The kids made it back Saturday. My mother-in-law praised the food I had cooked (roast turkey breast with carrots and new potatoes, and minestrone) and everyone was happy to see I’d built a fire in the fireplace.
Alpha returned home Sunday. She wasn’t quite the wreck she has been following such business trips in the past, thanks in part to using her frequent flyer miles to upgrade to business class this time, which made the trip much nicer for her. She ate none of the vegetarian lasagne I had made Sunday, because she had just flown business class for hours and hours and had been stuffed with food and movies apparently.
Gamma also ate none of it, since it contained cheese, zucchini and black olives, as well as garlic and onions. I figured, since she’s not going to eat it because it contains cheese, I might as well throw in other things I like. Beta didn’t eat it because she had a stomach ache.
We sat around being a family for a few minutes, then I drove Beta into Vienna to catch a train. Her class is going on a field trip.
I remember going on a field trip when I was in school. I think we went to the zoo once, where we no doubt looked at animals. And I recall taking a school bus with a bunch of other kids to some game preserve, where all I remember seeing was grass taller than I was, and my teacher running around with a clipboard counting children, and no wildlife whatsoever. Then we reboarded the bus and drove back to school.
Beta’s physics class is going to Hamburg to look at a particle accelerator. One friend of hers is going along, even though she is not in the physics class, because she is interested in particle accelerators.
At the train station, Beta and I went to a coffee shop where she drank some concoction, and I had hot chocolate. Then we walked around the station with our take-out cups and chatted. Then she met some other students. Then we went magazine shopping for the trip – she paid for her own magazines, with her own money. Then we went back out into the station and talked a little. Then I drove home before I got embarrassing.

Paris Hilton looks quite ordinary up close, with none of the aura one normally expects from celebrities. You expect them to be at least alpha emitters, but Paris Hilton is just, eh. Still, a picture of Paris with me would make a great blog post, I thought, so I gave my camera, an old-fashioned film-based snapshot camera, to the guy across the table from us and asked Paris if she would mind and she said, Ehn, and I snuggled up to her for the picture and looked over at the guy, who said, This is a very important shot so I have to make sure the film is in order, and he had opened the back of the camera and spooled out the film in a long ribbon, exposing it to the light. Dude, I said. Don’t do that.

Then, the next night, my wife secretly dyed my hair black. I wish she would have warned me, or discussed it with me first, because I was appalled. What will the people at work think, I thought, regarding my image in the mirror, my pixyish jet-black hairdo. All the complications this introduced to my life – the need to touch up the white silver roots daily, for example, or the way it will suggest a midlife crisis that I am so over.

I was so upset. How could she do such a thing. I thought she was just messing around with some mousse or something.

My phone rang at work, it was my kid, Gamma, crying; they have to spend another night in the ski area, it’s snowing too hard and roads are closed. Gamma is a person who likes her schedules, and they had been supposed to come home today, so she was unhappy.

Her grandmother got on the phone and explained. I hadn’t heard anything on the radio of the intensity of the snowfall in their area. She said the roof of the place they were staying was being shoveled off because 1.5 meters of snow had accumulated.

It’s a father’s nightmare: your kids are far away, trapped in the snow. Okay, not exactly trapped in the snow, trapped in a snug apartment with central heating and a teevee, with their grandparents to take care of them. But you know what I mean: they’re there, and they’re supposed to be here, and they’re not and you can’t do anything about it. I couldn’t even drive there and get them if I wanted (and I do!) because, ehn, roads closed.

It is hoped that they will return tomorrow. So until then, I just have to survive somehow. Beta phoned this evening, she was all, Some people don’t want to drive home today because allegedly the roads are closed. She’d rather be home, too. It’s good when the family members like each other and more or less get along. When you try to make a house the kids will want to live in, and they actually do.

But tonight, they can’t. I hung up the phone at the end of our conversation and did whatever it was I did. Sat back down at the kitchen table and went back to work on the bottle of Beauxz Boojolay Boujeaulais Beaujolais I had purchased at the store on my way home, and the baguette, and the two types of cheese, and the olives stuffed with goat cheese, and the cold cuts. Read the papers undisturbed. Went upstairs and checked my email, and my statistics. Fed the cats, let them out, and in, and out, and in.

Changed my clothes. Had some more wine. And some more. Filling that empty time before bed. Still, time remains. Practice cello? Paint, finally? Write something? Read? Emptiness weighs heavily on us at times like this, but somehow we muddle through.

It’s an ambulance driven by a blind man, my understanding. Always too late and with plenty of dents. My… I… The single most… I’m just tired, is the thing. Or, rather: sleepy. I’m used to… Normally, see, I get home at like six in the evening. I leave work, race home and…

I was reading somewhere about essays, and how the best describe the common trivia of a life and make it luminescent and I’m thinking, who’d ever want to do that.

And I was thinking, on the way into work, having no Beta to distract me, although it is rarely described, we do all take craps, don’t we? Except for maybe Dick Cheney, who I suppose has a sphincter that distends like a pink tapir nose and squeezes out giant hornet eggs. And then he sits around his basement talking to them; the translucent eggs are arranged neatly on his pool table, which he never uses anyway and is therefore covered with large sheets of heavy clear plastic and as they gestate and hatch he talks to them. Arranged neatly in rows, aligned vertically, horizontally and diagonally at the same time. I’m going down to my study, he tells his wife, because that’s what they call the basement, his study, and he goes down there and says, I can’t let you out you know. Because you’re giant. If you were regular hornets, I could just let you go. But you’re giant.

And then he says, Man, I shouldn’t have had that spicy pork. And lays a few more.

Sleep, you see, battles with social contact in my snowy little paperweight this week.

It all comes down to, what do you want?

I was in a bus depot somewhere. I was seventeen or eighteen. Salt Lake City. Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Someplace. Sitting around talking to people, or rather, listening to other people talk, somehow in this group of strangers waiting for buses. This old wrinkled up guy asked me, So what you want from life anyway? And the question floored me because I had no idea. Maybe he felt sorry for me, because he said, Just fuckin wit you man.

Different things present themselves to you at different times, don’t they. Right now, it’s the what do you want thing that keeps coming up in different forms for me, in various conversations, whatever. Like life asking, Are you going to listen right off or do I have to get your attention first? It pays to listen from the start, because life has all sorts of ways to get your attention.

Where was I?

Left to my own devices, I gravitate to people. This is new.

Left to which, I observed this morning, I transform into a single cube of carrot and one of broccoli embedded in a shiny tan aspic of sloth, depression, headaches, fatigue and nosebleeds; or, rather, into Julie Andrews in her dirndl on the Salzburg hillside, arms outstretched, point of view swooping from a medium close-up showing the edelweiss and the smile on Julie’s face, to a long shot revealing the amazing scenery, except it’s shot from a Nazgul, not a helicopter, and it’s not amazing scenery or even a hillside, but the inside of my house and the only sound is not music, it’s the clock ticking, and the wind outside, and the coffee machine, maybe, finishing its perk, and the PC fan, and it’s not a dirndl, it’s sweatpants and a t-shirt and this stretched-out dark grey fleece sweatshirt thing and I’m not dancing and twirling and singing, just walking from room to room opening curtains, or closing them.

Left to my own devices, I think, I neither paint nor do the collages I’d planned nor play the cello nor do extra work nor write nor get extra sleep nor exercise nor anything.

My devices are:

1. Loneliness, which I like to think does not bother me, but which I actually secretly use to enter a profound state of melancholy misery.

2. Misery, to which I think I have a certain attraction, if not addiction.
3. Catatonia, which supports the first two.
4. Wind, which the band will be playing the day I lose my mind completely. It is my least favorite weather, below freezing rain, below even fire, brimstone or toads. You can’t see it, yet it pushes your car off the road. Just like time.
5. Something else. I could continue this list, but it would sound like self pity.
6. Self pity: I wonder about this one. Is it my device? Or would stoicism and self-deprecation be? What is the relationship between the two (three)? Do they all cloud clear, non-judgemental vision of what actually is?

So I played the cello and left a little later for work. They played Maurizio Cazzati on the radio, Capriccio sopra sette note, played by Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca, which just so totally rocked.
And it’s sunny.

scroogle

It is windy outside. The rain has stopped, I believe with little faith. It snowed this morning, the drive into work was very good at keeping everyone’s attention. The snow seems to have taken the road crews by surprise. Most of them were probably in the mountains skiing with their families, since schools in this half of the country are on vacation this week. So, being skiing, they were unable to plow the roads, including the freeway, and it took us a bit longer to get to work.

I am not on a road crew, and so must work this week. My children are off skiing with their grandparents, my wife left today on a business trip. I look forward to days like this, empty days of nothing but work and sleep and various fun hijinks, such as feeding the birds, or the cats, or walking from room to empty room, alone or with a cat in my arms that watches my face with concern as I murmur things like, just you and me buddy, or, they’ll be home Friday pal.

I always imagine it’ll be more fun than it is, this time off. I’ll paint, I tell myself. I’ll play unlimited cello. Now it’s nine PM and I’m already sleepy.

It’s windy outside. Gusts of wind nearly blew my little car off the road tonight. But the snow has turned to rain which means less shoveling. It might mean other things in other cultures, but in the one I inhabit it means, less shoveling.

I talked to Beta and Gamma this evening. The lifts weren’t running because it was so windy, Beta said. She didn’t sound so great but didn’t want to talk about it. Gamma was unhappy with her group at her ski school. The girls are stupid and also all left by lunch, leaving her the only girl with a bunch of stupid boys.

Outside it’s windy. Inside it’s quiet, only the sound of wind and my fingers on the keyboard and the PC fan whining like an industrial washing machine.