“This mold house” or how I spent my Spring break

Early this year, I visited my father while attending a conference in New York City.  The clutter and disorder had reached new depths.  Three years ago, I had spent a week moving his Oz books from the damp cellar to the attic.  The area rug was then damp to the touch.  The room had flooded more than once and a leaky pipe had done a fair amount of damage to a hallway ceiling.  I hacked out what I could reach of the carpet.  I then assumed that the plumbing problem had been fixed but given the clutter and visible mold on walls and ceiling evident during this visit, I smelled a rat.  Speaking of rats, there was also rodent poop on some of the shelves, enough spider webs and egg sacs to festoon a Harry Potter set, and I later learned that two snakes had once taken up residence as well.

moldy books

Welcome Webs

"Lawndry" webs

Time for an intervention.

The dumpster - will it be big enough?

I offered to return during my spring break and clean out the basement so some professionals could then get in there and fix the plumbing, eradicate the mold, etc.   My younger sister Nancy arranged to come up for a day and convinced my father to allow her to remove some shelving/cabinets that he had constructed some twenty years ago.  I can’t even describe them; look at the pictures.  Let’s just say they transformed a split level landing that overlooked a finished basement into a barrier that separated the two spaces and transformed the ground level hallway into a narrow alley.  Utilitarian, but bulky.

entry way - before

basement - before

Day 1: Luck of the Irish!

Going to NJ is a cultural experience.  I arrived on St. Patrick’s day and while debriefing with my dad, I heard bagpipe music.  Great, the neighbors are having a party.  But no, there’s a dude with bagpipes playing next door.  Think Christmas carolers but with pipes.  In my Irish/Italian/Catholic hometown I should not have been surprised.  Still very cool.

Day 2: “What the f@*k”

Ground zero at 7:20 a.m.  Already my NJ speech patterns have returned.  Upon clearing the debris from the hallway enough to open the back door, I found atop the concrete patio, a few inches of top soil, an upper strata of decomposing leaves, assorted debris, and vegetation approaching the door.  Not quite what Dorothy encountered when her house landed in Munchkinland.  I believe I exclaimed, “Holy Mother of God.” I’m not Catholic.  As the day wore on, I began interjecting the f-word in every other sentence.  By the afternoon I was mixing Catholic oaths and expletives.  Don’t ask me why this happens; I have no idea.  It’s just NJ.  “Cawfee, anyone?”

"Holy Mary, Mother of God!"

"I'm not in Kansas anymore!"

My sister came and wielded wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers, and hacksaw to good effect.  We concluded that had a nuclear bomb ever gone off in the vicinity, the neighborhood would be flattened save this shelving structure which was built to last.  2×2 steel beams were bolted, screwed and nailed into adjacent surfaces and to each other in ways that contributed to its sturdiness but were a bitch to take apart.  Admittedly, this thing sustained the weight of a half ton of boxed books without collapsing, but still!   Definitely built for the cold war.  Other cold war artifacts included books with titles like “The Mighty Atom” and “Russian for the Scientist.”  There were also eleven boxes of freeze-dried food that had been purchased for the bomb shelter under the shed in the back yard.  My dad reconstituted a pouch of dried carrots and ate them before agreeing that we could throw this stuff out.

Nancy at the end of her rope

bye bye shelves!

Never know when you might need a hacksaw

cold war rations

Into the dumpster went the metal beams (some rusted and moldy), the warped doors, additional metal shelving units from the basement, some of them half collapsed.  Once the shelving was removed, some rotten pipe and two cast iron supports that had once held up a decorative railing separating landing from basement were revealed.  About thigh high with sharp metal edges.  Dad insisted that he would cover the tops with padding.  We overruled him – no need to risk impalement.  Hacksaw out!  Several hundred beta videotapes, scrap wood, rotting pieces of the aforementioned shed, etc. going into the dumpster completed day 1.

"the pipes"

"Look a hallway!" See how wide it is compared to the "before" picture.

Day 3: Flying crabmeat

A painful wake up.  After 10 hours of moving stuff, and minor injuries (steel beam to the knee, can of frozen crab to the shin, etc.), I embarked on day two solo.  Progress was more incremental and far less dramatic.  Moving shelves, sorting books to go to the Audubon society, the local library, a local book dealer (31 large cartons in all), bleaching down ceiling, floor and walls, ripping out the rest of the stinky carpet (which took some of the linoleum tiles with it).  About half of the floor was exposed by the end of the day.  Wildlife sightings were limited to a dessicated earthworm and a cricket.

Day 4: Snow over the dumpster

A really painful wake up.  I now have an inkling of what it must be like to be old and have everything hurt when one arises in the morning.  It was also snowing, on the first day of Spring, go figure.  We threw out fifty or so empty boxes that once held ten reams of xerox paper each.  Seven boxes of books went to the local library.  We also bought some new shelving.  Another ten hours of hard physical labor and the room was done.

Boxes!

south view of basement - "after"

north view of basement - after

entry way - "after"

And here's the dumpster - it was big enough!

Day 5: Reflections

I realized that I’m very fortunate to be able to earn my living by using my mind instead of my body.  I was TIRED by the end of this.  Yet there is also a relaxing aspect to devoting oneself singlemindedly to a task for hours at a time.  No interruptions, no email (I checked it only once a day, how weird!),  or other distractions.  At the end of the day, I’d treat myself to a nice meal out and a beverage.  There’s some satisfaction derived from completing a monumental task.  And if I want to relive the magic, there are eight more rooms plus a garage that could use my attention….

Out of the mouths of babes

I have been writing a book for what seems like forever, to the point of embarrassment.  I’ve been working on it so long, half the time I don’t remember why I’m writing it or what I’m trying to say.  Like a graduate student that hopes to avoid queries about the progress of one’s dissertation, I dread the well meaning questions: “so how’s the book coming along?” “Are you getting any writing done?”  “So what is your book about anyway?”  I expect this from family, from friends, from colleagues.  Sometimes it comes out of the blue.  At my grandmother’s 100th birthday party in 2007, a friend of her named Connie, a spry, talkative, and mildly irritating 90-something, pounced on me and asked “so when is your next book coming out?”  Huh?  It turned out that she had read the copy of my first book that I had given to my grandmother.  Go figure.  Moreover, she came up with a very precise summary of the book’s main arguments that was surprising in a non-academic.

I began thinking about this book in 1997 and researching it in earnest in 2000.  A few extenuating circumstances – children born in 1998 and 2002, several years of related sleep deprivation, a five year stint as associate chair of my department – have legitimately slowed my progress.  But now it’s time to get the damn thing done.  A sabbatical last semester provided a much-needed jump start and I have two substantial (read overly long) chapters completed.  Since then, I try to write a little bit every day; often I get up early to make this happen.

The book, by the way, is about attempts to settle an indigenous frontier in Brazil from the years 1760-1910. It examines the extent to which Indians were able to dictate outcomes in a context of limited effective state presence.  It deals with how disparate cultures interact with one another.  There’s violence and slavery and disease and exploitation, illicit sex, lascivious dances, entrepreneurship, religious and cultural intolerance, environmental degradation, and a fairly predictable unhappy ending.  In the most abstract sense, it deals with how human beings deal with difference and create boundaries to make sense of their world.

So this morning, I was completing  a section about an Indian soldier named Inocencio who served as an interpreter and mediator for a Portuguese man named Bento Lourenço who was a prospector, explorer and road builder.  Inocencio traveled to Rio de Janeiro and requested and sought audiences with the Brazilian emperor, not once, but at least three times during the 1820s.  This involved walking several hundred miles in each direction.  The local authorities didn’t approve of this fellow wandering off to Rio without formal papers, often attracting native followers to join him in Pied Piper fashion.  They issued arrest warrants.  The Emperor, however, was impressed, and gave the shrewd Inocencio a title as Captain of the Indians, special privileges, freedom of movement and lots of presents, some useful, others symbolic.  My favorite was the portrait of the emperor in a gilded frame – which Inocencio valued enough to lug along a few hundred miles before he was arrested.  Within the space of a year, he went to Rio, illegally sold booty gained from the Emperor, was arrested, reassigned to a new frontier post, escaped, went back to Rio, was arrested again, and sent back to his new post.

As I was finishing, my husband wandered out and asked me what I was doing.  I proceeded to summarize this tale, in a shamelessly long-winded and circuitous fashion, replete with excessive detail.  While holding forth, my 6 year old daughter emerged from her room and sat in my lap and listened.  She then spontaneously made up the following dialogue which summed up the main points quite nicely:

“Oh no, I’m in jail again!  Poopy!”

“Hurrah!  I’m out of jail!  Let’s go to Rio!” (upon repetition, she added “with our Indian friends!”)

“Let’s sell stuff!”

I think she should write the damn book.