Uncle Albert update

Uncle Albert update   

Uncle Albert has moved out of our house. He has a lease at least through August in one nearby he is sharing with two university students and a construction worker.

     He has two narrow rooms on what seems to have built onto the house above a mud room and a small office as a sleeping porch, very similar to the one on the back of our house. There are windows all along the outside wall and the walls at either end. In one room is a single bed against the inside wall and under the windows a row of shelves built with board and brick and filled with books. In the other room are more books on shelves under the windows, and on the inside wall are a very narrow desk with two shelves above it and a large armoire. There is a huge padded rocker with a footstool that doesn’t match, and a hospital table, one of those on wheels that can be swiveled, raised and lowered. On this is Uncle A’s laptop, on or from which he does everything that he does not do by hand: He watches the news; he listens to music; he watches Premier League football – for one more week at least, when baseball season will begin for him (lasting until Premier League play resumes in August); he writes emails to his new Senators and his congressman, a “Neanderthal,” he will not call by name, only “that black-hearted, ice-hearted, stone-headed illegitimate son of a lawyer and stoat.” (I think he begins his emails that way: “Dear black-hearted, ice-hearted, stone-headed son of a, sir: . . . .”)

     There is a bathroom just down the hall. And he has access to the kitchen, two shelves in one of the two refrigerators, use of the stove, oven, microwave, dishwasher. He has contributed to the well-thought-out kitchen fund, started and maintained by the construction worker, the longest-term tenant and for that reason (but cheerfully, it seems) in charge of most of the minutiae of communal living. The landlord lives “somewhere else entirely,” Uncle Albert says – he understands from the real estate company that collects the rent and manages the property, it may be Bombay, or Eugene, Onegin.

Uncle Albert met La Rochefoucauld
in a night club in Paris, 1997*

He says he is happy to be out from underfoot here. But I pick him up every morning at nine, and he stays much of the day. After we drink a cup of coffee and eat a slice of toast, he sets up his lap top on the dining room table and connects to our wi-fi. From there he can hear the television – he can manage the television from a remote he has installed as an app on his laptop; if something catches his ear, he can even see the television, if barely, through the connecting door. He can swear at it or yell at me, “Come down and look at this.” I get off the bed, where I am reading and dozing and thinking I need to get up and move around. I come down and look.

     We eat lunch together in our kitchen. We go here and there as warranted. He rides with me to my appointments with Dr. Feight and sits in the waiting room. From nine to three, we are like school children under the care of a benevolently absent teacher, who has advised frequent recesses.

Uncle Albert continues to study La Rochefoucauld. “Listen to this one,” he yelled up the stairs just a few minutes ago, and I came down:

Quelque disposition qu’ait le monde à mal juger, il fait encore plus souvent grâce au faux mérite, qu’il ne fait injustice au véritable.**

He continues to write his own sentences, though he is never satisfied with what he has written. Here are two from this week:

We are all Puritans about vices that either never did, or – especially – that no longer, appeal to us.

I spend at least one hour every day looking for scapegoats.***

05.15.17

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   * So he says.
  ** However inclined we are to misjudge, we will give credit to false merit more often than we will be unjust to true.

 *** If true, Uncle Albert's efforts in this area appear to me very modest.