‘Hey! Hey!’ At what felt like 3am, he asked, ‘What did you get for breakfast?’ Or that’s what I thought I heard at that hour. I began the work required to pull oneself up out of layers of deep, almost comatose primordial sleep. It was sluggish, heavy and labored going. I heard my voice say, ‘Two kinds of sweet rolls; one cinnamon with traditional white icing and the other plain with strawberry and cream icing’. Silence. ‘No doughnuts?’ ‘Nope’ I responded. ‘Who asks about breakfast at 3am anyway?’ Silence. I must not have heard right and drifted back off, down into deep slumber.
In the morning, I looked out the upstairs window and noted the strong winds from last night had leveled the neighbor’s swing set. The blue plastic slide jutted off at an angle and pointed toward the street. There was a large piece of black rubber lying along the edge of the property; the brown beams, swings, chains, silver nuts and bolts and braces were all collapsed on top of themselves in a crumpled heap, broken and pointing toward the bright blue May sky.
‘Well, there goes my asymmetry problem’ I said, turning away from the window. ‘Solved by the wind’.
Last summer when the neighbors with two small children set up the large beamed swing set, they placed it at a jaunty angle on a slight slope; the left end of it lined up crisply flush with the property line…and the far right end of it bent awkwardly inward. It was a fluke of physics; perhaps the right side was heavier than the left, or they had measured badly or the ground was uneven or muddy. Whatever the reason, the entire swing set was not symmetrical, not flush, not sequential in its ‘flow’ and I could observe this daily from our upstairs window. The set leaned drunkenly forward waiting for a stiff breeze to knock it over.
‘It makes me nuts and dizzy’ I said on more than one occasion. ‘Now I can’t look out of the window’. He had rolled his eyes at the time and laughed. ‘Do you want me to go tell them to fix it?’
I went downstairs to put the coffee on to brew. I heard him coming down the steps and turned around as he entered the kitchen. ‘Hey! Hey, did you see the swing set?’ He grinned and pointed in the direction of the neighbor’s yard. ‘There’s your asymmetrical problem. Gone!’ I glanced upwards as a sunbeam began a golden descent over the curtain’s top hem, through the window, touching the edge of the table and moving slowly in the direction of the oven. ‘The wreck of the Hesperus in the suburbs. They did not build that thing right!’ he shook his head. ‘They didn’t pour cement to set the posts in or to lay down chains under the soil. They just sat the thing on top. On top of a hill!’ He shook his head again.
‘What do you expect?’ I asked. ‘They are jazz musicians. They’re gone every weekend playing the venues. Can a jazz musician pour cement?’ He sipped gingerly at the steaming coffee. ‘Well, I can’t pour cement’ I answered myself. ‘Things better left undone’…I remembered a recent wall paper incident which had gone badly. Despite an inordinate amount of time spent measuring, the wall paper had come up short. ‘Or I came up too short’ I said quietly. ‘What?’ He stared at me. ‘Hey, what’s for breakfast?’ He looked over at the oven. ‘Did I ask you already?’ I stared at him. ‘Don’t you remember? At 3am? You asked if we had doughnuts?’ He stretched his neck a bit, ran his right hand down over his beard and queried, ‘Doughnuts? What about sweet rolls? Are there sweet rolls?’ I sighed. ‘I have the wreck of the Hesperus out there and a Jackson Pollock mess in my kitchen. And by the way, no! Jazz musicians should not attempt to pour cement. They’d hit that high note and assume it was all good. Richard Wagner seems more appropriate’. ‘Who’s he?’ he asked. I sighed. ‘Nobody, nobody at all. Nobody a stiff spring breeze couldn’t take down’.
He swallowed the rest of his coffee. ‘After I eat my doughnut, I’m going to go over there and ask if they need any help putting it back up’. ‘Sweet rolls! We’re having sweet rolls!’ I sighed for the third time. ‘Think Wagner!’ I yelled as he headed out the door. ‘Poured cement! Flush with the property! No jazzy notes…!
690 Saint Paul 