TENDON SURGERY

The young guy in the surgical waiting room had one hand in an impressive bandage. Maybe this was tendon surgery follow-up day; my son and I were there to have three severed and stitched-up tendons looked at, in the wake of his fall through a glass door shortly before Christmas. The other man in the waiting room described how on Thanksgiving morning he got in the way of the electric knife his girlfriend was using to slice the turkey, and had to have some tendons on the back of his hand reconnected.

I didn't follow exactly how this injury was supposed to have occurred. His story struck me as just the tiniest bit fishy around the edges. I found myself remembering a case I had recently typed for a criminal defense attorney, involving a lovers' quarrel in an Italian restaurant, an extra-large pizza knife, a trip to the hospital for him, and criminal charges for her.

I didn't say so. If the guy with the bandaged hand wants to save face, protect his girlfriend, or whatever, I'm willing to let him. I hope his tendons heal appropriately and that he and his girlfriend find approaches to conflict resolution that don't involve things like electric knives.

BIG SPENDER

The cross-country bus from New York stopped for the evening meal in Elko, Nevada. As we stretched and stumbled into the nondescript beside-the-highway pit stop, I noted that the decor consisted mainly of slot machines.

After what might be called dinner, I stopped to use the ladies' room while my traveling companion went ahead and got back on the bus. On the way out, my attention was arrested by one of a group of one-armed bandits on the wall.

"Oh," I said to myself, "that's a slot machine. It takes dimes."

I fished a dime out of my purse, dropped it in, and pulled the handle. The machine whirred around, came up three lemons, and disgorged thirteen or fourteen dimes, which I scooped out and put in my pocket.

Back on the bus, several people proclaimed their winnings at similar activities.

"Everybody seems to have won," my friend observed.

"The ones who lost aren't talking about it," I answered.

As for me, I knew full well and then some that I would only spoil my record by putting any more money in slot machines or any other system for separating fools from etc. I kept my handful of dimes in my pocket and never even considered trying it again. From that day to this, my lifetime track record on gambling shows a profit of 1300%.

Road Service

Driving home to South San Francisco well after 10:00 one night in the mid-1970s, my 1971 BMW R50-5 started to slow down. A minute later I was sitting in the middle of the road, bike in gear, clutch all the way out, engine running, going nowhere. It all happened too suddenly and completely to be caused by stretching of the clutch cable, which had recently been replaced; but it doesn't cost anything to try tightening the cable, so I tried. It didn't work. Time to call my husband.

The secondary road I was on was dreary and desolate enough, but a better place to be stranded than the freeway. I tried pushing the bike toward home, judging that the road was level for a good distance. In fact, it was slightly uphill. The bike weighs upwards of four hundred pounds, and the horizontal pistons are inconvenient for female arms; I never could push that thing without repeatedly barking my shins on the left crash bar. I pulled up beside the road and looked around.

The only sign of sentient life on the long, dark street was a trailer park. Knocking on the door of the first trailer that seemed inhabited and awake, I was scrutinized by a woman who declined to open the door or let me use her telephone but suggested that I try the trailer next door. The guy there let me in.

I called my husband and explained the situation. He told m to tighten the clutch cable. I said I already had.

"You obviously didn't do it enough. Go tighten it some more."

I thanked the guy in the trailer, went back to the bike, and set about tightening some more.

You can tell when a control isn't affecting anything. This one certainly wasn't. I turned it many revolutions, and then many more, and then a few more, just to be really sure before bothering the guy in the trailer again.

My husband wasn't impressed. "You didn't do it enough. . . ."

I knew I had turned it enough and more than enough, and I didn't like the way the guy in the trailer was looking at me. Time to insist.

"Yes, I did, and I can't keep bothering this guy who's letting me use the phone. You've got to come out here."

"All right -- but if this turns out to be nothing, it's going to cost you." This really was a threat to charge his wife for road service. He'd have been capable of that.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, he pulled up in his ugly green panel truck, grinning from ear to ear. The best of this guy can be seen in an emergency; once he gets started, he actually enjoys this kind of thing. He turned the same control I had been turning, for some time. Then he ordered me off the motorcycle --obviously, I couldn't be trusted to try it myself, since I couldn't even tighten the cable adequately.

Vaulting into the seat, he plugged the key into the ignition (the old BMWs had that key that pushes down to make the connection and then turns to the "on" position), stomped on the starter, kicked the bike into gear, let the clutch out, and went, as I confidently expected, nowhere. He kicked around from gear to gear for a while, finally announcing with a broad grin,"That's what's left of second gear." (As it turned out, he was wrong. All that had happened was the bolts that connect the transmission to the drive shaft had worked their way loose. Possibly, they hadn't been tightened properly after the last flat tire. The clutch cable had nothing to do with it.)

We produced a long, sturdy plank that lived in the truck, and followed our drill for such emergencies. First, he pushed the bike as far up the plank as he could reach. Then I held it while he jumped into the truck. He pulled it the rest of the way, and I pushed from behind as best I could.

A previous owner of the truck -- I wonder how many previous owners that truck had? - had paneled the inside, so there was nothing to tie a rope to. We put the bike in gear and tied the foot brake firmly. Then I crouched beside the bike, clinging to the hand brake that stops the front wheel, thinking about Newton's laws of motion and hoping we wouldn't hit any potholes.

We got home all right. We always did. As we prepared for a well-deserved rest, my husband remarked: "You're lucky you called when you did. If I had been in bed, with my glass of wine and a book, you'd have been out of luck."

If he had actually left me stranded on the road, I'd have considered murder; but he wouldn't have done that. If he'd presented me with a bill and extorted the money from me -- he did things like that -- we'd have had one of our classic fights. But he didn't do that either. Part of the dynamic of our relationship was that as long as no harm was done, I was inclined to laugh at his nonsense. I have avenged myself for this instanceof churlishness by telling the story to anyone who would listen ever since.

BANDSAW 1, KID 0

My father was happy to teach me to operate the bandsaw but of course strictly forbade me to use it unless he was standing beside me. So I played with it by myself every chance I got. Every human tradition must have stories about children coming to grief after doing something strictly, and for good reason, forbidden.

One day when I was about twelve, I was in Dad's workshop in the cellar, cutting in half at the thinnest point some pieces of scrap wood -- thin in the middle and wider on the ends, curved, as though circles had been cut out of square boards. Having polished off all the ones within easy reach, I stretched for one of the ones farther off, my hand still resting on the platform of the saw. I heard a tzzzit and felt the breeze on the end of my thumb as the blade sawed off the tip of a long thumbnail I had recently taken to cultivating.

I could have cut off my thumb and a bunch of fingers about that fast, and I knew it. Feeling my face go white, I shut off the saw, made my way upstairs, and confessed to my mother what I had been up to. She didn't seem particularly impressed; after all, there was no harm done.

Mother has described me as "oblivious." In my late teens I put so many spoons into the electric mixer that I got really good and fast at repairing the damage to the blades. I have dropped many pieces of silverware and other objects into garbage disposals and failed to notice until somebody turned the disposal on. I usually have one or two minor cuts or burns on my hands from incautious cooking.

Since the day I nearly cut off my thumb, I have used no power tools. I am too careless and inattentive to manipulate at close range any tool designed to subdue material harder than cold butter.

Blueberries

BLUEBERRIES

Blueberrying: trudging through woods and pasture, bitten and scratched by the fauna and flora; watching one's bucket fill slowly and then empty suddenly after a false step into a juniper bush that looked like solid ground to a kid; whining at Mother and getting scant sympathy ("I told you to wear long pants!); all under a blazing July sun mitigated only by the haze of 80-odd-percent humidity. Who needs that? You can buy blueberries, right?

Maybe. Maybe those big things in the supermarket, or even from the organic fruit farm, really are as good as the little wild ones of my childhood and my mother's youth. Maybe, as with so many scientifically engineered designer fruits and vegetables, we have bigger ones and/or more of them per plant or acre, but the amount of essential oils and nutrients per berry or plant or acre hasn't necessarily increased in proportion. I buy and use the big berries but I'm prejudiced against them.

Anyway, when the earth offers blueberries, it makes sense to accept. So Saturday morning found me at the back of the field behind the house, sitting on a milk crate under a big straw hat, plastic lidded container in hand, batting ineffectively at mosquitoes and waiting for daylight to advance enough that I could distinguish color and thus find the berries. Lady, make a note of this: quarter to five is too early.

These were low- or ground-bushes, eight or nine inches high; hence the milk crate. As kids we squatted or sat on the ground and quickly got hot and bored. The high bushes in the pasture, on the edge of the woods, or under the high-tension electric wires enjoyed plenty of blazing sun, but crouching down in the open field in mid-afternoon was particularly cruel and unusual.

We also picked and ate what we called dewberries, tiny things of the blackberry kind, spare and sour and seedy; and checkerberries, bright red skin over a white interior with a texture like water chestnuts and a mild wintergreen flavor, and the characteristic X at one end. We ate dewberries and checker-berries a few at a time on the spot. It was only the blueberries that we made any attempt to bring home and do something with --probably put on cereal -- but most of those got eaten on-site as well.

Ground-bush berries are conspicuous in small clusters at the top of the bush, two or three ripe ones and a few more green. I discovered that there are more berries down the side of the plant, one or two together, smaller than the ones up there in the sun. I found that there are more berries within arm's reach than it looks as though there would be. The cup and a half of berries I returned with doesn't seem like a lot for an hour's work; but have you checked out the price of organic wild blueberries lately?

For my mother, blueberrying may have been a communing-with-nature experience, although I doubt that she'd have thought of it that way. I can't report any Emersonian epiphany from this weekend's blueberrying experience. I observed, as I fished for dropped berries, the dense mat of moss, checkerberries and other field underbrush, and the tall grass pushing through here and there, the seed-heads brushing my face like bugs. I heard birds chirping and rustling in the trees, and mosquitoes shrilling in my ear. In the heavy, soggy air of a day that promised, and in due course delivered, the kind of weather I associate with blueberrying, I smelled the hay from the part of the field that was cut and drying; the checkerberries disturbed by the mower; the pines in the woods nearby; and, faint and far away, organic gasses released by the dump in the next town.

On balance, I was satisfied enough with my venture into hunting-and-gathering that I went out again on Sunday morning. It's rather like planting, tending and harvesting tomatoes and beans: Beans picked half an hour before dinner really do taste better even than beans from the local vegetable stand, and the tomatoes are cheaper. And they are unquestionably organic: I'll spring for $5 worth of fertilizer from the owners of the organic cows up the hill, but not for the pesticides, weed-killers and fertilizer the garden stores want you to buy. Even though seed and tomato plants and organic manure cost something and the self-watering planters rather a lot, and in spite of the labor-intensiveness of blueberrying, harvesting them gives me a heartwarming illusion of getting something for nothing.

LOOKING AT A KING

"A cat may looke on a King"
John Heywood, Proverbs (1546)

Trying to do something with one of the three cats that my
roommate and I harbored, I was getting, after the fashion of
cats, no respect. My then-boyfriend Danny was happy to explain
what I should be doing instead and to tell me how much better he
managed with the cats he lived with: "My cats obey me," he said.
His cats, indeed -- they belonged to the landlady. He doesn't
even like cats much.

A day or so later, one of "his" cats sat itself down under
the table in his room and showed no inclination to move. He
pointed at the door and ordered the cat to leave. The cat stayed
put. Danny doesn't, on principle, countenance opposition from his
natural inferiors (this, as I later found out, includes wives;
but that's a series of very long stories). He pointed and ordered
again. The cat, after the fashion of cats, sat still and looked
at him.

Danny, as someone once observed, never drops anything until
it's absolutely finished. He doesn't compromise with Error. He
probably wouldn't, for example, roll something out the door in
the hope that the cat would chase it, or go into the kitchen and
pick up the can opener. Having determined what should happen and
issued an order in accordance therewith, it would be weak and
possibly sinful to back off or change his tactics. If ever I saw
an irresistible force confronting an immovable object, it was
Danny giving orders to a cat. I laughed so hard I couldn't stand
up.

The cat won the first round. As Danny was scrambling under
the table in the undignified fashion of a human negotiating with
a cat, I managed to choke out, "Danny, I'm glad your cats obey
you!"

Danny ultimately won, of course. Humans win most encounters
with animals, at least in the short run, and a small animal in a
confined space is at a great disadvantage. The cat was hauled out
from under the table and deposited ignominiously outside, leaving
Danny triumphantly in possession of the space under his table --
albeit with some sacrifice of face and dignity. I was inclined to
give the moral victory to the cat.

NOTICE TO QUIT

Off and on for years, we have heard what sounded like
chirping and fluttering in the hose that vents the dryer. Once
we went so far as to look behind the dryer and, by shaking and
poking the hose, satisfy ourselves that at that time, at least,
no one was living there. This spring, however, the fluttering
and twittering were more pronounced than ever before. We had
many discussions entitled We Have to Do Something About the Birds
in the Dryer; but getting at the hose is nontrivial. We are
easily daunted by such projects.

The dryer is in the pantry, on a waist-high shelf. The hose
is vented out a window at nearly ceiling height. It is illegal
to vent a dryer out a window: the fire department thinks every
window should be available for egress in case of fire. This is
hysterically funny when applied to a condominium where all the
windows are blocked by potted plants, electronic equipment, a
seven-foot Steinway, and much other stuff, and particularly when
applied to the pantry window, which is a couple of feet high and
a foot wide and accessible only from that shelf.

The dryer, like all new-ish appliances, is huge -- much
bigger than we need. It's maybe three inches from the wall on one
side and five from the pantry shelves on the other, and that's a
generous estimate.

The interface between the hose and the window is one of my
famous jury-rigs. It works fine and even looks more coherent than
much of my handiwork, but it is next to impossible to remove or
work on it without taking it apart completely. When I put it
together, I didn't know that an unprotected dryer hose is prime
avian real estate.

This spring, after a month or so of declining performance,
the dryer substantially stopped drying. It got warm and tossed
stuff around, but the stuff didn't dry. There was nothing for it
but to relocate the boxes stacked from the top of the dryer to
the eight-foot ceiling, coax the dryer away from the wall, and
see what was going on.

We pulled and twisted the dryer forward and tipped it off
the shelf, resting it on the top of the step stool -- which
filled most of the pantry -- in what would have been a precarious
position if there had been any room for it to fall. I was able
to step onto the shelf and move gingerly around the dryer into a
position where I could reach the top of the window.

We found that we couldn't see even a glimmer of light
through the hose. There definitely had to be a nest in there.
Hoping there weren't any baby birds in the nursery, I amputated
the house several inches below the window and disconnected the
other end from the dryer. Several inches from the top was a neat
little nest, empty: no birds; not even any eggs. Greatly
relieved, I folded a piece of stout wire screening into a hollow
cube, crammed it into the entrance to the hose, and grafted a new
hose from there to the bottom of the dryer.

This all sounds straightforward enough; but it was rather
like building a ship in a bottle from inside the bottle, and then
trying to get out. Also, with the dryer and the step stool
effectively filling the pantry, we couldn't get at our main stash
of tools and were confined to the contents of a small tool box
that happened to be on the floor. Thus, for example, we had no
hammer and only a small pair of wire cutters.

Even before we finished, somebody came home, took one look,
and flew away. Before I finished connecting the hose to the
bottom of the dryer, the homeowner was back, first with a flutter
and an irate chirp, thereafter with clicks and scritches and
great persistence.

I didn't fasten the cube in place with a couple of skewers,
as I thought I might, because I didn't have any skewers, I didn't
like to make holes in the hose, and I was tired of the whole
project. There's no knowing how long it took the little beasties
to get the wire cube out. By the time the dryer failed again,
about a week later, they had done so, rebuilt the nest, and laid
a couple of eggs. We found out about the eggs when Laurie put
his thumb in one and the other fell on the floor.

We broke down and bought a plastic bird guard from the
hardware store. It would have been a whole lot easier to adapt
the bird guard to my venting system from outside the window; but
we live on the second floor and don't own a ladder. My husband
doesn't do ladders and gets the blue willies if I threaten to do
so. Fortunately, I have achieved sufficient maturity not to do it
anyway just to prove that he can't tell me what to do. I probably
wouldn't have driven my motorcycle to the maternity ward either,
but it was great fun to tell my first husband that I planned to.

I was absorbed in trying to incorporate the bird guard into
my original jury-rig, with much difficulty and ill temper, a
scratched knuckle, and a couple of broken fingernails, when the
phone rang: my son, offering to move a potted plant that I had
asked him about the day before. "Good," I said, "you can finish
sticking this thing in the dryer." The dryer had come up in the
previous day's conversation as well.

Justin finished the job, not exactly easily, but more expe-
ditiously than my husband and I were managing to do. With it all
together and the dryer back in place, Justin noticed the screen
to the bird guard lying around somewhere. I had wondered about
that -- It had fallen off while I was working with it, much too
easily, it seemed to me.

He pulled the dryer out from its position yet again -- for
the fourth time counting the prior week's event -- and wired the
screen back onto the bird guard with paper clips, one of his
favorite building materials (have I mentioned that jury-rigs run
in my family?). We offered him anything he wanted as a reward for
his efforts. He settled for a burrito from Anna's for himself and
another for Amanda.

If the birds have tried to get in again, their efforts
haven't been audible from inside the house. I regret their
frustration and disappointed expectations -- but we need the
dryer.