Baker Nicholson - A Box of Matches

I suppose if I taught at a college I would gradually drift into the role of the absent-minded professor. One of Claire’s history teachers in college showed up late to class one morning with his wife’s bra clinging to the back of his sweater. Another morning, lighting a pipe near a longhaired student, he gestured with a match. A smell of hot hair filled the room; the professor, not noticing, continued his lecture.

Once I lost a key. I spent a day looking for it before I gave up; a week later Claire found it frozen to the bottom of a piece of raw meat that she took out of the freezer. I don’t know how it got there.

Good morning, it’s 5:25 a.m., and last night was less good from the point of view of sleep. I had to pull out some of my old suicide fantasies — like the one where I’m the only passenger on a roller coaster that is fitted out with a horizontal blade at the top of one of its turns. I swoop up towards the high turn and the switchblade flips out into my path, chopping off my head. Released from my body, I tumble placidly through space, closing my eyes. Another one I tried was my self-filling grave idea, a mainstay in high school. If you kill yourself, you are being inconsiderate, because others must deal with the distasteful mess of your corpse. The self-filling grave solved that. You dig for a long time, mounding all the dirt on a sheet of plywood by the hole, and when you’ve gotten the grave just the way you want it, with the roots neatly trimmed off and a layer of soft, cool, fertile dirt in the bottom and no stones, you put a chair in the grave — not one of any value — and you clamp a revolver to the back of the chair pointing diagonally out and fitted with a remote-control trigger; and then you arrange a complicated system of pulleys and weights so that when you shoot yourself fatally and fall into the soft cool fertile earth, your fall will cross a tripwire that pulls away a prop and allows the load of dirt to slide in after you. The dumping of the dirt in turn triggers the flapping down of a large piece of biodegradable two-ply fabric, between the layers of which you have sprinkled grass seed, wildflower seed, and weed seed, in the proper proportions. After a few months, if all goes well, nobody will know where you are buried — except that the tilted sheet of plywood attached to the system of ropes and counterweights may occasion curiosity. I never end up actually dead in these fantasies. I can’t die: I have to be able to check whether, for example, the proportion of wildflowers to grass seed is too rich and must be adjusted down.

From college I once sent my grandmother what I thought was a good letter. She sent a chatty letter back, but at the top there was an arrow pointing to the date, and she had written, in larger handwriting, “By the by, always date your letters.” Her flaw-finding note hurt my feelings, but she was right, and from that moment on I became extremely date conscious. I date every piece of children’s art that we keep (on the back, in tiny lettering), and I made sure that the Fuji camera had a “date-back” feature: it burned the date, year first, in orange fiery letters on the lower right-hand side of every picture.

In the last letter my grandmother wrote us, when she asked for another picture of Phoebe to brighten the front of her refrigerator, she didn’t date the letter. No date anywhere. I had to note it on the letter myself, referring to the canceled stamp. I should have known then that she was letting go.

I took the plane down the day after she’d broken her back. My grandfather was downstairs playing his Chopin prelude. I called an ambulance; she cried out with a terrible pain-cry when they moved her a certain way on the stretcher, which they had trouble maneuvering around the hallway to her room. But she got better. She didn’t believe in the dishwasher; she stored cans of soup in its top rack. While she was in the hospital, I taught my grandfather how to heat up a can of tomato soup, and how to put a load of laundry in the washing machine.

For years she’d written (not just typed, but written) all of his scientific correspondence, and yet he insisted on moving to new universities and research centers, where he would attempt to carry on. When my grandmother was angriest at him — over the oblivious playing of the Chopin while her back was broken — she said to me in a whisper that the three fungal diseases he was known for were partly hand-me-downs from one of his teachers at Yale. What really bothered her was his autobiography. He had given it to her to edit. In the third chapter, he wrote that he proposed to her one afternoon, and then hurried back to his microscope to examine some interesting slides of coccidioidomycosis, prepared with a new kind of stain — and that was the last mention of her. “He is, I think, an affectionate person,” she said, “but he takes after his mother.” His mother was a self-absorbed and difficult birdwatcher who moved in soon after my grandparents were married and then grew vague and quarrelsome. My grandmother said, “There was one time, Emmett, when I was out for a drive, just on some errand, and there was a steep slope on one side of the road, and it was everything I could do to keep myself from driving right off the edge.” I said that I was very sorry it had been so difficult. “I’m really letting my hair down,” she said. I’d never heard that idiom before. Her hair was white with many gentle curls; it could not be let down.

She loved her four children, though, and was good to them, and I do believe that it made her happy to be a grandmother. Also she liked that she knew where everything was in her house, and that she could list all the books of the Old Testament at high speed. She gave Claire a bag of rags, for polishing things, when we were engaged; one of her aunts had given her a bag of rags and she’d much appreciated it. Always date your letters, she taught me. Thank goodness for that Fuji camera.

Good morning, it’s 5:33 a.m. and I’m feeling better about my beard. Yesterday I was going through a box of clothes and I found a dark blue sweater that I’d forgotten about. It has a silvery white pattern of small shapes in it, and these bring out the silver in my beard or at least make it look less unintentional.

We’ve run out of apples, so I’ve brought in a pear. I’ve held it up to the fire to read the label, which says “#4418 Forelle,” and then, around that, in capitals in a green border, RIPE WHEN YIELDS TO GENTLE PRESSURE. I woke up at 5:15, shivering. I could feel each shiver system with more detail, more precision, than normal. It began in my torso and then rose, vibrating, up my spine until I could feel the muscles in the back of my neck participating, and then it was gone. The duck sometimes shivers. I was glad to learn when I was a child that shivering serves a useful purpose, and is not simply a signal of cryothermic distress, although it clearly is a sign of that as well, since it feels bad. You know that if you’re shivering you must go inside or put on something warmer and you want to do that because the sensation of the shivering is unpleasant. But for some animals, who don’t have any warm places to go to, the shivering may be a neutral or even a pleasurable sensation, a way of passing the time.

I’ve thrown my eaten pear into the fire. Phoebe cleaned her room yesterday and found two lost pairs of scissors there, one of which I am going to use to clip my mustache so that when I go out for lunch today I won’t get salad dressing on it and have to use my tongue to draw some of the mustache into my mouth and suck the lunch off. My beard has gotten long enough that it can become sleep-squashed on one side and flared-out on the other. Sometimes on the weekend I don’t take a shower until late in the afternoon, and then if I go to the store I have to fluff my beard into symmetry in the rearview mirror. People seldom give me strange looks, though, so I must not seem too eccentric.