Today is a cold day. Matter of emphasis here. Of course it’s a
cold day, in the conventional sense, at eight degrees below zero.
Single syllable temperatures predicted for the whole day. That kind
of “cold day” is pronounced, “Cold day,” with almost equal stress
on each syllable, taking a modest pause between. “Pipe to the
spirit ditties of cold day.” Like that.
But this is also a “COLD day,” with the same pronunciation as
“SNOW day.” Explain to me why schools in Massachusetts, statewide,
have closed for the cold. Okay, specific schools, if pipes freeze,
I can understand that. But all schools? All day? This is
Massachusetts. It gets cold here. They haven’t closed the schools
in Montreal or Montpelier or Manchester, so far as I’ve heard, all
far to our north and far colder.
Maybe there’s something in the bitter suspicion that Mass
teachers just wanted a four-day weekend, with the MLK holiday
coming up Monday.
The boys are home. Once again I contemplate the mysteries of
male sibling rivalry. If these guys really don’t like each other,
and it often seems that they don’t, why do they so stubbornly start
to play together, over and over? It ends in screaming and tears,
especially first thing in the morning.
And why don’t children ever believe they’re hungry? Breakfast —
home-made bran muffins for a treat — calms things down
marvelously, at least for now. For now, the boys have settled
around the wood stove, its firebox jammed lumpily full of good
wood, glowing orange-hot, with the wind making the same sound over
the rim of the chimney that an empty soda bottle makes when you
blow across it. Bud plays his GameBoy, Joe twists his Transformers
into illegitimate shapes, periodically breaking off a piece that I
have to restore — teeny, tiny little plastic joins that challenge
an old man’s farsighted eyes and non-too-steady hands.
Until 10:00, I manage to keep the guys off TV. I periodically
threaten them, “I’m going to go to comcast-dot-net and program our
TV so it gets nothing but golf.” So far, I have not done that. Joe
succumbs first this morning, with his usual frustrations at
scheduled programming. “I don’t want this, I want ‘Ed, Edd &
Eddy.’” “Joe, ‘Ed, Edd & Eddy’ doesn’t come on now.” “I don’
WANT this!”
The kind of impulse that led to the creation of Tivo.
Our VCR has also packed it in — the old one, the one I know how
to operate. The new one, a combined VCR and DVD player (where did
all these letters come from?), requires “programming” to use
properly. It “reads” the channels from the television to which it
is connected. If you use the television and select channels with
the television’s remote control, it wipes out the new VCR/DVD’s
memory of what went on before. You have to re-set the whole thing.
So far, only Sally has figured out how to do this.
Once again, aging farsightedness figures in. The new device came
with a vast remote control, labeled in microscopic print, and an
owner’s manual full of instructions requiring full-on high-tech
exegesis. “Use +/- to SELECT.” It requires reading glasses and good
light even to try to figure something out, and then I have to keep
ripping the glasses off to look at the TV screen, where even more
abstract diagrams and forms appear, taunting me to fill them
out.
Joe has begun to enjoy the Phonics Game, and has made marvelous
progress in his first two days. Ah, but that probably requires a
videotape to charm him into playing, and that video has snagged in
the old VCR, and the VCR repairman, though only a mile away, is OUT
THERE, and it is eight below zero out there.
We will survive. We always do. We have plenty of food. We have
plenty of milk. We have plenty of toilet paper. We have lots of
coffee, and lots of cigars.
