Dead Letter Department #72
weather report
The sewer system on my house (she turned 100 a couple years ago) began to sputter and complain a few months ago in a series of increasingly expensive clogs. It turns out some of the pipe down to the sewer mainline is cast iron (heavily rusted, after 100 years) and some of it is a material called orangeburg, which I’m sure seemed like a grand idea at the time it was installed but sounds incredibly implausible now: ground wood pulp and asbestos bound together with coal tar. Apparently this is what has been sweeping the waste out of the house & down into the sewer system for the past decades. We started trying to get quotes for replacement almost immediately, but everyone is so busy & overworked & understaffed that we had a devil of a time actually getting a number on paper, let alone scheduling the work to be done. Meanwhile, the pipes compressed, and filled with roots, and generally behaved in the exact way you wish pipes wouldn’t.
There was occasional gurgling in the wall—a deeply alarming sound—in the upper story apartment, which I knew from past experience meant a clog lower down. The whole business backed up into my mom’s shower down below, on a weekend, of course, and the on-call plumber thought that meant the system had collapsed entirely, and didn’t think there was much he could do about it, so I spent a couple of nights at the La Quinta nearby, which has the great advantage of very quiet rooms with desks & adjacency to a Starbucks. A surprising number of dogs at the La Quinta, I found, including an enormous standard schnauzer who seemed to require constant walks, so that every time I looked out the hotel room window, there he went again, accompanied by a man with an extremely schnauzer-like mustache.
It was a little hard to figure out what to eat, an area of my life where I am usually a creature of habit, pulling the same things out of the fridge for breakfast & lunch every day, which saves both time & thinking. One morning I found myself with half a combination banh mi (jalapeños included, but removed at the last possible second so there’s just a little bit of heat) and a Captain Crunch latte at 6:30 AM, which felt extremely decadent compared to the usual black tea & hardboiled eggs.
It was odd to have an entire apartment, filled with my clothes & books & work things, that was essentially unusable because of the plumbing. For various reasons I had to be there during the day a couple of times, and the bathroom rankings in close driving distance are as follows:
Cornwall Park: very, very bad. Port-a-potties that appear to have not been tended, perhaps since some sort of music festival that I did not know was occurring.
Cordata Park: relatively clean, but only has one of those hand drier things, and is in close proximity to a playground.
Taco Time: Great, actually, 10/10, would bathroom again in this location.
Dark Haggen: aborted this particular mission, although I recalled the restrooms as being fine, since there was a row of Port-a-potties outside the building suggesting they might be having plumbing problems of their own, and the horrors of Cornwall were fresh in my mind still.
We did manage to get back into the house—the guy who’s spent so much time here I’ve been joking about sending him a holiday card came out & got things limping along long enough to get us to the finally organized work, and I was relieved to leave the continental breakfast & cable cooking shows behind.
Today the replacement is scheduled to be begin, and since it involves digging a trench through our front yard and the street, I spent some time on the weekend tromping around advising the neighbors that there will be a lot of noise & mess the next couple days, including flaggers directing traffic. Everyone was very sympathetic, the people with newer houses making soothing noises, and the ones with older homes clearly wincing at the thought of getting the same work done themselves.
Hopefully by mid-week, the plumbers will have departed, having completed their repairs. I’m sure at some point I’ll probably stop listening urgently to the pipes whenever they make the slightest swishing noise, but I suspect it will take a while. There’s nothing that makes me appreciate conveniences like running water & flushing toilets like having restricted access to them.
screening room
The monitor I’ve been using to watch television for the past couple of years finally threw up its hands and demanded a dignified retirement, so I was keeping my eyes out for something I could use instead when I saw a post by a neighbor giving away a TV. She listed the measurements, & the fact that she’d used it with a Chromecast, & it seemed like spending $30 for a Firestick was more sensible than however much I’d need to put down for a whole new television. I did a little math in my head & thought it would be about twice the size of my laptop screen, a nice size for my tiny apartment, and went off to gratefully retrieve it.
“I’ll help you load it,” she said, when she opened the door, which I thought was a little odd for something so small, but I certainly wasn’t going to turn down the assistance. When I rounded the corner into her living room I understood why. I had been merrily imagining a two-foot wide screen sitting delicately on my bookshelf—somehow having mathed myself into thinking that 42” divided into two feet, which, as you may know, it very much does not, and now I had this nice stranger heaving a screen the size of an armchair into the backseat of my car.
It felt very much too late to do anything about it, so I staggered up the stairs with it, managing not to ding any of the corners on the wall, and now I fire up this enormous machine to watch Real Housewives of Potomac at something close to real-life proportions, which is giving me a substantially better view of everyone’s makeup. I think I’ll be grateful for it when the weather turns & I find myself wanting to watch more movies, but at the moment it keeps startling me with its size, and I keep it draped in a length of lacy curtain when I’m not using it.
Thank you for reading. If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may all of your modern conveniences behave beautifully.