Baker Nicholson - A Box of Matches

Also, if you sit your activity is silent; whereas if you stand and you are lucky enough to hit water, the cat wakes up at the noise and may pluck the bed.

Passing me by, passing me by. Life is. Five years ago I planned to write a book for my son called The Young Sponge . I was going to give it to him as a birthday present. It was going to be the adventures of a cellulose kitchen sponge that somehow in the manufacturing is made with a bit of real sea sponge in it, giving it sentient powers. It lives by the sink but it has yearnings for the deep sea; it thirsts for the rocky crannies and the briny tang. Then Nickelodeon came up with a show, and a pretty good one, about a sponge. My idea was instantly dead: my son would think I was merely copying a TV show. Nickelodeon had acted, I had only planned to act.

Speaking of creative torpor, when my half-eaten apple fell off the ashcan just now, it occurred to me that I don’t really know what the Ashcan school of art is. Yesterday evening I felt the fireplace ash. It was cool, finally: deep-red bits can stay alive for many hours. I shoveled some of it into the tin container with a lid that was here when we moved in — it must be the ashcan. The ash was a very light grey, almost white, and very fine — composed mostly, I imagine, of clay, which doesn’t burn when paper burns. Henry, who was watching me, said: “Dad, think of all the stuff we’ve burned, and it all goes down to this much.” It was only the third time I’ve shoveled out the fireplace. The ungraspableness of history, which can seem thrilling or frightening depending on your mood, can assert itself at any moment. I just found another small bedroll of lint in my automatic lint-accumulator and I tossed it into the fire: there was an almost imperceptible flare of differently colored fire — ah! lint fire —and it was gone. That is part of why I like looking at these burning logs: they seem like years of life to me. All the particulars are consumed and left as ash, but warm and life-giving as they burn. Meanwhile the duck is outside in the cold. She piles her excretions high in one corner, according to Claire, and she has a little declivity in the wood chips, where she fluffs up her feathers, but she’s got to be cold out there. She will be so happy when things thaw and she has the mud along the creek to root around in. Yesterday I touched the feathers on the back of her neck: they don’t look as if they would repel water quite as well as they did in the high summer, because she hasn’t been able to swim in water. Yesterday, also, I heard her take off behind me and I turned to see an egg-shaped, cross-eyed form with windmilling arms flying towards me at head height. Often she changes course right at the very end of her flight, and this time she landed on an icy patch; her feet went back like a penguin’s and she scooted a little. But she was unhurt.

I’m still fascinated by the ability of her feet to withstand cold. The cold must go right through that thick layer of skin into her leg bones. What she wants is more blueberries. Claire bought frozen blueberries for her and defrosted a cup of them in the microwave. You can feel strange worries about the nature of consciousness when you try to imagine what a duck is thinking about all night closed up in a doghouse with a bowl of slowly freezing water and some food pellets, with a screen door over the opening to keep out coyotes and a blanket over the screen door. Every so often, she roots a little in the shavings — looking for what? She wants grubs and worms, but there aren’t any now, too cold. Why does she exist? We as a family exist to be nice to the duck, and the duck exists to puzzle us. Who would have known that ducks make desperate sounds, trembly murmuring squeals, when you hold out a handful of pellets for them? Who would have known that she prefers to be fed by hand than to have the food in her bowl? What she likes best is to have you hold out to her a handful of pellets over the warm water. That way when she jabs at them with her beak, some fall into the water, and she can rap away at them under the water, snuffling through her beak-nostrils, and then come back up and get some dry pellets again, up and down.

She seems less interested in the cat’s anus: he keeps a distance and has returned to his primary mission, asserting the rights of private property against neighborhood coon cats.

I just laid a Quaker Oats container on the fire, which had burned down to a dim red glow. The cylinder flamed, blindingly, and the Quaker in the black hat, smiling, was engulfed. What is left now looks like some war-blackened martello tower on a distant coast. I looked over to the window to see if there was any light yet outside, but the curtains were drawn: Claire sometimes closes them at night because they are, she’s right, a kind of insulation. But I think I’ll pull one of them open now so that I can see the hints of light outside as I work.

“It’s completely dark,” I whispered when I pulled back the curtains. The glass, though, had a good smell of summer-afternoon dust in it.

Good morning, it’s 5:44 a.m., and I’m up late again, but I’ve got four big old logs on the fire, each with a layer of burn-scabs from yesterday evening that break off when I rearrange them. The coffee is extra strong this morning; I poured in some from the less good bag so that we wouldn’t run out of our reserves in the good bag. Phoebe is disappointed in herself because she didn’t say interesting things when a restaurateur came to dinner last night. She appeared, dressed with great care in a T-shirt with tiny sleeves, her bangs perfect in a fourteen-year-old way, in the living room, and listened while the restaurateur told Claire about his drive through Nova Scotia, and I carved off bits of nutty cheese log and scraped them onto crackers. Finally, the restaurateur asked Phoebe how her school was. Phoebe described her science project, in which she baked three small cakes, each made with a different brand of baking soda, to see which one would rise more. “Hm,” said the restaurateur. Phoebe went quiet again. Afterward she said, “I wanted to ask him how you get to be a chef and instead I just sat there.”

“You told him about your baking-soda project.”

“I’m a boring person,” she said.

I told her that she wasn’t a boring person, and she insisted that she was, and I countered that she wasn’t, and then we got onto the subject of the unnecessary repaving of Calkins Road, which took us to the subject of war crimes, and that we discussed till ten-fifteen, which is why I got up late.

I’m glad there are fifty-two weeks in the year — it seems like the right number, and there is the interesting congruity with a deck of cards. But there really should be more than twelve months. January is one of my favorites, and we’re getting towards the end of it. My children are practically grown, and my beard — I’m not at all content with my beard. Fortunately February is a pretty good month, too, so I’ll still be okay. They’re all pretty good months, actually, it’s just that there aren’t enough of them. On New Year’s morning this year Claire got us to drive to the ocean to watch the sun rise. That outing was what made me suddenly understand that I needed to start reading Robert Service again and getting up early — that New Year’s outing combined with the time a few months ago when I took the night sleeper car from Washington to Boston and woke up in my bunk and pulled the curtain to look out the window and saw that we were in the station in New York City, and I realized that I was passing through a very important center of commerce without seeing a single street and that something similar was happening in my life.

On New Year’s morning we packed two thermoses, one of hot chocolate and one of coffee, and we drove for half an hour, the four of us, to the little parking lot at the beach. There was a bitter wind that made our pants flap, but several people were there with their dogs, looking out at the places on the horizon where they expected the sun to rise. Some seemed to know where it would come up and some didn’t; one old couple, bundled and hooded in matching orange puffy coats, stood still, halfway down to the water, mitten in mitten. I figured that they would know where the sun would appear and, yes, they did. It underwent some waistline contortions, as rising suns so often do, narrowing first and then oozing out as if from a puncture in the seam of the horizon, and then the sky around the puncture point became inconceivably blue.