Summer Most Heat Moon
Well.
Remember me as you pass by,
As you are now so once was I.
As I am now, so you must be.
Prepare yourself to follow me.
Monthly Archives: July 2014
Foregrounded
Summer Most Heat Moon
With Jon and Ruth here, the last realtor coming tonight and the 2nd Wind people coming to remove the Vectra and the leg press in a few minutes, the move has been pushed radically into the foreground, right here with daily life. We’re living the move almost all the hours of the day. (This needs slowing down, which will happen when three generations of Olsons pack up on Saturday.)
Jon, Ruth and Kate leave for Colorado then. Kate will meet two realtors out there and see some houses in situ. I’ll be packing books while they’re gone, maybe cleaning out some files, too.
Old computers, keyboards, mice and one printer will also head off to new places. Computer breaking yards are not as glamorous as the ship breakers of Bangladesh (which are pretty grungy really), but they’re vital. In fact, in the near future they may become as important as the mines from which their rare metals came in the first place.
We’ll have at least one more round of furniture (some desks, file cabinets, maybe more bookshelves) and many more books. Probably more this and that, too, all headed to the consignment store. Kitchen items, surplus garden tools.
After the realtor and Kate’s visit to Colorado, we’ll have much more reliable numbers on which to base our house hunting and the overall cost of the move. (not cheap) Then, we’ll go back to puttering the move. Getting stuff done in relaxed, but regular way. March will come in its own time. So will the moving van.
Summer Most Heat Moon
Where to live? It’s not a question most of us ask very often over the course of our life. Kate and I have the luxury of asking it right now. Having settled on a general area, a 40 mile radius of Denver, give or take, we now face the next task, deciding on a particular lot and a particular house.
Knowing that no one site will have everything we want, though it must have everything we need, criteria have come and gone. Broadband, air conditioning, good insulation, room for our creative sides, space for the dogs, enough water privileges for a garden, access to emergency health care, at least a fire wise lot (at best out of the wildfire redzone), a decent house, those are things we need. Whether we purchase them with the house and property or install them soon after doesn’t matter.
The wants have been in more flux. A new want that may transition to need is living around 7,800 feet. This altitude decreases the high temperatures in summer and ensures cool nights. A single story home, which could become a need, too, seems the wisest choice. We would prefer more isolated over less. Mountain or water views add appeal. Having our own well and septic system is desirable, too. An architecturally interesting home with a balcony overlooking forest, mountains or water. Reasonable driving distance to one of the Denver light rail lines.
A pleasant surprise adds something, too. I found one home, for example, that already has a steam bath. Not a need exactly, but I associate a steam bath and the end of a workout. Our one here been a good, immediate reward for staying with my routines.
Yes, we’re open to unusual housing solutions. This one is called a no-shadow home. We saw a geodesic dome we liked. A passive solar home with the capacity to generate our own electricity would be a plus.
How our new home integrates with the land, our lives and the future needs of mother earth, that will determine which place we choose. Oh, and how much it costs.
Rules of the Game
Summer Most Heat Moon
Ruth and I played blackjack tonight. I dealt and she still won. Just going into third grade,
her math skills are more than up to the game and her betting showed some uncanny, if randomly lucky, skills, too. She had played some version of the game in school with her teacher, but the real game is a bit harsher, less forgiving. That’s the one I play and the one I taught her.
Cards have been part of my life since I began delivering newspapers. My parents weren’t game players of any sort, so all the card skills I’ve developed came away from home. Starting at age 8, I would gather with ten or fifteen other young boys in a wooden shed where we waited while the old press rumbled through the daily run of the Alexandria Times-Tribune. Sometimes the web would break, the web is a v-shaped piece of metal that folded the newsprint as it came through the press, ready to become a newspaper. This would require much cussing and hurrying on the part of the printers, but it also meant that sometimes our games extended well past the usual half hour or so.
Later, in junior high I began playing poker with a regular group of guys and our game continued through high school. Once in college I veered toward bridge, playing duplicate bridge in a local league and endless hands in an endless game in the student union. After college, the people I knew well, my friends and work colleagues, didn’t play cards, so I set aside that long history.
Only lately, in the past 4 or 5 years, have I picked up regular cards again, playing the five handed version of sheepshead that I report on here occasionally.
Still, I have many hours of card playing behind me and the memory of it has given me an excellent “card sense.” Card sense carries across various sorts of games and refers to an intuitive knowledge of how a hand might develop.
I may not knit or sew, have carpentry skills or fix-it talent, but I can teach my grandchildren how to gamble. An odd realization, but there it is.
The Demi-Monde
Summer Most Heat Moon
Yesterday I did an experiment in sleep deprivation. Not intentionally, of course. As I gained back an hour to an hour and a half at a time over the day-necessary because of the sleep lost that night-my mind began to lose track of the sleeping/waking distinction. I would wake up, still clinging to the dream state and still tired enough to be only partially awake. Then, tiredness would take over and push me back to bed, the waking state only partially realized while I was up.
Sundowning. In a strange place like a hospital, how the elderly could enter a state like the one I experienced yesterday, the disoriented state called sundowning, became obvious to me, sleep disrupted and coming in uneven increments over a 24 hour period. Once untethered from the usual clear demarcation between awake and asleep it could be very difficult to find your way back to it.
It was not unpleasant, at least for me, but if the outside world, the world outside my dreamy/semi-awake state, had demanded normal attention, I could easily have become agitated, unable to understand the expectations. Then, others would have become concerned about me. They would have wanted to “help” me return to the usual way of experiencing day and night. The harder they pressed, the more difficult it would become. At least I can see how that might happen.
Remembering my father-in-law Merton as he neared death, he seemed to float in an idiosyncratic demi-monde most of the time. Near the end he reported angels descending, coming for him. This may well have been his reality, rather than a dreamy experience. Once in this place epistemology becomes untethered too and our ways of knowing enter a different metaphysical realm. In other words our reality becomes different from that of the consensus, though we don’t know that. At that moment we have passed through a portal, not to the Otherworld, but to an Otherworld.
It could be that death comes to us, probably does come to many of us, in a demi-monde of our own. It might come, in that case, in the cliched form of a beloved parent or other relative. Or, angels. Or, depending on your inner compass, a demon from the depths of your own hell. Me, I’m hoping for a slow stroll into Arcadian fields where, bounding toward me, are all the dogs I’ve ever loved.
Germans Rising
Summer Most Heat Moon
Stunned. I’m stunned I was shocked when Germany beat Brazil. I’ve not followed the world cup with any diligence, but apparently enough to go, Whoa! And we played Germany to 1-0. Maybe we’re better than we think?
Another international sport I follow with a bit more diligence than the world cup is Formula 1 racing. How ’bout Team Mercedes? Treating everybody else to rear wheel views around Formula 1 tracks from China to Great Britain. First time they’ve been this good since the 1950’s.
Hmm. World Cup. Formula 1. Next, world domination?
The Johnson/Olson Clan
Summer Most Heat Moon
The deck continues. Ruth’s out building a house using found materials while her Dad drives screws into cedar decking. Kate’s asleep for her nap, but I’m awake, an hour or two shy of a full night’s sleep. Kate’s sister Anne is out pruning the crab apple tree. This Johnson/Olson clan loves working. Or, at least, they work a lot.
Jon kvetches about the heat and the humidity and how Denver is better. But I reminded him of the 107 degree days I’ve experienced out there in August and early September. Oh, yeah. Well, it gets hot some. A dry 107 degree heat will cook a chicken, too.
Meanwhile, I’m downstairs, my head in Ovid, wrestling with declensions and conjugations rather than electric drills and Japanese saws. To each their own.
Permitted
Summer Most Heat Moon
Kate went to city hall (which looks like a 1960’s elementary school rather than a gothic stone fortress) and got a permit. Jon can continue on and we’re covered once the inspector checks the work at the end. One more item off the list. And, now I can sleep.
Yesterday I went on Google Earth and looked at some of the homes we’re considering in Colorado. This way we can see the home in its context, not just the interior and immediate exterior shots in the real estate listings. Some homes that look isolated, private are actually butted up against neighbors, but some sit in splendid isolation. Just right.
Up
Summer Most Heat Moon
Oh, pooh. Been awake thinking about building permits. This is something I’ve not spent any time thinking about before now. However, when Stefan asked if I had a building permit for the deck I said no. Didn’t think I needed one. (actually, didn’t occur to me. at all.) But, we’re selling the house next year.
We need a permit (I just checked) so I’m going to have ask Jon to stop working while I apply for one. This may put Jon out of the deck finishing since he needs to leave, probably before I can get a permit. Sigh. The number of things that come up during a move.
Anyhow, now that I’ve decided what to do (what was keeping me up was not knowing and therefore indecisive) maybe I’ll be able to get back to sleep. Or not.
The checklist of things to finish before March seems to grow longer. I’m not going to let this challenge my decision to enjoy the move and its various parts. Including learning about building permits. Something I suppose I should have learned by now, but I haven’t.
Parting is
Summer Most Heat Moon
Woollies at Wilde Roast in St. Anthony. Jon, Scott, Warren, Frank and Stefan. Ode circled us in cars he was test driving, but never touched down. Tom was in Chattanooga, Bill and Charlie H. in Wisconsin, Paul in Maine, Jimmy in South Dakota.
Major topics: Sold sign on the next to last Wolfe household. Congrats, Warren and Sheryl. Frank’s right leg pain is gone. Scott is working like a beaver to finish a roommate apartment for his stepson Alex and his significant other. Yin’s having some difficulty letting go of material, mostly clothing, accumulated over the years. Stefan’s winding away from the workaday world, yet experiencing, in his words, uncontrollable anxiety about days looming ahead in which he might not be productive.
We focused for a while, in response to Stefan’s transition, on the question of how to deal with a need to be productive. My contention is that you need to do things which feed your soul, which express who you are. My writing is one example. Fly fishing could be another. Doing favors for folks another. Working with computers for the electronically challenged could be another.
Stefan raised my statement, made awhile back, that I wanted to do only the work only I can do. I stand by it. Over the next 20 or so years, perhaps my entire lifetime from this point forward, my focus will be on those kind of things. Helping raise our grandchildren, tending our garden, writing my books. Working politically on those things that I care about deeply.
Afterward Jon and I wandered over a rusted iron bridge to an island in the middle of the Mississippi. We looked at the water streaming over the receding St. Anthony Falls. Having him at this Woolly meeting brought together the attractive forces that have kept me here in Minnesota this long and that now pull me on to Colorado. A sadness, a certain kind of sadness, came over me. I’m glad that I have such good friends that I will miss them as family; but, I’m sad to leave them.
There was, too, a muted joy in joining this man, now in his mid-life, and his family. Muted, I say, only because I reflected on it at this particular moment, just after leaving my friends for the evening. And those number of evenings are diminishing.