1. With appointments one right after the other, the Deke and I got established at Heritage Health uptown with Linda Jo Yawn, N. P. Of all the medical persons I've seen over the last, oh, thirteen years or so, Linda Jo Yawn was the most interested in the accident I experienced at the Zinc Plant back in 1973 and was the first to wonder, as I have, if the exposure I suffered to sulfur dioxide might, after many years, have contributed to the chronic kidney disease I live with. As she said, "It's all interconnected you know."
She said that and later in the evening I was reading poems by Howard Nemerov, a poet I had taken a keen interest in when I was at NIC in the months following my accident at the Zinc Plant. For some reason, his passages, from the poem "The Blue Swallows", here, came to mind, the ones where he writes about the many centuries it has taken "for the mind/To waken, yawn and stretch, to see/With opened eyes emptied of speech/The real world where the spelling mind/Imposes with its grammar book/Unreal relations on the blue/Swallows".
I hadn't read this passage for a long time and I enjoyed the sudden insight that, in terms of purpose and vision, Nemerov and Wallace Stevens are cousins, if not brothers, in the writing of poetry. I hope some of you who read Wallace Stevens will see the similarity between this Nemerov passage and, say, Stevens' "Idea of Order at Key West", here, and his dive into "The maker's rage to order words of the sea".
Then I turned Nemerov's poem, "The Dependencies", here, and how, by meditating upon spiders spinning webs, Nemerov reflects upon "the intricate dependencies/Spreading in secret through the fabric vast/Of heaven and earth" and I thought about the Zinc Plant and how I was working maintenance in a roaster and fell and inhaled sulfur dioxide and how it might seem that because that moment is forty-four years old it is gone, but it's not -- it lives on in any number of "intricate dependencies" through "the fabric vast" of my body and mind, and, as Linda Jo Yawn mused today, might have, after nearly thirty years, asserted itself on my kidneys and diminished their function.
Today Nemerov and Linda Jo Yawn helped me see more clearly that the past is never gone. Nothing is ever over with. What happened in what we call the past is always alive in intricate dependencies with the fabric vast of what we call the present, whether in our bodies or in our social relationships or in the ongoing story of our nation and our world.
2. After our appointments, the Deke and I checked in to see how things were going on the remodel project. Shortly after noon, yesterday's furnace problem got fixed. It turned out to be a very small problem and the result of a small oversight, probably caused by fatigue, and was easily rectified. It turned out that the gas valve was not all the way on.
After the guys do more work on Saturday, I'll take some pictures. I'm very pleased that the Deke and I are working with --not fighting against -- how small this house is and not trying to take things like cabinets and furniture that belong in a larger house and put them in ours. The kitchen cabinet installation is not complete, but we can see that ordering as few as we did conforms with the dimensions of our small kitchen. We have ordered a small dishwasher and a small refrigerator. Today, we didn't buy a sofa for the living room, we bought a love seat and we will no doubt buy two chairs -- not the larger chairs so commonly found in furniture stores, made for larger living rooms, but smaller ones.
We want to create a defined place in our living room for people to sit and talk with each other and we want a clear route to exist from the front door on into the house that doesn't make a person walk through this area.
It's liberating not to have a television because we don't have to set up the living room so that we can watch the t.v. We can set it up with conversation, reading, and our windows in mind.
I think our purchase of the love seat -- which will come in a couple of weeks -- got our plan for the living room off to a solid start.
3. On Fridays, when the work day is over, the Deke, Shawn, and I try out a beer together. Shawn brought a couple of 12 oz bottles of Alaska Brewing's Husky IPA. It's a small batch beer, featuring a single malt and a single hop -- Mosaic -- and the Mosaic does double duty in this IPA, bittering the beer moderately and providing a complex range of aromatics and flavors. All three of us liked it a lot as we reviewed what has happened on this project over the last week and what is to come. We also continued to get to know each other better.
After Shawn left and we took care of some things at home, we headed over to Hill St. Depot and split a huge and flavorful chicken fajita burrito and tried out different hot sauces from the hot sauce table that Liz, our industrious and most friendly server, brought to us. My two pints and a half of Pepsi-Cola paired perfectly with the burrito. As we left, I saw a group of youngsters at the buddy bar playing cribbage and I longed to be in my twenties with a bunch of friends pegging my way to 121.
We ended our evening at Christy and Everett's to check in on their preparations for the delivery of a new stove and refrigerator on Saturday and to watch some of the Gonzaga v Creighton game.
I like this Gonzaga team, given what I've seen so far. They are versatile, able to score inside and from long range. They play together well and don't seem overly reliant on any one player -- they seem well balanced. Tonight, they weathered Creighton's hot shooting first half, put the clamps on the Bluejays in the second half, and, when the Deke and left to go home, were cruising to a 91-74 win.
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