23 July 2003

The Day My Ottoman Burned to the Ground

I cranked up the Fujitsu as we cleared Flight Level 29 and headed for crusing altitude at 33 thousand feet. The airline had promised us the movie Chicago- a feature article is prominent in the in-flight magazine, too, some sort of product placement cross-promotion- did not seem to want to play on the tape machine. They pulled it after a while and tried the Steve Martin movie where he falls in love with Queen Latifa. Icould not find the audio channel I thought maybe "1" was a good bet. No soap. It was the same rock schlock on the first four channels, and then a country station that covered some of the same channels backward.I took off my headset and talked to the guy in the seat next to me. He looked like he had been in the Air Force, or maybe computer repair.

"Airbus" I said, scowling.

"Yeah," he said. "I'd rather push my Boeing than ride in an Airbus."

We hurtled over the middle of America, headed west. There was a layer of puffy clouds, maybe down around FL20. They were sprad at equal intervals, almost a puffy grid of clouds. We were over a partof the country that was square and green.Later the squares would get bigger and the color would go out of it. Great brown ribbons of muddy water came together, nestling an Interstate and a gigantic housing development. I am disoriented. I don't know where I am. hbe squares get bigger and then are filled in with circles from the irrigation.

I am always struck by the fact that from the air it does not appear that we are intended to live in these palces.

I pulled the little Fujitsu LifeBook out of the ballistic nylon bag. I like the keyboard, even if it is a little tricky. Great little machine for flying over the middle of Americqa. I am going to miss it when I hand it bqack in. I am evaluating the machine as for the office as a prospective replacement for the low-end, light-end laptop we will procure next. There are many pluses and minuses to consider. Not the least of which is technical change. Moore's law says that however good these boxes are, they are obsolete in eighteen months. I have a ThinkPad I bought four years ago. It is around 600MhZ on the clock. Just ne step off the state-of-the-art when I bought it. This mich smaller, much lighter device is 2 gigs on the clock.I am seriously thinking about sending it off to college this fall in the hopes it may learn something before it is stolen.

Turned out the guy next to me was the Air Attache from Hong Kong. It is a small world. We had a great time talking through the great issues of the day, and at the twilight of his career, they are offering him the post in Buenos Aires as a prelude to retirement. I envied him, and am considering going down to visit when he gets there. We parted with great camradship and I alit in the high desert to participate in a series of meetings to plan for a simulation of mass casualties in a Western State. It is odd to have spent a lifetime worrying about events over seas to concclude it planning for intentional disasters right here at home. I was unsettled and did not feel the same camradship with the people I was meeting. I thought, as I left, that maybe this is about it for me. I should think about moving to the country and putting this all away someplace, pretend that it isn't going to happen.

I slept fitfully in the new time-zone and arose to find that three U.S. kids are dead in northern Iraq this morning, troops killed in more ambush activity. There seems to be a lot of death going on. I listened in amazement There was a spate of joy on the media over killing two Iraqi kids- the commentator called them "Bevis and Butt-head" but I suspect that Uday and Qusay Hussein meant something to their Father, even if they were little monsters of his regime. We really do need to roll Saddam up. It was good news that an Iraqi turned them in, good news that they could have surrended if they wanted, and good news that there is going to be no trial or long-term imprisonment. But as I said to the guy next to me, I would consider it bad news if someone killed my kids and probably wouldn't rest until I had done something to avenge them. So we will see what happens. We really do need to get the old man, and we need to do it quickly. Maybe the steam will go out of the Baath resistance. Or maybe we have just created more martyrs for some new jihad.

I was thinking about a lot of things yesterday. I got off one airplane and while passing to another heard that the New York Coincil Chamber had erupted in gunfire. Someone was disgruntled about something, if was home-grown and domestic, and consequently not that big a deal. They are saying that the gunman had come in with a Councilman and didn't go through the metal detector. Neither did Mayor Blumburg, The last time something like this happened was San Francsico, when Havey Milk wa gunned down with Mayor Moscone. I guess I am surprised it doesn't happen more often, considering how emotional people are about their life and situation. But it wasn't terrorism, so this falls into some other category of violence that is more tolerable, like the failure of the vertical stabilizer on the AirBus that crashed in New York. Mechanical failures we can handle better, or at least I can, sine they are just failures of man rather than acts of God. The malevolent acts of man are somehitng else, though I suppose flying AirBus products as much as I do I should think of it as a bigger personal threat.

I had another one of those act-of-god moments this week. The antique furnature dealer I use sometimes called me up about a piece of furniture I had taken to him for repair. When my Uncle passed away last year I came into possession of a footstool that had been in the family for a hundred years or more. Maybe 1890s vintage. It was a nice mahogany peice with scrolled legs and a portly Victorian top with a needlepoint insert where you would rest your feet. An Ottoman, they call the type, after the great Muslim empire that tottered right into the last century. The curious thing about this Ottoman was that it was the mate to one that had come to me on the death of my Great Aunt years ago. That peice had taken some hard use over the years with the growing of my Boys. The needlepoint was worn, but repairable, and one of the scrolled legs had lost the bottom in a brutal return from a duty station in California. I had not gotten around to having it repaired, one of those chores that was swept to the back of the line of cores. But seeing the two Ottomans together, the slightly down-at-the-heels one that had knocked around with me for twenty years, and the one that my Uncle had in his living room, I was constantly reminded of the vagaries of time and of fate. These two pieces, reunited after a half century. I felt a custodial duty, since I have come to realize we only act as caretakers for these things in our brief time in the world. A few Saturdays ago I gathered up the tattered and broken version and piled it into the truck I had purchased from my Uncle's estate. I took it over to the furniture guy and he assured me that his repair guy had an extensive stock of mahogany that just might math the broken leg. He said he could probably have it done as good as new in a month or so, work load dependent, of course.

I thnaked him, saying that I had no immediate need for it, I just wanted to have the work done right and have the two foot-stools looking as good as they once had, in the homes of the father of my grandfather and his father. I felt good about my cutodial role in this, and looked forward to telling my own sons of the story of the Ottomans, traveling independently down through the years, together once more.

I assumed the dealer was calling to tell me the work was done and I would soon have my foot-stool back. But he seemed agitated and beat around the bush before he came out with it. He said the repair place had burned to the ground the day before, all the old wood and glue and inventory and tools and walls and the roof falling in an a great shower of sparks. The old wood burning fiercely, he said. It took me a second to catc what he was saying.

"So the Ottoman is gone?" I said.

"Totally destroyed. With everything else. I had three other peices in ther for repair. You are the second one I have talked to."

"Burned to the ground?"

"Total loss. They had two volunteer fire companies there."

I thought about the needlepoint browning and bursting into flame, the old varnish bubbling before the wood exploded into flame. I wondered what the askes looked like, if the wood had converted to charcole in a way that you could still see what it had been, what the graeful scrolls had looked like. Or if a collapsing beam had just exploded it into a shower of sparks along with a proud old armoir and a matching set of drawers.

"Well, I suppose it was just bad luck. Lot of old wood and infammable material lying around." I said slowly, working my mind around the fact that I could just as easily gone up to the roof of my building and hurled it off the eighth floor, or driven over it in the truck. And if the repairman had just flicked a cigarette butt into the shop, selling his business back to the insurance company.

"I'm going to try to make it up to you" he said, relieved that I was apparently not going to get hysterical on him. "I swear to you I will."

"Well, maybe you will find another one like it" I said. "After all, shit happens."

"You better believe it" he said.