Making Sense

Between a rock and a hard place. I could go on. Something happened. I was washing dishes, mostly spoons and forks, and I was thinking about making sense. I'd found a note, scribbled on an envelope, at the bottom of the driveway, and I could make no sense of it. The language, the grammar, the syntax, the spelling, everything was wrong. I knew who had written the note, and he speaks ok Appalachian English, but he must have quit school after the third grade. The note must have been left under the wiper blade on B's truck, at the bottom of the hill, and I finally figured out that it was asking for help in getting an old man home. I'll have to ask B about it. Talking skills and writing skills are very different. What caught my eye this morning, I'd never noticed this before, I was walking down the driveway, stopping every fifty steps for a sip of coffee (a sip of coffee involves taking off a glove, rotating that little cover, looking down, to see where the hole is, so that you don't pour coffee down your front). Looking down, I saw these little prisms on the ground, I'm sure they have a name. Several people will tell me, it's one thing I can count on; drops of water condensing out of the ground into the air. The frost coming out. It was beautiful. Didn't have to be at work until 1:00 but I went in early, to take advantage of the hot running water, and to have lunch at the pub. The water level in the Ohio is up another ten feet and the lower road, below the floodwall, is inundated. The wrack field is extensive. Emily was on the front desk, so I could cloister myself upstairs and resume my Carter research. An odd occurrence on Friday, one of the ceramic pieces, a wall hanging, failed. A piece that had never been hung before, and I had said to Charlotte, when we were hanging it, that it was too heavy. These pieces are lovely, a clear plastic base, with the mounting feet attached, then several layers of thin white porcelain held off the base on clear posts, all held together with epoxy. The piece that failed was the widest and heaviest. Thirty-six inches between the two attachments and it simply de-laminated in the middle. Stress. So the potter came in today, Carol, with her husband, Mark, and we discussed what had happened. I'd saved all the pieces, to show them (Stress Failure Analysis) and we all agreed on what had occured. For one thing, when they were seating the clear plastic spacers they pushed too hard, and most of the epoxy had been squished out. I told Mark that he might experiment with a Mapp gas torch and see if he could just bond the plastic directly. It's what I'd do. Two factors in play: shear, and cohesion. I don't trust glue when it comes to shear. A spirited conversation in which we were trying to make sense of what had happened. They took the piece home, to repair it; but they also pulled and tugged on the other pieces, and found one other that needed a minor repair. Another problem is that the sheets (or slabs) of porcelain are not exactly flat. They warp, slightly, in the firing, and that adds to the confusion. An interesting afternoon. At some point, poking among the broken pieces, I thought of the phrase disjecta membra, five years of Latin comes to tell, "a separated part" a "rejected piece" but it actually comes from Horace, disjecti membra poetae, which means, roughly, limbs of a dismembered poet. A sobering thought. In my reading yesterday I came across an apocryphal story about Mohammed's favorite camel, Al Kaswa, that is said to have kneeled when Mohammed was reading the last of the Koran to the gathered faithful in Mecca. Also that he had a white mule by the name of Fadda. (I think the camel was merely signaling it was time to go home, they kneel that way so you can mount, and who wouldn't love to have a white mule, a pale sterile hybrid, reminding you of your failures.) On the way back in, walking up the driveway, I heard B before I saw him. I knew he was splitting wood, to carry out halves or quarters, from where he'd sawn the last tree. He's a bulldog on this. I stop for a few minutes, he's not aware of my presence, and watch him deal with simple problems, how to carry a specific piece of wood. We finally make eye contact, and he allows he's going into town tonight, and driving back in with supplies, did I need anything; yes, I said, a dozen eggs.