Naming Things

The new waitress at the pub is Kori, I finally see her name writ on a note for me to pick up lunch for the ladies at the museum. Kori is Kora is Cora, means maiden, another name for Persephone, daughter of Demeter, queen of hell. A derivation. I wonder what her parents were thinking. Or not thinking, maybe just heard the word and liked the way it sounded. My daughters were named after goats, but for the grace of god they're not named Black and Decker. We tended toward paired names, as we tended to acquire breeding stock in pairs, don't get me started on that, we had our reasons, following some early failures. Briggs and Stratton. Night and Day, Ryobi and Suzuki. If I'd ever had a son he would have been Plumb Bob. Thank god I never had a son. There's a kind of mud I call 'shattered', without getting too far into personal vocabularies, is just that frozen crust where you break through to the mud underneath, and it oozes out. I can't tell you the number of times. It climbs up the legs of your jeans. Anyway, Kori is a lovely person and she tapped me on the back, to make sure the order was correct, and I explained to her that this happened, time to time, that someone from the museum would call, with an order, because they knew where I would be. It all seems too familiar, but such is life. Some things are patterned. Grammar and syntax, I get it now, syntax is the train and grammar is the track. Commas are just small towns in the mid-west, where you snag a mail bag. Museum Board meeting at noon today, Pegi was in a panic and D spent the morning preparing. I brought some of the bad Chinese food home. I make better fried rice. Patched and repaired all day. Tomorrow I'll sand everything, refill the plastic anchor holes, of which there are a great many, and break out the painting supplies. I think I'm staff on Saturday and I might have a chance to get into the Carter filing cabinets that no one has ever gone through. I'm beginning to feel the need to organize all the Carter material, but I refuse to do it on my own time. The museum needs to get a grant to allow me to work on the archives for a year. I'd still install shows, because I love doing it; it's such a hoot, wearing white cotton gloves and handling art, doing all the math, hammer-drilling into the walls of an old bank (concrete as god intended), and the endless problem solving. I love solving problems. My strong suit is that I can visualize almost anything. I build houses in my head, on weekends, as a game. Post and Beam houses that involve complicated joints. Generally speaking, if I'm not reading or writing, I'm imagining a complicated joint. A habit I developed early. Look at a schematic of one of the trusses in Westminster Hall. No one, still, knows how they work. We assume certain loads, the way they're carried, but this was 1393-1397 and Hugh Herland worked it all out in his head, the greatest feat of the Middle Ages. He more than doubled any span that had ever been attempted, and it still stands, though some of the timbers are rotted and there's cause for concern. 68 feet, and the previous record was 28 feet, which was why you had rows of pillars, dividing the central seating area from the side galleries. His vision was a Grateful Dead concert in which there were no bad seats. I don't travel, except by car, I don't believe airplanes actually work, I think it's a smoke and mirrors thing, so I'll never go to England and see the real thing, but I've taken the virtual tour many times, and I have photocopies of the structural components. I've studied this roof for 40 years; nothing strange that I'd want to spend a couple of years studying the archives of a minor regionalist painter. I've watched frogs for a couple of years, Pileated Woodpeckers: anything worth doing, as the saying goes. I'd rather spend three months befriending a crow, that she would trust me enough to eat out of my hand, than I would all those hours of meetings. How do I say this? When you meet me, you know what you're going to get, an ass hole out in left field. I guess I pride myself on that, where I stand, the ridge, high ground.