A Flood and Some Books

 From the stairs this morning I saw condensation on the window and transom of the front door, which I would not have expected in October. A large puddle on the kitchen floor explained this, and I roused my wife to start on the cleanup while I went to turn off the water at the main shutoff valve. (The valve is awkward to reach, and stiff to turn.) The water clearly came from the dishwasher. The dishwasher had caused no problems in eighteen years, but made up for that overnight. The plumber tells us that the failure is in the dishwasher, not in any connection to it.

The basement had its own puddle, aggravated by fallen drywall tape and drywall debris. After some mopping, I hauled wet rugs into the backyard. One remained on the steps for some time until drained enough to be manageable. We will need to bring in someone to do serious drywall work.

One bookcase suffered. The books were swollen, so that it was difficult to extract the first couple from each shelf. Not all the books were affected, maybe eight of every ten, and those that were varied from a little damp to quite wet. Some are probably not salvageable. I don't know whether the bookcase itself will still be usable, for it is of veneer over plywood.

Had I been asked whether I wished to discard any of the books on the three shelves, I'd have probably said, No, why? Yet now the question for some is whether I'll replace them, and there the answer sometimes is No. I found Leszek Kolakowski's God Owes Us Nothing tremendously interesting, but do I need to review the theological history of Jansenism? Perhaps not. I have probably looked into John Lukacs's The Last European War within the last year or so, but will I replace that? Maybe not. On the other hand, I do want to have copies of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, The Last Puritan, and some others that suffered damage.

Longevity

About twenty years ago, I settled on a barbershop near work. The barbers then working there were mature, one having served in the U.S. Army in WW II.  He must have been born no later than 1928, therefore he must have been seventy-four or seventy-five when I first met him. The other had graduated from high school the year I was born, so he was about ten years younger.

The barbershop has since changed hands. The current owner told me today that she will be seventy-nine in December. I remarked that the veteran must have worked at least until he was eighty. She said that in fact he worked until he was ninety--though I don't think this can have been full time.  She said also that a lot of barbers work until quite old. Her explanation was that many of them have few friends to spend time with upon retirement. Perhaps so. It seems the sort of work that would be hard on one though, requiring one to stand while working, yet not yielding the benefit of steady walking.

 

Last Words

 A footnote in Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness give alternative versions of William Pitt the Younger's last words:

William Pitt the Younger's last words may have been, "Oh, my country! How I leave my country!", but in a different report, "I think I could eat one of Bellamy's veal pies." See Lord Roseberry, Pitt, p. 269 and Appendix D.

 An essay in Simon Leys's The Hall of Uselessness is called "Tell Them I Said Something", after the purported last words of Pancho Villa in front of a firing squad: "It can't end like this: Tell them I said something." The account that Leys gives seems unlikely, for Villa died by gunfire, but in an ambush, and probably hadn't the time to say much of anything. Pitt's friends, though, may have done well by him in telling what he might have said.

John Adams seems to have come up with admirable last words: "Jefferson survives." But they just missed being correct, for Jefferson died a little earlier on the same day, July 4, 1826,

The Zoo Loop Trail

 The trail skirting the Zoo tunnel reopened sometime last week. I discovered this on my run Sunday, and was delighted. Bypassing the tunnel by following the Klingle Road path was fine, if one was energetic enough for the hill. Running through the tunnel was OK, only the sidewalk was narrow and one had to squeeze around bicyclists and other pedestrians.  But the level trail is better than either.

I had run on this stretch of path on and off from about 1981 until it was closed for repair in 2016. I had never known that it had a name, and perhaps it didn't. A sign designates it as the Zoo Loop Trail, and gives its length as .5 miles. I'd have guessed it to be nearer a third of a mile.

Mike Causey, RIP

 Wednesday's Washington Post carries an obituary of Mike Causey, who for thirty years wrote the column the Federal Diary, a column covering the federal workforce and matters affecting it. The obituary credits him with popularizing, if not necessarily inventing, the expression "inside the Beltway." It says also that he was one of the first to make a circuit of the Beltway (I-495 and I-95) in 1964, of course for his job. Causey left in the Post in 2000 for the Federal News Network. He died in his offices there on September 26, after filing his last column.

The obituary remarks that Causey often broke news in his column, far back in the newspaper, that would show up a couple of weeks later on the front page with a big headline. If I recall correctly, The Washington Monthly forty years ago regarded this as a scandal. According to the obituary, Causey was mostly amused by it.

Casual Reading: Houses

It must have been about thirty years ago that I read a review of David Owen's The Walls Around Us: A Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works in The Washington Post, for the book was published in October 1991. I knew of Owen as an entertaining writer, and the topic was one that much occupied me just then, but I did not buy a copy. I must have been too busy in my own dealings with how a row house did and did not work.

Last week, I rectified my neglect, for I found and read a copy. I greatly enjoyed it, and will send it on to my brother, who has undertaken much more ambitious home projects than I would think of. Yet I can't say that practically speaking I have missed out on that much over the thirty years. Probably sixty percent of what Owen writes of I had learned by then or have learned since. The other forty percent involves work I would not undertake--work with copper pipes and blow torches, work with power saws and routers, doing my own drywall work.

But Owen is quite entertaining. He is good on the madness that develops when the upper middle class deals with kitchens--

They live in the apartment just half the year, and when they are in residence they almost always eat out. ... The rest of the kitchen gets a real workout only during parties, when it used not by the couple but by people they have hired.
This couple did not build a drop-dead kitchen because they wanted to create a pleasant working environment for servant and caterers. They did it because they wanted to send the world a message about themselves. Their kitchen is not so much a place to cook as it is an affirmation of their wealth and good taste.

Or, occasionally, when it does its own home renovation:

The only real setback I encountered involved a wallboard screw that made a funny noise as I drove it in. I looked at it for a while and then unscrewed it. A thin column of water streamed horrifyingly through the hole. Like most plumbing disasters, this one occurred late on a Saturday night.

The Walls Around Us seems to be out of print now--I must have contributed to this, in a small way, by my long delay in finding a copy. It does not seem to be hard to find used, though one must distinguish it from a novel of that name by one Nova Ren Suma.

 

 

What Am I Missing?

 John Jay Chapman's preface to the second edition of his William Lloyd Garrison begins

I once knew a man who wrote a brilliant biography of Abraham Lincoln. He himself belonged to the Civil War epoch, and while writing the book in about the year 1895, he became so absorbed and excited by that war as he studied it, and lived it over again, that he could not sleep at night. He paced the room, lost in thought, awed by his subject. It was a contemporary of this biographer who told me that, while the Civil War was in progress, the enthusiastic historian had taken no interest in it; it didn't seem to attract his attention.

I find this odd, yet I have no doubt that there are matters I ignored between say 1975 and 1985 that will interest the future much, and would interest me also--if not to the point of insomnia--were they brought to my attention.