Fifth of July

I went to visit my mother for the Fourth of July and stayed for a couple of days. Brother and SIL were there too. The day of the Fourth itself was very low key. Lots of food, plenty of beer, splashing in the pool ... good, relaxing, holiday stuff.

The Fifth got busier. That is to say, it didn’t start off busy. But at some point in the afternoon Brother and SIL went out into the garage to straighten up some of the stacks of boxes and do a little bit more on a project of cleaning things out that they had begun helping my mom with last weekend.

A couple boxes here led to a couple more boxes there. There were two or three boxes of books of my dad’s — mostly self-help or “You too can be a millionaire” books, though I spied a volume of history on the conflict between Keynes and Hayek that I grabbed. And then I heard, “Hosea, you better get out here. There’s a box labeled H&W’s books that you need to take a look at.”

“Need to take a look at.” The books had been eaten through in so many places they were unreadable. But more than that — the pages had also been pasted together, as if they were reverting to wood pulp instead of paper. In some cases I could still pry the pages apart to read words; in other cases all that was left was the shape of a book and a splash of color from the cover, that crumbled into dust when I touched it. And there was some very solid brown waste product filling in the gaps between the books and the side of the box, like a hard and very durable mortar cementing bricks of ash. What the ever-loving hell could have done this? Rats? Termites? No clue. But it was stupefying.

There was maybe one book salvageable from that box — one of Wife’s, with an inscription from a couple of her students back in 1989. But by the time I’d got to the bottom here came more boxes of books from the same shelf, and could I go through those? These ones were labeled as Tartuffe's books and they were mostly in the same shape: what had been a complete 20-volume hardbound set of the Bollingen edition of the Collected Works of Carl Jung in pristine condition had been reduced to maybe five volumes in usable shape. (I adopted the rough criterion — not always consistently applied — that the pages had to be spotless except for debris that could be brushed off, and the bindings could not have holes going all the way through.) The rest went into the trash.

Then there were a couple more boxes from the same shelf: one of music and one of cookbooks. I let my mother go through those ones. By the time that shelf was empty — and vacuumed clean — Brother and SIL had started to tackle other boxes, at least to understand what was inside them. This included three or four more boxes of books with my name on them — not destroyed this time, thank heavens. But some of these were Wife’s books; do they really need to be in my mother’s garage? I culled those ones. Then ... there’s a big shelf inside the house with my books too. I combed through that looking for books that were plainly Wife’s. In the end I had three very full boxes of her books, which I put in the back of my car. This freed up enough space on the shelves indoors to house those of my books from the garage that I still want to keep ... or, more accurately, those of my books from the garage which were fully intact and also satisfied one of two other criteria: either I want to keep it, or else I’m not certain that I want to discard it.

So the books are out of the garage.

We stopped for lunch about 4:30-5:00, mostly leftovers from the Fourth. About 9:00pm, Brother shooed me out of the garage and told me to stop helping, as nicely as he could given how hot and exhausted he was. My mother figured that applied to her too. So I went for a swim (finally!) to cool off. Brother and SIL finished reassembling the stacks of remaining boxes and closing up the garage about 10:00.

Does anybody want any dinner?

God no, just gallons of water.

Do we have any beer left?

Looks like we are all out.

After this much hot work we should have cold beer.

Yeah, that’s true.

So while I was clambering out of the pool and drying off, Brother and SIL went to the store. They came back with beer, noodles, and some pre-made vegan red sauce; distributed the beer (cold, bless their hearts!), boiled the noodles, and started heating the sauce. So they had food ready about 11:30pm. (To be clear, we’d been sitting around the table talking over the beer while it cooked. Before they got back I had been prepared to make do with ice water and a little bourbon — I kept thinking I was going to bed any minute and might not be still up when they arrived — so I had those both out when they got back. SIL joined me in having a splash of bourbon on the side of her beer.)

Anyway, when the food was ready at 11:30 — that’s about when my mother packed it in. I kept thinking I’d better do the same, because I had an early morning phone call for work that I figured I had better join even though technically I'm on vacation. But the noodles also looked good. So I turned in right around midnight, and got up just before 6:00 this morning (for a 7:00 call).

What’s the plan for today? My mother will be out all day: she has tax clients at the office in the morning, and then a couple different doctor’s appointments in the afternoon. SIL is still asleep. Brother says he wants to do just a little organizing in the garage yet, and then draw my mother a map so she knows where things are now. Then he figures they will go home. I had kind of cleared my schedule until Sarah House tomorrow, and I don’t get down here to see my mother nearly as often as Brother and SIL do. Also it is supposed to get up to 112° today, and I have no air conditioning -- neither in my car nor in my apartment. But this house has it. So as my mom left for work this morning I told her I’d stick around another day, and she looked very pleased.