This might not be the most informative website, but now and then it’s the purdiest, ma’am. Or not. This pastel scheme, like last week, is a way of conjuring a spring that does not want to arrive. All the plants are up, and most of the trees have a good start on the leafage, but the temps are mired in the dank cellar of the fifties and the rain is interminable. Seattle on the plains. The local mood might best be described as a straight-edge razor hovering a half-inch over an artery. Just say the word. And the word would be snow.

Mother’s Day went off fine. Gnat chose the gift the other day at the Mall; she’d wandered into a store and picked up a pink candle-holder that said MOTHER on the side. This was the gift to get, I knew, because Gnat had chosen it. The fact that it fit the contours of the genre, and wasn't a Richard Petty Collector's edition Bic lighter. was a blessing. I could even overlook the fact that it said MOTHER. My wife is a Mom, or a Mommy, but MOTHER sums up an image of a gray-haired matron in a rocking chair, waiting for little Timmy to call - he’s been at the Front all this month, and I’m so worried; he just so hates the smell of mustard gas. “Mom” is a breezier term, a more contemporary term, and it fits my chic spouse right down to the nonexistent cuffs of her capri pants.

So we had a brunch today with friends and relatives. Before the meal I had Gnat sign the card, and she did so with great seriousness. I felt like someone presenting mortgage documents to an illiterate: sign here . . . annnd here. A simple pink squiggle sufficed. And that simple pink squiggle said more to my wife than any words in the inch-thick sunday newspaper that landed on our stoop.

After the guests had left and everyone had napped, we went furniture shopping. The company that makes our furniture is hiking up its prices 2 percent, for no apparent reason, and we’d been sent a postcard warning that we should act now or forever pay more for our pieces. So we went to look at a dresser. Young single men, this is your future: Sunday afternoons spent Looking at Dressers. I don’t mind, since I lack what some presume is a male disinclination to matters domestic. On the contrary. I impose my aesthetic sensibilities with an iron fist. Well, no. It’s mutual. My wife and I have the same tastes, and I think she’s happy that she has a husband who has actual tastes in the first place. Afterwards we split up - she went to look at toys for Gnat, and I went to Restoration Hardware for various polishes and cleaners. Stupid as this sounds, as no doubt is: if I’m going to do the polishing around here, I want a cloth that has a cool logo in a classic 30s font. And by God I found it.

The world is a messy place, but at home you can actually create a unified aesthetic field.

Damn, it’s a small world: this morning in the shower I heard an interview with Virginia Postrel, who mentioned the Prof, and when I went to his site tonight there was a link to a Steve Levy piece in Newsweek, with a photo credited to Sigrid Estrada - who shot the covers for my first two collections. I wonder if she has the same tiny studio in that office building I wonder if Mr. Levy stood there like I did, and like Leslie Neilsen did before me.

Anyway. I was working on a long bleat about Woody Allen and the Fritz Lang movie M, but that’ll have to wait. I got sidetracked by an unavoidable screed, and let me tell you:

. For those not interested in my anti-clown harangue, I commend you to the matchbook and flotsam links. Never let it be said that you don’t get your money’s worth on an Monday morning here.

The grocery-store line you have just joined moves the slowest. The passing lane is occupied by a grim-jawed obdurate who is doing the legal limit, thank you very much. The person in line ahead of you at the government office has decided that now is the time to chat with the clerk as if no one in the world was behind him. True dull facts, banal observations. Annoyances to the impatient man - and I, alas, am an impatient man. It’s one of my worst faults, and today I became my worst enemy.

Went to pay my property taxes, lest the King’s Men tromp up the hill and lay siege. I was given number A078. According to the display, they were currently serving A062. Ten minutes later, they were still serving A062. I felt the weight of the day’s obligations pressing on my neck, and made a command decision: I would take the pre-addressed envelope, and after work I’d get out the taxes from 01 and find out what I should pay. (They sent a bill, of course, but I’d given it to the tax preparer and it wasn’t in the sheaf of documents she returned. I turned the house upside down that morning, too - the one document I need, and it’s converted back to atoms and joined the celestial ether. When I see those photographs of gigantic colliding galaxies, I think: now there’s an excuse for not getting your taxes in on time. Couldn’t find the receipts; massive gas giant ate them. Of course, this is ridiculous; the galaxies are colliding at a leisurely pace. It’s not like stars smash into your planet like a drunk going through the plate glass window . . . still, it would be hideous for a culture, a civilization to rise to the point where 20th century cosmology and technology allow them to examine the heavens and learn that they have about six years before that black hole comes close enough to perturb their sweet-spot orbit. Or sixty years. Or fifteen. It would be the global equivalent of bullet-time in the Matrix, except no matter how much you twist and dodge, it’s going to hit.

That’s assuming anything gets close enough to hit anything, of course. These distances are as vast and empty as the space between Barbra Streisand’s ears.

Anyway. I’m in the line, and the line moves not, so I bolt. I’m on the highway heading to work, and I hit a jam; the only exit is a southbound freeway that takes me away from work . . . but back to the government center. Realizing I have spent almost an hour and accomplished nothing, I head back to the government center. Hurrah! They’re on number A077. Perfect.

When I’m called I present my address to a kindly old gent, and he squints, grins: why, he lived a block away as a kid - in the late 40s, I’d guess. I tell him which house is mine, and he recognizes it instantly. Then he describes a house up by the watertower, a grand and mysterious place that looks out over a gorge, and has an actual castle wall with a turret. I knew it, of course; it’s one of the great houses in the neighborhood.

The man who built it, he said, he invented the toaster.

I knew just what he meant. The Toastmaster company was based here in Minneapolis - and in fact one of their 30s brochures was featured in my Gallery of Regrettable Food. It was the Waters-Genter Co., which meant that the house was built by a Waters or a Genter. (Having paused to Google this, I know how that the inventor was Charles Strite, who patented the thing in ‘28. It’s off to the old reverse directories in the Strib basement tomorrow. Do you realize what this means? I live in the house of the man who invented Walnettos, and I live a few blocks from the man who patented the toaster. The shadows of giants fall long in these parts,)

Oh, we built tunnels in those woods, he said. We had a grand time.

I told him a few details I’d learned from the autobiography of a man who’d lived at Jasperwood in the 20s, back when his father was a candy magnate (they made Walnettos, among other confections.) You don’t say, the man said. Oh, and there’s more -

And at this point I realized that I had made that switch people make when they’re no longer waiting, but are being served. Suddenly the class consciousness that bound them to their fellow serfs is gone. Suddenly there’s no one waiting. This was wrong. I stopped gabbing, cut the check with a few genial mumbles, and we were done.

Driving back to work, I thought: what were the chances of that? I run into a bureaucrat in this big sprawling city who grew up close to my house, and in the few minutes we have to chat we each learn something about the history we shared. It almost made me wish I could have found A079 in the waiting room, given him a fiver and asked if he could wait for a few minutes. There were some stories I needed to learn.

Tonight, walking Jasper, I passed the house in which the old man lived. It’s unchanged - no tell-tale additions. Tonight, standing on the cliff, I realized I can see his house from here - one of those lights was his childhood bedroom. To him this was a long time ago; to him this was just the other day. When I mentioned that the neighborhood was louder nowadays - meaning the planes - he said “Oh, I don’t know. We raised a ruckus.” He grinned and noted how the neighborhood was full of kids. I thought about the current makeup of the neighborhood - lots of kids, but mostly pre-teens, tweens, and adolescents; not too many tots of Gnat’s age. He’d lived here when the area had a certain demographic consistency, and every summer day every door burst open with someone running into the sun to play in the creek or climb the Great Hill, skulk around the water tower with its impassive stone Paladins, or sneak through the tunnels carved in the Toaster Man’s dense woods. It’s all so common it seems ridiculous to insist that these details need preservation, or should be noted and passed along. But they matter. These houses are stones in a river of quicksilver; so much flows between and among and around, and nothing clings to anything.

I’ve one more story to tell Gnat about the neighborhood, when she’s in the mood to listen. We can see the Great Hill and the water tower from the kitchen window; we can see what the inventor of the toaster saw.

I didn’t catch the man’s name - his badge was tucked in his sweater vest. If I went back and asked to speak to him again, I might get odd names. Who? What? Old guy? No one here like that. Which would mean he was a sprite sent to teach me a lesson: be patient. You might learn something.

God bless him. Unless he’s in the passing lane doing 55, in which case: move it! Or you’re toast!

____

That's all for this week - deadlines call, and no bleat on Friday. Apologies for the cranky neurotic bitchiness this week, and many thanks to all who sent along a thumbs-up - I'll try to answer as many letters as possible this weekend. See you Monday.