Category: Like Life

Live from Snowpocalypse ’09: I shoveled out about a foot of accumulation in front of my house, and the snow is still falling. The hour-to-hour forecast says we’re going to get another jolt this evening.

George Plimpton’s hockey book is back in print; an old Dickens from the basement shelves that I never got around to reading; an Angela Carter that I didn’t know about; and this seems to be the year of Edna Ferber around here.

Leta, where’re your shoes?

How to clear out a one-bedroom apartment — with fifteen years of loving/living in it — in only six days: it helps to have worked a few theater strikes. Just because a 6-inch chunk of 2×4 with two screws broken off in it is a perfectly good piece of lumber is not a good reason to keep it.

It’s also essential that you get yourself a cousin who is an absolute mensch. I couldn’t have done it without you, Rita.

When you’re shopping for an assisted living facility for yourself, check the fine print in the house rules and regulations to make sure that you can have a glass of wine in your own dang room.

When you’re cleaning out the apartment of someone who can’t do it for herself, and you’re standing in the trash bags aisle of Longs Drugs on a Sunday evening, spend the extra coin and get the ones with a drawstring top.

Lots of little tasks accomplished today; the sad thing is, none of them are actually written down on a to-do list. This is just dealing with little piles of stuff all over the house.

• Polished two pairs of shoes. Realized that I should treat the Florsheim oxfords that I keep in the overflow storage downstairs with a little more respect, since I seem to wear them in every show I’m in.
• Cleaned my hip waders.
• Cleaned out my makeup kit.
• Found a rain jacket that I thought I’d given away.
• Got together some glass jars for upcoming entomology field trips with Don Messersmith.
• Updated my Goodreads shelves. The [author: ] tag is broken.
• Ran vinegar water through the coffeemaker.
• Tested the batteries stored in the shoebox.
• Reviewed the recent schedule changes for the 505 and 551/553/557 buses.
• Listened to a half-month of Songs of the Day and nearly caught up with reading other blogroll backlogs.
• Got my Day-Timer pages for the year (starts in October) sorted and ready to go.

I rotated a couple of volumes to a backlog shelf to make room for some new fiction coming in. I’m reading my way through the Updike Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy about as fast as he published them. The Queneau is a re-read: someone pointed out that even though it’s published as a novel, it’s laid out like a play, or perhaps a screenplay, so I’m wondering whether it’s actually stageworthy.

A scent of hot dust, and some recollections are triggered. A sense memory that I’ve been meaning to write up for a while.

When I lived with my grandparents in Piqua, Ohio, in the mid 1960s, the Piqua Baptist Church sat at the northwest corner of Broadway and Greene Street. Dark, deep maroon-colored brick. Side entrance on Greene, which is where I usually entered. A Congregationalist church catercorner (no one could explain what was different about their faith), and another church (Catholic? Methodist?) up the block.

My grandparents were members, and one of my grandfather’s stewardship roles was non-resident caretaker of the facility. I think he preferred the term “custodian,” but frankly a lot of the work was janitorial. He was notorious for making the building a priority over everything else in his life; we had a tiff at my college graduation because he was anxious to get back home to check on the church. My grandmother helped him in his caretaking duties, and while I lived with them, I did, too. It was a painless way to earn my allowance.

Mostly what I did was to empty wastebaskets once a week. So I would make a circuit through the building, stopping in all the Sunday school rooms, the minister’s office, all around. Trash containers rank with stale lilies, used tissues, hardened chewing gum. The classrooms were arranged in a gallery along three sides of the basement multi-purpose room, with a kitchen at the other end. Walls faced with painted board and batten paneling. For the brief period of time that I was in Boy Scouts, our troop meetings were here. Stairways up to the rest of the church, and at the far end, a short flight to the furnace room, a convenient short cut back to the rest of the building.

The building was heated with a coal-fired furnace (hence my grandfather’s frequent trips to check on things). The furnace room was dark, but neither frightening nor particularly cosy. Just black dusty. From time to time, we all have the dream of moving through a familiar building, passing through rooms we’ve never seen before; for me, that dream usually begins in the church furnace room, where back in a corner is a door I’ve never seen before, that leads to someplace behind the baptistry, and on.

Back upstairs, facing the altar from the sanctuary, the baptistry was at the right, the minister’s office off left. The choir stood behind the altar. I don’t remember an organ, but there must have been one. Behind, and on the second story, were two rooms open to the sanctuary. I believe these were rooms set aside for mothers with infants, so that they could participate as much as possible without neglecting their babies. In one of these upper rooms I once found a booklet of devotions. The authors/editors were apparently holdouts from the Chicago Tribune’s spelling modernization plan, because each passage ended with a thot to be pondered.

Once I was finished with my chores, I would sit in the office, at the minister’s desk, and read whatever was available. Generally the calendars and addresses preserved under the glass desktop. I would play solitaire—that is, until my grandmother got wind of this. She didn’t actually call it “the Devil’s picture book,” but she made her feelings clear. (My grandfather, who would sometimes take me to play pool at his lodge, didn’t seem to mind.)

Each week my grandparents would dust the pews with ratty gray rags and fragrant polish. Once, I helped with a special project. In this church, communion wine was taken in individual glasses, in the pews. There were racks for the used glasses in the pew backs, on either side of the hymnal racks. I seem to recall three holes per rack. It seems that the clatter of all those cordial glasses being racked at the same time got to bothering someone, so one week I helped put rubber gaskets in the racks. Much quieter.

The church has since moved to a new building. The Broadway and Greene site is a parking lot.

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I don’t think that my shelf of books on deck to be read has been this short in years—maybe not since I started doing theater. There are a couple of things here that I’ve started and put aside, and a couple of titles that I may bail on. Watson is a promotional copy, and Nagel and Newman is a re-read from graduate school days. I thought I was done with the Carter until I realized that I apparently had never read The Bloody Chamber, one of the volumes collected in Burning Your Boats.

Good thing that there is a box of books on its way from my bookseller!

Not too much time or money for traveling this year, so the list of out-of-town places I overnighted in this year is short:

• Nimbus, Calif. (Sacramento suburbs)
• Martinsburg, W. Va. (3 visits)

2007’s list. 2006’s list. 2005’s list.