The Last Word On Nothing

I have had occasion to mention January before, once with hard eyes and grit and once with faith and hope. I mean, it needs both, doesn’t it. Another option is always to become one with the cold, dark skies.

You finally get through the infinite holiday season, think you can relax for a minute, and there’s January. For instance, coinciding with the new year was a leak in the gas main running down the street outside my house. It’s all underground but the gas filtered through the ground, followed the water mains, and drifted up to the surface and then through the air, finally so obvious that not only were the neighbors reporting it but so were random people walking though the neighborhood. And with every report — eight of them — the gas company has to send out a technician who walks around with sensors and makes alarming marks on the ground and asks to inspect your basement in case you’re about to be blown to kingdom come. Luckily, I never was. And finally they sent out a team who looked like construction workers ready to become a bomb squad, dug up my sidewalk and down to China, and fixed it.

Which was just in time, a week or more later, for the yearly water main break to whose early signs I am now fully alert: water runs down the street, it’s not raining, you look for where the water is coming from, and it’s just oozing up through the asphalt. And in a mere matter of time, that water will carry away enough underground ground, and the street will cave in. Luckily this time it didn’t. And they sent out a construction team who can see in the dark, dug up the street and down to China, and fixed it.

UPDATE: A geyser has just blown up, like 10, 20 feet straight up, in the middle of a cross street around the corner. I mean, jeez.

A person could think this all was due to Baltimore’s 19th century infrastructure, which responds catastrophically to cold snaps. But the temperatures were unusually mild. The cold snap didn’t come until after the infrastructure go fixed and it came accompanied with the 5 or 6 inches of snow that now wouldn’t melt. And I’m thinking that once again, the fault is January. It’s a dreadful month. So that’s me complaining again, tired of facing life with courage and realism.

But what choice do I have? Crawl under the kitchen table and stay there? I knew a med student working on a rural ambulance who rushed with his team into an isolated house to save people, saw an old lady curled up under the kitchen table, and tried to pull her out but she had her toes curled around the table legs and wouldn’t budge; and the owner said, “No, no, that’s just Grandma. My wife with the bad cough is in here.”

So maybe the kitchen table is an option. Just quit. Stay under there, stop dealing. But then what? I mean, life under the kitchen table doesn’t offer much, right? Outside has lots going on, right? So look at the snowdrops, right? They’re even coming up through the iced-up snow.

And look at the piles of shoveled snow and think, That’ll take until March to melt; and then notice the neighborhood kids look at the same piles and think, What if we dig holes in that? what if we crawl inside that? what if we make a shelter? And they do, they work at it like a construction crew. Mind you, it’s 18 degrees out there and the snow is packed to ice. They do it like it has to be done, like they’re wired to do it, like every stage of their little lives recapitulates human history and starts with cavemen. Next they’ll be drawing mammoths on the walls, dogs more likely. “Ontogeny recapitulates homogeny,” says my brother the humorist, and don’t bother looking up “homogeny” because it’s doesn’t mean what he wants it to mean.

What I’m saying is, yes, it’s January and almost February and it’s a goddam election year and who knows what other horrors will visit themselves uponst us. And visit they will. But equally, so will puddles of brilliant sun on the living room rug and the troglodytes in turquoise snowpants out there evolving under our very eyes.