Journal of a Sabbatical

September 11, 1999

bleeding the pipes

Today's Starting Pitcher: Mark Portugal

Today's Reading: Danube by Claudio Magris, Outside the Crater by Richard V. Fisher

Another day when I have to be up and dressed before 8:00. Unit 26, where the busybody lives, has some kind of a leak in the heating system, which means they have to shut off the heat in the entire building to fix it. Then they have to go around to every unit in the building and bleed the pipes. We got notes under our doors about the heat being shut off at 8:00 and requesting us to either be here to let the guy in for the pipe bleeding or provide a key. I dutifully set my alarm for really early (6:30) so I could be sure to get in a shower before there's no hot water.

I woke up at 8:00. Grrr. No shower before the pipe work. I dressed and went downstairs to await pipe-man over a pot of coffee (French roast from Fowle's - you can buy their coffee over the Internet you know and they are not paying me or even asking me to advertise for them) and a plate of bread, cheese, and tomatoes, which I now consider to be the ideal breakfast (note absence of salami). And for dessert, a few Cheerios with a banana and soy milk. I was really hungry.

I read several chapters of Outside the Crater while I waited.

The doorbell rang. Doorbell? It's been broken for months, or so I thought. Pipe-man causes spontaneous healing of broken doorbells? I let him in. He disappeared into the basement for about 10 minutes. By this time it was 10:30 and I'd read nearly two thirds of Out of the Crater, concluding that all volcanologists know each other and that volcanologists must have a hell of a time getting life insurance. Also read some more of Danube, and found this fabulous passage, which will become the epigraph to my Hungary trip diary:

Cuvier divided travelers into voyageurs-naturalists, -geographiques, and -botanistes. Things are easier for a botanist: he can carefully pick the last specimen of a plant and preserve it in his herbarium, or even transplant it in a pot and take it with him, weather and climate permitting. Human geography complicates matters a little, since it is more difficult to embalm a landscape which is vanishing beneath the cement of the building speculators, a minority on the decrease, its roads, its customs, its people gesticulating in the marketplace. ...

A voyageur-botaniste would certainly have a lot to collect, with the requisite care, and put into a herbarium that would protect them, even if it is always too late, from being crushed by the wheel of things as they are.

I imagine pressing North Andover at the end of the twentieth century, with its fast-food joints, strip malls, assisted-living complexes, and its few remaining cows. In 200 or so years scholars can peer into the herbarium and exclaim "How quaint those strip malls look!" or "I didn't know they had cows that late in the 20th century!" or "Look at the traffic on 114!"

It was hard to tear myself away from books and coffee for a walk with the walking buddies but I did. Priscilla and Joan-east and I walked. Rita came over to Priscilla's house to chat with us but couldn't walk because her toes are still a little blistered from a bizarre fire in her kitchen at North Conway (she can still play golf though). Harold is working on a vegetarian version of his famous baked bean recipe, so he brainstormed some ideas with me while we tried to mobilize to walk. Once we got going, we kept going and I worked up quite a sweat. I guess it's hotter than I thought. We passed a lot of houses that had impressive streams of water coming out of their sump pumps still. I don't know how much rain we got yesterday, but it was a lot in a very short time.

It was after 3:00 when I got home. Plans with Nancy began to fall apart. We won't make the 4:30 show of Spike and Mike's classic animation and there isn't another show 'til 10:00. We decide on dinner, then we undecide. Nancy needs space and I haven't showered yet and the ball game is on. We decide to watch in our separate houses and call each other between innings. What a ball game! Bizarre ups and downs. Red Sox win 11 to 10. In New York. This is too amazing. Never mind the wild card, they could actually catch the Yankees and win the division. How weird is that? Saberhagen tomorrow.

The "Table at Vallholt" photo doesn't have anything to do with today's entry. I was moving some books around and knocked my Iceland photo album off the shelf. It fell open to the page with the original table photo and reminded me of an idea I'd had for a black and white image based on it. I scanned it in and worked on it in Photoshop until it looked like the image I had in my mind's eye. I'm kind of happy with the result.