04 September 2010
 
Whitecaps

(The view of gray sky and gray waves, with whitecaps, from the deck in little city by the bay. Photo Socotra)

As a midwesterner, the Labor Day weekend marks the change of season. There are weeks of summer left here in the Northland, months of it back in Virginia, but this is when the Fudgies depart to resume their lives downstate and the stores shut down and life changes.

We are a wired lot these days, and I was in serious withdrawal in the house on the bluff above the Bay. I had to file a timecard on-line, and the house was not cooperating. Lights blinked on the modem and the wifi but there was no signal and no combination of rebooting the laptop or the devices seemed to change it.
 
Michigan is always IT hell.
 
The problem is the three of us kids, coming in cycles, and instituting our own IT solutions to whatever lunacy was going on at the moment. The surveillance cameras might have worked momentarily when my brother put them in, running some of the wires through the gas fireplace that opens to both the dining and living rooms, but if so, it also knocked out the wireless hot-spot I had set up the year before.
 
I tracked every untagged line while the workpeople did their thing, hooking up the gas lines to the new stove and replacing some corroded fixture in the downstairs apartment. Nothing seemed to work, though the lights blinked nicely on both the cable modem point-of-presence and on the wifi.
 
A fucking mystery.
 
My sister called from Alaska to tell me that the only way she was able to access the internet was by dial-up from the computer we bought Mom before she lost the ability to log on. I tried it, and it worked, after a fashion, though getting through the eighty-odd email with the bright images took forever. I got the daily story on the wire hours late, interrupted by two sets of workmen stopped by looking for payment for services rendered over the summer. It was a giddy feeling, writing the checks, not knowing if there were actually sufficient funds available. I mean, I assumed there were but have not dived deep enough into the finances to be sure.
 
And the allure of trying to get things presentable again after the workpeople were gone. Why, I don't know.
 
I finally could delay leaving the house no longer, and drove over to the Village. Dad/Raven had pissed himself- should I get Depends this trip or try to maintain the fiction that he could still control his bladder? Mom was sitting up bright and inquisitive. It was Friday, the day her group The Coterie was supposed to meet. She had no curiosity about it, and clearly could not gather herself together in the time available.
 
Raven's head sank back on his neck, eyes closed and mouth agape in sleep. I said I would run up town and make apologies for their absence, and fled the Village and drove uptown, dropping off two more files of my Uncle's letters to Dad at the copying place. We are trying to salvage the mound of correspondence that Jim had penned weekly to Dad for more than sixty years.
 
Then I used Dad's handicapped placard to park next to the door of the Perry Hotel, the only surviving hotel of the great days of tourism in the little city by the Bay by virtue of its masonry construction. All the other great hotels that lined the railroad tracks and the boat landing were made of pine from the great North Woods, and they had burned merrily in their time. Only the Perry remains as an island of the past in the heart of the little city.
 
I could not identify anything that looked precisely like Coterie, and asked a couple groups before feeling like an idiot and going back out to the car. Labor Day crowds swarmed the streets, what a merchant pal of mine terms a Visa Storm, the benefit that falls to the shop-owners of crappy holiday weather that leaves no activity but shopping for amusement.
 
I could not bring myself to indulge in that, not with all the un-amalgamated crap in the house to get through and dispose of, and with the weight of all that e-mail piling up on the other side of the dial-up connection. I stopped at the house again, and dug into the wires, disconnecting the cameras and tugging at cables that ran though the wall.
 
Nothing.
 
I finally unscrewed he cable point-of-presence and reversed the cables on the splitter that went to the television, which seemed to be working just fine. I had no confidence that would work; after all, it was just a splitter, and the television sputtered back to life just fine on the other side of the little device.
 
I wandered back to the Mac where it sat mute on the kitchen table, hit the Airport icon on the toolbar at the top of the Mac, and out roared Gmail at the speed of heat.
 
Back in business. Damn, it felt good. Reconnected. I buzzed though a hundred email and did my time-card for the office, adding an hour for my trouble in trying to contact them and marking up seven hours of alleged vacation.
 
I had promised to come back to the Village in time for dinner. "Do you think they are serving?" Mom had asked, as if dinner was a random event. I assured her that they were. She seemed to think it was Labor Day already, and the residents were left to their own devices. She has lost where the holiday fits in all this, and has no feeling for the rhythm of the Village.
 
I escorted them down to the "B" dining room, where staff had place them with addled Jerry, their regular dining partner, who was digging into Salisbury Steak with gusto. I got Dad seated and Mom chatted away merrily. I put the dressing on his salad and fled the facility.
 
The BuI thought about stopping at a bar to hear grown-ups talk, but decided I would inaugurate the new stove and broil a steak I had brought frozen in the cooler from DC.
 
This sucks. Mom's last words at dinner were about her house, and how she wanted to go through each room to mark everything.
 
No fucking way. Anook already shipped stuff to Alaska, and we can’t leave everything out for the taking in an empty place.  I don’t know how I am going to deal with that, or conduct an outing for them in the blowing rain and the gray skies and the whitecaps on the Bay.
 
I guess I will just have to be a hard ass. Or maybe just lie and tell her there are way too many workmen in the way.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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