Dear Diary: History
The weather is distinctly autumnal, and I am coming back to life. One of these days I will be able to repeat after me: Summer is Depressing! Heat! Haze! Humidity! No wonder I shut down. While I’m not crazy about slush and short days, I can live with them easily enough. But I really cannot abide the “seasonable” weather of July and August.
After lunch, I went out to drop the bills at the Post Office — the mailbox that used to stand outside the Viand, on the southeast corner of 86th and Second, has been removed, presumably because of the subway construction (forfend!) — I walked over to Best Buy, to pick up a sheath for my new Nano. I’m not happy with what I bought; I don’t trust it not to open in the middle of a walk, casting the player to the ground, where it would break, having pulled free of the headphones on the way down (the casting-floorwards part happened in the bathroom before I took my walk; thanks to a small rug, the breaking part did not happen). I ought to have ordered something online; the selection at Best Buy was really unsatisfactory. Not content to spend a mere $22, I looked for a DVD to buy as well, and I chose Love, Actually, a movie that I rented not long after it became available, perhaps in 2004. In those days, I didn’t know who half the actors were, and I wasn’t sure about the slice-of-life aspect — all the independent love stories that converge on a Christmas pageant. I was fine with it tonight, though. I couldn’t see for about forty minutes after the film ended, my eyes were so salty. Is 2004 really five years ago? Increasingly, it is.
Once upon a time — a lot longer ago than 2004 — Kathleen and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of this building. The man who lived next door to us still lives next door to that apartment — or at least he still lives on the seventh floor. The man who took our apartment lives on the eighth floor now, but he is still very much here in the building. The next-door neighbor is tall and only slightly stooped; his hair has always been white, and he looks as though he ought to be running a general store in the heartland; but he has had a very beautiful Asian girlfriend for a very long time (perhaps she is his wife!). The man who took our apartment is, we were told at the time of our move upstairs, an economist from Russia. He has a teenaged daughter now — perhaps she is older now (I haven’t seen her in a while — which is what happens to children you’ve watched grow up, between the ages of 17 and 30). Here’s the thing: neither of these guys looks a day older. Than twenty-odd-closer-to-thirty years ago! It’s true that I’ve seen them over the years. Now that I think of it, none of the other residents whom I’ve watched age over the years looks any older, either! How is that? Aside from a few cases of serious illness, a few instances of drastic weight loss, usually involving wheelchairs, and always ending with a death notice posted at the elevator, everyone looks just the same as he or she did in 1985! Oh, also except for the man who likes to pass out cookies in the middle of the day — he really is a sweetheart, although I can never really think of anything apt to say to him, exccept “No, thank you” — and who stopped wearing a hairpiece about two years ago. That was pretty drastic! But we’ve all gotten used to the new look; we always knew that it had nothing to do with chemo.
Kathleen worked late this evening, so I fixed myself an impromptu chicken salad on the early side, while I was watching the beginning of Love, Actually. Same old same old: yogurt avocado dressing, with the other half of the avocado cubed, along with ditto chicken, tomato and mushrooms, and a sprinkling of toasted walnuts, the whole topped with a happy grating of Maytag blue. The mushrooms and the blue cheese pushed the concoction a bit over the top — not as inedibly as if I’d crumbled a few pieces of bacon into the mix, but you know what I mean: a Richie Richness. The walnuts were slightly past their prime — I am no less sensitive to the rancid turn of fats than the princess was to the pea — but the salad was tasty withal, and I managed to put most of away. What I had trouble with was putting down the dinner-time read. Having nibbled on the sexy chapters already, I’ve begun Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome at the beginning. As I read, nodding, I realized that it is time to dump Gibbon in the tip. The Roman Empire declined and fell? Good riddance! Renaissance nostalgia for the enlightened Rome of serene peristyles, in which Cicero spoke his perfect Latin, is totally bogus. Cicero was hacked to death in a mafia-style hit. Check it out.Â
When I got back from my walk, I turned on the laptop in the living room. It was cool enough (plenty beaucoup!) to work in there, and I had a book to write up. As the computer booted up, I did the nesting thing, getting my the book and a mug of tea. There was something that I was supposed to get from the blue room, but I couldn’t think what it was. Without getting carried away, I sat down in the living room and started to write. I hadn’t got far when the doorbell rang. That’s when I remembered what needed to get in the blue room: cash for a deliveryman tip. I blame the cool weather. I’m so happy with the rain and the brume and the generally Novemberish conditions — what can I say; I’m a child of the North Atlantic and I find its miseries validating! — that I forgot what I was looking for.