LETTERS FROM HOME: SOMETIMES YOU NEED A ZOOKEEPER, SOMETIMES A REPAIRMAN

Jan. 15, 1998

Dear Jay,

Our new year has begun with a broken dishwasher, an ailing pickup truck and a furnace that turns itself off in the middle of these frigid nights. As my mom always says, "If it's not one thing it's something else."

My vision of domestic bliss is a month in which all the gifts of the technological age actually work as designed. Of course it could always be worse. Our dishwasher was only broken. One of our friends found a snake residing in hers one day. Ever since then, doing the dishes has seemed more of an adventure.

We didn't need a zookeeper, just a repairman. Ours at first thought the dishwasher would have to be replaced but then discovered this was not a death rattle. Likewise, the gray smoke that rose from beneath the pickup's hood was not its ghost being given up. And our electrician says we're lucky, the furnace isn't the problem. It's our antiquated fuse box.

She's perplexed, though, about the cause of the arcing. I told her about the bees that made their nest in our doorbell hole last summer. And about the spontaneous and prolonged ringing that occurred even long after the hole was closed off and the bees entombed alive in their own little wax museum.

Finally we could stand it no more and disconnected the doorbell clapper. Now we realize the doorbell may have been silently ringing these past five months. Fortunately, the electrician says the bees couldn't have caused such electrical chaos.

I'm glad to see your Packers are back in the Melted Velveeta Bowl. We actually have a fellow Cheesehead on the staff now, though she hasn't been seen wearing the chapeau de cheddar yet. As silly as they all look, it could have been worse. Packer fans could have chosen the meat cleaver as their symbol.

Like the rest of the Western world, DC and I started the new year by embarking on a diet and exercise regimen. We realize we are, at this stage in our lives, the metabolic equivalent of a banked fire. We burn our fuel more slowly than we once did. And, if I may give this metaphor one last Hail Mary, the flames of youth have been replaced by more of a glow. It's not a bad thing.

Bodies, like machines, break down, especially if they are not cared for. We all do well to care for ourselves and our machines.

DC and I are already trying to decide where to spend New Year's Eve 1999. My position is that the millennial New Year's Eve is monumental enough to rate a special setting. Paris or Machu Picchu, maybe. DC wants to stay home with the dogs.

She has offered a compromise -- Tibet -- but I'm suspicious. I think she's pitting me against China and betting on Beijing.

"No matter how cynical I get it never seems to be enough," one of Lily Tomlin's characters says in "The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe."

Sometimes I think that way. Other times I think like Jane Hirschfield's poem "Jasmine."

"Almost the twenty-first century" --

how quickly the thought will grow dated,

even quaint.

Our hopes, our future,

will pass like the hopes and futures of others.

And all our anxieties and terrors,

nights of sleeplessness,

griefs,

will appear then as they truly are --

Stumbling, delirious bees in the tea scent of jasmine.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.