Ice
In early February, someone I’d never met inquired in a friendly, professional, and nonchalant way if I was well. This was via email, in an email very much not about my health at all. It was about a bit of business our organizations were transacting—invoices and deliveries and whatnot. This person was just being polite, employing the standard human niceties we use to navigate social space so as not come off like sociopaths.
But I was having a moment. The six weeks of unrelenting cold and dark had gotten to me. Especially the darkness. So much darkness is disorienting. Waking up every day in the dark. Leaving work every day in the dark. (By the end of June it’s the same in reverse, abundant brightness destabilizing the inner phototropic gyroscope.)
It’s like this every year. I’m like this every year. But still, my heedless response: “Everything is mostly well, though I do find myself wondering on single-digit mornings, as I walk my dogs across the frozen tundra in the blue-black pre-dawn, why I chose to live in a place inhospitable to human life for many months of the year. And yes, we can certainly do the thing you request, at the stated price, at the appropriate moment. Best, Brian.”
And then Winter Storm Landon happened. What was the temperature in your house when the power came back on? It was 42 degrees after 36 hours without heat at our house, and we were lucky.
Change
In the window of a fancy dress shop, an aphorism has been affixed to the window:
“You can change the world by being yourself.” This bit of self-directed positivity, according to the internet, was either uttered by Yoko Ono or Amy Poehler. It’s a fine and uplifting sentiment, but I don’t think it’s directed at me. I’m a 51-year-old cishet white guy. Me being me doesn’t change the world, it likely keeps it fairly status quo. I’m okay with that, but it leaves me wondering if I can be more myself in some way, or if that’s moving in the wrong direction.
Mute
The most thrilling sentences I’ve read so far this year are from Robert McFadden’s New York Times obituary of real estate heir and murderer Robert Durst, who died in prison in January: “On the run, he became a vagrant urinating in public, sometimes disguising himself as a mute woman. He beat his wife and, by her family’s account, forced her to have an abortion; beheaded a man he had killed as he sat in a pool of blood, and once wrote a ‘cadaver note,’ telling the Los Angeles police where to find a woman who had been shot in the head. Distraught and alone in a bathroom, he unwittingly confessed to all the killings on a live recording used in a 2015 HBO mini-series about himself.”
But I do have two quibbles with McFadden’s prose. One: How did Durst disguise himself as a “mute woman”? A disguise is an alteration of appearance to conceal one’s identity—how did Durst change his physicality for muteness? Two: There’s a lack of syntactic clarity in this phrase: “beheaded a man he had killed as he sat in a pool of blood.” The last male pronoun is confused—who is sitting in the pool of blood, Durst or his victim? Ultimately, I guess they both were, but still. This could have been better handled by the Times copy desk.
Rosé
Listening to music critic Rob Harvilla’s excellent podcast “60 Songs That Explain the ’90s,” I stop an episode on Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” to make a note of a tiny nugget from Harvilla that seems to encapsulate a world within it. His words are a snow globe that you want to shake again and again like an amazed child. Listening to Dion’s 1997 duet with Barbara Streisand, “Tell Him,” Harvilla says, is “like drinking rosé through a firehose.”
Rubadub
After we profiled Hudson-based cook and author Tamar Adler last June—she is best known for An Everlasting Meal (2012), a cult classic primer on economical cooking—my colleague Ashleigh recommended Adler’s Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revised (2018) to me. It’s been sitting on the table next to the couch for the last few months, and I pick it up from time to time when I can’t sleep and I need to disengage from the insomniac monkey mind.
Adler is an engaging companion, and the book is a writer’s cookbook rather than a chef’s litany of recipes. Her recipes are accompanied by references to old cookbooks and anecdotes from her life, including seemingly extensive European travel. After her rehabilitation of a recipe for mussel croquettes, Adler sets the scene where she first ate the dish, Ricardo’s, “a tiny bar…one street away from the sea on San Sebastian’s shell-shaped coast.” She continues: “The old men who meet at Ricardo’s to eat croquettes, make small talk, and watch Real Sociedad play soccer on a tiny television eat them accompanied by nothing but small glasses of red wine and the rubadub of early evening.”
Sheer alchemy, that. But rubadub is a surprise. Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary (it’s not in the 10th edition print volume on my desk, propping up my monitor along with Garner’s Modern American Usage) defines it as “the sound of drumbeats.” That frankly sounds too loud for what’s happening either in the sleepy Spanish bar or on the streets of San Sebastian. The word I thought Adler was after was the soundalike hubbub, but hubbub is closer to uproar than clamor, and clamor doesn’t suffice either. And din feels too pedestrian. There is something dusky and crepuscular about rubadub, a softness on the tongue that leads me to endorse Adler’s unorthodox usage.
[3/2/2022 Ed Note: Tamar Adler reached out after reading the above to inform me: “Spanish men watching soccer are REALLY loud.”]
Rubber
Loading the dogs back into the car after our morning walk—Shazam’s legs are a tad balky so he needs a boost into the backseat—I spy with my little eye a used condom on the ground, not more than two feet from my face. (To be clear, I’m not sure it was used. I did not sniff it. I didn’t stick my finger in there and poke around, nor did I send it out for DNA testing. It was a condom on the ground. Certain assumptions can be made.)
Three things happened next in quick succession. First, I felt a knee-jerk sense of revulsion: Eww, gross, I’m face-to-spunk with someone else’s semen. Second, the revulsion passed and I thought: Well, that’s kind of nice, actually. Two people consummated an act of love here. They weren’t particularly tidy but I too once had sex in cars on cold nights because that was the only place available. Third, I bent down and picked it up with an extra poop bag and threw it in the garbage can. If I didn’t pick it up, somebody else was going to have to do it—the condom was not going to crawl off on its own and die in the bushes like a wounded animal. I saved someone else—maybe a few someone elses if there was a succession of people who saw it and just left it there on the ground, a gross monument to civic disengagement—having to confront it. I was, in fact, a hero. It is said that you can change the world just by being yourself.
This article appears in March 2022.
