You had a bad day, but you finished putting the nightstand together. One down and one to go. It was an IKEA piece, of course. A “GULLABERG,” which sounds like the name of some Medieval guy who invented the printing press and sold it to a guy who promised he’d be back with the money in a minute. After the labors of the TV stand, you are certain you can knock this out in 45 minutes. An hour later you are disassembling it because you put the drawer runners on incorrectly, just like you did with the TV stand. You hate drawer runners now. You didn’t ask for these to roll out smooth and silent. People did with plain old runner-free doors for centuries. Longer. Romans conquered the world with old-style drawers. The pharaohs architects kept their plans for the pyramids in a plane old drawer.At least you won’t make that mistake with the second nightstand. A wholly new error awaits there. But first, you have to file a piece.
It needs a quick read before it wings its way to the editrix. In normal life you would sit out in the gazebo with a post-lunch cigarello, luxuriating in the spring breeze fragrant with the world stirring to life, thrusting up the spears of tulip leaves, but you are at the Fred, so you sit on a curb in the parking lot of the insurance company next door. There is a man with a leaf blower working his way towards you. If you’re quick you can finish the edit before he reaches you. Although the blower might remind you of those spring breezes in the back, except with a note of gasoline.
The piece is okay. It’ll do. Back upstairs - and you think oh this business of beeping the door and pushing a button and riding a steel box and walking down a long hallway fragrant with the dead-possum stink of weed, this will never get old. Now it’s time for lunch. You have been looking forward to making lunch special here, but for reasons that mostly have to do with the underwhelming zing of the Jalapeño mustard, it’s just another goddamn chicken sandwich. And with chips! What are you doing? You cut those out years ago. Now it’s back to bread and chips. Well, as they say, live a little. Ah yes but I don’t really want to live at all, that’s the problem, and this mustard isn’t helping.
It’s no small thing. You were counting on that mustard, and all the other condiments you bought and filed nearly away, thinking this will be good on a sandwich! But you lost your sense of taste, again, a month ago, and everything tastes like the stuff they compress and glue to make IKEA furniture. Maybe some filet of Gullaberg with some Scotch Bonnet Whap Yer Butt ’n’ Murder Yer Momma sauce, that could work.
For some reason you think of better lunches. It’s an odd thing to have a data set about, but you remember the fantastic lunch last July in that Italian town. The whole family, in-laws, everyone sitting around a table in a piazza at the top of a fortified hill. In the past the stones no doubt ran red with blood as men of different clans clashed for control of the tower, and its view of the surrounding countryside. You’d walked up steep streets where hand-to-hand fighting had cost many men a limb or their lives, tumbling backwards to topple those behind them in a mess of arms and legs and halberds, the shrieks of the wounded echoing up the narrow street and evaporating in the pitiless sky above. Now, there’s a Gelato shop. Actually two. And another around the corner.
It had a been a lovely day, one of the best you’d lived. Start to finish. And you’d thought: this is how it’s going to be now. Retirement, a life of writing and learning about wine perhaps, pickleball, and an annual trip with dear ones to do something civilized, like eat spaghetti in a Renaissance palace.
The reality turns out to be sitting on a curb in the suburbs watching the leaf-blower guy.
You go back to the house. (Drives you nuts when she texts and asks if you can bring something home.) The stagers are just leaving, The house looks like a store, a showroom, and of course that’s what it is. There’s your wall paintings in another room. There are all the big books that filled the shelves by the fireplace. Your guitar, because you’re never going to play it again. Many copies of your books. People are going to think man, he really liked that author. Maybe he did once but he’s not too crazy about him now.
Your current wife joins you in the gazebo and notes the things that have to be done. You have to take your coats out of the closet. The fact that you have not taken your coats out of the closet complicates the stagers jobs. You have been told twice that you were complicating things. You had also promised to get the stuff out of the supply closet, including the 478 bags of treats she had for the dog. And you say that that is what you had come to do. Fine but the coats need to go. You get up and you move all the coats to your car. You come back. You make the mistake of issuing a few bitter words about your mood, and you make the additional mistake of talking about the lunch in Italy. It’s a mistake not because she argues, but because she just listens, as she must, and then says that you will build a new life. You hear that a lot. People like to say it. They're hopeful and genuine. But it comes across a bit differently when it said by someone who chopped off your right hand and tells you how much you’ll enjoy writing with your left.
You were going to make her dinner, again, wondering why, but the table is full of your China and dishes, and there’s hardly anything in the fridge you want. There’s a pork chop, and you think that might go good with jalapeño mustard. Oh right. You decide never to cook for her again, although you know you will. She goes to chop some branches from a tree, still doing yardwork, even though the house change his hands in nine days, and you just leave. You’ll be back in four hours, having written something, having assembled half a nightstand, having rearranged all the dog treats, and attaching a table keyboard drawer to the desk. The runners are already assembled, so the day is looking up.
Earlier you made the mistake of noting to Current that you wished your daughter would respond to your text with a little bit more alacrity. You told Current that you intended to make a little daily text, affirmation of life, a little connection, because you dread falling over dead At The Fred and being found three days later with your poor dog, doing a Marie Provost on you.
You are advised not to text daily or expect a reply, even a thumbs-up or a heart emoji️. “I thought we agreed not to burden her with this.”
How is this a burden?
For Christ’s sake, what does she think you’re texting her about?
I almost gave myself a tonsillectomy with a 45 Smith & Wesson the other day, but then I realized that I still had two months left of my extended warranty in the car so I’m gonna take advantage of that while I can. As they always say, don’t leave money or brains on the table!
Yesterday she texted you some badly translated AI art for fun and you had sport with the neologisms. The last thing you texted was how the people doing the staging for the estate sale make the house look like a movie set designed somebody from another planet, who thought yes of course all of the wine glasses should be on the table, every one of them, and four radios should be on the bureau. Is that a burden? It got a HaHa. Look, just because you have nothing interesting to say doesn’t mean -
But what if she’s right?
What if you’re being needy and making demands on Daughter's time
She has her own life, Current said.
Well, so do we all, but having it intersect another in the course of a day can be nice.
The estate sale is Saturday, and everyone has to be out of the house. Well, that’s not a problem for you. The day before you’d invited her over for breakfast at the Fred. Bring the dog. It was one of those aren’t we being deucedly civilized and splitting up like Noel Coward characters having morning scones in silk robes laughing about a spat you had in Monte Carlo.
You vow this will not happen.
You know that it will.
It’s 1900.
Masthead says: "A successor to the Central Nebraska Republican." Not The, but A? Were there others? I have implicit confidence that there were.
Typical front page news: Grandma low, bike purchased.
This is the art for the local news section. What?
Doniphan, the famous military man? Is this a word for small news of a social nature? I must google
Ah. It's a nearby town.
Mr. Smyth had taken on the oil octopus:
From the NYT:
OIL TRUST IN NEBRASKA.
Attorney General Proceeds Against It Under the Recent Law.
OMAHA, Aug. 12.-Attorney General Smyth to-day began proceedings in the District Court of this county against the Standard Oil Company under the Nebraska anti-trust law.He asks that the company, which, he alleges, is a trust and controls the price at which petroleum and its products are to be sold, be ousted from the State and enjoined from doing business therein.
The petition not only names the Standard Oil Company as defendant, but a number of other firms and corporations which are alleged to be owned and controlled by it.
Attorney General announced his intention to bring similar action against other alleged trusts shortly.
Including the feared Shoe Machine trust. A remarkable career, really.
Page two is stuffed with world news. The Boer War continues apace:
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This is a bigger story than you might imagine. |
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Oops: “The original Convention Hall was designed by Frederick E. Hill, and opened on February 22, 1899. This center was destroyed by a fire on April 4th, 1900. The center was redesigned by Hill, and re-opened within a 90 days after construction began.”
The replacement:
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Which prince? The continent’s lousy with them. |
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Prince of Wales, it seems. It’s related to the Boer story.
Jean-Baptiste Victor Sipido (20 December 1884 – 20 August 1959) was a Belgian anarchist who became known when he, then a young tinsmith's apprentice, attempted to assassinate Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), at the Brussels-North railway station in Brussels on 5 April 1900.
Accusing the Prince of causing the slaughter of thousands during the Boer War in South Africa, the fifteen-year-old leaped onto the foot board of the royal compartment right before the train left the station and fired two shots through the window. Sipido missed everyone inside and was quickly wrestled to the ground.
He was acquitted on account of his age.
The serial:
Jephthah? Right down the road from Doniphan. The author:
Julia Magruder (September 14, 1854 – June 9, 1907) was an American novelist. Most of her novels are love stories in which the heroine must face obstacles in pursuit of her goal to find true love. Several of her novels were serialized in the Ladies' Home Journal. A week before her death she received the award from the Académie Française for which she had been nominated a year earlier.
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The last page is all local news again, including missives from the town of Chapman. The Do, Za, Me clan! |
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We'll end with a picture of the Chapman main street, today.
Someone's got some patriotic verve.
That will do.
Whatever will Wednesday bring, I wonder.
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