Nicholson Baker: Traveling Sprinkler

“Oh, my mom’s not doing well. She was allergic to the painkiller and she got something called Emergency Room Psychosis, and she was having delusions, and now she’s got pneumonia on top of that. It’s just endless.”

“Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Chuck’s away consulting in Korea, which is frustrating. And Raymond’s been in Boston a lot visiting his girlfriend. I miss having him around.”

“Of course,” I said. Raymond is Nan’s son, a tall amiable long-haired young man of about nineteen who’s into music. Nan invited me to his high school graduation, but I couldn’t go because I was giving a reading at U Penn.

I thought maybe I should hug Nan, but I didn’t because it was late at night and she was wearing a bathrobe. I said, “I’m right here, as you know.” I gestured toward the henhouse. “I can easily do the chickens.”

“Thanks, I really like doing the chickens, but yes, if I have to go back to Toronto, I’d appreciate some help. I’m sorry to lay this on you. Nice moon.”

“Very nice moon,” I said. “Also, I was thinking I could water your tomatoes with my traveling sprinkler. If it would help in any way.”

“That’s very kind of you, but Raymond should be coming back tomorrow,” she said. “I guess I should go in. Nice to see you. You’re up late.”

“I like looking at the sky,” I said.

“Me, too.” Then she reconsidered. “Actually, there is something you could do that would be very helpful.”

“Sure, what?”

She said that Raymond had been working like a fiend on some songs and he seemed happy about them and he’d been writing the lyrics in a little notebook, but he didn’t want to play them for her because they were inappropriate. “I guess they’re hip-hop or something,” she said. “He likes the fact that you’re a poet, and I think he’d like you to hear them. Or I’d like you to hear them.”

I said sure, I’d love to hear his songs. “I’m no expert on Biggie Smalls, but I just got a guitar and it would be fun to hear what he’s been up to.” Then suddenly I had a thought. “Why don’t you and Raymond come over sometime and we can have dinner and then he can play me his songs and you can put your fingers in your ears. I could get takeout sushi.”

“That’s a nice idea,” she said. “Raymond loves California roll.”

“Great,” I said. So Nan and Raymond are coming to dinner. Fortunately the downstairs bathroom’s still clean from the video couple’s visit. I’ve got to get some songs together to play for them. Casually available for singing, if it comes to that. I’ve got to be able to hold my head up.

• • •

I’M OUT IN MY KIA RIO with the door open at eleven in the morning, the day after the barking deer episode. Get back on the horse. Today there is only one agitated bird. A nice thing happened to me last night — Nan asked me for help. I feel honored. I wish there was something I could do to help her, or her mother. All politics is local. I wish I could write Nan a song. I gave it a try, using some of the chords I’ve learned, an A minor chord and a D minor chord and a seventh chord. The chorus was: “I wish there was something I could do for you.”

My fingertips are profoundly numb from too much guitar. They feel like little white islands.

• • •

HEY HEY HEY. Let me try to get it together. Deep breath now. Hide the things that you’re most embarrassed by. Nobody’s going to care, but hide them anyway. I have so much in my head that’s screaming to get out. Politely requesting passage. Sometimes knowing things and knowing that you’ll never unknow them, unless you say them, is really unbearable.

Here’s my Traveling Sprinkler file. It’s fat with patent records that I’ve printed out from the patent office. Some people call them walking sprinklers. I talked to a man in North Platte, Nebraska, named Ed Saulsbury, who restored traveling sprinklers. Back before I got distracted by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I was going to write a poem about Ed, and I bought two very interesting vintage sprinklers on eBay. I wrote part of the poem and then I put it away, and then a few months ago, I thought I’d call Ed and see how he was doing, and it turned out that he’d died in 2007. He’d been a utility pole climber, servicing power lines.

In New and Selected Poems, Volume Two , Mary Oliver has a prose poem about a black jet flying over a hummingbird. “All narrative is metaphor,” she says. Or is it “All metaphor is narrative”?

• • •

I GOT OUT OF THE SHOWER this morning and didn’t want to go to Planet Fitness, so I put a pillow under my bottom and hooked my feet under the bed and did some sit-ups while reading a poem by Léonie Adams. There’s a scene in one of John Wayne’s last movies, where he’s puffy-faced and sick from cancer, which he got either from playing Genghis Khan in a radioactive valley downwind of the Yucca Flat nuclear test site, or from smoking four packs of Camels a day. In the movie, Wayne dies in a big shoot-out, with Opie of The Andy Griffith Show looking on sadly, but before he dies he rides for a long time on a horse-drawn streetcar. He has a talk with a fresh-faced young woman and remembers his love for Lauren Bacall. Then, just as he’s about to disembark from the streetcar, he gives the conductor a fancy whorehouse pillow that he’s been carrying around with him. “These old bones surely thank you,” says the conductor, sitting on the pillow.

I thought of John Wayne’s red pillow as I did my sit-ups and read Léonie Adams. I got to the second-to-last line of the poem: “My every leaf leans forth upon the day.” Good line. Adams was influenced by the Elizabethan songsters. She wanted to sing densely, like Campion and Dowland. She taught at Bennington and had a brief affair with Edmund Wilson. Wilson, who was married, got her pregnant, and she had a miscarriage and grieved over it. He was such a low, mean, drunken bug of a critic. He jeered at Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and wrote a vicious but accurate parody of Archibald MacLeish for The New Yorker called “The Omelet of A. MacLeish.” MacLeish was never the same after Edmund Wilson’s parody. He began writing urgent bad speeches in favor of intervention in the Spanish Civil War, and then Roosevelt asked him to be Librarian of Congress.

I’ve been reading about protest songs on the Internet. Somebody recommended one called “Living Darfur.”

• • •

BEST BUY GIVES YOU one free lesson if you buy a guitar, so I signed up with a man who teaches progressive rock. When I think of beginning lessons again, though, it really hurts. All those years of bassoon lessons I took. All those Milde études I learned. All those years of soaking my reed in a baby food jar and croaking it to see that it was still healthy and hearing the tick tock of my red plastic Taktell metronome perched on the edge of the piano. My teacher, Bill Brown, was a student of Norman Herzberg, the great studio bassoonist in Los Angeles. You can hear Herzberg’s bassoon in E.T. , in Jaws , in Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons, and in the theme music to The Alfred Hitchcock Hour . Herzberg was a Zen Buddhist of bassoon, and Billy Brown taught me his method of meditating while practicing. The meditation was called “long tones.”

A long tone was a note that you played for sixteen beats of the Super-Mini-Taktell metronome. You started as softly as you could, at pppppp , the way you would start the low E in Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie Pathétique , and you held that for four beats and then you did a very slow and very perfectly graduated increase in sound, letting just the right amount of air into the reed and never varying the pitch and never adding any falsification of vibrato, and eventually you were playing as loudly as you could and yet with perfect control, for four more beats, squandering all your lung air, but you still had to keep steady and do a perfect diminuendo for four beats and go all the way back down to an extreme pianissimo for four beats. One day you’d do long tones on a low E and the next maybe you’d concentrate on a middle A flat, and you would do this for every note in the full range of the instrument. This was discipline. And while you did it you emptied your mind of everything except that note — which you were hoping would become, would truly achieve, the fully rounded bassoonistic sort of note that you’d heard the great virtuosi play, men like Herzberg, or Bernie Garfield in Philadelphia, or Maurice Allard in Paris, or Simon Kovar, wherever he was. Simon Kovar had edited a number of practice books for the bassoon, including the Milde études and the Pierné études, and he’d recorded a performance of Mozart’s bassoon concerto. He was one of our minor deities. Gabriel Pierné was a conservatory friend of Debussy’s and a sometime conductor. He conducted the first performance of Stravinsky’s Firebird , which has a brain-melting bassoon lullaby in it.