I feel like I don’t write enough about what’s actually around me.
Over the weeks and months, this Substack has evolved into a set of essays about a ridiculously diverse set of subjects. Basically, I write about whatever I’m thinking about at the moment. But interestingly, not that many of them are about the here and now. It feels like it’s gotten a little remote, a little theoretical and abstract, like a debutante in line at In-N-Out.
This is kind of weird. Essayists LOVE to write about the immediate, with the occasional exception of people like Lewis Thomas, who wrote about science or Annie Dillard, who wrote about nature. Here’s E.B. White, one of the greatest of 20th century essayists, for example:
We went fishing the first morning. I felt the same damp moss covering the worms in the bait can, and saw the dragonfly alight on the tip of my rod as it hovered a few inches from the surface of the water. It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and there had been no years. The small waves were the same, chucking the rowboat under the chin as we fished at anchor …
Right? Right!!??
Quieting Down
The challenge writing about the immediate presents is that my life is very, very quiet. There’s not a lot going on. That things have turned out this way is a huge surprise for me. I’m a massive extrovert, big and loud, and I loved a party. And a drink. And a surprise. Until very, very late in life, for example, I always lived in some kind of situation in which visitors, relatives, crushes or interesting people would sort of crash in and out of my house, including living in it. Or around it. Or near it.
I loved the chaos, the unpredictability, the surprises. There were a LOT of parties. I’ve lived this way since I was about twenty, with occasional, unsuccessful attempts at a more conventional life. And now? I live out in the country. I have an unbelievably boring daily routine. What is there to write about?
Maybe a lot. Solitude concentrates things. When you do the same thing over and over, in the same place, day after day after day, you become very good at it. And you begin to notice the details, and to ponder them. This is the raw material of my life at this point. It’s not a way station, or a distraction. It may be the show itself.
An awful lot of religions address the sacredness of the day-to-day. Monks build furniture or bake bread. Buddhists say: “Seek enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Find enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” Spending a lot of time alone has taught me, I hope, to pay attention to the minor-seeming parts of my life. They hold a lot of lessons, I’m learning. Starting with the really basic – waking up in the morning.
Waking Up
I begin my day by waking up. Most people do, right? The whole business of needing time to gradually awaken is totally alien to me. I’m one of those people who is up in an instant, and unless there’s a very compelling (wink) reason not to, I am overcome with an immediate urge to get going. Let’s go! What time is it? Get up! So I do. My nocturnal, later-sleeping friends hate this about me.
I slide out of bed, and after determining what part of my body hurts due to the previous day’s workout, I walk through a door (as quietly as possible, particularly the closing-the-door part) and into my office. The office doubles as a kennel -- Koda is always either stretched out on the floor, or in his box. He is usually seriously asleep, and will kind of open an eye when he sees me. I will pat him, remind him that he’s the best dog ever, put on my bathrobe, and go into the kitchen.
Interacting with Koda in the morning is trickier than it sounds. Every morning, when I see him, I’m reminded that he’s a BIG dog. He sort of fills the frame. Huskies are also very energetic, and kind of nuts. If he gets the idea that it’s playtime, or a walk is imminent, he’ll start jumping around. I need to greet him without riling him up, so I’m very careful at this stage, a little distant and a little chilly. With my dog. A polite “good morning” and a couple of pats, and that’s it. Usually, he goes back to sleep.
With these details taken care of, it’s time to make coffee.
Grinding coffee is a noisy undertaking, and I don’t want to disturb everyone else in the house, so I close all the doors to/from the kitchen. This traps Koda in my office. Sorry, man. The two main recipients of morning coffee in my household prefer radically different forms of the stuff. I like mine almost black, with just enough milk to take the edge off. She prefers it around 40% milk, like some little French girl in a storybook. She also doesn’t care if it’s hot, which is fortunate, because I get up two hours before she does. Mine comes in a big mug – either the Skytop Lodge ceramic one, or the Yeti steel one. Hers comes in a water glass.
Remembering
Every object in this day-to-day comes with a story and a memory. Skytop is a beautiful old resort in the mountains of Pennsylvania. It has 5,000 acres, and despite the arrival of modernity, is still about going outside and doing things – hiking, tennis, golf, fly-fishing – and ending the day with an elegant dinner, ideally while sporting a sunburn. My grandfather was a guest when they opened a hundred years ago. My parents went there, and took me and my siblings. I went there, and I’ve taken my daughters there.
I love it because it’s very old-fashioned, and retains the graciousness and civility of a previous era. In the old days, families would spend the entire summer there. They’d travel up from New York, Philadelphia, Washington. The wife and children would stay, and the husband/father would remain in the city and come up on weekends, and for a week or two at some point. It was a destination. The dining room still has a dress code. Sitting at breakfast by the window in the dining room with a cup of coffee, the New York Times, and the view of the gardens outside is, for me, the height of luxury, of continuity, of peace, unless, as often happens, something in the Times pisses me off. The mug reminds me of the place, one of my favorite in the world.
Because I am a purist, a Spartan and a Stoic, I use a French press, the most basic way imaginable of making coffee. I’ve heard of cowboy coffee, which is allegedly even more primitive, but not by much. Carafe, grounds, boiling water.
The carafe is glass, fits into a frame with a handle, costs $17.99 on Amazon. Beans: a cup of either Peet’s Major Dickason’s or, my preference, Heart of Darkness from the Santa Cruz Roasting Company. Although we disagree on coffee format, we both love very strong coffee and these two fit the bill. Turn on the big grinder, dump the beans in, and thirty seconds later, we’re ready to go. There are always a few beans that stubbornly rattle around in the hopper before finally surrendering to the blades.
The ground beans get dumped into the carafe. I have a love/hate relationship with this thing. I keep breaking them – it’s glass – and it’s a pain in the ass to clean. When I wash it, I have to reach in and scoop out the wet grounds with a cupped hand, which is messy and not fun at all.
The bean-grinding taken care of, a kettle is then put on the stove, as full as I can get it. I’m not completely sure why I always do this – I have some weird concern that when I’m pouring the boiling water into the carafe, there won’t be enough. So, I always overfill the kettle, meaning that when it does come to a boil, which happens fast due to our antique gas stove, some always spills over and makes a little mess.
The business of getting the hot kettle over to the sink to be poured into the carafe is also a challenge, because of bad design. The kettle handle gets hot. I have to find a dishtowel to hold it. I always forget to do this, and have to hunt for one. It’s usually hanging on the handle of the cupboard on the other side of the kitchen. I go and fetch it, and use it to carry the kettle across the kitchen, and to pour hot water into the carafe.
When I do this, the carafe is parked in the sink because I usually fill it to the absolute top. The grounds float to the surface, and the next stage in this ritual is giving the thing a good stirring, so the grounds remix with the hot water and do their thing. I remember learning in a coffee shop in San Jose from a remarkably pretentious barista that this is called “breaking the bloom.” Silly, yes, but evocative. A chopstick is ideal for this, but anything will work – a butter knife, a spoon, in a pinch, the handle of a kitchen gadget. When the grounds at the top are reintroduced to the water, I let the mixture sit for a minute, and then it’s showtime.
I insert the plunger, and push it down. Depending on how I ground the coffee, which is sort of a crapshoot, this can take sixty slow seconds and lot of effort, or five seconds and no effort. With the plunger all the way down, I now have coffee. I pour an ounce or so down the drain, to get rid of the stray grounds that are always collected in the spout, and the rest goes into the mug. Add a little milk and voila. The day begins. Consciousness has been consecrated.
I just did the math. I have woken up in the morning 22,648 times. I’ve woken up from nightmares and from dreams that were so great I wanted to remain asleep. I’ve woken up everywhere from Singapore to London. I’ve woken up with women I’d slept next to for decades, and women whose names I couldn’t remember. I’ve woken up on the floor, and in the Ritz-Carlton. I’ve woken up drunk, which is an interesting experience.
We spend one-third of our life asleep, dreaming, unaware of what’s going on around us, motionless and lost inside our own heads, thoughts, fears, needs. We’re as vulnerable as freshly hatched sea turtles. The best sleep I’ve ever gotten, by the way, has been next to one of my daughters when they were very little. Laura, especially, was a champion sleeper. Children sleep very deeply, are absolutely motionless, and provide this wonderful reassuring stillness. It’s hard to wake up, roll over, see your child fast asleep next to you and be worried about anything.
And then every morning, thanks to some mysterious process that happens deep in our brains, we return to the world around us. We’re refreshed. We have a sense of energy, of cleanliness, of hope. Fatigue is gone. Waking up is so mysterious, and yet, it’s the most common experience imaginable. You can decide to fast for a day or two, but staying awake that long is impossible.
As the earth turns, and dawn breaks and light moves across the surface of the planet, millions and millions of people, to say nothing of animals, all do this together, at about the same time. It’s like a wave moving over the world. Everyone wake up, everyone fall asleep. Over and over again, in steady rhythm. We surface and dive together, like dolphins. People are born, and join in. People pass away, and drop out. But we all do this together, over and over and over, for our entire lives, and don’t even think about it.
Very elderly people develop the habit of simply dropping off to sleep in the middle of doing something. It’s a fascinating interruption in the world’s rhythm. My mother did this. During the final years of her life, she was largely confined to chairs. Because of circulation problems, she needed to keep one foot propped up. She would be sitting there talking, or reading, or something, and somewhat abruptly, she’d suddenly close her eyes and be fast asleep.
One of my favorite memories of this was during a car trip. It was one of those beautiful summer days in Western New York State when the hills are covered in trees. Meadows are green. Rivers and streams are flowing. The sky is blue, and filled with puffy white clouds, floating high above, with shadows that move over the hills. We had gone on a long drive to Jamestown, where she’d grown up. We’d had lunch, and were driving home on the highway.
The talk had gradually wound down between us and stopped, the comfortable silence of a mother and son, who’ve known each other all my life, and for sixty years of hers. The hum of the engine, the warm sunlight, the view out the window of the part of the world where she’d lived for her entire life, all slowed time down, maybe stopped it. I took my eyes off the road for a second, and realized she’d fallen asleep.
The bright sunlight illuminated every detail. The cloud of white hair, which once was absolutely black. The cheek, which once was smooth and young, and was now seamed. Her hands also showed the results of ninety years of life and work. She was now a very old, fragile woman, who’d fallen asleep in the warm sun and would need help to get out of the car. Was she dreaming? Of what? I had the same thought I’d had the first time I’d taken one of my daughters out in a stroller, on the streets of Philadelphia: “Sleep in peace for as long as you like. I’ll watch over you.”
And then she woke up, as if nothing had happened.
Oh, look. I’m not talking about the here and now anymore.