Sunset, Sunday, 21 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I’m sitting in a chair by the woodstove with my notebooks and pens, Pi the cat is on the oriental rug in the other half of the living room (it is indeed divided into halves), lying halfway on her right side, head resting on her right front leg, paw outstretched toward me. Flint the foxhound has thrown himself down diagonally across the big pet bed (a dog bed that each of the three cats believes is actually the perfect size for a cat bed) right in front of the woodstove (the closer the better, in his opinion), his head right by my foot. Lily, the blind genius just two months shy of 18, is taking a break from perching on my lap and lies directly behind me in her spot under the little table by a window, her head toward me. They all seem, to my imagination, to be trying to help direct the flow of something or other to me – maybe the foregoing is in fact the whole thing.

The robins hopping (or bobbing) along on the dead oak leaves where the snow has melted, out the windows to my right, I’m not sure they care to be part of this energy grid we’ve got going.

A copy of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, parked in the triangle of struts of a wooden stool that serves as my morning desk (or deskette) – the book’s at an angle toward me complementary to Flint’s, but I can’t say if it’s there to inspire or maybe just intimidate the hell out of me.

Pi’s up on the bench to observe the robins. I think she’s too small to deal with them, but that’s not what she’s thinking.

In the disgracefully little time I spend reading – in the morning at breakfast and in a few minutes at the end of the night – I’ve been reading Proust and Poe, respectively. (Lily just decided to get back up here. Kneecaps, prepare for claws.) Picking up the Proust, I discover I’m at a point where the narrator’s grandmother is trying to encourage in him a steadier, more reasonable temperament, which she believes will bring

more happiness and dignity to life than were ever afforded by cultivation of the opposite tastes, which led the Baudelaires, the Edgar Allan Poes, the Verlaines, and the Rimbauds into sufferings and low esteem, the likes of which my grandmother wished to spare me.

I believe that at any given moment any of us may be justified in wondering whether something or someone is messing with us.

What’s Happening?

On December 11th, I picked up some effects, papers pertaining to family history, that had belonged at one time to my aunt Elizabeth Van Doren Ankers. In the top of the box was a letter from 1947, sent from the Russian sector of Berlin, concerning a German woman my father had been engaged to, at age 19, before he came home and met my mother. This is something neither I nor any of my siblings had known about. In any case, the letter informed my grandmother – Dad’s mother – of the woman’s death in a railway accident. The date of her death: December 11th.

A few days later, I signed a contract to edit and produce a book commemorating the anniversary of the founding of a local hospice. That night, we turned on the television, as we usually do – currently, having exhausted our favorite rentable series, we’re going episode by episode through a British series, Midsomer Murders, that belongs quite solidly to the second tier.

That night’s show: murders involving the founding of a hospice.

O.K., fine. A few nights later, the episode was titled “Dead in the Water,” It included several references to rats, including a dead one. Meanwhile, we had placed a vase under a leaky pipe. Surprising that nothing like this had ever happened in 15 years of living in a house so permeable to mice, but, you guessed it: that very night, a mouse ... literally ‘dead in the water’.

(We often are aware of having a mouse or two around – no rats that I know of, although for a while we suspected we were hosting a mouse we called, thanks to The Princess Bride, a ROVUS – Rodent of Very Unusual Size.) 

The next one is not quite as unnerving. Last night, as the snowstorm was finally ending, our lights kept flickering – the power would go off for half a second – and we kept wondering, especially given our many power outages here in the country – Are we about to lose power? We filled more water jugs (important if you depend on a well) and made other preparations. We didn’t lose power, fortunately. And that meant we could watch another episode! This one just happened to take place at Christmastime (not a planned coincidence). It opens with folks placing Christmas lights outside ... and seeing them go out for a moment.

“Not another power cut!” they cry, before power comes back on – and someone inside the house shoots himself.

So, that’s it, up to the moment, I think. Perhaps I should be worried, except that strange synchronicities have happened to me many times before – just not quite so thick and fast. As for the connections to mortality, I ignore them – or take them simply as a sign of something serious. Something’s happening – I wonder if I’ll ever understand what it is.