harvey
So, I live in a house built perhaps around 1930. It’s two stories tall, capped by an attic, and mounted on a very unfinished basement. It’s covered in some not-very-pleasing yellowish aluminum siding, and set on one of the busier streets in this medium-sized town here in Central Illinois. The house sits on a somewhat barren lot, that contains three trees and a large gravel driveway or parking lot.
Functional but unbeautiful, this is clearly a rental property. The house is subdivided into an upper and lower apartment. I occupy the somewhat larger lower level, which is a space that includes some some well-preserved hardwood floors, a fireplace, and seventeen windows. It also contains some horrible linoleum, some tacky wood paneling, and some horrid acoustic tiles on the ceiling. It’s an interesting old building that’s been sadly ignored, as layers of ugly, utilitarian, and amateur coatings and coverings have slowly swallowed up what was once a decent and well-assembled little home.
Which brings me then to Harvey. He’s the landlord. And he scrupulously maintains the place. So scrupulous is he in fact, that almost every day he is to be found wandering around the outside of the apartment, doing maintenance of an indeterminate kind. He’s picking up twigs from the messy Sycamore tree. He’s poking at the gutters. He’s watering the nasty chive-type plant. He’s doing I don’t usually know quite what. But he’s there.
I woke up the other day (the international day of the Other) around 8 or so, to find Harvey (not unusually) standing squarely in front of my North window, watering something. I sat at my desk, in the south bay window, and perhaps 10 minutes later he was standing right outside that one jiggling a gutter. He remained there for several minutes before again disappearing. Then he was in the basement, where you could hear him moving things about. Now, I’m not sure why, but somehow Harvey’s random circling around my apartment was beginning to freak me out. I decided to leave the apartment, perhaps to get a taco.
When I opened the door from my apartment into the front hallway, there was Harvey. Harvey was perched on the stairs that ascend to the second floor apartment, leaning out from them to change a hallway lightbulb that I’m quite sure hadn’t burnt out (I discovered later that he’d installed an incandescent lightbulb of a strange greenish yellow color) . I said hello to harvey and ducked under him and headed to my car. I noticed as I turned the key in the ignition that one of those fat brown web-weaving spiders had built an enormous web across the passenger seat and now appeared to be hovering next to my head.
Ok, so the spider is not harvey’s fault. And one cannot dislike him (Harvey that is) too much—two years ago he had a heart-attack raking leaves on my front lawn (I was gone, and he called for help on his cellphone). For a while after, his kids would come over and rake leaves. And I offered to help a few times. But he continues to appear most days, performing random and often unnecessary maintenance tasks. And though his terrible repairs are slowing encrusting the property with ugliness, his compulsive conscientiousness is I guess preferable to the hostile neglect practiced by most landlords.
Yet the persistent popping up of Harvey in front of this or that window is beginning to get a little disconcerting. And his recent desire to install a plastic shower stall in my bathroom, covering up a window does not meet with my approval, any more than his green-yellow hall light, or the taupe-colored faux wood paneling that cover the walls of the kitchen. The project of finishing my dissertation, finding gainful employment, and acquiring a place of my own is looking better and better all the time.
Other news includes:
Yesterday: tried some delicious fried Mandoo w/April at that one Korean place on campus. More experiments in Korean food to come, I think.
Also yesterday: had some fantastic office hour conversations with three very sharp students. Two of these concerned Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited”–a subtle sad story that contains a number of details that I missed on first reading it. These conversations reminded me why it is occasionally possible to really love teaching.