The horses of San Marco are (probably) not Roman, but Greek.

My measurement of the density of the universe (one atom of hydrogen to two quarts of nothing) is, I suspect, inaccurate, at best approximate--I cannot remember (or indeed imagine) how I derived it.
 

A friend studying archeology, a few days after her marriage, sat typing a paper. At a lapse of memory, she called across the room to her new husband, asking how to spell arduous.

Mishearing, he spelled out, slowly, letter by letter, the word artichoke.

She typed it, letter by letter as he called them out. At the end, astonished, she found before her eyes the word artichoke.

At which she burst into tears, for a time inconsolable, her whole world-view--as she later told me--suddenly crumbling.

"You mean," she sobbed, "arduous is spelled just like artichoke?"
 

One June in Ann Arbor, while we were graduate students, my friend Gordon Mumma found himself without money. He got a job selling houses, but was to be paid nothing until he sold one. He had a sack of soybean mash and managed to steal two eggs a day. (This is the way I remember it, but surely it would be easier, safer, to steal them a half-dozen at a time.)

He had also, from some earlier windfall, a small stash of smoked oysters in tiny tins. These he fed daily to his cat, since the beast refused to eat soybeans.

It was a bad summer.

The first week in August, he sold a house--but was told he would be paid when the mortgage application cleared.

We projected a celebration.

In September, he found that the house he sold in fact belonged to a university professor in Europe for the summer, quite unaware of the sale of his house. The realty company Gordon was working for had disappeared and he himself was called down to the police station.

The celebration we went ahead with, since--though he was never paid--he was not prosecuted.
 

He came through all this, of course, as one does. I recall that when he was on his feet again, the cat--put back on Nine Lives--deserted him.
 

The past lies in layers, not neatly in calendar years, but folded over sometimes like earth strata--uneven in any case, much of it unidentifiable, with here and there the fossil of some interest long extinct.

My calendar is geographical. I can date events if I can connect them with Kansas or with Illinois or South Carolina--date them more closely in places I lived more briefly. Atlanta and Berlin are narrow frames of reference. The vaguest is my time in Providence, since I have lived there longer than anywhere else.
 

Scriabin came to believe in a final harmony that would undo the world, spell an end to existence. Play the right chord at the right place at the right moment, and the whole shebang would collapse.

And he was preparing to play that chord, when blood poisoning struck him down.

"What a disaster," he cried, and no one knows to what those last words referred--whether to the fact that he himself was dying, from a pimple under his moustache, or to his being balked in the great work of ending the universal scheme of things.
 

Once I walked, with Judy Grossman, through Checkpoint Charlie into what was then East Berlin. It was already dark, had been since a little after four. The first guard was cordial, shivering, while Judy hunted through everything for her passport. The next guard, luckily indoors, we reached only after standing in line. In the meantime, Judy had misplaced her passport and those in line behind us were beginning to murmur in several languages before she found it--in a side pocket of her well-stuffed purse--and handed it over. We filled out currency declarations then and twenty minutes later (a good day--sometimes I waited an hour for my number) our passports came back to us. I wondered what they do with them, back in that other room.

At this point there was a short wait at customs because some Turks were being searched, but finally we came to the woman with the rubber stamp and Judy, knowing better than to put her passport where she lost it before, had put it somewhere else and started going through her things again. She is always, in these situations, profusely apologetic and generally the guards (or ushers, or conductors--she loses everything, in all situations) are so astonished at the sight of Judy fumbling the contents of her bag and repeating, "Sorry," and something that sounds German to me but not, apparently, to them, that they rarely give her trouble.

This time, however, we faced a Walkyrie whose instant dislike for Judy was momently growing. In spite of the increasing line behind us, Judy was marched off into a back room for interrogation and it was only later, walking down Unter den Linden, that, still a little nervous, she told me how she was ordered to empty her purse, just dump the contents right out onto the table. Then--with what futile attempt at maintaining a cloak-and-dagger atmosphere I could easily guess--to please collect the mess again, from the four corners of the table, those used and unused bus tickets, outdated transfers, playbills from last year's season in a different country, matchbooks with and without matches, an infinity of notes for things to write and groceries to buy. (I mention only what I've glimpsed from time to time--the depths remain mysterious.)

The last straw: her attempt to discard certain items then and there, because she could not get everything to go back in.

After that evening, I thought I noticed a softer approach at the checkpoint, the Greater Anarchy--of which Judy is surely an agent--having shaken, however slightly, the foundations.
 

When--no longer a child--I got around to reading The Wizard of Oz, there was something about it, something I couldn't at first identify, that put me off, kept me somehow from accepting its obvious charm.

Eventually it came to me, that no matter how willing I might be to suspend my unbelief, the basic premise of the book was too absurd, too greatly implausible: that someone would want to get back to Kansas.
 

The film--which I saw still laterwas another matter. I can well sympathize with wanting to get back to black and white.
 

A trifling plumbing problem brings to mind my last handyman attempt. To fix the upstairs toilet, which trickled unendingly, I bought from Adler's a Water Master: "Thrust-Back Collar," it said (a registered trade mark), "Toilet Tank Ball." And in red:

AMERICA'S LARGEST SELLER

On the side--I was so fascinated with the box, it took me days to think to open it, withdraw the ball, and fix the john--it shrieked at me

STOP Wasting Water

STOP Annoying Noises

and for a moment--in the spirit--I protested vehemently that while I may well sometimes waste water, I never annoy noises.
 

Smetana composed the ringing in his ears.

Copyright 1995 by Keith Waldrop, used with permission.

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