with how long it takes to deal with it.
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we keep building here in the Capital City
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171
JUST
TYPING