MOUNT AUBURN STREET

Abstract

1 2 2 Y M O U N T A U B U R N S T R E E T J O H N C R O W L E Y Harry Watroba kept a lookout for signs that he was transitioning into old age. For instance, he had come to notice how, like a cheerful oldster, he took increasing satisfaction in tidying, in small-job completion, in preparation and storage, in refreshment of the spaces around him. Shaping up the last redoubt? It didn’t seem so, but certainly he was becoming more like the ant than the grasshopper he’d been in youth. Also he was growing more miserly , a sign of age in many cultures, as he knew: the slippered pantaloon counting over his coins. Right now he was scrubbing the accumulated calcium and minerals from an old stainless-steel teakettle that had become so coated with thick white stu√ the water could hardly come out. He’d had to find a thin sharp thing (an ancient silver nut pick, in the end) with which to poke down through the stubby spout and clear the holes that the water would, or rather wouldn’t, pour out of; scrape with a green scrubbie the interior, and – as long as he was at it – the greasy and waterspotted exterior too. The water in this place he’d come to live in was phenomenally hard. The kettle belonged to the place, not to Harry. Harry’s own kettle, an even older and more battered one, had 1 2 3 R been lost forever when Harry’s house burned down, or up – Harry pondered the di√erence, what made one preposition preferable to the other. And lost: the catastrophe had given him many reasons to consider the various and di√ering occasions for that word. I lost my wife, we say, though (excepting the case of a separation at a mall or in a crowd) we know just where she is. The lost in I lost my way seems to be a rather di√erent word than it is in, say, I lost my hat, or in I lost that fight. Another thing Harry had lost in the fire was the nearly complete draft of a major revision and updating of his popular (even briefly best-selling) book A Rhetoric for Everyone. He had certainly lost the book, even though he knew where the scorched remains of the pages and the sturdy binder that had held them were: they were with his library, down in the wetted ash and blackened lumber of his former o≈ce in the nice Colonial Revival house in the hill town where he had lived for decades. He’d lost the computer on which it was almost done being typed, and the disks on which several drafts were stored, and those also on which it was backed up, and he knew where those were too. Because of the fire he had also lost, di√erent sense, his wife Mila: she blamed him (justly enough) for the fire, and had moved in with her mother in a nearby city. In various losings then, his home, his book, his occupation, his wife, his way, his future, and his (weirdly longstanding ) innocence. The old teakettle now shone, glowing like an athlete after exercise . The dent on one side made it all the more appealing: refreshed and ready, but old and reliable too. Baraka: long ago Mila had told him this Arabic word meant ‘‘the holiness human things acquire through long use.’’ Only recently had it occurred to him to look this up and confirm she was right, and she wasn’t. Which left a gap in the language, for surely a word for the condition he’d thought baraka described was necessary and gratifying. He put the kettle back on the stovetop where it resided. For a couple of months after the conflagration Harry’d moved in with his daughter Hope and her daughter Muriel, in the spare room, feeling a weird sense of privileged stasis, like a soul in the quiet forecourt of a not-yet-determined afterlife. That couldn’t continue, and without...