A Box of Matches

  The Olivetti electric typewriter that my father bought me was designed—this was in the seventies—in the high-Italian way, like a Bugatti from that era, very clean, no sharp corners but no unnecessary aerodynamicism either. It made a fine swatting sound when one of its keys hit the paper. A week after I got it, I masked over all the letters with black electrician’s tape, and that was how I learned to type. I took it with me to France and typed French papers there with it. Six years later it was stolen from Claire’s apartment, when thieves came in through the fire escape. They stole her miniature TV and her roommate’s speakers, too. I find it remarkable that my father was buying me a farewell typewriter when he was younger than I am now.

  Last night I washed my son’s hair, thinking what I always think: How many years will be left before I have no child young enough to wash his or her hair? Phoebe takes long showers now and of course washes her own hair. The loss is enough to make you lose composure—I’m not kidding. The dawn sky is now visible: the snow is a very light blue rather than grey. Yes, grey with an e—that’s one of those English spellings that I accept (aeroplane isn’t bad either), and not just because I learned to read it on the boxes of Earl Grey tea that my mother had. When spelled with an e, grey half hides the wide, crude sound of the a behind the obscuring mists of the e. It’s rare for a one-syllable word to have so much going on.

  I once saw the earl of Grey on The Merv Griffin Show, an afternoon program hosted by the always cheerful and always tanned Merv Griffin. The earl of Grey had three things to say: one, that you can’t make good tea in a microwave; two, that the water shouldn’t be boiling but just on the verge; and three, that he wished that Twinings had trademarked the phrase Earl Grey, which was used by everyone. The poor man had lost his name.

  And it was on The Merv Griffin Show, as well, that I watched a father-and-son act in which the son, who was about seven or eight, climbed up a ladder and got into a small chair welded to the top of a long pole. The father balanced this pole on his hand, his foot, and then lifted it and placed it on his chin. But here something went wrong. The father had never been on TV before, one suspects, and he was nervous, and the lights onstage were brighter and hotter than the lights that he had rehearsed under, and he knew that he had a shorter time than usual, only two or three minutes, to do his act, before they cut away to the commercial. So his face was sweating more than it normally did—it was in fact dripping. He and his son were both wearing leopard-pattern caveman outfits—crazy looking getups with belts and shoulder straps as I remember. Perhaps the wife, who made the costumes, thought it was cute.

  The man threw back his head and got his chin into position under the chin-cup at the end of the pole that held his son in the air and set it in place, and spread his arms. But then I saw two rapid jerky adjustments—maybe the son was more nervous too and fidgeted for a moment—and one of the movements made the chin-cup slide off the man’s unusually slippery chin. It slipped down his neck, and his neck tendons became dozens of individual cords as he grimaced, and the pole continued to slip until it came to rest in the hollow just above his collarbone, where he held it by tightening his neck muscles so that the pole wouldn’t drive right into the soft tissue there. He held that, quivering, for a few seconds, until the orchestra made the sound of triumph, and the applause came, and then he lifted the pole off, brought it down, and the son jumped into his arms and the two of them took a bow in their matching leopard-skin caveman outfits.

  Anyway, I gave Henry a bath, and saw all of his forehead, as you do when your child is in the bath—all that high, smooth forehead, as I rinsed out the shampoo, and I pointed towards the back of the tub, meaning “Look way back,” so that his head would tip back enough for me to rinse the shampoo from the hair just above his forehead, and I saw his young face, trusting me not to drip water in his eyes, his mouth chapped below one side of his lower lip because he sticks the tip of his tongue out and to the side when he is concentrating, which is a genetic behavior that he inherited from my father-in-law (who puts his tongue at the corner of his mouth and bites it while performing some act of minor manual dexterity; their heads and ears are similarly shaped, too)—and I thought, I’ve got only a few years of Henry being a small boy. Even now when he stretches his legs out, his feet push against the tap-end of the tub. I remember how proud Phoebe was to be able to touch both ends of the tub, too—“Nice growing!” I said to her. And I even remember how proud I was myself to touch both ends of the tub. Generations of people grow to a point where they touch both ends of the tub. This is all too much for me.

  15

  Good morning, it’s 4:04 a.m. and I made the coffee very strong this morning. Two extra scoops in the dark. The cat wanted to be fed, but the cat rule is not before six-thirty, otherwise there will come days, I guarantee it, when I will want to sleep and the cat will want to eat at what will have become his accustomed time. When we’re still asleep and he thinks that it is breakfast time, he slides his claws into the fabric along the side of the mattress and then plucks the bed like a giant harp.

  Passing through the dining room, after an eye-moistening crunch of apple, I saw a coppery flare of sloshing liquid where my coffee mug must be. Once again I thought it must be moonlight—moonlight in the morning coffee—but no, there is no moon available. And then I recognized, by experimenting with where I held the coffee, that I was seeing a liquid reflection of the light from my new friend, the little green bulb in the smoke detector.

  The mug of coffee rests on the top of the ashcan, and it gets hot on the side that is near the fire. But it stays cool on the side I sip from. This particular mug has a blue stripe around it and a small chip in the sipping area. Each time I take a sucking mouthful of tepid coffee I have the sharp-edged, chalky, chipped-ceramic experience as well, a good combination.

  I’ve got my eyes closed now. The flames make semaphoring rhythms against my eyelids. An itch just made a guest appearance on my cheek, in the foothills of my beard—as the fire gets hotter it can make your face itch—and I noticed that I’ve gotten into the habit of using my tongue to prop my cheek from underneath, in order to stretch the skin a little and establish a solid base against which to scratch. I wonder now when I first began countering the force of my finger-scratch with tongue pressure through the cheek. Years ago, it must have been; I’ve kept no record. Once I had a briefcase that got a long scratch in it. I was looking for a job after college, and my father, in whose house I was then living (my parents having separated a year or two earlier), bought me a hand-sewn briefcase made of dark leather—not the lawyerly kind with the expandable bellows but a simpler design with two leather handles that slid down into the recesses in the sides of the central compartment. The briefcase sat on a chair in the middle of my room—every day I woke up and saw it there and was made happy by it. In it was a file with all four of my unfinished poems and another with my résumé and several more empty folders ready for the time when I would have more things to file. My father was at work by nine, so I didn’t see him in the morning, but he would leave notes for me—NEW BOX OF CHEERIOS, a note would say, in his fast but calligraphy-influenced printing, with a late-Victorian arrow pointing to the unopened Cheerios box, which was displayed at just the right angle to the paper. Next to the Cheerios was a bunch of bananas (often), and he would draw a hand with an extended index finger calling attention to that. NOTE FRESH BANANAS! the message would say, and the exclamation point would have its own drop shadow. I wish I had every morning note my father ever wrote me. I have some, I think, I hope.

  So I would get up around ten-thirty and take a shower and talk to Claire on the phone, and then I would go out into the world with my new briefcase to seek my fortune, which involved walking around downtown for about an hour until I got hungry. One day I went to a cafeteria to have a hamburger. I was sitting down at the table with my briefcase in one hand and my tray holding a hamburger and a medium root beer, coleslaw, coffee, and a piece of pecan pie in the other, when the cup of root beer s
omehow tipped over and gushed into my new briefcase. I used some foul language and poured the root beer out of the briefcase into the tray. I took little pleasure in my lunch, although the mushrooms on the hamburger were quite good. When I was done, I called my father from a pay phone and told him what had happened. He said to go to Paul’s Shoe Repair and buy a can of Neat’s Foot Oil and rub it in. I did. I didn’t just rub it in, I poured it in, from the inside. This worked: the combination of root-beer sugar and shoe oil made the leather darker, and there was an odd smell for a while, but the briefcase was fine, better than ever.

  Then at my grandfather’s funeral, one of my overly successful first cousins, all of whom went to Yale Medical School and are full of shallow competencies—humph!—said, “Here, I can put this in the back,” and wrestled my briefcase out of my hand and flipped it up and let it land on the spare tire in the trunk of his rented car. He took hold of both sides of it and pushed it back deeper into the trunk, not noticing that there was a long bolt with a rough edge projecting up from the bottom of the trunk, onto which the spare tire was clamped, and that as he pushed my briefcase across this bolt, it would scratch the leather. This was no surface scratch—this was a deep, straight gouge, a wound three eighths of an inch wide that went all the way down one side, exposing the leather’s untanned layer. “Sorry,” my cousin said. I took my briefcase over to a stone parapet with a round decorative cement globe in an urn and I bounced my fist a few times against the urn’s rough surface. When you make a tight fist, your little-finger muscle, which runs along the side of your hand, can bunch up and become surprisingly springy, and if you time the the fist-clenching just right, you can use the sudden bunching of the muscle to help send your fist back up in the air for the next bounce. At the airport, my father looked at the briefcase scratch, and he said, “I’d take it to Paul’s Shoe Repair.”

  Paul sanded down the roughness of the scrape and dyed it a chocolate brown that wasn’t a perfect match but was still very close. I used the briefcase for almost fifteen years, until finally both handles tore. Now it’s in a box in the attic.

  16

  Good morning, it’s 4:55 a.m.—Last night I went to bed at eight-thirty, and this morning I woke up having found a position in the bed that was one of the best bed positions I’ve ever been in. I must be getting better at sleeping. No part of me hurt or had stiffness; I was floating on a perfect angle of pillow and shoulder. I lay for fifteen minutes, thinking about the time long ago when I had a pet ant named Fidel, and then I heard Henry get up and pee and come into our room. His blankets had fallen off and he had gotten chilled. I lifted our covers so that he could get in, a small shivering boy with a very cold hand that he put on my shoulder. Claire was asleep. We three lay there for a while, Henry’s nose against my back, until he warmed up and fell asleep; then I somehow managed to pour myself out of the bottom of the bed without waking either him or Claire, so that I could come down here and fire up the morning. I’ve just crumpled a colorful advertising supplement from Sears. Their slogan is “The Good Life at a Great Price.” Every year on my birthday my mother would take me to buy a new pair of Sears work boots. They cost five dollars, and they would get very soft at the toe after a few months. Good boots they were, great boots, in fact. Boots wear out, but how many socket-wrench sets and circular saws can the world buy? I’ve lit the crumpled Sears circular. Blue ink sometimes burns bright green.

  Home Depot is part of what is hurting Sears. Claire bought the unpainted doghouse that we use as a duck château at Home Depot. And this past weekend we went there to buy a mini-refrigerator, so that in the future, when houseguests come, they can have breakfast in their guest room, with their own butter and their own milk for their coffee and their own ultracool cantaloupe. While it’s true that you can have very good conversations with houseguests in the morning, when everyone’s hair is poking off in novel directions, it is also true that by the fourth day both guest and host, hoarse from forced cheer, will find that they may prefer to read the paper in their pajamas in different parts of the house. So we selected a mini-fridge. We stood in an aisle for a long time, waiting for a person to show up with an electric lift that he could use to pull down one of the several boxed fridges that were on an upper shelf. Finally the fridge-retriever arrived. He was a diminutive man who has advised us in the past on faucets. This Home Depot employs several very small people, if I’m not mistaken, and they’re usually the most knowledgeable. Go right for the bearded dwarf with the tool belt if you want the best advice.

  He rose up on the lift and, fifteen feet in the air, began wrestling with the mini-fridge. He whistled a Supertramp song loudly to convey that all was well. I didn’t want to make him nervous by staring up at his struggles, so I turned and looked down the aisle. There was a lot going on. A couple was choosing between two pieces of white pipe, and farther down I saw a big woman in a sweater and leggings pointing up at something. She had a lot of hair. She mounted a moving metal stairway, one that has rollers on one end and rubber nubbins on the other, so that when you put your weight on them the nubbins act as brakes, and she unhooked a toilet seat from a display. She looked at it from several angles—a big angelic oval in the air above the heads of the ground level shoppers—and then she handed it down to her husband. He held it for a while, nodding, then handed it back up to her. She rehung it on its hooks. By then our mini-fridge had landed.

  So now there is quite a nice fridge in the guest room. Henry and Phoebe unpacked it, pulling off all the pieces of blue tape. It was similar to the unpacking of a new printer, which always has pieces of sticky-but-not-too-sticky tape holding the various movable elements in place.

  And now Henry has appeared in the dawn-lit living room. I just asked him if he’d had a good sleep in our bed.

  “Yes, I was quite warm,” said Henry.

  I asked him what made him wake up so early.

  “Dad, you see, Mom said she was going to read me some more of the book we’re reading, and I wondered if she was awake yet. And when I felt how warm it was, I snuggled in. I joined the party.”

  Henry puts the word Dad in practically every sentence he says to me. He seems to want to say the word Dad. Who is that Dad? I am.

  “Dad, in only two years I’m going to be ten,” he just told me. He has tossed an egg carton onto the fire. There was a fall of large shaggy flakes yesterday; the wild grape at the end of our lawn and the tall pines across the valley are squirrel-tailed with snow. And now I can hear the crows, the birds that announce the end of my secret morning.

  17

  Good morning, it’s 4:03 a.m., early, early, early. I did something new while the coffeemaker was snuffling and gasping: I washed a dish that I’d left last night in the sink to soak. Claire made a pathbreaking noodle casserole, which we ate three quarters of. One quarter is now socked away in the refrigerator. While I was filling up the carafe of the coffeemaker, it clinked against the glass casserole dish, and I thought what the hay. The dish was full of night-cooled water when I began. I put my hand in it. The suds were gone and the water was still—it was like taking an early-morning swim in the lake at camp, not that I ever did that. I could feel some hard places down on the bottom that would need scrubbing, and there were two dinner forks lurking below as well. I was glad to know about the forks, because if I had poured the water out without removing the forks I would have made a jangling that might have woken Henry. I got the water from the tap to a hot but not unbearable temperature and, having successfully felt for the rough-sided scrubber sponge and the container of dishwashing liquid, I squirted a big blind C over the bottom, where the baked-on cheese was. It was a silent C: as one gets better at squirting out dishwashing liquid one learns how to ease off at the end of a squirt so that one doesn’t make an unpleasant floozling sound. And then I began to scrub, scooting over the smooth places and then ramming into the islands of resistance. Soon the baked-on atolls, softened overnight, began to give way: I pestered at the last one from the side for a while, smiling
with the clenched-teeth smile of the joyful scrubber, and it was gone—no, there was still a tiny rough patch left behind to be dealt with, and then, oh sweet life, I could circle my sponge over the entire surface of the dish at the speed of the swirling water, frictionlessly, like a velodrome racer on a victory lap.

  What a way to begin the day. You get to know a landscape by painting it; you get to know a dish by washing it—washing and rinsing it both, and there is a way of rinsing that I have developed over the years that uses less water, a low-flow method. Let some water run into the bottom and then work the dish to create a rotating wave that sloshes centrifugally up to the upper edge of the dish. Then dump that water and fill it again, and spin again. The idea is to remove all traces of soap, because soap tastes bad. And then—and this is a part that some people forget—you should turn the dish over and rinse the underside: for when a dish sits in the sink it can stamp itself onto bits of food and you don’t want those bits going up on the shelf where they will harden. I got the dish settled in the drainer without making any loud clinks, and by that time my coffee was done.

  What you do first thing can influence your whole day. If the first thing you do is stump to the computer in your pajamas to check your e-mail, blinking and plucking your proverbs, you’re going to be in a hungry electronic funk all morning. So don’t do it. If you read the paper first thing you’re going to be full of puns and grievances—put that off. For a while I thought that the key to life was to read something from a book first thing. The idea was to reach down, even before I’d fully awakened, to the pile of books by the bed and haul one up and open it. This only works during the months of the year when you wake up in a world that is light enough to make out lines of print, but sometimes even when you open the book and can’t quite read it in the grayness, or greyness, when you see the word that you know is a word hovering there in a granular dance of eye particles, and then you find that if you really stare at it you can read it, and the word is almost, the reading of that single word can be as good as reading a whole chapter under normal lighting conditions. Your fingertips are still puffy from sleep, and the corner of the book is the first sharp thing you feel, and you lift it open at random, not knowing what book your hands found, and there is that almost slowly coming into semi-focus in the gnat-swarms of dawnlight. It changes your whole day.