The Music of the Spheres

I made a call to Waltham today, and learned that my replacement billiard cloth had arrived just this morning, and that John is planning to drive up early Friday to finish the installation.  I'll be there as well, both to see it completed and to help with the brief two-person element of the job.

Just as a side note, there are a lot of jobs that I imagine to be two-person jobs, even if the second person is doing nothing more than holding the other end of the board, or steadying the ladder.  But time is money, as they say, and people who rely on billing their time have often figured out ways to do both parts of a two-person jobs.  Hanging drywall, for instance.  That stuff comes in sheets that are 4' wide and 8' or 10' long, weighing seventy pounds or more each.  Okay, so imagine lifting a 70-lb panel, fitting it into place on a sloped ceiling, holding it correctly aligned, and driving four rows of six screws per row in line with the studs.  By yourself.  All day.  If I were doing that, it'd be a nine-person job, and I'd still be whining about how hard it was.

Anyway, the table and the lighting will be complete as of mid-afternoon on Friday.  And then will come the long process of furnishing the room.

A few years ago, no one had ever heard of the idea of "man cave."  But for the past six years, there's been a reality makeover show on the DIY Network devoted to nothing but man caves.  The common interior decorating elements seem to be:

• Sports jerseys, helmets, photos, or other equipment
• Beer signs, beer taps, beer mugs... beer...
• Actually, logos in general, now that I think of it
• An enormous television, perhaps more than one
• Taxidermy
• Astroturf

Nope.

And now that my pool room is nearing completion, I hear the term "man cave" all the time.  Just as I hear "pool shark."  It seems that we only have the most limited vocabulary for my poor beleagured game.

There will be no sports memorabilia.  No dormitory mini-fridge.  No taxidermy.  No Astroturf.  There WILL be a computer, so that I can study my instructional DVDs at the table.

I don't have a sense of the chairs and tables yet.  They need to be tall, so that you can see down onto the table; but they need to be comfortable, because if you're playing someone good, you might be sitting there for quite a while.  At present, a terra cotta urn serves as the cue rack, which is a nice touch — that might stay.

One of the elements of the room will be music.  My good stereo is going up there, including the Sony CD player that holds 400 discs.  Typically, pool room music is just as stereotyped as man cave decor:  AC/DC, Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, blahblahblah.  Auditory testosterone, to match the football and gambling and hunting motifs.

I've never had good pool music, because I've never had control over the jukebox or television that establishes the tone in commercial pool rooms, so I'm just speculating from the kinds of music I listen to when I write.  A good pool music, I imagine, sets up a quiet breathing cycle, a kind of groove that allows you to loosen your muscles, free your joints, and stop competing with yourself.  Not that wind-chimes-and-flutes new age crap, either, but real music.  People like Harold Budd and Brian Eno and Alison Goldfrapp and Massive Attack.  Or if you prefer, Samuel Barber and Erik Satie and Amy Beach and Arvo Part.  Or, if you prefer instead, Pat Metheny and Rachel Grimes and Dave Brubeck and Vince Guaraldi.  It'll be a great experiment, and one that I invite you to join me in any time after this weekend.

Music is a neglected component of interior design.  Maybe I should teach a class...

Carding Mill, Blue Mouse Ears and Robobees

It has been a day of warring stories in my head. Most of the time I can’t get myself past the writer’s block. Today, there have been four different stories that are begging to be written, and the two that have been back-burnered because I can’t quite figure out how to complete them or whether I am ready to share them. Some months are like that –from writer’s block to hypergraphia in the blink of an eye. In any case, I am starting with the trivial because it is easy to get that out of the way, sort of like checking off the things on the to-do list that you can complete, and leaving the complex ones to roll over to another day.

So H was writing some weeks ago, about the names of paint color. I have an alternate: the names of flowers. As a novice gardener, I have gotten accustomed to hearing my friends refer to Astilbe and Phlox  and Sedum. I even occasionally try to speak the language, dropping a Ranunculus or Echinacea into the conversation, but today I flipped open a catalog from White Flower Farm as it adorned the top of my pile of mail, and I saw the names of roses: Julia Child, Sugar Moon, Eden Climber, Burgundy Iceberg. I can imagine the color of the Burgundy Iceberg and I presume it grows well in colder temperatures, but is the Julia Child long legged and likely to drop its petals on the ground? Is the Sugar Moon a cousin to the Green Cheese Moon? Those names are all trademarked. There are others that are in single quotation marks for reasons that are unclear: ‘Dublin Bay’, ‘New Dawn’, ‘The Fairy’ and ‘Twilight Zone’. Is  Dublin Bay the color of seaweed and salmon? Does Twilight Zone have several dark descending notes? There are also some that are registered: Double Knock Out and Pink Double Knock Out, and my personal favorite, Carding Mill.  Carding Mill?  

 I have visions of unmarried Puritan girls stuck in the factories at loud machines for endless days, limping home at night to a dark and cold room where a single peach-colored blossom adorns the table beside the coal stove.  Oh yes, and there is one other flower named by someone with either an edgy lifestyle or a sense of humor…I hesitate to write it here…well, ok…”Golden Showers.” These just seem like something that a crew of somewhat stoned people are coming up with at Monday’s marketing meeting when everyone is still a little hung over. 

The names evoke a kind of garden pornography with which I am familiar but there is something different here from the catalogs of Johnny’s Selected Seeds or Fedco that has a no color, no frills, line-drawn catalog and seems designed to appeal to the Birkenstock crowd (like me). Johnny’s caters to commercial growers. The smallest snap pea seed pack has 250 seeds, or 1000 spinach seeds or 1000 lettuce seeds (that’s not a typo: 1000). And yes, those packets are at my right elbow awaiting the Mother’s Day planting sun (including “Goldies” that we discovered on a plate of pasta in Venice). Fedco has a subsidiary known as Moose Tubers where they are currently soliciting support on behalf of a farm that is growing SEVEN HUNDRED varieties of heirloom potatoes to keep the seed crop alive, now that the “Seed SaversExchange” has discontinued its support.  Bet you can’t name more than 5 of those 700!

But in either case, the uncautious reader can find herself with a hoop house for the tender annual starts, rime to keep the bugs away, and a life far from the computer desk, up to those elbows in manure. Johnny’s web site will seduce the unwary with a long handled wire weeder “just like the one that THE FOUNDER Eliot Coleman invented.”  

My friend Derrick just spent 300 hard earned dollars on heirloom organic seeds from a place in the Midwest, and will be growing striped tomatoes in red and green, or purple black ones, and two foot long squashes, and 800 pound pumpkins.

But THIS catalog, the one from White Flower Farm at my left elbow, takes the pornography to an entirely different level. There is something that just hints that the reader has help in the garden—maybe a paid gardener who does the hard work of planting and manuring the ivy covered stone wall enclosed English acreage, while she contemplates the crystal for just the right bud vase. The cover photo has a white house with a Palladian window, above four windows each with three over three panes, that tilt in to let the virtually scented herb garden waft through  (It is 23 degrees here, and the wood stove needs to be fed.) There are terra cotta urns, wood benches, a “swoe” that can be “comfortably pushed or pulled around plants while scuffling the surface of the soil” (no need to break a sweat), and a variety of “tuteurs.”  A tuteur? Is that something that you buy to prepare les petits sprouts for a place at the best nurseries? 

There is a single double spread of tomatoes from heirlooms to “teeny tinies”. There is a single double spread of tools. There is a single double spread of bulbs for Spring color, and a single double spread of the plant of the month club. There is a single double spread of pre-planned gardens that “take the guesswork out of garden design.” There are 16 photos on a single double spread of “Perennials you can count on,” 11 photos and one half page photo of Astilbes that are “rugged beauty for shade.” There are 18 photos of the “ever-popular daylily” on the single double spread of Hemerocallis. It is the “year of the Hosta”  (including “abiqua the drinking gourd,” ‘Blue ivory”, “cathedral windows”, and another personal favorite: “Blue mouse ears.” ) 

There are “show-stopping blooms of hydrangea” and “Little Mermaid” and “Sweet Summer Love” and “Alligator Tears” and “Cityline Rio” and “Guacamole.”  Truth be told, there is precious little to sustain a body, and even the tomatoes seem to be chosen for aesthetic value rather than for whether they will be good for canning or sauce.

Here in Vermont, where there are no Palladian windows, I have yet to really test the soil. I know it will be rocky. I know that the raised beds need new edges and the bird house needs a new foundation. We inherited herbs and a plethora of perennials, now complemented by the irises that Julio and Kathleen sent from Wisconsin as a house warming gift. But as I look out over the snow and send out emailed requests for borrowed snow shoes, it is hard to believe that Spring will come soon with its own urgency to plant and to weed, to fertilize and protect from the woodchuck that I already know lives beneath our garden shed. 

When it does, I will likely be supporting the beans on an old tripod my friend made of three strips of molding held together with some insulated phone wire; the tomatoes will be supported by cages that have rusted from years of use.  

Many years ago, I took a Sociology class in “Ethnomethodology” which studies the way we build rules of social discourse: what is the next auction bid after “ten dollars” or one hundred dollars? What do we say after someone says “Hi! How are you?”  What if instead of saying: “Fine, thanks, and you?”, we said “What business is it of yours?” These garden catalogs make me wonder what the rules of social discourse are when it comes to gardening. How do we know what plants are appropriate in a place, not just because the sun and soil will support them, but because they reflect us as members of our community – or not. I read somewhere about the beginnings of Arbor Day in the Midwest – founded in a desire to plant something that was not indigenous to the place it grew, something that would indicate the ability to control the land rather than living in synch with its natural inclinations to tall grass prairie.  A friend just returned from visiting other mutual friends in Hawaii where the garden is planted in a rainy climate, necessitating that the plants be protected from the rain by covers, which in turn necessitate that they be watered by hand.

What is it in the Carding Mill rose or the Blue mouse ears that speaks of our aspirations and our belonging? Why does it feel different to plant a variety of heirloom tomato or protect some potato? The Fedco people wrote about the potato savers “There is no long-term storage in a vault on an Arctic island for potatoes. Consider making a donation to Scatterseed (send a check to us or directly to Scatterseed) or donate your refund to help keep Will’s potatoes alive.”  There is something that appeals to me about keeping an arcane variety of potato alive – as we want to preserve the endangered polar bears or whales or some species of newt.  There is something that appeals to me about holding the vernacular intact. If we let these go, then we can also let go of the farmers who gather maple syrup in 5 gallon buckets instead of gravity lines to tanks that get pumped onto the back of a Ford pickup. Or worse, there are the robobees that have been designed to replace the real bees that are dying from colony collapse disorder.

I suppose I will be planting potatoes this year, and some sun gold tomatoes and a few Amish paste for sauce. I have been eating the last of our “put-up” applesauce with dinner each night, as though it will hasten the blossoming of the old apple tree on the land where I used to live. I think I will leave the Carding Mill to those who are more prepared to put cut flowers on the table rather than food drawn from the garden. Maybe it is a good thing that I have a few more weeks to dream; it is going to be a long hot summer on my knees in the dirt.

Precision and Error

John and Dave arrived at about 1:30, and carried the re-finished rails upstairs to the beautiful new pool room.  The rails had been rebuilt, new rubber cushions covered with fresh Simonis 860 cloth.  The brilliant blue cushions were tucked in tight against the wood grain of the rails themselves, the joint scribed straight and true.

The base came up next.  I vacuumed fifty years of pool room dust from the inside of the case while John stripped rust off the threads of the flared chrome feet and spun them back into place.

The frame, four massive chunks of hardwood doweled and bolted together into a perimeter, then attached to the base.  We centered that assembly into the playing area of the room, using a cue as a plumb bob to dowse the table's geometric center, using the boards of the wood floor as a measuring line. "I'm going to put the edge of the foot right on this seam between these boards," John said, and I matched that seam on my end.  Then half a board back, and two inches toward me.

The frame was leveled carefully before the slate arrived.  The chrome feet spin for a reason, each quarter turn moving that corner of the table upward or downward by a thirty-second of an inch.

Two friends had stopped by, and I was reminded of descriptions of 19th Century small towns, in which every novel event brought onlookers who needed relief from the endless familiarity of their chores.

John and Dave brought up the first of the three slates, 220 pounds of stone carried groaningly up a narrow stair and slid onto the frame.  John used his utility knife to scrape old joint compound off the edges.  It was the middle of the three, the one whose alignment would determine the others. We set the semi-circular pocket cut-outs above their paired cutaways on the wooden frame below, and John screwed that slate down tight.

Two other slates followed, each one treated as carefully, screwed down only after careful alignment and flush-edged with the master slate in the center.

Once all three slates were in place, a counter-intuitive move... each screw was loosened a turn or two.  The level — a massive precision tool carried in a soft, padded case — was brought out again, along with a pack of small hardwood wedges.  At every point of the slate not being exactly level, John drove a wedge between the slate and the frame, lifting the low spot — imperceptible to view but enough to move that spirit bubble fractionally closer to its home between the guide lines.  Once satisfied, he screwed the slates down tight once again.

Next, a block of beeswax and a propane blowtorch.  He melted wax down the seam between the slates, and then flamed the wax to a transparent fluid, letting it seep into the joint and find its level.  Torch off, and the wax quickly became opaque again.  He pushed the wax off the table with a push-plane, a curl of dried wax rolling ahead of the blade, leaving only what was below the surface.  Each seam was waxed three or four times, along with any small scratches in the flat expanse of the slate itself, and what was segmented became unitary.

Tools away, the next step was to attach the cloth to the frame.  John retrieved the clear plastic bag holding the folded cloth in Tournament Blue.  That color — a rich, electric blue that looks like the high-beam indicator on your dashboard — contrasts more sharply with the balls, and is now used in almost all competitive circumstances.  All of our poetics about the noble field of green will soon be anachronisms.

John unfurled that blue flag across the slate, ensuring that the playing side faced upward.  (Yes, billiard cloth has two faces, one of which has been razor-shaved at the factory to eliminate any trace of lint.  The Iwan Simonis company has been making billiard cloth in Verviers, Belgium since 1685, and are good at it.)  The cloth was stretched to its full eight-foot length, and play was stopped.

I have a nine-foot table.

At some point in the order process, a small cascade failure occurred.  I had specified that I have a nine-foot Gold Crown I, and when John fitted the rubber and cloth to the rails back in his shop, he used the size appropriate for the rails of a nine-foot table.  When he came to the apartment in Medford on Friday, he carried the frame and slates out to his truck, and the slate segments fitted exactly into the jig he had installed onto the bed of the truck for safe travel.  Everybody knew that this was a nine-foot table.  But the factory had shipped an eight-foot length.  The label on the bag had Simonis' three formulations — 860, 760, and Rapide — and 860 had been appropriately circled at the factory.  Below that, 7', 8', and 9' were printed, and the telltale grease pencil circle surrounded the 8.  So how that bag made it onto the truck without being caught is unclear.  What was clear was that 99" of cloth was not going to make it to the end and around the corners of a 108" assembly.

John and Dave quickly packed their tools away into the truck and drove away for their four-hour trip back to Waltham.  New cloth will be shipped from the US distributor in Illinois, and John will return alone in a week or so to finish the installation.  Given that all the table's parts are in Vermont, he can drive his own car rather than the big box truck, and come alone.  As an apology for the delay, John took the six chromed corners with him, and will re-polish them to eliminate some of the corrosion from three years in a basement.

I would have liked to have played pool last night. But I had an excellent afternoon nonetheless, watching and talking with someone who exercises painstaking care to maintain and restore a well-made object.  And there is something about a nearly-completed object that inspires optimism.  The foundation is firm and true, and the conclusion, although deferred, will be sweet indeed.

Hard Day's Journey Into Night

Most of the time it's okay.

But there are days that feel remote, days in which I'm distant not only from Nora but from myself too.  Days that roll by as silent movies of malice, the landscape as seen through Tony Soprano's windshield, where everything is broken and stained.  The machinations and intrigues that reveal themselves are less threatening than sad, that someone would reduce themselves for so little.

A day goes by, and then an evening goes by as well.  Last night's pizza reheated, consumed along with the New Yorker.  The Bolshoi Ballet reveals itself to be just as treacherous as any workplace, talent and aspirations painstakingly bent over time to become weapons.  The history of Guantanamo Bay, neither Cuban nor American terrain, "the legal equivalent of outer space" where no laws pertain, no one can adequately explain under what purview its inhabitants had arrived, and no one can decide to stop.   A generation of young people who, dissatisfied with their assigned identities, elect to physically modify themselves in fundamental ways.

When cats have nothing to do, they do nothing.  Not so with us.  Solitaire, Sudoku, crossword puzzles.  A certain form of zazen, mildly focused but not attached to outcomes.  A $1500 computer put to the same use as a two dollar deck of cards or yesterday's newspaper.

Six becomes seven becomes nine.

A week ago on Thursday evening, I was in California, heady with success.  That afternoon's talk had inspired a room; the second talk the morning to come was certain to be even better (and turned out to be so).  I was at dinner with my hosts, filled with hope and possibility.  As one of my friends has recently said, "It was nice to feel like a smart and talented person for a few days."

Not so today.  Possibilities have been replaced with threats, green grass with slush and chill wind.  Completed projects unraveled, intentions unstated, friends in pain.  Gallows humor is, after all, a recognition of the gallows.

I know that sleep will help.  The house is cold, so the cats will be close by, Simon at my legs and Ed at my ribs.  We will all sleep, and see what news awaits us in the morning.

From Tangible Love to Faded Rhetoric

Okay, see if you can guess what these lists have in common.

List One:

•    Levitate

•    Barn Swallow

•    Carriage Ride

•    Hat Box

•    Close Out

•    Hard Work

•    Forbidden

No, not Broadway show tunes.  Try again.

List Two:

•    Calm Pacific

•    Admirable Child

•    Ministry

•    Favorite Pastime

•    Collective

•    Exclusively Yours

•    Spooky

No, not race horses, either.  One more try.

List Three:

•    Huggy Bear

•    Faded Rhetoric

•    Reverence

•    Tangible Love

•    Garden Gate

•    Thoreau

•    Thrill Seeker

By now, I'm sure that you have the correct answer, which is that they are the color names on test strips of True Value interior house paint.  Each color family is in order of saturation, from the lightest mix at the top to the most saturated at the bottom.

Oh, but what COLOR are these?  Well, List One is a grey-brown, List Two is a sage green, and List Three is blue with a little slate tinge.  But you can't sell paint if you call it "blue with a little slate tinge," and you can't sell paint if you call it 3184.  You've got to have the evocative, romantic names... even if they don't evoke any color image, nor are Close Out or Hat Box especially romantic.

Of these 21 color names, we have mostly nouns and adjectives, with only one verb (Levitate).  So here, free of charge, are the next generation of color names.

•    Senate's Despair — seemingly purple until looked at directly, at which point it turns red.

•    Frequent Flyer — the brushed aluminum grey of a beverage service cart.

•    Hidden Cop — a faint, smoky color evocative of sudden braking

•    Dean — whatever color the Provost wants it to be.

•    Road Rage — the brilliant red of Massachusetts license plate numbers

•    Namby Pamby — not white, but so pale you can't tell what its root color is

Someone makes their living writing this stuff, along with catalog copy that makes your pants seem like they deserve a trip to the Serengeti and your sheets were slept on by Marie Antoinette.

Here's a matching game for you to try.  Put this list of color names:

•    Chair Squeak — 

•    Compressor Motor —

•    Sound of Discontent — 

•    Fire Ant — 

•    Napkin Ring — 

•    Morning After —

•    Dark Underside —

•    Hue and Cry —

•    Cantilever — 

•    Oxymoron — 

•    Pregnant Pause —

•    Catapault — 

onto this list of colors:

•    Orange with a bit of tobacco-chew brown

•    Salmon filet left out in the summer sun

•    Shower grout mold

•    The approximation of black when the black cartridge is empty and the printer has to use only CMY

•    A cake left out in the rain

•    The copper stripe in the middle of a well-used quarter

•    A ten-day-old bruise

•    Blacklight posters

•    The last fire embers

•    The stain on Monica's blue dress

•    The skin under your watch where you don't get any sun

•    The rust of an abandoned pickup in Kansas

(Apropos of nothing, Nora was telling me about someone named Marie and she changed the accent as we sometimes do when we're in mid-sentence and a word doesn't come out quite right.  But all afternoon, I had a picture of Murray Antoinette...)