Another Solution

Feet hurt. Twenty trips to the basement, then a hundred trips the length of the main gallery. A huge and amazing spread of stuff. We have to guess what some things even are. I take a few books (I'm allowed), a Wodehouse and a huge biography of Faulkner (Frederick Karl) plus a few thrillers for stormy Mondays. Already hot by noon and by 4 o'clock the air is hot to breathe. The house is 87 degrees when I get home, but I have club sandwiches from a meeting in the board room and don't have to fix dinner. So damned dirty from hauling up dirty items from a dirty place, I strip and pour half-a-gallon of water over my head on the deck, lather up, shampoo my hair, and rinse with a gallon of beautifully tepid slightly pickled water, from a new bucket I'm breaking into the system. Exhausted, fall asleep on the sofa. Beautiful blue cloudless morning and I head into the museum early, to read for an hour before work, on someone else's air-conditioning tab. Already warm at 7:30. More hauling stuff for the auction, then Tom the Box Artist shows up with some more boxes and D and I have our box tutorial. It is quite amazing to me that if you flap fold a box, these are 18x18x18, and then carefully engage the flap-folds of one to another, you can actually screw them together. I've used boxes my entire life and never came up with that. It's very cool. He uses this technique to build posts, then hot-glues lintels and builds structural forms. Check the museum web site, I think D has some pictures on there. One of the artists from Cream Of The Crop, who had been on vacation, shows up to get her piece, the lashed together stick figure, but she couldn't borrow a truck and we have to cut the figure into pieces to fit it into her Toyota. Zoe, and I quite like her, says not to worry, she can reconstruct the piece, just cut the figure off at the knees, saw off the shield, and the spear can poke out the window. We're trying to stuff the damned thing into the hatch-back from the rear and the breasts catch on the rear bumper, Zoe swears, "I knew the goddamn boobs were too big", did I mention I love working here? but we finally get the thing stuffed into her car. The final problem was that she was carrying her Visa card in a side pocket of her cargo shorts and it had popped out, through the grate of a window well outside the loading door. She thought she had some bubble gum in the car, but I went inside and got the container of Museum Wax, which is the stickiest stuff known to man, put some on the end of a stick, and retrieved the card on the first try. She'd had the same idea, had found a jar of vasoline in her car, which I wondered about, and was rummaging in the dumpster next door for a stick, when I beat her to a solution. At that moment I thought we were a match made in heaven. Then I remembered why I lived alone, the ten thousand reasons; but still thought I'd like to cook her dinner, and talk for a few hours. Intelligent conversation is icing on the cake. The cake is mere survival, a base line, where you don't fall and kill yourself, which is enough for me. I'm not dead, greet another sunrise: look, that butterfly is yellow; dawn, in the woods is a serious event. Everything awakes and it's really noisy. A cacophony. Barnhart should do a "Morning In The Woods" piece. I hear it every day, you should be able to codify that, it's real right? what I hear? I might be hearing voices, it could be nothing at all, the sound of your refrigerator, two crickets outside the door. I don't want to seem to be passing out assignments, but we really need to be advancing the cause. Whatever that is.