Archive for June, 2008

I have a new job. My clients contact me by e-mail and order all kinds of things—from groceries to medicine, even particular items like opera glasses. I get busy, go to stores and pick up the goods. The work isn’t unpleasant, and I especially enjoy shopping at an optometrist’s for the opera glasses. The pair I pick out are surprising. Instead of the usual mini-binoculars, these are oversize spectacles. Lenses of different magnification and color are attached to the frames and can be rotated in or out.

I make all my purchases and congratulate myself on a good day’s work when I suddenly realize, late in the day, that I haven’t made any deliveries. Somehow I’ve completely forgotten that my job isn’t just shopping; I also have to deliver. What was I thinking?

Heavy with tiredness and irritation, I get on the subway in Brooklyn to make a delivery in Manhattan. It’s hot in the car and the train stalls on an elevated track in the late afternoon sun. Sitting there I realize my new job is more impractical than I thought. However, I did enjoy picking out the opera glasses.

Just as every car has a parking place
There’s a cross beam or girder in a building frame
That corresponds to your particular goals and objectives
As you wrestle with the inevitable disappointment
Over the turns you have taken
You squint and frown, squeeze and stretch
Into a load-bearing column or high rafter
In a house of your choosing
Maybe something with clean modernist lines or
A Victorian wedding cake or
A villa in Tuscany or Provence
How about it

An Argument

It began friendly enough. After good coffee in a very spacious, pleasant café, new acquaintances decide to play a racquet game, like badminton, but which substitutes a small, pillow-shaped balloon for a shuttlecock, and involves teams of several players on each side, as in volleyball. A very tall young man with longish brown hair serves first. As you might expect, the little balloon doesn’t travel very far. In fact it lazily drifts just over the net and wanders outside the line. The man prepares to serve again when I ask him how the service changes. Is it like tennis, with each game, or like volleyball, until you fail to score? The tall man frowns, as if the question is impertinent—the serve changes whenever he says. He thinks I’m overly concerned with the rules. I don’t back down as he towers over me in exasperation. Finally I say okay, let’s just play.

Strange Laundering

A middle-aged father and his teen son are doing laundry in a basement laundromat. Or are they? While his son unloads a washer, the man is putting cigar stubs and broken tobacco pipes into a dryer’s lint trap.

No Questions

We walked up and down a broad staircase, the dapper little man—hardly more than a boy—and I. He was short of time. “What do you do?” I asked.
“Passports. Visas,” he said.
“You fill out forms? You expedite?” He wouldn’t answer me. He looked away. As he went through a door on the landing he turned and said, “You haven’t been here long.”
“Only six months. But twenty years at my other job.” He shook his head. The door closed behind him.

 Minor Deities

My anesthetist, a tall lanky fellow with a short grey beard, is supposed to be the great-grandson of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Somehow this is comforting.

At a backyard garden party hosted by a portly magazine editor who shares a name with a savagely contested hill in the Korean War, I am cutting down tall weeds and collecting them in a garbage bag when I find a bundle of keys inside it. I show them to the editor and he says he’ll return them to the owner. I have vague suspicions about those keys. He hangs them on a hook by his garage door. I mention to two veteran woman journalists at the party that the editor seems seems sad. “Sad?” they ask and laugh at the idea. “He’s never sad.”

I consult the Virgilian lottery and put my finger on Romulus and Remus, twin babies suckled by a she-wolf, depicted on the shield of Aeneas.

The door buzzer goes off. Who is it? Piano movers. We leave the back garden and go inside to find the crew propping three disassembled pianos in pieces against the wall.