Baker Nicholson - A Box of Matches

Good morning, it’s 5:25 a.m. — once I told a doctor from France that I was able to wake myself up at a preset time with the help of nightmares, and he said that his father had been a soldier who had taught him that if you want to wake up at, say, five in the morning, you simply bang your head five times on the pillow before you close your eyes, and you will wake up at five. “But how do you manage five-thirty?” I asked the doctor with a crafty look. He said that in order to wake at five-thirty you just had to do something else with your head, like jut your chin a little, to signify the added fraction, and your sleeping self would do the math for you. I’ve tried it and it works except that it’s much harder to go to sleep because your head has just been hit repeatedly against the pillow.

Incredible: I’m forty-four years old. What’s incredible about it is that my children are eight and fourteen years old, still here living with us. I’m driving Phoebe to her school every morning, after she irons her blue jeans. Only a few months ago I realized that when my father was the age I am now he had already lost me — that is, I’d already gone off to college and moved away. My parents were twenty-three when I was born, which would mean that my father drove down with me to college and bought me my first typewriter when he was only forty-one. What did it feel like to lose me? Maybe not so bad. Maybe by the time it happens you’re used to the idea.

The Olivetti electric typewriter that my father bought me was designed — this was in the seventies — in the high-Italian way, like a Bugatti from that era, very clean, no sharp corners but no unnecessary aerodynamicism either. It made a fine swatting sound when one of its keys hit the paper. A week after I got it, I masked over all the letters with black electrician’s tape, and that was how I learned to type. I took it with me to France and typed French papers there with it. Six years later it was stolen from Claire’s apartment, when thieves came in through the fire escape. They stole her miniature TV and her roommate’s speakers, too. I find it remarkable that my father was buying me a farewell typewriter when he was younger than I am now.

Last night I washed my son’s hair, thinking what I always think: How many years will be left before I have no child young enough to wash his or her hair? Phoebe takes long showers now and of course washes her own hair. The loss is enough to make you lose composure — I’m not kidding. The dawn sky is now visible: the snow is a very light blue rather than grey. Yes, grey with an e —that’s one of those English spellings that I accept (aeroplane isn’t bad either), and not just because I learned to read it on the boxes of Earl Grey tea that my mother had. When spelled with an e, grey half hides the wide, crude sound of the a behind the obscuring mists of the e . It’s rare for a one-syllable word to have so much going on.

I once saw the earl of Grey on The Merv Griffin Show , an afternoon program hosted by the always cheerful and always tanned Merv Griffin. The earl of Grey had three things to say: one, that you can’t make good tea in a microwave; two, that the water shouldn’t be boiling but just on the verge; and three, that he wished that Twinings had trademarked the phrase Earl Grey , which was used by everyone. The poor man had lost his name.

And it was on The Merv Griffin Show , as well, that I watched a father-and-son act in which the son, who was about seven or eight, climbed up a ladder and got into a small chair welded to the top of a long pole. The father balanced this pole on his hand, his foot, and then lifted it and placed it on his chin. But here something went wrong. The father had never been on TV before, one suspects, and he was nervous, and the lights onstage were brighter and hotter than the lights that he had rehearsed under, and he knew that he had a shorter time than usual, only two or three minutes, to do his act, before they cut away to the commercial. So his face was sweating more than it normally did — it was in fact dripping. He and his son were both wearing leopard-pattern caveman outfits — crazy looking getups with belts and shoulder straps as I remember. Perhaps the wife, who made the costumes, thought it was cute.

The man threw back his head and got his chin into position under the chin-cup at the end of the pole that held his son in the air and set it in place, and spread his arms. But then I saw two rapid jerky adjustments — maybe the son was more nervous too and fidgeted for a moment — and one of the movements made the chin-cup slide off the man’s unusually slippery chin. It slipped down his neck, and his neck tendons became dozens of individual cords as he grimaced, and the pole continued to slip until it came to rest in the hollow just above his collarbone, where he held it by tightening his neck muscles so that the pole wouldn’t drive right into the soft tissue there. He held that, quivering, for a few seconds, until the orchestra made the sound of triumph, and the applause came, and then he lifted the pole off, brought it down, and the son jumped into his arms and the two of them took a bow in their matching leopard-skin caveman outfits.

Anyway, I gave Henry a bath, and saw all of his forehead, as you do when your child is in the bath — all that high, smooth forehead, as I rinsed out the shampoo, and I pointed towards the back of the tub, meaning “Look way back,” so that his head would tip back enough for me to rinse the shampoo from the hair just above his forehead, and I saw his young face, trusting me not to drip water in his eyes, his mouth chapped below one side of his lower lip because he sticks the tip of his tongue out and to the side when he is concentrating, which is a genetic behavior that he inherited from my father-in-law (who puts his tongue at the corner of his mouth and bites it while performing some act of minor manual dexterity; their heads and ears are similarly shaped, too) — and I thought, I’ve got only a few years of Henry being a small boy. Even now when he stretches his legs out, his feet push against the tap-end of the tub. I remember how proud Phoebe was to be able to touch both ends of the tub, too—“Nice growing!” I said to her. And I even remember how proud I was myself to touch both ends of the tub. Generations of people grow to a point where they touch both ends of the tub. This is all too much for me.

Good morning, it’s 4:04 a.m. and I made the coffee very strong this morning. Two extra scoops in the dark. The cat wanted to be fed, but the cat rule is not before six-thirty, otherwise there will come days, I guarantee it, when I will want to sleep and the cat will want to eat at what will have become his accustomed time. When we’re still asleep and he thinks that it is breakfast time, he slides his claws into the fabric along the side of the mattress and then plucks the bed like a giant harp.

Passing through the dining room, after an eye-moistening crunch of apple, I saw a coppery flare of sloshing liquid where my coffee mug must be. Once again I thought it must be moonlight — moonlight in the morning coffee — but no, there is no moon available. And then I recognized, by experimenting with where I held the coffee, that I was seeing a liquid reflection of the light from my new friend, the little green bulb in the smoke detector.

The mug of coffee rests on the top of the ashcan, and it gets hot on the side that is near the fire. But it stays cool on the side I sip from. This particular mug has a blue stripe around it and a small chip in the sipping area. Each time I take a sucking mouthful of tepid coffee I have the sharp-edged, chalky, chipped-ceramic experience as well, a good combination.