-It’s cold, Father.
-Generally is, in the winter.
-Aren’t you cold, Father?
-Not so anybody’d notice.
-Why is it cold in the winter, Father?
-To remind you to pay attention in the summer.
-Will it ever be summer again, Father?
-Oh, I expect so. Not tomorrow.
-Why do you wear a ring, Father? Doesn’t it get cold?
-To tell people things.
-It just goes ’round and ’round. What can a ring tell people, Father?
-Everything.
I have never seen a better example of something that’s really sort of complicated that is made to seem effortless and off-the-cuff. This is a very sophisticated trifle.
We used to play this song, and break into the theme for the Gary Shandling Show in the middle of it. I’m sure the Turtles would approve. Key of F. 1.2.3.4…
The sun is a smudge in the sky and a smear on the ice.
There’s evidence of each turn around the pond. The little aretes of chips frozen on the ice from all the yesterdays after the freeze remind you.
Everyone talks about the washboard feel of it. They’re not paying attention. It’s the sound that’s a thrill. I hear the thrum of the water beneath the slab of ice. The ice lives atop it, really. Alive is not too strong a word. The liquid has been bested and waits its turn, but complains the whole time. All water hates to be in the audience. It seeks the stage, always. Sorry, I’m on it.
There’s wind to whistle in your ears of your own making. The best kind. Even when you steal the breeze in the hot summer in the shadow of your shoulder-of-mutton it’s not your wind. Here you make it.
No hockey. No noise. No fun. Glide.
This is the part of the year that grinds.
I work below ground. There are a few windows, but essentially no natural light creeps in. If you’ve never worked on a concrete floor for long periods of time, you’re lucky. It sucks the life out of you through the bottom of your feet, is the only way I can describe it. The fluorescent lights overhead cast a greenish pall on everything. From November to March, it’s like being suspended in refrigerated, dessicating formaldehyde.
There’s none of the dampness of the usual basement to it. It’s dehumidified to death for the sake of the wood I use and store. Between the low temperature and no humidity, all the heat and moisture is wicked from your body all the time. I have a heater, but I can only afford to use it when the items I’m working on require a warmer temperature for finishing or something. By late December it gets down in the forties otherwise.
My fingers don’t work properly when they are cold. Many in construction don’t mind the cold, but are enervated by heat. I’m the opposite, generally.
Everything makes noise. It’s tiring to listen to it, and tiring to wear something to muffle it. I listen to the sports talk radio in the background because I don’t care about sports.
Almost every machine I use is dangerous enough to hurt or maim or kill me in an instant, or perhaps debilitate me over the long run. There is a constant state of readiness, an alertness I imagine a person that hunts for more than sport has. It never goes away. It is taxing to have job where a mental lapse can be freighted with such dread. A surgeon must feel that way, a little. If you sneeze, someone might be hurt, or perhaps die. At least with the surgeon, it’s not him.
People generally dabble in physical labor when they are young and then move on. Cubicle farmers often regale me with stories of their toil in life’s vineyard of the aching back before becoming men and women of letters. It’s different, you know. Many people– and I do not really count myself among them, as I have chosen the path I walk in life — have nothing but hard, unremitting physical toil stretched out in front of them from day one to the horizon, and beyond, and can never choose another way. I’ve done more than dabble in hard, physical labor, so perhaps I am able to talk about it better than most by sheer familiarity. But that’s about it. It would be presumptuous of me to claim to be like the people born with their shoulder to the wheel. I’ve always cherished their respect where I could cadge it.
I’m not sure why I keep doing it. Some character flaw. A kind of stubbornness, perhaps. Maybe I like it. I don’t really know.
The naugahyde was cool against your cheek. I remember that.
Driving back from Roxbury. Rambling along the Charles on Storrow. The car pitched and yawed on its butt-sprung suspension and the spidered pavement . You could reach down and lift the floor mat and see the asphalt roll by through the rusty pinholes in the floor, where the road salt had done its work, and worked overtime, too.
Pop was operatin’. He was like a sub commander. Steering through shoals with vision obscured. Our moist breath clouded the windshield. The defroster exhaled on the windshield like the dying animal it was. Pop wiped the fog away with his hanky, and pressed on.
Little brother was already asleep on the seat next to you. Mom packed the blankets and pillow around him to hold him on the seat. I bivouacked on the rest, and tried to align my face on the part where the cushion wasn’t split from a thousand butts. The edge of the rip would cut your face and the foam would tickle you.
The scene was framed, imperfectly, through the lens of the side window. Left to right, the world ran past. The drops of condensation coalesced on the fogged window’s screen, ran down, and revealed the Cambridge shore through the mist. Low-watt Christmas everywhere. The enormous billboards shrunk by distance and time and poverty to faraway smears of luminous color with winking neon and the stink of death on their topics. FULLER OLDS. NECCO. KASANOF’S. The window made them into a kaleidoscope.
The useless wipers went scrreee-BAP, scrreee-BAP over and over, and Pop would fiddle with everything to no effect and keep going. Mom would look out the window and over her shoulder and her thoughts were her own. The Christmas presents from doting Aunts who asked you over and over “Which one are you?” would shift and tumble over in the trunk an inch behind my head when we got to the huge sign that said REVERSE CURVE — the one that caught Pop by surprise every time even though he was born a brisk walk from it.
There was sometimes a hand free to twist the huge, mostly useless dial on the radio. Snap, Crackle, Pop, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, came out of that thing. At night the big stations like BeeZee would bleed all over the place, and bizarre incursions of French from Canada would appear, unwonted, fight for primacy like radio chimeras, then disappear as Pop searched again for whatever you could catch and hold.
Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone…
We rolled on into the night.
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