… Die Fledermaus at Northwestern University. His favorite song: the Watch Duet.
On a long soggy walk today through Garrett Park, the town I grew up in and moved back to twenty-five years ago, I come upon four police cars and a dump truck. The authorities are once again forcibly removing large abundant junk from the front yard of a man I’ve known since elementary school. Indeed, one of the cops routinely sent out for this abatement procedure is also an old school friend of both mine and the junk guy’s — the police dispatch him hoping a familiar face will make the operation less ugly. Less threatening to the junk guy.
Who, given the complexity of human beings, turns out to be a lot of things besides an angry (KEEP OUT signs are everywhere on the lawn) white male. For decades he’s been the town handyman, circulating in his rusted gray pickup and mowing lawns, repairing machinery, whatever. Although his appearance is a little unnerving – à la late-stage Howard Hughes – he is the soul of sweetness and does much of his work around Garrett Park for free (even though almost everyone here is wealthy). He did quite a bit of raking and mowing for us ten or so years ago and we’re still waiting for the bill.
Garrett Park is a very small town and I’ve known it intimately forever. My old friend Bennett’s mother still lives across the street from the handyman, who helps her out with everything all the time. The house on one side of the junked place burned down a few years ago, and a remarkably large number of townies donated money to get the family in it back on their feet. Rebuilt in a chic woody eco sort of way, it recently sold for about a million dollars, and UD figures the new owners would dearly like to see the end of the handyman.
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And how does ol’ UD, notorious for energetically picking up trash on her walks, feel about this town eyesore, kept by a belligerent old acquaintance?
I always say to Mr UD, “When you get old, everything about you gets worse.” He disagrees, in his pollyannish way; but you know what I mean. The pack rat the junk guy used to be is now, age 65, a mad hoarder, made madder by what he sees as neighborhood and police harassment. When you stand in front of his small house and really contemplate his junk (cars, car parts, mowers, trash cans, plant containers, tables, chairs, rakes, snow shovels, radios, tires, piles of jumper cables, loungers, a trampoline, fake flowers), you perceive the expressivity it represents. None of it is placed arbitrarily. This is an aesthetic gesture — something to do, I guess, with his life work — the gathering up and staging of his accumulation, over many years, of unwanted objects from all of us. We’d walk by its display in MOMA with a shrug.
Ja, ja, of course I want the police to take it away. It makes you laugh, but after the giggle subsides you’re basically appalled. No one should have to look at that.
Like a lot of aesthetic gestures, it has plenty of aggressivity against the world behind it. But it also expresses that thing all of us are desperate to express. I. Exist. Here. This is my private history, my personal truth, my hard-won, hard-salvaged ship.
UD (over breakfast): Caroline from across the street asked me the names of various plants in our new garden, and I had to explain that I mainly relied on the landscaper and didn’t know what was there on a … granular … level…. GRANULAR! I think this is the first time I found granular while conversing! It just came out. GRANULAR!!
MR UD: Very nice.
UD: It’s like orthogonal. (Snobby Brit accent:) That matter is orthogonal to the point in question… ORTHOGONAL… Wait. Wasn’t there some hilarious Supreme Court back and forth about orthogonal?
MR UD: ?????
UD (Checks cell phone.) Here it is! (Reads.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: I think that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issue here because the Commonwealth is acknowledging –
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I’m sorry. Entirely what?
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal. Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh.
JUSTICE SCALIA: What was that adjective? I liked that.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Orthogonal.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Right, right.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Orthogonal, ooh.
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE KENNEDY: I knew this case presented us a problem.
(Laughter.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: I should have — I probably should have said –
JUSTICE SCALIA: I think we should use that in the opinion.
(Laughter.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: I thought — I thought I had seen it before.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Or the dissent.
(Laughter.)
Began the day playing Bach’s Toccata in E Minor; and, as I got here –
… to Rehoboth Beach, where they will join friends to see in the New Year. Blogging persists throughout.
… to frigid, dreary Boston for the holidays.
Though now that she checks the weather, maybe the old joint will crank out some sunshine for a change.
Blogging continues undaunted.
Les UDs finally discovered the precise boundaries of their property; their landscaper had a surveyor do the deed. Turns out we own a good deal more forest than we thought we did, so yesterday UD created a path through the woods, connecting one of our established paths to the new boundary marker. This involved raking up leaves and dirt, plus pulling and tossing dead branches – work UD loves for itself, and also for the way it shapes the land and gives the dog and me more walking space.
It was a clear cold day, full sun, and it took UD very little time to forge a nice wide walkway.
At one point she raked up an old lp.
Why would someone toss/bury a record in the woods? She and Mr UD speculated. An unwanted gift? Did it fall out of a trash bag? But then how would it end up a half acre away, at the very top of the property? What animal would find it worth picking up or nudging?
Something emotional? A favorite track, associated with a love affair gone sour, hurled in rage or sorrow into the void?
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Short of sending it to the FBI forensic lab, there was certainly no way of identifying the record. Right?
Wrong. Take a look at the lp’s center, where I’ve focused a light. All it took was deciphering the printed and written language there, and then checking a discography.
VAN GELDER appears on part of the curve; that would be the recording studio; PRLP is I suppose the record label: Prestige. 2934A (I think that’s the written number) is, according to the Prestige Records Discography for 1961, “To Rigmor,” a piece Joe Newman (the whole album is the Joe Newman Quintet, Good ‘N’ Groovy) wrote for his wife.
