Cool Jazz and a Warm Blanket
A Californian's reflections on winter, relatively speaking
Dear Friends,
Today I have been listening to Charles Mingus (right now: “Boogie Stop Shuffle”) and luxuriating in the relative warmth of the afternoon sun.
In conversation with a friend recently, I meandered through a series of synonyms to describe how we heat our home during the mild Davis winters. I described us as pioneers, as homesteaders, as frontiersmen, comparing us to Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family in the Minnesota sod house that she describes in such rich detail in her book On the Banks of Plum Creek.
All of this is hyperbole, perhaps an expectation from conversations with a poet who traffics in metaphor, amplification, and grandiloquence. What I meant, mostly, is that we keep it cold in the house in the winter and warm in the summer. My wife (Chicago) and I (Washington, D.C.) miss the actual seasons of our childhoods, so we sample them slightly throughout the year through our thrifty approach to gas and electricity use.
If you were to look at our heater or air conditioning unit, you would see why. Both were installed when our Davis home was built in 1992, the same year that we got married. With its odd noises and uneven functionality, our old heater might remind one of the furnace in the McCallister basement in Home Alone. In recent years, we’ve felt cold drafts like an affliction, and not the refining kind that John Adams describes when he says that “The furnace of affliction produces refinement, in states as well as individuals.”
When we recently discovered both warm and cold air coming from the registers in our home, we called Greiner Heating, Air, and Electric so we could get a diagnosis. As with visits to the doctor, diagnoses typically result in expensive treatments, so we agreed to replace the entire unit even though Kate had somehow fixed the temperature variance in the interim.
As replacing an HVAC system typically takes two days or longer, the folks at Greiner kindly delivered space heaters – one for our room, and one for my son Jukie’s – for us to use overnight when we had access to no heat whatsoever. I wanted to say that we call such days “Tuesday,” by which I meant that we always turn off the heat at night. That’s what layers of blankets are for. I recall what Melville says in Moby-Dick: “For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air.”
Are we actual California homesteaders? Not really, especially when compared to the Little House on the Prairie crew. December temperatures in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, near where Laura Ingalls Wilder once homesteaded with her family in a sod house, range from a low of 16 degrees to a high of 28 degrees. At one point, Wilder wrote that “Snow as fine and grainy as sugar covered the windows in and sifted off to the floor and did not melt.” Sometimes the Wilder family tacked their blankets to the window-frames to protect the home from the ravages of winter.
With our powerful new heating system, seemingly ready to heat a home twice the size of ours, I anticipate that future winters will see me wearing no more than three layers at once. My recently departed mom, who used to read to me from the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, has indirectly paid for our warmth this winter, providing for my comfort as she always did when I was a boy.
Like then, I am full of gratitude. And like then, today I am spending a bit of time with some cool jazz, a warm blanket, and a writing project.
P.S. Three questions from last week’s pub quiz:
Four for Four. Which two of the following are terms for the phenomenon of a moon having a moon: micromoon, moonmoon, second moon, submoon?
Laundromats. According to Yelp, how many laundromats are there in the city of Davis: Two, five, or ten?
Name the Year. In what single year were the biopics Elvis, The Fabelmans, and Weird: The Al Yankovic Story all released?