A long (7:30 pm to 4:52 am) and pleasant (literally refreshing) sleep last night, after a long and difficult (2 am to 7:30 pm) day yesterday; I’ll put off a report on yesterday to the end of this posting, which is instead about how that sleep came to an end, in a half-waking reverie during which a sleep-final story dream morphed into the Pythagorean Impromptu, a dream in which Danny Kaye sang the Pythagorean Theorem, in the form
The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides
(which is the version the actual Danny Kaye sang in the 1958 movie Merry Andrew, and, yes, I do remember this from 1958; I can also reproduce from memory Kaye’s
The pellet with the poison is in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true
from The Court Jester of 1955, though I have trouble working the flagon with the dragon into Kaye’s final aide-memoire) — the Pythagorean Theorem, sung to the tune of Franz Schubert’s Impromptu Op. 142 No. 2, a piano piece that I happen to have played in concerts when I was a teenager, but which, more important, was actually playing (in a wonderfully warm performance by Mitsuko Uchida) on the Apple Music in my bedroom as I came out of that reverie into consciousness, when I had the sense to recognize that the words of “Pythagorean Theorem” fit reasonably well into Schubert’s melody for that Impromptu at the beginning, but that the marriage of this text and tune rapidly comes unglued, and then I was fully awake, cleaned myself up for the day, and discovered that my blood pressure had returned to excellent, after several days of anxiety-driven somewhat elevated bp, in a bounce-back that accorded with the delightful Pythagorean Impromptu dream .
You can listen to Danny Kaye perform “Pythagorean Theorem” on YouTube here; and listen to and watch Alfred Brendel (who died yesterday, at the age of 94) play Op.142 No. 2 on YouTube here (the Uchida performance seems not to be available on YouTube, and in any case it struck me as an opportunity to play the elegant Brendel recording in his memory). And then you can admire the beginning of this posting, which is one long, goofily digressive, sentence; I wasn’t aiming for that, but as I watched it unspool, I realized that I might be able to pull off something entertaining, and went with it. (And when are you going to see Danny Kaye paired with Alfred Brendel?)
Brief notes on the cast. Kaye, Uchida, and Brendel.
Kaye, from Wikipedia:
Danny Kaye (born David Daniel Kaminsky [to parents from what is now Ukraine], January 18, 1911 – March 3, 1987) was an American actor, comedian, singer, and dancer. His performances [in 23 movies, on television, in recordings, and in concert] featured physical comedy, idiosyncratic pantomimes, and rapid-fire novelty songs.
Uchida, from Wikipedia:
Dame Mitsuko Uchida (born 20 December 1948) is a Japanese-English classical pianist and conductor [especially in the US]. Born in Japan [and schooled in Austria] and naturalised in England, she is particularly notable for her interpretations of Mozart and Schubert.
Brendel, from Wikipedia:
Alfred Brendel (5 January 1931 – 17 June 2025) was a Czech-born Austrian classical pianist, poet, author, composer, and lecturer, based in London. He is noted for his performances of music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt. He made three recordings of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas and was the first pianist to record Beethoven’s complete works for solo piano.
A notably international cast.
Yesterday. The background for that long restful night.
It started with my getting the news that for the second week in a row I wouldn’t be getting any home help (it’s gotten harder to find suitable caregivers), as I begin the months-long appalling task of cleaning out my house for sale (so that I can pay for an assisted-living retirement community) and paring down my belongings to what will fit in a much smaller space but still provide the resources I need to do my writing. So I’ve had to put off most of what was on my to-do list (the initial part of which was focused on having stuff brought down off shelves I cannot reach and out from storage spaces I can’t bend down to enter) and ended up spending a very long and tiring day coping with immediate household tasks.
I did a load of hot-water laundry (there are, alas, three categories of laundry, requiring three different treatments), managed one little scabrous but scholarly posting on this blog (“The raunchy verse of biblical manhood”), then turned to the two household disasters: the bathroom sink that had declined to just barely draining; and the front patio strewn with big chunks of gritty stuff and covered everywhere with a heavy layer of nasty fine grit, all from work being done on the deck above my patio.
The sink. For some time, it had been draining more and more slowly. I started using a plunger on it every morning, and that made some improvement, but the effect got smaller every day, until yesterday it took 10 minutes to drain, very slowly. Clearly it was plumber time.
As it happens, I have a regular plumber (with a Z-name, as a kind of bonus), thanks to this very drain, which had previously been difficult, but nowhere this difficult. So I called in Dan Zaiss, who saw that this was a clogged drain of a different order, past the therapy of snakes, and went out to his truck to bring in the heavy artillery: a huge water jet machine (on wheels) that will literally scour out the drain with water under high pressure. This treatment disgorged astonishing amounts of thick sludge.
What with clearing things away beforehand and cleaning up afterwards, the whole operation took 3 hours, so this was an expensive cure — but the sink drains beautifully now, and should until long after I’m gone from the house.
The grit. Dan remarked on what a mess the workers on the front deck upstairs were making. Indeed …
Most days during this project, at the end of the workday, a series of workers appeared on my patio to pick up the larger pieces of junk (slabs of tarp, chunks of wood, bits of plastic trash), sweep the area thoroughly, blow stuff away, and then wash everything down to get off the fine black grit that coated everything, including the ivy growing on the walls, the plants in their pots, and the garden ornaments and furniture.
But when last week’s work came to an end, on Friday, the workers just vanished, leaving a really phenomenal mess. So on Saturday, when Opal and Emy came along with my daughter Elizabeth (who sets up a week of medications for me), they were sent out, with protection for their shoes and with masks on, to bag the larger pieces of trash (a bit of tarp, a crumpled soda can, leaves torn off the hydrangea plant by falling junk) and sweep the patio tiles. And after they left, I had my half-hour of spray-washing everything, over and over, until no more grit was visible. And, while I was at it, watering the plants.
Monday, they were back, and cleaned up. Yesterday the project came to an end; the workers finished around 3, leaving (as Dan Zaiss noted) a big mess, which I had to clean up as on Saturday. But now I hope that it’s all done. I have schemes in progress to give the potted plants away, and then the plant care part of housework will almost be gone (there’s still a big tub of ivy-leaved geraniums out by the entryway to my condo).
I think I did more housework than this yesterday, but it’s all gotten hazy. I was certainly dead tired at the end of the day.
June 18, 2025 at 5:53 pm |
At 5 pm today (still Tuesday) workers arrived with gigantic ladders, which they set up right outside my worktable windows; and then others trooped in bearing various lengths of brand-new drainpipe. So I realized they had nothing to do with the work on the condo upstairs, but were part of the crew doing the gigantic (2-month) job of replacing all the condo roofs, with their gutters and drainpipes. And one of those drainpipes came down just outside my window. (There’s another one about 10 ft away, but that’s clearly not on today’s program.)
I have no idea why they’re doing this from 5 to 7+ pm, but they’ve been hard at work at the task (right now they’re down to painting the drainpipe, so they’ll finish before the sun comes down.).
You never know what the next act in the show will bring.
June 19, 2025 at 6:27 am |
I am having trouble making that text fit the Schubert Impromptu.
June 19, 2025 at 6:42 am |
It only works, sort of, for a few words. Hey, it was in a dream.