Million Dollars Red

My daughter-in-law Kristin posted a picture of her toes on Facebook after a recent pedicure.  Slender and delicate, her phalangial extremeties (toes) are pale and regular like those of the six cavorting ladies in Botticelli's "Allegory of Spring".  Bright red nail polish and a tiny fanciful daisy---slightly different on each great toe---add joy to her agile step.  And step she does.  Kristin is a nurse in a trauma ICU.  She works ten to twelve hour days, goes to school to earn her BSN, and loves my son Christopher. They have an energetic dog and a nervous cat and many, many friends. And two mortgages. Step, step, step.

I am fascinated with the bones in the foot, especially now when the metatarsus of my left foot seems to have developed a life of its own. For example, bones fracture.  Since November of last year I've had metatarsals 3 and 4 both break. I've spent months in various kinds of casts. Knobs of bone seem to be developing on the sides of the foot. What is this?

Of course, I am older than Kristin---by nearly four decades---but I still want my feet to work.  I don't stand, or walk, or run as much as a younger person would; I try to be kind to my skeletal system. I realize that bones age and get tired, but I take calcium and vitamins.  I've not quit; why should they?

I coddle my feet.  I wear Birkenstocks and just invested in a pair of New Balance 927s for walking.  Not only are these shoe prices high.  If you have any fashion radar, you see that you have to revise your entire wardrobe to accomodate this large boxy shape at the base of the silhouette.  Or, not look down; or cover the lower portion of a full length mirror. The "line" just doesn't work.

Then, there's therapy; I get a foot massage from Tom at a manicure/pedicure place in LA.  But the nail and polish business is less important to me than the "reflexology" therapy he does on my feet and legs.  Whatever the scientific value of  my "qi" or meridians, my step is light after an hour with Tom. This business is an Asian speciality, of course, and in Los Angeles, practically every block you drive has at least one nail salon.  It's one of the growth industries of the last decade and the particular province of Asian immigrants.

Tom and his sister Nancy are from Vietnam; they run a little shop in one of the countless strip malls lining the major arteries in Torrance. They are open 7 days a week, from 9 am to 9 pm. Decor is minimal and the tv has no cable.  A little shrine sits on the floor---an indecipherable Asian baroque design; sometimes with some kind of sweet roll offering in celophane. I restrain the impulse to genuflect. How they got here is sketchy: she'd escaped in a boat and watched people drown; then waited in an internment camp.This must have been several decades ago, maybe during the 1970s.  Now she sends letters back to family in Vietnam, but not too often. I overheard this history in the most chatty encounter I'd observed in the three or four years I've gone there.  Tom and Nancy do not talk much; their English suffices for business.  Once in surprisingly expansive moment Tom confided to me that his daughter was applying to medical school and needing to re-take entrance exam.

But the main thing is that Tom understands my feet and in particular what's going on as my left foot ages and stress fractures occur.  It touches me that he examines my foot with such understanding and compassion.  He slowly nods his head when he takes my left foot in his capable hands and carefully probes its strengths and weaknesses. Gently tests its flexibility. Presses points in the sole and behind the knee.  I am comforted.

Toward the end of an hour, after all therapy, he applies the polish: "Million Dollars Red."  It's a bright, true red; makes me think of Marilyn Monroe.  Who wants subtlety in southern California?  For several weeks now, my feet will feel young again.  That is, to say, I won't feel them at all. Some yoga classes and regular walking in those 927s will improve my attitude toward my phalangial extremities.  So much of my life has been done on foot---the long blocks of Vienna suburbs and the cobblestones of Cracow, traipsing from campus to the edge of town in grad school, childhood wandering northern California hillsides from bus stop to home.  Whatever the need, if I could walk it, I was OK.  If I got tired, I could sit and rest.  Legs and feet  recovered. Walking has been my measure of life. Maybe only street people gauge their lives that way now.  I wish them and their feet well.

Read more essays at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

Jerry Rig

Urban dictionary defines jerry-rig as fixing something non working in an unconventional way. Their etymology states that the term was created during World War II, a reference to the Germans who were termed "Jerries" as slang. Allies supposedly came across hastily repaired objects left by the retreating Germans.  Hence the admiring, resourceful Yanks invented the term Jerry-rig.

Wikipedia offers a competing derivation; it contends that the phrase's origin is nautical, deriving from jury-rig, a temporary mast erected to replace one carried away. The make shift mast would only survive one day--un jour. Presumably this jour migrated to jury and thence to jury-rig.  So the term dates back to sailing ships and predates American adventures in twentieth century war. 

I’m not sure about all this; it's pretty shaky web research.  Just the kind of “evidence” that I circle in red on student papers.  But whatever its historic origins, jerry-rig is a useful expression in life which is so often make-shift.  

Despite the term’s condescending connotations of something flimsy and shoddy, these temporary repairs sometimes outlive the original piece of equipment.  Such successful jerry-rigging depends upon equipment: wire, duct tape, C-clamps, and an assortment of screws, shims, and sealants.  All this in addition to a set of good tools that include a power drill.  Jerry-rig operations also benefit from a solid work bench (stationary vise highly recommended).  And above all, jerry-rig requires invention.  

Jerry-rig is the specialty of my partner, Dennis.  Through him I have learned to look differently at the broken objects of daily life.  To embrace potential, instead of succumbing to frustration, to visualize the material world working in alternative and unexpected ways.  To honor the originality praised by the romantics. Throwing something into the trash or even the Goodwill pile means that you just don’t rise to the challenges of life.  It’s not sporting---a rejection of improvisation, imagination, and the unconventional.   Going to the mall to buy a replacement means craven capitulation to the commercial (although we always seem to have a sheaf of expired Bed, Bath, and Beyond coupons just in case).  

Last summer the switch on our tea-kettle cracked and broke off.  As you can see here, Dennis' solution was to hold down the internal lever with a chop stick. Presto! The little orange light goes on and soon the water is boiling.  English Breakfast tea will steep to its sable brown, caffeine-laden intensity. And no one has been electrocuted.  To turn the kettle off, you pull the stick out---and just toss it into a drawer until tomorrow.   No trace left to disturb kitchen décor. Of course, to insert the stick properly requires surgical precision.  In my early morning, pre-caffeine bleariness, I am neither patient, nor particularly adept with chop sticks. I need a flashlight to poke in the stick at just the right angle.

We are offspring of Depression generations and recall the stories of how homes and lives were held together and very little was thrown away.  Our family lore includes tales of the first refrigerator that replaced the old icebox, of sewing machines converted to electricity (my mother had one with an electric pedal), of knives and lawnmowers sharpened annually at the hardware store.   Any piece of good metal, wood, or rope was stored and saved.  What to do with such bits and pieces?  Out of habit we continue to coil wire and wind up rope.  We sort screws, nails, and bits of metal in tea tins and jelly jars.  We buy duct tape on sale in multiple rolls from teen-aged clerks who pronounce it “duck” tape.  (What do they envision with that webbed and quacking metaphor?)

The sturdy workbench in the basement of my house dates from the 1950s.  The builder constructed it.  Successive owners paneled its back wall with peg board and someone had thoughtfully left a few hooks.  Now the wall is now covered with tools.  Its dangling shop light has been augmented by old bathroom fluorescent rods also from the 1950s---salvaged and mounted on the beams.  Still working but in a new context. Good light is essential for jerry-rig work.

Dennis comes from the rich repair tradition of the mid-twentieth century.  His father and grandfather delighted in scavenging for broken equipment.  They fixed motors and re-built car engines.  Once they wired up a communication system from kitchen to garage so they could work in peace until dinnertime.  Dennis even built his first stereo set.  I marvel at this energy and precision, this depth of knowledge of the mechanical world.  How it can be mobilized in a small emergencies.  

My appreciation of jerry-rig has grown in recent years, while energy for re-furnishing the domestic material world around me has declined.  I’m increasingly immune to the whole lot of the redecorating enablers---Restoration Hardware, Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, Williams-Sonoma. Fatigued by their showrooms of coordinated objects. Making do with a jerry-rig is just fine, so long as things collapse at a leisurely pace.

  For more essays see East Village Magazine at  http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

Waste management

When I come to Los Angeles in the summer I live in an apartment on an alley. Actually, an alley in Torrance, one of the over 88 cities of LA county. It’s an area of small homes, a few shingled cottages from the 1940s, many tract era houses, and on the hillside multi-storied stuccos on stilts. A few two and three-storey apartment buildings cluster closer to the highway. Our place is the upper level rental at back of a small house, the kind built before the era of subdivisions. That’s what the decades of real estate expansion did here. Bungalows sprouted a second story, rear lots added rentals, garages became storage, driveways became patios, and cars went to the street where between 5 pm and 6 am there is no parking at all. When I walk the alley, here and there a garage door will be partially raised. Boxes and plastic bags jumbled inside from concrete floor to ceiling. No car. It’s strange for me, a California transplant to the Midwest where housing space abounds and population declines.

Los Angeles is not a very conversational place. Neighbors don’t acknowledge one another much. But in summertime the alley is lively: the cat lady calls to her felines by name in the morning, the classic car enthusiast guns his burgundy vintage Mustang as he heads out to Saturday breakfast, the Mexican swap meet guy hunches over the tail gate of his truck tinkering with something, and Steve the iron worker forges metal trellises with his blowtorch in the backyard.

But the prince of the alley is Larry. He has a real set up. And he’s friendly. In shorts and polo shirt, comfortable shoes and thick white socks, Larry pushes a laundry cart he’s customized for action. With brooms erect and bags dangling off the sides of the cart, he is outfitted for battle. Trundling methodically along the alley, Larry halts at the round, black 300-gallon trash containers set out every two or three residences. With gloved hands and a variety of home-devised spears, he probes the barrels for recyclables. It’s delicate work. Four feet high and nearly four feet across, the black containers are---as the city website proclaims---the frontline of the waste management system for alley residents. Unofficially, the Mexicans with small pickup trucks scour the alley on weekends for large metal: water heaters, room air conditioners, and miscellaneous pipes residents leave to the side of the barrels. We are on Larry’s Monday morning route. His schedule is set by the Mexicans and the city. On Mondays, Larry can park his cart at the barrels and poke in peace. On Tuesday mornings, an enormous city truck wedges and beeps its way through where two cars cannot pass; automated claws extend to grasp the containers, lift and tilt and dump them, now lighter from Larry’s work. And unimpeded thanks to the Mexicans. A lone driver operates a vehicle that would have been useful at the siege of Stalingrad.

Larry is retired and he first began re-cycling to get some exercise and lose a little weight. It enables him to get out in the fresh air and move around. And the alleys are an El Dorado. His son sometimes helps out; it’s worth it to net a grand or two per year. On summer mornings when the windows are open, I hear Larry’s soft, patient prodding of the barrels around 10 am. These are a retiree’s hours. I call out and he responds with a wave and a smile.

Today we term this work recycling or re-purposing; it connotes extra effort associated with higher values. Monochromatically “green,” earth-friendly, with a whiff of the virtuous. But such current discourse is pallid compared to the vocabulary of the past. Colorful, motley English terms---rag and bone, grubber, tosher and mudlark---refer to people. Like the tinkers, itinerant menders of kitchen pots and sharpeners of knives who extended the life of valuable metal. Smelly at best, disreputable if not illegal at worst, nevertheless, in the nineteenth century, re-cycling had a human heart.

Lest I wax too nostalgic, it’s worth remembering the crass practicality of the more distant past, armies melted down bronze statuary for weapons, roads were laid with the stones from the monuments of the defeated, new towns were built on the convenient rubble of their predecessors. Today in some European cities, you have to walk down steps into churches, the street level having risen several feet over time.

The online “Solid Waste Management Glossary” (from Aerobic Composting to Worm Culture and Yard Waste) is encouraging for the global environment, but, alas, not much fun in my daily life. A 2007 article in The Economist details impressive improvements in recycling in Europe, Japan, and Britain, as well as the US. National rates for waste recycling have risen to over 50 percent in some European countries. New developments like sustainable packaging and spectroscopic sorting have streamlined the recycle process; markets for recycled materials have emerged. It’s scientifically and technologically inspiring, an intellectual G-up as I haul my bottles and cans to Meijer here in Flint.

I miss Larry though. At least my Flint paper goes to the Neighborhood Association’s collection where there’s always some chit chat with the volunteers on Saturday mornings---a bit of human connection as we manage our waste.

Read this essay and others at The East Village Magazine, http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

Social Utility

I am into Facebook. This past October when I got the urge to be social, I could not log on to the Facebook page. Panic. How to find my login name, what was my password? I am locked out of society. My retrieval system to the rescue: rummage in my briefcase for the piece of paper on which various passwords---campus email, university libraries, journals, credit cards---are scribbled horizontally, vertically, obliquely.

My friend Jan wrote a sharp essay about Facebook. It’s somewhere on her blog, Nightblind. I can’t find that online now either---too much time has passed for me to remember the month she wrote it or the tag it might have. She and I are in the same age cohort; we are boomers, as the pop sociologists say. What are we doing here in our early 60s posting on an electronic social network? You’d think if we didn’t have a social network by this time we might just hang on until we are in “assisted living” and go with what’s there. We are old enough to have grown up with another social network, one that monitored now forgotten minutiae of behavior: gloves and hats, invitations and thank you notes in the mail. And yet here we are: pursuing the socially networked life online.

I can’t scorn these new ways. One night a couple of months ago my side of the city of Flint suddenly resounded with booming sounds like fireworks. Only it was October 3. Facebook friends were flummoxed---what was the reason? No answer online, but comfort comes from communal clucking about mysterious and perhaps alarming events.

Facebook is the preeminent social network service or, as Google and founder Mark Zuckerberg categorized it, a social utility. Social utility is not new. It is the backbone of the nineteenth century fiction. Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, Balzac---the utility of social connections for status and success is the driving force of their plots. Where would these novels be without the filiations, gossip, and intrigues of social networking? If the characters had had a reliable service, think of the possibilities for the climbers, poseurs, parvenus.

Back in the day, certain behavior used to “have social utility”: an advantageous marriage, a promising business connection, joining the right church. My maternal forebears were keen observers of these social stratagems to advance in the world. They had phrases they used privately to describe people who deftly or disastrously deployed them. Today we openly, indeed brazenly, network, log on and link in to the socially useful.

When people post obnoxious statements, I can “hide” them. Not just the present irritating opinions, but the people themselves and everything they say on Facebook in the future. They disappear from my News Feed, retrievable later when I feel up to it. Exiled from my trough of web-based chatter, chit chat, or per uno chiacchierare as the Italians say---the natively gifted in this field. What a change from the past social life in the flesh when I mentally strained to marshal a smart retort, or physically had to dodge and dart to avoid people. And then the guilt. My mother ---who as a young woman was fully armed with social skills to deflate such verbal irritations---would be impressed with this new, painless convenience.

Our city newspaper has gone to three days a week. The task of recycling has eased, but the consequences for local democracy are negative. What has come to the rescue? Facebook. Flint civic and cultural organizations---most all are on Facebook, the FIA and FIM, Buckham, Steady Eddy. Along with the Mayor and the young urbans renewing the city.

My neighborhood association now has a Facebook page. We can join efforts to maintain our neighborhood, to advocate with our Councilman, to discuss city problems. We find the “Affordable Handyman” to keep our old houses going. Most of all, the neighborhood Facebook page helps us with safety---the bedrock social utility. We keep the neighborhood page up on our laptops in the kitchen, ready to alert others about “scopers” roaming our streets. A Facebook member sends text messages to our phones as an alert. Highly efficient when compared to email which is fading along with dusty answering machines.

My students are on Facebook, of course; they reinvent themselves there, play games. A new profile picture, an update of personal information, album after album of pictures---their doings, their relatives’ doings, their friends at indecipherable and generally uninteresting events. Scores of people whom my Grandmother once would have dismissed icily remarking, “I don’t believe we have met.”

So now a librarian colleague has taught me how to use “delicious” to save my teaching and research bookmarks. It’s wondrously efficient for organizing sites and has brought order to research and teaching. And it has a social networking feature. Maybe my Facebook network would like to know about my primary sources or 19th century maps of Central Europe? Probably not.

Several of my former students have invited me to Linked In. I don’t think I can take it; I’m not building my career, I’m trying to dismantle it. Toward the close of last summer I went to see friends for a twilight glass of wine and some chit chat. Where was her husband, I asked, as we walked to the candle-lit screened in porch? Oh, he’ll be out soon; he’s just back in the dining room in the dark---facebooking.

Read this essay and others at The East Village Magazine, http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

Conversations with my house, revised and continued

A year or so ago I was thinking once again about my house as a chapter in my life gradually approaching a close. Our relationship was changing: each year I move closer to retirement and selling the property and moving on. A poignancy had crept into our conversations. I have always loved the layout of the house, its coved ceilings, the views of the golf course through the windows, its airy and open position on a corner lot. This house taught me about the capacity of the right real estate to frame possibilities for a changing family--- a newly single mother, a teenage son, an aging grandmother, a dog. And at one point a visiting Doberman who did not do stairs. The arrangement of its rooms had enabled three people to invent a new life successfully.

When my partner Dennis was here that October he replaced the screen doors with glass for winter. The last tomatoes were picked and the plants pulled up. He hosed the gutters clean and our high school helper Grant raked leaves to the street for city cleanup. All the annual fall tasks, the rhythm of the last ten years. But I knew then that things were not the same between us, the house and I. After Dennis left, my relationship with the house did not return to its slightly bittersweet equilibrium. The mortgage crisis had disturbed our formerly philosophic dialogue. My side of the conversation grew querulous. How will this house sell in a depressed Flint market a few years from now? Reproaches about market value loss had replaced gratitude for shelter and security. The house stopped talking.

In other times in America, in other centuries and other countries, people lived in houses for generations. Tragedy often struck and families sold off goods and furnishings until finally the house would have to be sold to a new owner. In a final, sacrificial service and now a shell of former self, a house would generate cash to pay its owner’s debts. The colonial mansions of Jefferson, Washington, and Madison went through this process until restoration societies could salvage them. Memoirs and autobiography, novels and drama often convey the connections between human life and houses. Psychologically and metaphorically the house has been understood as an analogy for the self and human relations. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard described the fortitude of the house which anchors us in the swirl of the universe.

How can the value of a good house be measured?

The mortgage crisis has advanced since the fall of 2008 when these ruminations began. Those fortunate enough to still have their homes have gone bi-polar, lurching between dismay at drops in home values and hope for floors or plateaus so that at least we’d know we are at the bottom. The federal incentives have hit snags. The mortgage modification options have not been implemented well by the Great Lenders. Unemployment now causes mortgage defaults, pushing more properties on to the market.

Meantime I began to size up the condition of my conversation partner and to list the repairs: roof, garage door, basement walls, yard. The list was not what I would do, of course. Parallel to the column of tasks were the names of those who had always worked on the house before, back in the duplicitous days when our real interest lay in marketable improvements---“updates,” as realtors say. Maintenance was an irritation.

Ron the builder, Tim for heating and plumbing, Bill the glass man, Big Dan the tree man, Lewis the painter---a roll call of repairmen. Flipping through an old rolodex it appears that about a third of my Flint social life is connected to house maintenance. My house has been kept together by friends. They were respectful. My house provided them work and displayed their talents. Each noisy, dusty day of a project brought hoots of amazement or humor at finding out how things were constructed sixty years ago when the house was built. Or disdain at previous owners’ cheap and un-workmanlike fixes. I’d be called upon to make decisions about the quality of materials to purchase or the cost of extra hours of labor to do it right. Extended deliberations ensued.

One summer my mother, then about 85, set herself up on the front porch with a novel and the New York Times while eaves troughs were spread around the lawn, scrubbed and repainted. The dog slept under her chair, my son went off to friends, I went to work; everyone was happy. That was over ten years ago. The mortgage crisis makes it seem so far away.

After a winter of sulking and silence, my house unresponsive, I galvanized myself this past spring. I returned to the rolodex, got some estimates, and then a surprise. A new friend for the house turned up---Kyle, the part-time landscaper. He’s from the neighborhood association on Facebook. By late summer he’d laid out a new plan for the front entrance with hardscape design and shrubs. Long deliberations about which plants to choose, trips to the nurseries and the gravel yard. This time Dennis sat on the front porch; about 5 o’clock the beer came out. Everyone was happy.

The house is talking to me again, our conversations have resumed. The house has taught me something again, this time about flexibility and imagination in hard times. Oh, and our philosophic dialogue reminds me that I’ve found a man who likes house repair.

Read this essay and others at The East Village Magazine, http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

Books and Life

A dozen boxes of my Mom’s books, stacked in the garage since her death two years ago. I remember them in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that covered one wall in the living room of the house where I grew up, the colors of their spines, the illustrations on their dust jackets, the titles read sideways. As an only child I gazed at them in the vacant time I seemed to have. I am sorting them now. To keep are the sets: my Mom’s Anthony Trollope novels, the political novels and the ecclesiastical novels, in the Oxford World’s Classics edition. They are small, just 4 inches wide, 6 inches tall (not quite octodecimo in book sizes). Hardcover but lightweight, they fit in the hand, easy to read despite the small print. Their jackets not as bright as I remember them, but still multi-colored. Next is the complete Jane Austen novels in the London J.M. Dent edition with Brock illustrations---all were ordered from England. Then there are her old college books inscribed with her older brother’s name; he’d passed them down to her. Their mottled buckram spines and musty smell uninviting now but in the 1930s a world of learning to a young man and woman able to go to college when so much of the population was struggling to survive. Her father had only a grade-school education, but ran a hardware store in Portland, Oregon. Barrels of eight and ten-penny nails, cans of paint, tools and lawnmowers---the store produced enough to pay for private tuition for my Mom and her brother. And for these books.

My sorting project migrates to my own bookshelves, to old books I’ve been meaning to cull---Signet Classics marked 95 cents in the upper right corner; I can barely read the print any more, at least not for pleasure. Notes edge their pages, angled obliquely to the text which itself is underlined in the days before highlighters. I had been enthralled by these books in graduate school; they had been my life of study and intellectual exchange. What was I tracking as I read Anna Karenina? Some analysis demonstrating that it wasn’t really a love plot, it seems. Shabbier are the books bought in communist Poland with cheap paper and ink; weak glue in the spines. They fell apart like communism, only faster.

One year, after my income had improved, I decided to invest in some quality hardbound editions---In Search of Lost Time in 6 Modern Library volumes in the translation by C.K. Moncrieff-Terrence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright. Twenty bucks or less a book. I read up to volume 5 the first year my Mom lived with me. Having the set stacked at my bedside got me through the day, anticipating the night when I could finally be alone with the next chapter. While perhaps not elegant, they were sufficiently handsome, a pleasure to hold. Then a year or so ago, I learned that there was a new translation of Swann’s Way by Lydia Davis, part of a project to re-translate the entire Remembrance of Things Past, with six other translators, each for a different volume---the twenty-first century “Penguin Proust.” Maybe the publishers worried that a single translator might die during the lengthy project, or maybe gearing up for 2013 and the centenary of the publication of Swann’s Way. I ordered the Davis translation and discovered a new world, fresh and direct. I’m hooked on another set.

The first week in December brings The New York Times Book Review with Holiday Books, “100 Notable Books of 2010” followed the next week by “The 10 Best Books of 2010,” and then The New Yorker’s “A Year’s Reading. Reviewers’ favorites from 2010.” Publishers are pushing for strong Christmas book sales, but for me it’s an extended winter project: mark the ones to review online, which ones to peruse at Borders, which ones to sample on Kindle.

There are drawbacks to the Kindle, of course. Why is it hard to remember what I’ve read on a screen? Somehow I can’t visualize the place on the page where I recall a certain passage. Not having page numbers displayed disconcerts. And it’s easier to quit reading a book on Kindle. It seems to work best for short fiction and essays. On a plane, its bright yellow zippered cover promises an hour or two in my own bookshelves. At my bedside it reminds me it’s not true that I’ve got nothing to read.

Sitting on the floor, I add my own books to my Mom’s. It’s our common project now, hers and mine, this cull from both our lives. I shift books from her boxes into bags, along with some of my own---re-read the inscriptions, smell the pages, and stack them into bags marked for the Flint Public library and UM-Flint Thompson library, choosing what I think would be good for each. They will dispose of them according to their own lights, of course. Hers here, mine there, a few to save for a while. I mark the calendar to haul the bags to the loading dock manned by the understanding volunteers from “Friends of the Library” on the first Saturday of the month. Why don’t I sell the better ones on Amazon or explore this website book exchange thing? When I’ve bought from an individual seller some books come in thrice used jiffy bags, former addressees blacked out, my name in crabbed handwriting; I visualize some strange book hoarder. Others come in fresh, new bags with a computer generated label. A pretty professional set up. Neither appeals.

Beginning in January, the Flint Public Library will close on Mondays, holding on until finances from a successful millage take effect. Branches of the Library will be open only 2 days a week. Even when the millage kicks in, the Library tax revenue will be almost 20% less than what it was in 2009.

Books from another person’s life and from a past stage in my own. Four bags ready to go. I get out my checkbook and join the library Friends, a small contribution to help out the library. But it’s more like Charon’s obol, the coin placed on the mouth of the dead so the ferryman would take them to Hades. An offering out of respect to these books, hope for their safe passage to another life. It makes the parting easier.

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No pawnshops for old stories

I turn the key in the lock and gaze distractedly through the lowest pane of the back door window. A slight but unaccustomed disorder in the dining room.  Chairs at an oblique angle to the table, the rug somewhat crooked.  Now that I’ve walked in, why are the winter draft rolls in the middle of the room?  The hall door to the upstairs unaccountably open?  No one seems to be here, but I feel a sense of someone having rushed by rapidly.  I call out my son’s name questioningly---the only other person with a house key and who might enter at any time.  Maybe an emergency search for tools or auto parts still socked away in attic and garage.  And then it hits me; someone else has been in my house. 

I stare hypnotized at details not yet part of a picture, like a gawker at a highway accident. Treading carefully through my own house as if not to disturb it more, I move from the dining room, through the hall to the bedroom.  Why are the dresser drawers open, underwear and socks rising like yeasty bread dough overflowing the sides of a baking pan.  Of course:  this is where ladies’ loot might be tucked into little private places, or nestled in sateen-lined boxes with lids that snap shut, or laid out in the efficient squares and rectangles of the burgundy faux felt compartments that organize everything. 

On top of the mahogany dresser sits the pottery dish where the jewelry most a part of me was dropped each night---empty.   Pearl earrings received at college graduation, my dad’s signet ring, a watch fob from my grandfather made into a pendant.  What else had been there just hours ago? Each piece was bound to a family story.  Everything was old, laden with memories.  Only this morning everything had been tangled in the dish, linking my life to those now dead but daily remembered.

I reach out but can’t touch the disarray, its surfaces tender like a wound. I retrace my steps and exit, but this time through the front door.  I need to tell someone that my things are gone, grabbed in haste by someone who did not know them. I stride with purpose across the street, ring my neighbor’s bell, and blurt out my distress.  She and her daughter are more alarmed; could someone still be in the house?  We call the police there and then return to my house.  A kind of post mortem begins, though the body is gone. 

The next morning I sit at the dining room table, trying to list the missing items, to describe their shapes, name their materials, and estimate their ages. Their identities derive from their history. In my grandfather’s time, gentlemen wore stick pins and had monogrammed watch fobs; they carried small penknives, engraved with their initials, relatively useless but indicative of elegance. One stickpin had been made into a ring for my mother and a watch fob had been mounted as a pendant.  New sorrows emerge as lost pieces come to mind that I hadn’t remembered initially.

Unlike princes and warriors of the ancient world, we are not buried with our treasure; it is handed down. My grandmother and mother would give me some small piece for an important birthday, a coming of age gift. Closing the tale of a ring or pin I admired, they would say, “You may have this when you are older.”  And so it was that the story melded to the object.  A ring or a bracelet marked the passage from childhood, to adolescence, to graduation, to marriage. Small pieces just lay in the drawer, waiting perhaps for another young girl to grow into them.

The household insurance did not cover these losses; I had not lost enough, it seemed.  The agent needed valuations in the thousands. The city police station sergeant, impatient and patronizing, had much more serious, life and death issues in his office distant from the front desk.  I should just leave my list of items with the somnolent officer behind the cage.  In any case, the goods were probably long since out of the area, on their way to Detroit.  Pawnshops might help---although they aren’t supposed to deal with hot goods--- but I could take my list around to them. 

Steeled by loss, I set off for the local pawnshops, remembering their locations out of disdain and now fearful in their parking lots.  Weaving through dusty tunnels of tools and tvs at the entrance, I make my way to the back and the jewelry counter.   The clerks vary.  One takes my list to the backroom, perhaps smokes a cigarette and returns: “no descriptions match.”  Another, more conversational, confides that he has so much jewelry in the back safe that every three weeks some of the stuff is just shipped off to be melted down.  Once chosen with care, engraved, presented as gifts marking important occasions, my family jewelry might return eventually to its original state.  A fate more appalling than theft.  Sold at market price, re-cast into ingots, my family jewelry could simply revert to its elemental state and re-join the world supply of precious metal.  

A neighbor tried to console me with urban lore.  Every once in a while, a local drug bust turns up a cache of stolen jewelry.  The stuff never makes it to pawn at all.  Dealers hoard it, give it to favored women; the goods are traded internally. Just hang in and wait.      

It’s been several years now since the break in. From time to time, I stop in at the pawn shops in town, following clerks’ advice that the stock in the cases changes every few months. I’ m almost a regular. Now comfortable, I slowly walk the cases.  Bending over the glass, I see bracelets and necklaces, mostly gold, their designs clichéd and rarely distinctive; perhaps their lack of originality makes them easy to move on the pawn market.  Twelve to fourteen feet of wedding ring sets arrayed in rows, the rank and file of failure.   Engagement rings with sad, small stones; the purchaser could afford little, but wanted to be proper.  The recipient was thrilled at the new stage of life this tiny diamond signified.  But now through disappointment or desperation it’s in pawn along with the wedding band.  Sadder stories than my own.

Some of my losses I can still visualize quite clearly, their color, engraving, detailed filigree, or how a ring felt on my finger. Thinking of the objects fondly, I wish that I could tell their stories to the new possessors---it’s the stories that can still pierce my chest.  Other losses I’ve forgotten.  No longer a young girl anticipating the occasions of adult life that they marked, I wait to pass down what is left.  With their stories, of course; that’s the most important part.  
See also http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/