Tine and Rubob's World In Disarray

Tine and Rubob took only a very short walk this afternoon, in the midst of a very busy day -- or perhaps not in the midst of it but at a safe distance from it, nicely removed from it.

The day had begun not at all favorably, with a bit of "turbulence," as Rubob described it. Whiny had thrown a fit over a misplaced remote control for the television when she settled down on the couch for her breakfast (a Gobby Wobbler and a donut with sprinkles on it) before school. “It’s like the Twilight Zone!” she screamed. The appliances are ganging up against me."

"A remote control isn't strictly an appliance," Rubob said.

However, allowing for that one inaccuracy, Whiny may have been right. The answering machine was dead after a power outage and the cordless phone was AWOL.

"I think it might have teleported itself somewhere else," Tine said.

"Maybe to a quieter house," Rubob added.

"Digital gadgets can do almost anything these days," Tine said. "Yesterday, I was almost bonked on the head by a digital snow bomb."

Whiny heard not a whit of this whimsy from Tiny, because she doesn't listen to her parents, which is perfectly understandable. “I need my remote control! I can’t turn on the television!”

Tine located the cordless phone, which had teleported itself upstairs overnight, and she later found the remote control, too, under Whiny's pillow after Whiny had pushed off to school.

The affairs of the world then intruded on Tine's morning. "Intruded" might not be the right word, because Tine enjoys the affairs of the world. Her grasp of them is not entirely practical in Rubob’s view, but she takes a great interest in them.

“Look, Tine, Dow Jones is naming a new chief executive,” Rubob had said earlier as he read the morning paper, before the affairs of the world insinuated themselves, shall we say, into their day. (That's why Rubob enjoys reading the morning paper so much, because the affairs of the world haven't intruded or insinuated themselves yet -- though paradoxically, the newspaper was all about the affairs of the world.)

“Did you know that it’s been a family affair, that the present CEO is married to the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Karen Elliott House?” Rubob had continued.

“I met a house yesterday that was married to another house,” Tine had replied. “But it wasn’t on Wall Street. It was on a street in our village.”

Rubob had looked at her uncomprehendingly. Perhaps Rubob’s grasp of the world is not so all-encompassing as he might think.

All those past-participle hads (that had insinuated themselves into this blog) can be dispensed with now because the phone was ringing and the affairs of the world were about to ... meddle in Tine's affairs.

"What past-participle heads?" Tine said later, when she was reading her blog. "Maybe those things hanging from the tree at Whiny's school yesterday were past-participle heads. Maybe the school had had quite enough grammar, and all the rules were tossed out the window."

Be that as it may, as Tine and Rubob moved nearer to taking their walk, the narrative moved closer to contenting itself with the simple past tense. But things were presently tense at Rubob and Tine's at the moment, because the world at large, on the other end of the phone, was making large demands on Rubob and Tine's time.

Why can't we simply move on to the walk, some of you are no doubt wondering? But walks are so delightful because they have context -- they're framed, as it were. Rubob and Tine's walks take place in the midst of very busy days, or safely removed from very busy days. And that's why they're so important -- or not important at all, but simply pleasant.

"I don't know what this blog would do without the word "or," Rubob said, reading Tine's blog.

"I could make do," Tine said -- "or maybe not."

With numerous phone calls out of the way -- largely phone calls about numbers on bills that didn't add up, made to digital people with curiously non-inflected digital voices -- Rubob said to Tine, "Our finances are in disarray. But we can go for a walk when the pot pie comes out of the oven."

Tine thought that waiting for a pie to come out of the oven might take forever, unless the pie teleported itself, and she suggested that Rubob take the pie out of the oven himself, right then and there.

"Twenty minutes, Tine," Rubob said.

"It occurs to me that there's an element of Whiny in you at times," Rubob said, and Tine, who loves Whiny, felt quite pleased with this, whatever Rubob was, well, insinuating. She looked at Whiny's pillow on the couch, where Whiny's rag doll, Little Wilbur, was sitting with Whiny's remote control, watiting for Whiny to return home and turn the TV back on. Here's a picture of Little Wilbur:



Tine then decided to go on ice patrol with her ice pick outside for twenty minutes, to try to clear some of the snow Rubob had left on the pathway, on the driveway, by the shed -- nearly everywhere, in fact.

"Rusty," she said to the snowblower, "Rubob didn't give you much exercise yesterday. Weren't you feeling well?" (Rusty often comes down with a bad cough.) But Rusty was busily contemplating a pool of oil underneath him in the shed.

"Alright, Tine, let's go for a walk," Rubob said, appearing with a bag of trash.

"You're not going to bring that with us?" Tine asked, because once Rubob, who can be absent-minded at times, had carried the trash all the way down to the mailbox. But Rubob had his wits about him this afternoon, and he put the trash in the garbage can.

Trash, as it happened, was one of the first sights on Tine's walk today, and Rubob asked her, "Why are you stopping to look at that, Tine?" Trash pickup had been postponed for a day, perhaps because of ice pellets and snow bombs, and Tine thought that perhaps Rubob should have brought his trash bag along after all.



"The snowstorm has left the world in disarray," Tine reflected, and this, as it happened, turned out to be the theme of the walk. That's not all that surprising because Tine's airy, whimsical mind has a surprisingly defined bearing on the direction of Rubob and Tine's walks, and sometimes her mind and disarray walked hand in hand, as it were.

"What's that?" Tine asked, pointing to the sky.

"That's the sun, Tine," Rubob said.

"I thought it might be the moon," Tine said, "what with the world in disarray and all."



They passed another indication that all wasn't right with the world, and Rubob took particular note of it because he knows a thing or two about fixing fences. "We've replaced six fence posts in the past five years," he told Tine.



Tine turned her attention to a tree that confirmed her suspicions on her walk yesterday, namely that it was trees similar to those in "The Wizard of Oz" that were hurling snow bombs:



"I thought there might be some 'Wizard of Oz' trees in the neighborhood," she said to Rubob. "They seem to have taught our normal everyday village trees some bad habits," she thought, "because a tree across the street has a collection of snow bombs."



But the snow bombs were frozen to the limbs today, so Tine and Rubob enjoyed safe passage down Hatter's Lane. "That'll show you," Tine said to the frozen tree.

They turned onto Main Street, which obliged Tine and Rubob with another scene of disarray -- or at least disrepair:



"How many years do you suppose that has gone without being painted, Tine" Rubob asked.

"I don't know, Rubob."

Not to be outdone, the church was looking rather neglected, too.

"They haven't done their civic duty, Tine," Rubob said.

"Scofflaws, Rubob," Tine added.



But all was right with the church in one respect -- in the most important respect. The Baby Jesus was in his manger, secure on his straw mattress in his crib.



This hadn't always been the case because, in actual fact, someone had made off with the Baby Jesus on Christmas morning, right after the midnight Mass. As The Hartford Courant reported, Father Flynn had put the Baby Jesus out in his crib after Mass, and by 7 a.m. he had vanished. ("He was left out in the cold," Tine thought, "and he probably went somewhere warm and cozy for the night. Very sensible of him. One could catch one's death out there at night.") The priest notified the police of the theft.

"If anyone's capable of teleportation, he is," Tine thought (referring to the Baby Jesus, not the priest, whom Tine hasn't met). All was not right again with the church, the village and indeed the world until the following Thursday, when the Baby Jesus was returned (or simply returned of his own accord if it was, in fact, a case of teleportation, as Tine surmised). The baby showed up at the back door of St. Patrick's Church, like an ordinary foundling (much as Whiny showed up on our doorstep, Tiny thought, entirely in jest).

"He's back where he ought to be," the Courant quoted the priest saying. "Where would we be without him?"

Rubob, who's not of a religious turn of mind, hadn't made the short (but hazardous ) pilgrimage across the busy street to see the Baby Jesus. He (Rubob, not the Baby Jesus) was standing on the other side of street admiring the architectural details of a stately old Colonial. After Tine had crossed back over the dangerous thoroughfare, putting her life into the hands of the Baby Jesus, Rubob said, "Look, Tine -- see the bubble in the window."



"That must be the real estate Bubble you're always talking about," Tine said, but Rubob had shifted his gaze to another architectural detail.



"I've never noticed that ornate knob before," Rubob said.

"There are a lot of nobs on this street, if you look carefully," Tine might have said (again entirely in jest), but she kept very quiet because she knew it might appear in her blog and her remarks might be misunderstood. "How many knobs have you noticed in this town, Rubob?" she asked.

But Rubob had turned his attention to yet another architectural detail, a splendid one:



In fact, that architectural detail was for sale, along with the rest of the house of the Rev. Noah Porter (who'd departed quite some time ago); there was a sign out in front of the house. "A window fan would be nice in the summer," Tine thought.

The village was certainly looking remarkably lovely since the appearance -- or reappearance -- of the Baby Jesus. The disarray had seemingly vanished, Tine thought. But she thought too soon, because Rubob found something not quite right in this scene:



"Most mountains have snow at the peak, Tine, not farther down."

"I hadn't thought of that," Tine said. "You're right, I suppose," but she wasn't quite sure. "Disarray is in the eye of the beholder," she thought. "Even the trash -- I thought there was something quite nice about it, all in all." And to Rubob, she said, "Maybe it's a mountain peak that's done its civic duty, at least at the very top."

The two turned onto a side street and encountered the tin shop, and sure enough, Rubob commented on the color, as he often does. "Too yellow," he said. "Yes, definitely too yellow. I don't think I care for yellow houses. It's not an ideal color -- not ideal at all."



"What is it about yellow that you don't like?" Tine asked, though she knew his real objection was that it didn't blend in all that well with the snow. She thought he'd reiterate his objection, which he's done on countless walks with Tine, and she enjoyed reiterations on favorite topics. But Rubob expanded on the theme, as he is wont to do.

Before we get to Rubob's remarks on yellow, however, that word, "wont" (which was on Tine's mind as she thought about Rubob) made her recall a piece in the newspaper the other day on the "Gullah Gospel." She'd torn the story out of the paper and left it by Rubob's chair, in hopes that he might peer over his own newspaper and read it. The newspaper is a topic that's already been introduced in this blog entry, so this digression is entirely permissible, and indeed part of the smooth-flowing narrative.

The Gullah Gospel is a translation of the Gospel that directly addresses the issue of a smooth-flowing narrative. Its creator, one Emory Campbell, from St. Helena Island, South Carolina, said that he'd never understood the line "I shall not want" in Psalm 23. " 'What does that mean?' he'd ask himself," the newspaper story said. So Campbell, along with several others, translated the psalm, and the whole Bible, in fact, into a language they could understand, the language of their ancestors. The line in the psalm became: "De Lawd me shephud. A hab ebryting wa A need."

"A hab ebyting wa A need," Tine said to Rubob.

"Wha'd'y'say, Tine?" Rubob said.

He must speak Gullah, too, Tine thought. "Nothing, Rubob." But she thought to herself, "I do have everything I need. Walks are like that. They make me think such pleasant thoughts."

And here we get back to the bothersome stuff that preceded today's walk -- not the pot pie (which was on Tine's mind, because her stomach hadn't had any sustenance at all on this walk, while her mind was full of all sorts of things, including a pot pie) -- but all the other detritus (as Rubob might say), such as Whiny's screaming, the numbers that didn't add up and the phone calls with the digital voices. Or rather -- there's always an "or" with Tine -- we don't actually get back to the bothersome stuff at all, Tine thought. We leave it behind us on the roadside like so much rubbish, and it gets picked up, perhaps a day late, but picked up all the same.

"A walk is a bit of a pick-me-up," Tine thought. Oddly enough, a garbage truck was just arriving on the street, and Tine gave it a wide berth. Perhaps the rumbling of the rubbish truck had prompted her thoughts before she was aware of it. "What an inspiration a trash can or a garbage truck can be," Tine thought.

All things do seem to be connected on walks, at least the best of walks, she thought. Rubob, on the other hand, didn't require one grand edifice or overarching theme for all the architectural details he stopped to admire. He kept moving along, from fencepost to doorknob to bubble, taking note of this and that, quantifying and qualifying, commenting on particulars -- as well he should, Tine thought. Well, maybe the Bubble was an overarching theme in the village, but rubob thought it wouldn't last anyway.

Thinking about Rubob, Tine remembered that he was about to comment on the color of the tin shop. "What were you saying, Rubob?"

"Yellow is the color of moral degradation in Dostoyevsky," he said.

"Moral degradation?" Tine asked.

"Well, maybe not quite moral degradation, but a sort of intellectual disarray. Yellow was the color of Raskolnikov's bedroom, I seem to recall -- or some shade of yellow."

"What about this house?" Tine asked, pointing to the house across the street from the tin shop:



"Yes, that's rather nice," Rubob said, noncommittally. It didn't seem to bother him that the house suggested little in the way of support for his argument against yellow. His opinion on yellow houses was a firm one, and a pleasingly yellow house wasn't about to dissuade him from his view. Rubob's views were as strongly constructed, as long-standing, as tested by time, as the yellow house Tine was presently admiring, and they weren't about to come crashing down with one observation from Tine.

And speaking of crashing down, Rubob was startled to see that the world was devolving back into disarray and chaos -- "perhaps because of the unfortunate, corrupting yellow of the tinshop," Tine thought, "or maybe we've wandered too far from the Baby J."

Rubob pointed out a tree that Tine had seen the day before (an observation that Tine's blog had overlooked, preoccupied as it was with snow bombs):



The tree had landed on an electrical line, and as a result the telephone pole by the street was leaning over. "This is terrible. We need to alert the power company, Tine," Rubob said.



Rubob made a mental note of the house number and even the number of the telephone pole.

"I hadn't realized that telephone poles had numbers, Rubob," Tine said. In Rubob's universe, everything had a number, and that's just how it should be, she reflected. "All is number," said Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher and a man after Rubob's own heart. "And I've got your number, Rubob," Tine thought, looking at Rubob examining the telephone pole. Perhaps Rubob did connect everything on walks, she reckoned, with numbers.

As Tine and Rubob arrived at their mailbox, Tine looked at the peeling numbers on it and thought their street number was the perfect number, the number of home. (Pythagoras thought the perfect number was the number of the universe, but he was thinking big. "He had the whole Mediterranean to travel around in, not just a little village," Tine thought.)

Even with some things in the village -- a number of things, in fact -- in disarray, all in all it was a very pleasant walk.