I Love Music
November 10, 2010
I love music because it can't be conquered. No one will ever get to the end of music, solve it or master it, although it can be dumbed down.
I love music because it is only occasionally black and white. It deigns to be black and white only because it represents all colors; music has no more desire to be black or white than it does chartreuse.
I love music because no one should make it out of obligation. I don't mean musicians don't have a responsibility to make it, I mean anyone who isn't making it because they love it probably shouldn't be. Music is there to be made, or not, just as you please. It is the opposite of bills, jogging, taxes, health insurance and laundry.
I love music because it's such an easy way to get happy.
Music is good for you. What some people do to music, often in elevators, can be bad, but music itself is good and does not require moderation. It is good for weekdays, the weekend, holidays, Sundays, cloudy days, sunny days, fast days, slow days, work or play, alone or with friends, home or traveling, relaxed or serious, weddings and funerals and Tuesdays, year-round. And it is especially good for boredom.
I love music because it is free and unregulated, and anyone can make it.
I love music because it is never offended by incompetence. It's very patient with my small efforts.
I love music because it's like food: after you've made it, you can enjoy it. Also like food, music can be delicious whether complex or simple. Itʼs also better than food: once made, it canʼt be used up.
I love music because no one can spoil it. It can be insulted and abused, adulterated and prostituted, but music is never harmed for good. It still exists in its pure form, ready and willing for someone humbler to drop by.
I love music because it is not of this earth. It has its own dimension. We hear ourselves in music, but we also hear something else, something we can't quite wrap our minds around. It is beyond us.
I love music because it is better than I am. It is more beautiful, cleverer, stronger, truer and more creative, and I have to respect that.
But most of all, I love how music makes no sense. Life is terrible when it is made up only of things that make sense. In this way, music is both an escape from real life and a glimpse of what life is really all about. Music is impractical and pointless and absolutely vital to existence. (As Wilde observes, "All art is quite useless.")
Music would never make that traditional list of those basic human needs – food, shelter, clothing. But just see how long you could get along without it.
lumbering encumbered
September 14, 2022
I contend that Charlotte Douglas International is the widest airport in the nation, possibly on earth, exclusively devoted to one airline. There are bigger airports – Atlanta, for example – but they all have a nice variety of airlines, whereas Charlotte is an American hub, meaning it consists of
1. American Flights
2. Flights operated by American subsidiaries (American Eagle, Envoy Air, Piedmont, Mesa, Republic, SkyWest, etc.)
3. Piddly little airlines like Contour that fly into and out of tiny airports like Muscle Shoals, AL. (No offense meant to Muscle Shoalers, you all invented soul and I’m forever grateful, but usually I’m not flying into you.)
What does all this mean? It means your arrival and departure gates for your connection may be (whoops!) at opposite ends of the airport. And what does that mean? It means you live and die by connection time.
Let me back up.
I’ve done my fair share of air travel. Moreover, I have extensive experience with the white-knuckle ride that is Flying with Valuable Musical Instruments. (Our livelihood depends on our vastly expensive and ridiculously fragile tools, ours is a high and lonely destiny, etc.) Generally I fly Jetblue, because I know what seat to pick in order to board early; with Southwest, you pony up for the Early Boarding and then set an alarm in order to check in exactly 24 hours ahead (this is a real pain when you have an indecently early flight, which nowadays seems to be the rule – your typical departure options are 5:15am, 5:45am, 5:50am, 11:20am and early evening). This knowledge has been hard-earned, but it keeps my fiddle intact, which, at the end of the day, is all I care about.
I also know Section 403 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 more or less by heart: it states that airlines must accept musical instruments on board aircraft if at the time the passenger boards the aircraft such stowage space is available, meaning you only get to leverage Section 403 if you get onboard before the bins are full. So on a day when I’m flying, my brain treats the upcoming boarding process like an application left running: it might be in the background, but it’s steadily working, assessing threats, collecting data, making contingency plans, preparing for the worst.
The Situation: Flight from Knoxville to Minneapolis, connecting in Charlotte. Connection time: 43 minutes.
Do itinerary planners put a lot of thought into making sure connection times are reasonable? They do not. What they do instead is change the font color of the connection time on your flight itinerary from black to red, in essence alerting you “Here is where you need to be stressed out,” i.e. PLEASE NOTE YOUR JOURNEY WILL LIKELY SUFFER AN UNRECOVERABLE INJURY AT THIS POINT.
“But,” I hear you protesting, “how is 43 minutes insufficient time to cross an airport? What is this airport, a mile wide?” First of all – yes. But there are other factors.
American Airlines starts boarding 35 minutes before scheduled departure. If you’re not at the gate, it doesn’t matter what group you’re in or how many of their credit cards you own or what early boarding fees you paid or whether or not you’re in the armed forces, you’re not there to board during the critical Available Bin Space Period. The speed at which overhead bins fill is like internet connection – it just gets faster with time. I don’t know if trust in baggage handlers has declined or no one wants the hassle of checking bags or everyone has a violin valued more than a decent car in their carry-on bag, but those bins go much faster than they used to. Soon the whole cabin will be full of overhead bags and the people will ride below.
So, sure, you can disembark at Gate E49 and take your sweet old time moseying across to Gate A7, and you will make your flight – technically. You will be the last to board, and the only thing you will take with you is the clothes on your back, because there is exactly zero space remaining for even a molecule of your baggage. If you’re me, this is a problem. I have the kind of baggage that I refuse to put under the plane; I’d rather miss the flight. Except I don’t want to miss the flight; it cost over $800 after all the early boarding fees and the seat upgrades and the extra bin space and all the rest of it, and the thought of sitting in the Charlotte Airport – which still, somehow, smells like an ashtray – for an extra four hours is what I think they call a soul-crusher.
So if you have precious cargo to carry on and every intention of being in line when boarding starts, you have a total of eight minutes (43 minus 35) to 1) get off the plane, 2) wait for them to bring your gate-checked, tiny suitcase back up to the jetway, and 3) cross the airport at a dead run. And this total of eight minutes is assuming you landed on time.
It turns out this is not actually possible – even if I had had the foresight to wear running shoes, I couldn’t have made it. By the time I got my bag back from Plane #1, it was two minutes to boarding Plane #2, and I haven’t run a two-minute mile in, like, soooo long. And so I just did the best I could, lumbering encumbered with my three carry-ons, flapping along like some ungainly flightless bird past lots and lots and lots of older white people in big t-shirts with pictures of barbeque joints with witty slogans (“I LIKE PIG BUTTS AND I CANNOT LIE”), who tend to clog the moving walkway (pro tip: skip the moving walkway, it’s a death trap), likely providing them their best entertainment of the day (“Jiminy Christmas, I knew them fiddle players was crazy!”), like some travesty of my marathon experience four years back, to present myself at last, with a final galumph, disgruntled and disheveled, sweaty and exhausted, heaving of chest and wholly unaccountable, at the proper gate and discover I was now in the second-to-last group, also known as the Maybe/Maybe Not group.
So I stood on the jetway in a very long line, listening for the bell to toll, which is to say listening for a disembodied voice to announce the bin space was now full and gate-checking would commence. At which point I would have a whole new set of unattractive options.
But it never came. I made it on and the fiddle did too, shoved precariously atop a duffel. All was well that ended well, although I didn't much care for how violently the flight attendant closed the bin door. I just hope the health gods are watching on these occasions when I am forced to exercise in long pants and sandals while carrying luggage.
So what was all this anyway, some kind of epic whine? Not on your life. Stuff like this comes with the territory. I get to play music! My attitude is gratitude, or however it goes. Be prepared for the unpredictable, especially when flying, and bring a decent pair of running shoes.
The Great Josh Road Adventure
August 12, 2007
Dear loyal readership,
Hope you had a great July. Remember, humidity helps you live longer. So if you're out in the UV rays all day, but it's humid too, you're probably going to die exactly when you were going to before. And that is a comfort.
I've learned the hard way not to squeeze too many gigs into one weekend – shows run long or start early, flights get cancelled, that kind of thing. It's just too dangerous, with too much potential for unprofessionalism, and we avoid unprofessionalism whenever possible.
But I really thought I could make this one. It was a wedding in Vermont, an old college friend, and I was completely honest with her about the possibility of being late. See, I was flying in from Chicago that morning, and there's a bunch of things that can go wrong when you wake up in Chicago and try to make a one o'clock wedding in southern Vermont ("I think I can be there by 2:00").
The way you pull it off is, you try to troubleshoot all the stuff that can be troubleshot, and the stuff that can't, well, you just hope for the best. And more often than not you get away with it.
So. Item 1: Alarm clock. What if it doesn't go off? That's why God made backup alarm clocks. Item 2: Traffic. What if there's some on the way to the airport? Leave earlier – fifteen minutes usually does it. Try to get to the airport an hour early; depending on the airport, this is either way too much time (I respectfully salute tranquil Manchester Airport, NH) or just barely enough (I give you the infamous Chicago Midway, IL). When I got to Midway at 7:19 a.m., with 56 minutes to spare, the line to the ticket counter stretched around the terminal, down the corridor, through the lounge and – this is true – out into the parking garage. Southwest Airlines is popular. To their credit, the line moved briskly. But not briskly enough – upon finally gaining the counter and punching various icons on the computer check-in screen, a deafening buzzer informed me (and everyone else) that my baggage was "late-checked" and might not show up in Albany. It was only later on the plane that I realized I had checked my car keys.
The plane took off on time and landed on time, which was excellent news. Planes definitely qualify as stuff you can't control (just try it and see). My bags made it too, and I drove out of the discount parking lot at 12:15 p.m., the very minute I'd hoped to. So far, so prompt.
Item 3: Directions. Always, always get them, and backup directions from a local are a great idea. But I’d let the backup go this time; Google Maps hadn't failed me yet, and so it was just me and my hastily folded sheet of printer paper as I took a right onto Route 7 and headed for the Green Mountain State.
I was supposed to travel Route 9 for 54.8 miles and then look for Shearer Hill Road, but who remembers to punch the odometer? Needless to say, I missed the turn and had to go back for it. By this time it was 2:00, but my directions said I only had ten miles of back roads to cover, so I was looking good for 2:15.
I found the next turn, Hatch School Road, and turned left. The composition of the roads was becoming increasingly rural, by which I mean less pavement and more dirt. This seemed ominous. Shearer Hill had been about 80% pavement, Hatch School was about 50%, with a couple of large craters. This wedding reception was evidently in the middle of nowhere. I drove the required distance and found a right turn with no street sign. With a sigh, I gunned the car up the slippery, gravelly, potholed dirt hill, my confidence pretty much shot.
'After 0.1 miles, turn left on Josh Rd.'
Josh Road was the kind of road over which Ma and Pa Ingalls probably bounced in their covered wagon through the Big Woods of Wisconsin, except in those more formal times I imagine it was Joshua Road. I own a Honda Civic, very dear to me, we've been together a long time, and this little car was not having it. One might qualify Josh Road as a road because there were no large pits or fallen logs, but driving it felt like I had suddenly exchanged my Civic for a boat on a choppy lake. Are we there yet?
And then it ended, in a line of carefree, overgrown grass with just a shadow of tire tracks continuing off into the cool, sun-dappled forest. A small house sat at the end, out of which issued a large white collie, barking furiously. I knew I must have missed a turn, though my directions said I still had a mile to go. There was no turning around – Josh Road was, it turned out, exactly the width of a Honda Civic - so I backed up, revisiting all the bounces again only in reverse, looking for anything that might resemble a turn ... but all I saw was woods. It was now 2:20, and I was officially late and unprofessional.
Mastering an impulse to run over the dog, which had energetically accompanied me up and down Josh Road for the last few minutes, I drove to the end again, carefully nosed the car into the grass and began to buck down the trail. A trail was what it was – like a hiking trail. We left the grass behind and embarked into the woods. After a hundred feet, the right side fell away in a sheer cliff. I saw a boulder ahead of me, dead center, embedded, about a foot high. I thought I could clear it.
A horrible, scraping, gouging sound came from directly beneath my feet. I actually felt the impact through my shoes, this awful scraping sensation, like when you drag the sole of your foot along a gravel road. It was like getting shipwrecked. I smelled engine. I stopped, impaled on the rock, then pushed through, in effect planing the underbody. Half crazed with adrenaline, I jumped out of the car and ran down the road to find a turn, but all I saw were bigger boulders. The road was impassible. I had to go back – in reverse.
For both physical and emotional reasons, I couldn't back over the boulder, which meant I had to angle one side of the car to climb up over it. This took a minute or two, and soon the hood was smoking, the tachometer having been in the red the whole time. I was sweating and cursing and barely sane. Slowly I managed to grind back up the hill. The dog, patiently awaiting my return, resumed running and jumped alongside the car, barking like I had a side of raw beef on the passenger seat.
My Honda, quite discouraged, was nonetheless still functioning, so I turned around in the dog owner's nice yard and made my way back down Josh Road, utterly defeated. I passed another house with an old guy in the back yard hanging up his laundry. I got out and hailed him. He was wearing overalls and one of those really tall caps made out of denim. He looked like he had just finished milking. He plodded over.
'Hi there, I'm trying to find Stage Road. My directions said to take Josh Road, but I ... can't. Do you know another way to get to Stage Road?'
'Josh Road? (Long pause.) Josh Road won't get you there.'
'Right, I know. Do you know another way?'
'Well, now. (Long pause.) You can't take Josh Road, I c'n tell you that much.' He chuckled.
It took another 45 minutes to find Stage Road, because its sign had been stolen. I got to the wedding reception around 4:00pm, by which time the cake had been cut, the speeches had been made and most of the guests had departed. I found the mother of the bride, apologized profusely and explained the situation. She was all sympathy, her eyes widening as I ploughed through the story, and I got the response I had hoped for when I finally mentioned that notorious strip of dirt that had been my downfall (the bride having joined us by this time). With gasps and a piteous wail that seemed to lament all suffering, they cried,
"OH NO! NOT JOSH ROAD?!?"
Reader, I was vindicated.
The master craftsman
June 8, 2023
My violin was built in 1981 by Ray Melanson. He was in Salt Lake City at the time, studying at the Violinmaking School of America. He first gave it to his wife, Marilyn. She played it for nine years, and then, exercising what we might call Violinmaker’s Wife’s Privilege, declared she wanted to try something new. Ray, who had since moved his family to southeastern Massachusetts, put the violin up for sale.
I was studying with a violin teacher named Alan Hawryluk at the time. Alan (it's an effort not to call him “Mr. Hawryluk”) owned one of Ray’s violins and had kept in touch with him; instruments go through all sorts of changes, predictable or not, and it’s wise to maintain contact with the builder for the occasional “violin whispering” the same way you or I establish a relationship with a physician for annual check-ups. It was thus that Alan, who knew I was in the market for a new instrument, learned that Ray was selling one.
So the violin came to me in the Spring of 1990. I plunked down $4,000 for it; my parents and I split the cost, me working off my half with earnings from my new job as fiddle player in my dad’s band, Northern Lights. The fiddle was nine years old, and I just three years older.
We have traveled to every state but Hawaii and Arkansas, where I’ve never yet been hired, and to Canada, Iceland, Europe and East Asia. As Zorro says to his horse, "We are like one spirit." It passes the “burning building” test: once my family was safe, unless restrained against my will, I would re-enter my burning house to rescue it. If my plane crashed in the ocean I would disobey crew member instructions and bring the fiddle with me, holding it above my head while treading water until the two of us sank to a watery oblivion.
But I’ve written a lot about my violin over the years. Let me tell you a little about Ray.
You leave the highway and take a series of those long, winding, beautiful Massachusetts roads happily immune to stoplights, until the land begins to relax and spread out and the properties take on the look of rural estates; a smattering of tilled fields, horse corrals, fenced pastures, stone walls hundreds of years old, a chuckling stream where kids are fishing. You pull in the entrance and creep along the gravel drive, which is the signal for two enormous German Shepherds, trying their best to look vicious but unable to conceal their true nature of half golden retriever, half goldfish, to bound up to your car and attack the driver’s side door with such deafening enthusiasm that you slow almost to a stop, for fear of running one of them over. You can hardly open the door, and when you manage to do so, one of them immediately clambers in.
Ray lives the life I would live if I were a master craftsman whose crafts have only increased in demand over the years. He has a few acres on a nice spread in Rochester, MA, with a handsome house, an enormous garage and a workshop he built himself, where he sits every day and whittles away at the latest of his fabulous creations.
The workshop feels a bit like an enlarged, reinforced cabin, made entirely of wood, with low ceiling beams that require stooping. An ancient stereo receiver sits atop one bay of cabinets alongside a framed, signed photo of Northern Lights I once sent him, with several racks of CDs installed below. Everything wears a thin coat of sawdust.
A plethora of woodworking tools hang in their designated places on the wall; when he removes one, you see a lighter impression of the tool on the wood behind, implying it’s hung there for decades. Each one looks handmade and custom; not only could you not find it in any of today’s hardware stores, you could not find it anywhere, because its maker has long since retired or passed away and most of the materials it was fashioned from no longer exist anyway. Ray trafficks exclusively in the inimitable: he makes unique instruments with unique tools. He is a walking antonym of mass manufacturing.
Upstairs in the workshop attic are piles of wood – red maple, mostly – that Ray is aging until each one reaches its correct hydration percentage. This can take years, and he’s got enough raw material there to keep him building until he’s 120, which I hope he does.
This is not to say Ray’s élitist about materials, just about the instruments themselves. All that matters to him are the qualities of the materials and what they do. He’s not above using a certain kind of magic marker to fix a discolored spot on a violin body or applying No. 2 pencil graphite to the notches of the bridge to allow the strings to slide more easily. He calls to mind the scene in Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when the narrator proposes fixing his friend’s BMW bike with a shim made of a piece of beer can (illustrating a fundamentally “classical” point of view); his buddy, the “romantic,” is offended by the very idea that such an object could be used in conjunction with his beautiful machine. It’s not unlike some of the crude work-arounds I’ve used over the years to achieve the sound I’m looking for – cardboard boxes full of junk rather than proper sound reflection baffles, for example. Sometimes the pretty, expensive way is the best, sometimes not. The end product is what counts.
When he needs a break from building world-class instruments, he builds cars – or rebuilds them, really. His garage never contains fewer than three classic automobiles in various states of restoration, this one still waiting for a certain engine cap to come up on eBay (his favorite seller, from Las Vegas, is away this week), that one needing the correct size tire (unfortunately discontinued in 1971). Needless to say, the man just enjoys fixing, building, tinkering. When I showed up with a busted windshield wiper last year, after rejuvenating my fiddle, he brought the wiper into the garage and fixed that too. He’s a kind of therapist for inanimate objects.
He’s going strong at 71, still tinkering away, still making those fabulous instruments. And you can buy one today, if you’re able to part with between a third to a half of your annual income. But it’s worth it. I was very lucky to meet Ray over thirty years ago, before his work began to fetch the prices it deserves. He’s changed my life, and I’m blessed to know him.
a case for cdS
August 11, 2023
I woke up yesterday really needing to hear a certain Tom Petty song, “The Damage You’ve Done.” So I look for my device to listen to it, but the battery has died overnight. I look for my charging cable, but it’s missing. I do have a charger in the car, but because it was made by a third party, it takes five minutes even to boot up a dead device, and besides, I’m just not ready to sit in my car to charge something at six in the morning.
Finally I find my charger, noting the cord has frayed, and plug it in; fortunately it still works, and my device boots up. This takes about a minute. I try to open up my music application, but before I can do so, the awakened device gets hit with a barrage of texts and alarms, each of which it considers for some seconds because I’m not swiping them away in the correct direction (Up). Finally I’m allowed to open the music application, which is the cue for my device to alert me that the application has been updated with new security fixes against various bugs and that it is imperative I download the new version from the App Store, to which we are now headed because I don’t know how to disarm that feature, and the device refuses to open the app anyway until the new version has been downloaded and installed. I try to download it, but before it finishes I receive yet another alert that my device's storage is full and cannot complete the download. It suggests I “free up space by deleting some files.”
I take my half-severed charging cable and plug it into my computer in hopes of reclaiming enough space to download an application I’ve already installed that may or may not allow me to listen to my song. Here’s where things get tricky.
My computer is worried: it doesn’t recognize the device I’ve plugged in, despite having recognized it a week ago, so it sends a secret one-time passcode to the device. I type this in, which then alerts the computer that someone located near MELROSE, MA is trying to sync with a device registered in my name; is it possible this is me? If so, I should please confirm on the next screen. I confirm, and the computer grants me access to its music application, which finally opens.
At this point, I realize I may simply be able to re-purchase the song through the computer’s version of the music store; a mere $1.29 seems a fair price to end this Beckett play I seem to be stuck in. I visit the online store, fighting back the thought that I’m paying the same company twice for a product I can't use, which really challenges my principles, and discover that my saved credit card has expired and I must update the information before proceeding. So I hunt up my credit card and update the information, and the store approves this development and cheers me on: “Hooray! You’re all set.” So now, with the store’s blessing, I conduct a search, but as it turns out, this specific song is not one of the five hundred million available at the store. (Who knew Tom Petty was so obscure?) So the tragic script continues.
By now all parties have successfully recognized each other and verified that no one present is illegally trying to play “The Damage You’ve Done," which is surely of dire consequence, so a tiny device-shaped icon appears in the application window, indicating that I now have some measure of access to my own device. I click the icon and see a graph confirming that, indeed, my device is entirely out of space, and what I need to do now, this minute, before I do anything else, is to make some space available, or I will not be able to download apps, receive emails or messages, or function as a full-fledged human, and all atomic motion may possibly cease as well. Or so the alerts claim.
Consuming much of the device’s capacity is a category called “Other,” which is not very informative, so I do some research on the internet and discover that Other may contain images, audio, text and fragments of data from sources that no one really feels like identifying, so they just dump it in Other. I have no idea whether any of this Other information is valuable, but I dump some anyway, upon which the computer immediately begins to sync with the device because I had failed to uncheck the box labeled “Automatically Sync With Device.” Upon beginning the sync (sorry, I just can’t write “syncing”), the computer, in its infinite quest to eliminate all threats to its trillion dollar market value, realizes my device contains a Rogue Song unsanctioned by the tech gods (I think I uploaded it from my desktop, which my laptop by default treats as a threat and possible security breach), and during the sync process the laptop clears away any chaff that may have found its way onto the device from other, bad computers, effectively deleting the original copy of the song.
All of this has been for my own security.
At this moment, having spent ninety minutes on a problem I never had in the first place, I realize an important fact: I am losing my mind. I tear my eyes away from the screen and look up, and as I do I see a shelf not three feet away full of CDs including one of Tom Petty’s with “The Damage You’ve Done” on it. I press the POWER button on my CD player, and the player turns on. Then I press the OPEN button, which opens the tray, and the CLOSE button, which closes it. I press the PLAY button and then the FFWD button five times to skip to track six. The player thinks for a second, then starts playing.
It sounds glorious. I listen with joy and feel my blood pressure slowly returning to normal, leaving me in the exact state I was upon waking up. I try not to think about how this implies exactly zero net progress in my life over the course of that time.
There’s Nothing Finer Than Fedders
Originally published in The Curator Magazine, September 2012
We had a pretty big week at our house. Actually it was just one day of the week, and a small part of that day, about one second long … but that one second made the whole week. It was a Movie Moment.
A Movie Moment is when you very briefly get to star in your own movie. It’s when something occurs that is so utterly perfect or fateful or cliché or tragic, it feels scripted. You almost expect to hear “Aaannnnd … Cut!”
These moments are best when they impart some deep meaning to your life. If life just picks up where it left off, you still feel pretty important and universal – after all, you did just star in a movie – but you’re not really a changed man. You’re just very pleased with yourself.
Well, our moment had deep, profound significance for me.
Ours is the kind of household that cares – rather too much, perhaps – about recycling. To that end, we’ve discovered a marvelous online community called the Freecycle Network. It’s simple and brilliant: instead of tossing something away, one posts it on a list service to see if someone else wants it; if she does, it’s hers. These objects can be anything, from frying pans to computers to food to dirt. It’s the world’s biggest junk pile, and like any junk pile, you find the occasional, slightly battered gold nugget. There’s also the obvious environmental benefit of passing this stuff on to new owners instead of sending it to a landfill; plus, the original owner avoids any potential effort or fees involved with disposal. Everybody wins.
My wife, an intrepid Freecyclist, recently tracked down an ancient air conditioner. We dutifully rescued it from eternal decomposition in some scrapyard, hauled it home and dragged it upstairs and put it in the window and plugged it in and it works – well, it groans to life and dims all the lights in the building and produces a small trickle of cool air. But in this wintry economic climate (and stifling meteorological one), free A/C is not to be scoffed at.
It is a Fedders. (Yeah, I haven’t either.) Their motto is, “There’s Nothing Finer Than Fedders.” It is brown. It is ugly. It is absurdly heavy. I don’t know when it was manufactured, but when was the last time you saw a brown air conditioner, the late 1980s? If it were a car, it would be a Ford Crown Victoria station wagon, or just something big, heavy and somewhat unpredictable.
This summer, we’ve been using our air conditioner more often, just like you. For various reasons, we decided a few weeks ago to move it from the bedroom to the living room. Then, last night, we decided to move it back.
It was a dark and stormy night.
I’m not kidding; when we get that sucker back inside, it’s soaked. “Slippery when wet,” I quip, puffing and stumbling across the floor and back into the bedroom, where I deposit it, along with a few well-chosen oaths, on the windowsill. We begin edging it back out over nothingness. Soon, the Crucial Moment arrives: as the hindquarters of the unit gradually project out into space, one must lift its front bottom lip over the lip of the windowsill; having done so, one must then support the infernal weight of the unit while one’s boon companion carefully but quickly lowers (quickly, quickly, for crying out loud) the window with the object of trapping the upper lip of the A/C unit against the bottom of the window (Fig. 1). Then, all being well, everyone exhales with relief and steps back to admire the dubious physics of one inch of plastic molding preventing a huge leaden beast machine from jumping to a watery oblivion.
Sadly, all was not well.
In the midst of the Crucial Moment I make a grievous error: having opted to counterbalance the weight of the appliance by positioning the ends of my fingers along the upper lip of the front and pulling towards myself, I now have nowhere to put them once the window descends – they are in the no-man’s-land between the lip of the A/C unit and the bottom of the window (see Fig. 2). Also, and again, everything is wet.
Somewhere between requesting a slight raise of the window and attempting to reposition my fingers along the edge, the Fedders slips. It’s like a fish – a scaly fish, which would like nothing better than to jump through your hands and escape. This air conditioner doesn’t jump so much as leap – it positively scampers out, I imagine a “Wheeeeee!” as it departs – and in that moment I realize we’ve done it, we’ve really done it. We’ve dropped the air conditioner out the second-floor window.
This was an important moment in my life. Something big was happening. Something big was falling.
And it was at that moment, my friends, that I knew, in my secret heart of hearts, that I have always wanted to drop an air conditioner out the window.
Why? Because it’s just asking for it. There was a day in history when the founding fathers of air conditioning sat around a table to decide how best to install their enormous, staggeringly heavy metal appliances in the home. And guess what they came up with? After much discussion, I’m sure, the winning solution was to mount the unit by its very edge in an open window with nearly the entire mass (certainly the entire center of gravity) suspended over thin air, supported by nothing – unless one is handy with tools and takes the initiative to build a brace beneath the window and nail it to the house. (Presuming of course that one owns the house; our landlord generally gives us the thumbs-down on punching big, round holes in the siding. By the way, I know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry, my landlord’s not on this email list. I checked.) But of all the air conditioners I’ve seen hanging out of windows, I’ve seen maybe four braces. It just isn’t done.
I remember being mystified as a kid as to why these things weren’t falling out all the time; seems like all it would take is a decent bump and whoops – here’s seventy pounds of rushing metal, sponsored by gravity.
It’s just that a Fedders is so heavy, and is balanced so precariously, and when it falls on you, you are not bruised or maimed, but likely dead.
With this in mind, one would think my immediate reaction upon dropping it was abject terror. One would be right. But that was not my only reaction; I must say, there is also a certain thrill to the experience. And, if I am honest, an element of humor, too.
It could be a guy thing, but there is a deep, mysterious gratification in causing a heavy object to fall from the top of something to the bottom, where, with luck, it smashes. It is a primitive impulse, but we must acknowledge it. Now, I enjoy it much more when I know no one will be hurt (at least permanently) by my enjoyment. But I confess the inner demon child in me will always love throwing dirt clods into the road, rocks into the river and, apparently, air conditioners into urban space – and have a hard time feeling guilty about it afterwards.
I’m happy to say that this albatross, this anvil of technology, came to rest in nothing more than wet sod. No one was hurt; no one, that is, but old Fedders, who, as it turned out, had jumped to his death. I think it’s the way he wanted to go.
I regret to say that, whatever our Freecycling intentions, we have bowed to the inevitable, and shall be visiting our local superstore to purchase a new air conditioner.
Maybe there’s a brown one lurking in the back room.