Survey

My birthday’s near the beginning of October. Another step down the slope towards irrelevance. Not that I’m complaining, exactly. It’ll be a low-key, midweek celebration, which I tend to prefer.

In the run-up to the day, memories surface and submerge. The just-cake-and-family celebrations of my youth, when Jesus’ birthday was the only one that mattered. The surprise parties of my 20s. The thank-you notes for the perfect presents, for the strange and awful presents, and for oh so many unicorns and purple things long after age nine, when these were, respectively, my favorite animal and color. Things in the mailbox–a note from a faraway friend, or the comforting perennial birthday card from my grandma in Chicago with a five-dollar bill in it. The thank-you for my grandma’s fives was always telephonic. My mom would make the call, Grandma and I would chat awkwardly for a couple of minutes, and then my mother would take over the conversation. We probably spent more than $5 on the long distance charges from Virginia to Illinois.

At any rate, ask me if I’d prefer something surprising or familiar around birthday time and I’ll say Yes, please. In truth, the unexpected is a little ahead in the contest. I haven’t shaken the habit of checking the mailbox (and my online notifications) early and often as September wanes.

This year September gave me two surprise envelopes, both with cash. These were not the fake bills that some companies send to promote windows or life insurance; they were legal tender! The first piece of mail contained two fresh dollar bills from the Nielsen people, along with an offer to become one of roughly 42,000 households that provide the data for TV ratings. I discussed the prospect with my husband Dave, after agreeing to split the money with him. I was a Nielsen household for a while when I was in my 20s. At the time participants had to fill out a diary by hand, which I felt was more work than it was worth. These days Nielsen collects the data remotely, but there are still time-consuming elements, along with the fact that they need to install monitors on your household’s devices. It took us about 25 seconds to decide this was a no go.

The other envelope, from the US Census Bureau, had a five-dollar bill, smooth and paper-cut sharp, fresh from the Mint. A slant rhyme, if history does indeed rhyme, with Grandma’s cards. Her fives had been bills farther along in the life cycle, crinkled and soft, smelling faintly of tobacco, sometimes missing a corner. In those times, ones were the shortest lived paper currency; longevity depends on how frequently a bill changes hands and accumulates wear and tear. In the 2020s, fives are the shortest lived of American currency at an average life of just 4.7 years, compared with 6.6 years for ones and a whopping 22.9 years for one hundreds. Grandma’s fives always seemed just a step ahead of the incinerator, though they were still good for candy bars at the five-and-dime.

The Bureau’s $5 was to get me to consider participating in an online survey to see if I’d qualify for the Census Household Panel. If I completed the survey, $20 would follow in the mail at some point in the next few weeks. Maybe on my birthday, I thought, wouldn’t that be cool? If I made it onto the panel I’d be given other surveys, about once per month, with  $10 for each survey, for a couple of years.

I could use an extra $25. Even on the slope of irrelevance, cash for trail mix and water comes in handy. Therefore I clicked my way through many questions and, to my surprise, was enrolled.

A little research found that the CHP aims to get 15,000 people on the panel, which sounds like a lot but is pretty small given that American population is 331.9 million. If I entered the numbers correctly, my laptop calculator computes that I am representing 22066.67 people! In which categories, I’m not sure. Middle class, suburban, female, married,  autistic, political progressive, self-employed, awkward, insomniac, college educated, New England resident? However the researchers and analysts decide to classify me, it’s fascinating, a little exhilarating, even, to conceive of myself as a data point. Quite the birthday gift…

Nightstand

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Browsing stock photo images of nightstands, I feel envious. So many elegant little tables adorned with some combination of lamp, alarm clock, vase, soothing beverage, and book. The table tops are occupied without being crowded. Occasionally some have as many as two books, in a pile with a clock atop them.

Technically I don’t have a nightstand. The doors and windows of our bedroom are placed in such a way that there’s no room for a single nightstand, let alone two. Instead we have a bed frame that includes under-bed drawers and a headboard with a shelf and a couple of drawers in the middle. It’s not the most comfortable setup for reading in bed, but with the pillows piled, it serves. There’s no space to store a chamber pot—the original purpose of the nightstand, as it turns out—but there’s plenty of room for books, lamps, and clocks, albeit in a rather more crowded configuration than the online images.

My side of the lower shelf has about 15 books, all of them to-be-reads, and a stuffed cat. The top surface serves as my nightstand. I have a combination alarm clock/CD player, a stack of CDs, a little reading lamp, because the built-in lights that came with the bed frame burned out long ago, a couple of artificial plants, and the stack of four books that I’m currently reading. These are my nightstand books. They wander a fair amount.  Sometimes they come outside for coffee under the trees. Sometimes they go riding in the car. Mostly, though, I read them in or near the bed.

A month ago the stack was higher. Overwhelming, even. There were seven books in the pile, which is a relatively reasonable number, but several were chonky volumes of 500 pages or more. On looking at the pile I was starting to feel disappointed with myself, rather than energized. This is unusual for me, because I’ve always enjoyed reading multiple books at a time, with interruptions for the delightful occasions when one book captures me and makes it so that there’s nothing else I can do but finish it. Back in my 20s, when I was single, I also had a headboard with a shelf, on which I stored stacks of paperbacks and a coffeemaker, so that I could make a cup of coffee and start reading without leaving the bed, bopping from book to book with caffeinated abandon.

Still, I don’t argue with agita. I made a plan to deal with the stack and whittled it down to four. Four is the minimum number to make a meal, which is what I see my nightstand books as comprising.  Remember that Francis Bacon quote about ingesting books, with some “to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”? Oftentimes I mush the books together like some diner forking potatoes, peas, and chicken into a single bite. I never would do this in a real meal—I eat one item at a time—but it takes way longer to read even the most breathless and gripping 300-page novel  than it does to eat a serving of vegetables. Even  Brussels sprouts, my least favorite of the tolerable greens.

I start my meals with the most challenging element, which for me is always the vegetables. That’s why the top book in my current stack is…

1.  The vegetable: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature and Selected Essays. I thought this would be a broccoli book. Broccoli is a vegetable that I actually find somewhat tasty. On the other hand, if it turned out that broccoli was not good for me I would give it up without a regret. This spring and summer I’d become curious about various New England literary figures of the 1800s, especially the Massachusetts writers, and about the transcendentalist movement, of which Emerson was a part. I’d liked a lot of Emerson quotes. I found this collection in Barnes and Noble and felt a bit disappointed that it was so short. I was looking forward to these pieces, but it turns out that for me, this is a Brussels sprouts book. Part of it is the style, which is flowery and ecstatic and puts me off, somehow. Part of it’s the attitude, which is dogmatic and tunnel vision-y. There are fascinating ideas and confounding assertions, so I read it first, write my reactions in the margins, and move on to…

2. The cocktail: The Portable Dorothy Parker. This is a collection of short stories, poems, reviews, and letters, so the pieces are short and self-contained. In a way this is the perfect nightstand book, except that the writing is far from soporific. Back to the plate I go, for…

3. The pasta: Jody Rosen’s Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle. Dave, who is an avid cyclist, found this book when we visited Beacon Hill Books and Cafe this summer. (Terrific, terrific place; if you’re passing through Boston you should check it out.) Once he’d finished it, he passed it along to me. I love this kind of nonfiction deep dive and am finding out all kinds of cool stuff, including that in the late 1800s bicycling was so popular and so controversial that there were newspaper articles that blamed this habit for breaking up families and corrupting general morals! Now there’s just one thing left on the plate…

4. The protein: George Solti’s Memoirs. Solti was one of the great conductors of the twentieth century. He headed the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when I lived in in that city, so I got to see him work in person. What that man could do with an orchestra simply by raising an eyebrow! Solti’s narrative voice is as vivid and engaging as his conducting. I’m about a third of the way through and finding the account of his experiences in Hungary, Germany, and Switzerland in the years around World War II to be compelling, and terrifying.

At first I enjoyed watching the stack dwindle. It gave me a feeling of accomplishment. I started with a quick read, a collection of James S. A. Correy stories set in the Expanse universe. I finally finished a history of opera that had been in the pile, about 75% done, for a couple of years. I sped through a collection of interviews with famous singers. Eventually it started to feel a bit like the time I went on the Atkins diet and cut out the carbs, when I lost weight (temporarily) but also kind of hated my life, especially when passing a bakery.

My original thought was to get the nightstand books down to one—no, down to zero, and then make a new pile. But at the moment I am, as often happens, rebounding to the other extreme. My stack is too small. I need a nightstand that’s a nightly feast…a party…a buffet! So now I’m on the hunt for appetizers and desserts.

What would you suggest? What’s on your nightstand?

Finis?

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My town contains three largish industrial parks: Pacella, Teed, and York. In my 2023 walk-about-the-town project, which I planned in March and began in April, I had put the industrial parks near the end. In alphabetical order, like the rest, but just those three. “Those places are no fun,” I complained to Sonny on the day before I started to walk them.

He was surprised. Sonny’s a big walker also, taking long treks most evenings. He says  he enjoys going past those parks because of their urban feel. (He’s a city boy at heart.)

“Have you ever walked down those streets themselves, though? From end to end?” I asked.

It turned out he hadn’t.

Myself, I like houses more more than warehouses and factories. The shoebox buildings just don’t delight or spark my imagination the way that mullioned windows, bathtub saints, porch pianos, nibbling bunnies, and streaking chipmunks do. But I am also someone who, having conceived of a project, yearns to complete it properly. The industrial parks were all that stood between me and Finis.

So the next morning I trotted down Pacella Park, which is technically more of a business park than an industrial park. Aesthetically it’s the most pleasing of the three. There are houses for about half of its length, followed by big buildings with lavish landscaping, then by a dead end with a fancy apartment complex. I appreciated the variety as well as the scenery. The business bit looks onto Great Pond (which is, indeed, a great pond), and the apartment complex backs onto the Blue Hills nature preserve. I passed Bright Horizons, where Sonny went for daycare when he was young (at a cost exceeding our mortgage payment). Years later we’d come here on Sunday mornings after Sonny got his learner’s permit, driving round and round the big parking lots, practicing left turns and right turns and reversing.

 Rain delays! The next walk, a few days later, was Teed. This is the park with the biggest buildings, and it’s the second prettiest. There’s no fancy shrubbery but the grass is green and lush, and the smooth roads have bright lane lines, clear even on a very foggy morning. The most intriguing feature is a set of railroad tracks near the entrance, which are remnants of the Old Colony Railroad and part of a dilapidated rail trail. The tracks are overgrown with moss and grass and go winding off mysteriously through some trees.

The York Park is the plainest of the three. It has no sidewalks. The shoeboxes are a little grungy. Some of the parking lots are potholed; so is the street itself. There are a few neat lawns, but none with artful flowerbeds. There are patches of weeds that grab with their green fingers at anyone crazy enough to walk down this long street. Especially some idiot planning just to go to the end and back. Many vehicles tootle through. Trucks, SUVs, even a tiny cherry-red sports car.

Despite no sparkling reservoir or mysterious railroad, it’s York Park that I enjoyed the most. I got the biggest bang to the brain here. There are points in the middle of any big undertaking when I wonder why I’m doing it. In one sense all that I’m really doing is getting some exercise in an absurdly structured way. Why do I need to elevate this pursuit by writing about it, and making a little journal with maps and notes? Mostly because some days the beauty of the world just socks me in the eye, and some days my brain bounces with memories and connections.

York Park is about a half mile from our first house in this town. It’s connected to High Street, which has houses, apartment buildings, a horse farm, a convenience store, a middle school, a baseball field, and even a nightclub. Sonny goes there some Saturday nights. In the old days my husband Dave and I would take Sonny out for twilight walks, during which we frequently passed York Park. There was a business on the corner that sold RVs, and Sonny was very taken with them. This was before he realized that he was a city boy. His long-term plan was to live in an RV parked in our driveway, along with his best friend, Ashley, and their two children, Peter and Veronica. This was a remarkable conversation because it was the first time that I remember Sonny talking about his future. Eventually Sonny and Ashley’s ambitions shifted to setting up in New York City. She would be a famous singer and Sonny was going to be a famous conductor. Ashley moved out of state long ago, and she and Sonny have long lost touch. But I still kind of miss the idea of the two of them setting up house in that RV.

Technically York was the final street of my project. Day #135. I found myself reluctant to write Finis. Maybe it’s because I’m trying on futures of my own as I walk and haven’t yet found one with the right zing…So I added cemeteries and parks to buy myself another week or two, and then, I swear, I’ll be done.

Words and weeds

How a word sneaks into my head…

Poem 1519

The Dandelion’s pallid tube

Astonishes the Grass, 

And Winter Instantly Becomes 

An infinite Alas – 

—

The tube uplifts a signal Bud

And then a shouting Flower,-

The Proclamation of the Suns 

That sepulture is o’er. 

Sepulture, I think. Hmm. It’s close to a familiar word…sepulchre, that’s it. A tomb. A church word, in my experience. This is fitting, because Emily’s poem—as I’ve read her poems 1 through 1518 before today, in my mind we’re on a first-name basis—is in a hymn rhythm. Common meter, in fact, which is iambic tetrameter (four feet) alternating with iambic trimeter (three feet). Isaac Watts, the “Father of English Hymnody,” often used this metrical structure in his works. After annoying his relatives by speaking mostly in rhyme, he eventually wrote the lyrics for around 750 hymns. Emily’s family attended First Church in Amherst, Massachusetts, where Watts’ hymns were a regular part of services.

These are the same rhythms that I belt out on Sunday mornings while processing to the choir stalls. Procession is a rather grand name for it; it’s more of a jerky shuffle produced by trying to sing the right line in the hymnal without bumping into anyone or tripping on the steps to the chancel. Still, there are candles and crosses and robes and music, so procession it is.

On my two feet, in common time, I circumambulate the bedroom. Not quite sure about the meaning of sepulture, I don’t want to stop walking to google. Emily often uses words in a way that suggests that her English is not my native language. I figure that I get the gist: spring’s coming and there’s nothing that winter can do about it. Or maybe it’s about the way that weeds can take over a patch of grass before you realize it. Dandelions weren’t considered weeds in Emily’s day, though, undercutting that interpretation. Plus I love the sight of them.

I can only walk with my Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems for a few minutes at a time, maybe 15, maximum. It’s a big paperback with a purple cover and more than 700 smooth white pages. A Christmas present. Nine months later it’s lost its new-book smell. It weighs a couple of pounds, but that’s not the problem; it’s the awkwardness. I’m in the 600s, page-wise, and the book, off balance, keeps trying to close itself. I have to actively hold it open, which gets annoying after a bit.

I return Emily to the shelf, pick up Poems of Robert Browning, Oxford Edition, and resume my steps. Mr. Browning’s book is smaller and lighter. It’s a hardback, bound in brown leather. The front cover has R. Browning, embossed in gold, and coffee cup speckles that look rather similar to a photograph of Browning on the frontispiece. (Check it out at the top of this post: can you see it?) The pages are yellowing, no surprise for a collection that was published in 1919. The poems are presented in two columns per page, single-spaced, in 8-point font. I have to hold this book very close to my face to make sense of the itty-bitty words.

Mr. Browning doesn’t use the hymn rhythms as much as Emily does, although he’s fond of couplets with a long first line and a short second one. I’m not far into the collection (so he’s still Mr. Browning, not Bob). It’s very different from Emily’s, with lots of stories and drama. Some of them I quite enjoy. Today’s selection is “A Grammarian’s Funeral.” As someone with grammar problems, to put it mildly, I’m eager to find out about this guy and what he might have had coming to him. The first lines are promising:  

Let us begin and carry up this corpse, 

Singing together. 

A thrill runs through me as I wonder if this may be a mystery story. Did the grammarian correct one too many subject-verb disagreements? Then, ten lines later: 

Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; 

Seek we sepulture

On a tall mountain, citied to the top, 

Crowded with culture!

Sepulture, again! I’m pulled out of the book entirely at the wonder of reading this word twice in ten minutes.

I lay Mr. Browning down–carefully, as he’s rather frail–and google. The rest of the poem will have to wait for another day. Sepulture means either the placement of something in a grave, with synonyms including burial, interment, entombment; or the burial chamber itself, with synonyms including crypt, tomb, and sepulchre. Its origin is the Latin word sepultura, which made its way into Old French and then Middle English.

I want to find some extra significance when a new word hits my brain. Especially such a weighted word. In actuality this isn’t surprising, especially when reading two poets writing in the same language during the same century. Unlike some of the words that work their way into my brain, I can’t figure out how to use sepulture in a real-life sentence. But I do spend a few interesting moments contemplating tombs and burials, rebirths and resurrections, and how words live on, in that nonliving way of words, after their authors.

Foraging for furnishings

It’s September 1, or as it’s known in my neck of the woods, Allston Christmas. All over the Boston area (Allston is a part of the city of Boston, a neighborhood that’s home to lots of university students), the leases are turning along with the autumn leaves. About 70% of Boston leases begin on this day. Just like the December holiday, Allston Christmas is celebrated for more than just a day. It starts in the second half of August and mostly concludes on Labor Day. It’s called Christmas because there’s a bunch of stuff on the street left behind by  people moving out—furniture, decorations, etc.—that’s free for the taking.

My town is a bit too far away from Boston to be affected by Allston Christmas, although we have plenty of interesting items on the street on trash day. If it’s trash day where I’m walking, there’s almost always a sofa or entertainment console or some other item that could be useful to someone on the curb amongst the bins. About half of our garden chairs are ones I’ve found on a street. Sometimes we leave a chair or table out there ourselves.

Today being a Friday and the start of the Labor Day weekend, things were pretty quiet on my walk. No moving trucks, no kids waiting for the schoolbus. It was clear that change was on the way, however. A pause before something glorious. The summer flowers were looking faded and dry, true, but the temperature was cool enough for a light jacket. Overnight the fall flowers, with their tight buds and darker hues, had bloomed.

At Allston Christmas, many of the people starting their September leases are college students. They’re transitioning between literal and figurate states. They’re looking forward to the new academic year and getting to know a new neighborhood, but first they have to make it through the hell of moving day. They edge past the U-Haul trucks double-parked on narrow streets; double-park their own; maneuver lamps and desks and bed frames and the etceteras up twisty staircases.

I was lucky that my first big move into my “own” place involving getting seven cardboard boxes, a suitcase, and my clarinet into the elevator that ascended to my fully furnished, seventh-floor dorm room. It was my single truly easy move, despite the annoyance of the speeding ticket I picked up in Indiana on the drive from Maryland to Illinois.

I have always loved moving, even the moves with hassle attached, which is most of them. I like uprooting everything. So I envy the people who keep Allston Christmas going with all that moving in and out. May their sofas make it around the staircase bends. go well. May they happen upon the coffee table of their dreams and grab beautiful upholstered furniture that’s free of bed bugs. (I wouldn’t bet on the upholstered stuff, personally, though. As the news reporters warn, “there’s a reason it’s in the trash.”) And may they avoid getting Storrowed on the way to their new apartments.

Storrowing happens when a vehicle gets its roof ripped off by an overpass on Storrow Drive, a road that runs along the Charles River. GPS systems tend to recommend this route as a way to get from one end of the city to another but neglect to mention that the street’s height limit is ten feet. There are lots of warning signs, on Storrow Drive itself and on the approaches to it, but some U-Hauls get Storrowed every Allston Christmas. Lifelong Massachusetts residents tend to view these unfortunates as doofuses, but I remember what it was like to sob uncontrollably in the breakdown lane the first time I had to navigate the cowpaths that had evolved into Boston streets. There are lots of signs and sights competing for a person’s attention on the way to Storrow Drive.

Soon the newcomers will be settled in, having arranged their furniture and books, and tackling their new lives. Storrow Drive’s overpasses will continue to take out truck roofs, albeit at a slower rate. In their apartments, people will smile at the chuckleheads bringing traffic to a halt. Allston Christmas will fade imperceptibly into December Christmas.