coffee table

It is the second consecutive Monday morning that I have stumbled out of the house at 5 a.m. to go to work after a sleepless night. I got to work at 5:20 a.m. exactly at the moment that my judge walked in the door. It's all fine; in two hours I will be slumped over my desk, fast asleep. Meanwhile, this feeble brain gets to make some decisions affecting litigants in federal court.

During the very early morning hours, I puttered around the apartment, picking up random books and reading a few pages of each in no particular order, eating peanut butter toast, throwing away electronics packaging, cleaning out the fridge, and so on. I also decided that it was the right time to document everything on my coffee table. The objects are in bold.

The coffee table itself is composed of two $12 birch veneer particle board end tables from Ikea; I pushed two together on a brown rug left behind by Erica Christoff, the former tenant. It was $60 cheaper to arrange my living room this way than to pay for a real coffee table. Underneath the table is Olympia’s mandolin, rented from the Old Town School of Folk music for an eight-week course in bluegrass mandolin. She has so far missed more than half the classes, but it is no big deal because Olympia’s familiarity with the violin, which is tuned just like a mandolin, puts her left hand capabilities far above those of her classmates. We made improvements on this mando: I bought new strings for it and together we spent a few minutes cutting a length of orange parachute cord into a shoulder strap.

There are also 2.5” inch DKNY tan embroidered high heels, size 9.5, which I rescued from the Hungarian swimsuit model who was the former tenant in Ilya’s apartment. When Sonia and I visited him there in June, we discovered that Ilya had left untouched many of the swimsuit model’s ornaments, including a dressertop full of elephant figurines and other southeast Asian iconography, a jewelry tree holding many rings, posters of cats (including white Bengal tigers, lions, and a drawing of a cat looking in a mirror (posted next to the bathroom mirror)), and had not thrown away the diet pills, diet Red Bulls, photographs, high heels, and clothes that the woman left behind. All her possessions were so gender normative as to be exotic, and they became even weirder when left in place in Ilya’s apartment. The heels fit me just fine and have given me hours of delight, although I have yet to wear them outside the apartment.

Also under the coffee table is my first tambourine, the $10 “economy” one that I bought in 2007, which cradles ten thimbles, which I bought to play my washboard with. Just to the left of this is my percussion rig for the bluegrass duo: one of Erica Christoff’s leftover pillows, with my brass cymbal tambourine (much nicer sounding than the economy model and four times the price) resting on top, and a big hardcover book (The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Knots and Ropework) on top of that. I stomp on this. It is calibrated just right: the hard surface of the book acts like a pedal platform, and the springiness of the cushion restores the tambourine to its resting state in preparation for my next stomp.

On the left side of the coffee table are two sets of Martin acoustic guitar strings, an A major harmonica, my Rubik’s cube, a purple egg shaker, and a set of postcards that Desiree took from her librarian conference as a gift for me. They read “Hawai’i is a Book Lover’s Paradise!” and show images of white people from the early part of the 20th century riding surfboards; none of them depict reading, except for one in which a woman resting on a surfboard in the surf looks over a hardcover at the photographer. There is a quart-sized Ziploc bag filled with Olympia’s inedible Asian candies, including a red bean-flavored Kit Kat bar from Japan, a fistful of hard coffee suckers, some azure suckers, squashed Lindhoff chocolates, and melted mini-Snickers bars. The books on this side of the coffee table are Bluegrass Fiddle, Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, and Poetry (which I turned to for inspiration in writing a song this weekend), Acoustic Rock for Guitar, and Rise Up Singing. There is a short length of bike chain that the kind worker from Rapid Transit Cycles gave to me. There is a sleigh bell bracelet that Stephanie and I bought close to Christmas 2007 to entertain Malcolm with (with great success—he loved it), and sixteen miniature kazoos leftover from Bridget and Raul’s wedding shower, where Bridget’s mom and I directed the crowd to buzz along with us as we sang “Yellow Submarine.”

On the other side of the coffee table is a papier mache watermelon half that I bought from the Museum of Mexican-American Art, in Pilsen. Olympia and I have filled this with our guitar and mandolin picks. There is the Mason jar that I usually keep full of peanut M&Ms, but that I have let sit empty since mid-June because I don’t know whether we’ll finish another jar before I leave. More things related to bikes can be found on this half of the coffee table: Olympia’s long road bike pump, her pedal wrench, her allen wrench set, a bungee cord for my bike rack, my Harvard Cycling Team water bottle (which, because my diploma is lost, is the only non-testimonial evidence I have that I went there; but the letters are rubbing off, so all this evidence says is that I went to "H RVA D"), my small crescent wrench, my SPD pedals, a saddle maintenance kit, and spare saddle tensioner. There are two spent AA batteries that I keep around until I can find a place that takes batteries for recycling. There is a half-eaten bag of trail mix that Desiree left behind last week, which I have been steadily reducing since her departure. There is a pencil made from recycled Chinese newspapers that Olympia quarried from one of her recent meetings or conferences. The books on this side of the table are The Professor’s House, which I have read intermittently this weekend, Learning Through Listening: An Introduction to Chinese Proverbs and their Origins, Hot Licks for Bluegrass Fiddle, The Fiddle Fakebook, and Mandolin Chord Book. There is also a lot more sheet music on this side of the coffee table, including a badly photographed copy of Bach’s Concerto no. 2 in E major, which Olympia must have studied when she was younger because it is covered in markings and stars and has a little rainbow sticker in the upper right corner of the first page. There are also Partita no. 3, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Op. 3 (Concerto for Violin and Orchestra), Spring, Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Violin and Piano, Op. 64, Forty-two Studies by R. Kreutzer, Introduction et Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 28, by Camille Saint-Saëns, and many photocopied pages of fiddle music bearing titles like “Jenny Lynn,” “Evening Prayer Blues,” and “Pig in the Pen.” Under Olympia’s music is my tablature for the ragtime and blues songs I have attempted to learn over the years.

Up until Saturday there was a pile of unread Chicago Tribunes under the coffee table and by the front door—Olympia got suckered into a subscription because somebody came to our front door with a sad story about how paper delivery routes gave troubled children a way to make money and stay out of trouble, and the papers just piled up unread day after day. On Saturday, I got sick of kicking newspapers out of the way to reach my shoes, so I filled a garbage bag with Tribunes and dumped it out in the recycling bin behind the house. There is now a newspaper-free path from the front door to the shoe pile to the coffee table, which will never look this way again.