Fruitless errands and forgotten silver

I shouldn't have stayed up till 12:30 this morning. While I did sleep much better than last night, I didn't sleep nearly long enough...all too soon the morning sun came in through that uncurtained window and woke me up in an irrevocable fashion.

The day dawned brilliantly sunny, a bit cooler and less humid than yesterday. The spare bedroom in which I've been staying is on a corner of the house, and the morning sun lights it up in a wonderfully cheerful way, streaming through the stained-glass Tyrannosaurus rex in the window (a gift from Donald's colleagues).

The bathroom is also sunny, but it's a less attractive place to be. Donald spends a good deal of time here smoking his pipe, and over the past 14 years the walls and (especially) the ceiling have become stained and mottled with the yellow-brown condensate of all that tobacco smoke. The ceiling looks positively leprous, because the tobacco condensate has pooled in the low places, leaving it dappled with large, evil-looking dark-brown pustules ranging in size from that of a nickel to a silver dollar. It's not pleasant to look up in this bathroom.

I brushed my teeth and took a shower, taking care not to touch the yellowed tile walls. At least there's no shortage of hot water in the shower, even though the hot water faucets in the bathroom and kitchen sinks broke or clogged years ago and Donald has never bothered to fix them—he figures cold water is good enough for washing your hands and face, just as toilet paper is good enough for blowing your nose.

After a breakfast that used up most of my remaining granola, I called up the only car rental place I'd been able to find that was within walking distance and inquired about getting a car for today. I was told that it would cost $44.95 plus tax if I returned the car by tonight. That seemed awfully steep for a one-day rental (I had been expecting something more like $30), and after talking it over with Donald, I decided that we could accomplish most of our errands by bus and on foot. So we headed off to the bank, about three blocks away, and then took the number 500 bus to Home Depot.

There we were pretty quickly able to find a microwave oven that suited Donald's needs perfectly and was on sale at $69.95, but they were out of stock. They offered to sell us their display model for $10 off, but when we examined it, it was dented and the control panel pushed in—not a safe gamble. So they promised to call us when they had more in stock, probably toward the end of this week. That's frustrating, because it means Donald will have to get Hugh to take him out there to pick one up...and as long as his current microwave is just noisy and not actually broken, I suspect that may never happen. I did pick up a couple of 10B:C dry chemical (baking soda) fire extinguishers to replace the extremely old ones he has now. But that didn't seem like much to show for a two-hour outing.

My real failure of the day was that I didn't get Donald over to the medical center to get a new doctor. He's diabetic (and off medication—his last G.P. took him off just before she moved to Florida), his sight is deteriorating...and after seeing what blindness has been like for my friends Walt Emery and Frank Lewin, I don't want him to go down that road. Blindness above all means loss of independence, and that is the one thing Donald—a perennial loner like me—would be least able to deal with. He hasn't had a checkup in two years, and at 76 that isn't something to skip. He needs a doctor.

But I just didn't push hard enough, and that errand got postponed. I'm going to end up extracting a promise to do it after I've left, and hoping that he will get around to it. I don't intend to start making arrangements for him. As long as he is mentally competent, he'll make his own choices even if they are bad ones. He's way too independent to let me do things for him, and I don't want to be in that position (although it could come to that someday). By the same token, I've never pushed him to stop smoking his pipe. It's his choice. But I worry about him just the same.

After we got back, I heated up the leftover chicken and pasta from last night's dinner (which he admits today was the best restaurant food he'd eaten in years) and we split it between us. An afternoon of wide-ranging conversation covered topics from Civil War history...to why Herbert Hoover—a very competent guy all around, an excellent engineer and a fine diplomat—got a bad rap...to possible reasons for FDR's characteristic head jerks (was he emphasizing his points with head movements because he had limited mobility in his upper body? No—it was because he was holding onto the lectern with both hands to support himself)...to coal mining technologies and the Spring Hill, Nova Scotia disasters of the Fifties, which inspired Ewan McColl's song that still sends chills down my spine:

In the town of Spring Hill, Nova Scotia
Down in the heart of the Cumberland Mine
There's blood on the coal and the miners lie
In the roads that never saw sun nor sky
Roads that never saw sun nor sky.

In the town of Spring Hill you don't sleep easy
Often the earth will tremble and roll
When the earth is restless, miners die
Bone and blood is the price of coal
Bone and blood is the price of coal.

We spent a good deal of time talking about mining. Donald has a geologist's knowledge of the subject (any paleontologist is half geologist) and a good deal of firsthand experience to boot: anyone growing up in western Pennsylvania in the Thirties and Forties has seen plenty of coal. Since coal deposits are rich in fossils, Donald and Lucy made many collecting to trips to Linton and other eastern Ohio coal-country towns right across the border from Pittsburgh.

And after he retired, Donald and his University of Texas colleague Bob Hook got a small grant from the National Geographic Society that allowed them to lease a couple of piles of cannel coal—stuff too high in sulfur to be legally sold—which they spent seven years going through, finding and describing many new and interesting extinct species.

Two or three times a year Bob would fly up from Texas, they'd drive out to the property of the East Fairfield Coal Company in eastern Ohio, and spend a few days happily pawing through tons of coal. Then they'd bring back the specimens to Donald's house and he'd spend the next few months preparing them in his cluttered basement laboratory (grimy work with coal-embedded fossils!) and writing them up for publication in scientific papers that bore his and Bob's names.

I had been meaning to show Donald a movie sometime during this visit. Now I wished I'd brought along my copy of "October Sky," the true story of a boy born into a small coal-mining community in West Virginia who wanted to become a rocket engineer...and against all odds succeeded. It would have been a good follow-on to our conversation about mining, as there are plenty of scenes in the mine.

But what I had instead proved to be very enjoyable for Donald. Since he has no TV, we sat side by side on the couch with my PowerBook in his lap, and watched "Forgotten Silver," a tongue-in-cheek documentary about the life of a fictional New Zealand film pioneer who purportedly invented sound movies, color film, closeups and traveling shots and the feature-length film—all decades before D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance," "The Jazz Singer" and so on. It's a dead-on parody of old film footage, and anyone who is any kind of old-film buff will catch the references and have a ball watching this skillfully faked and quite funny documentary. We both enjoyed it very much.

After the film, Donald offered me a choice of Dinty Moore beef stew, Spaghetti-Os or canned chicken for supper. I elected to have a slice of apple pie instead. Not a very balanced or a very filling meal (my stomach is growling right now)...but I just couldn't stomach the alternatives!

I'm going to get to bed relatively early tonight—10:00 p.m.—and tomorrow morning (hopefully not too late) Hugh will come over and bring me back to Gertie. Then I'll head out of town in an easterly direction, bound for Caledonia State Park and my friend Nan Carpenter, who recently retired from the company where I work and moved to a town near the park.