Breakfast Saga

I had not known before this morning that water can set off a carbon monoxide alarm.

A few months ago, when feeling under the weather, (probably a combination of a cold and boredom) I came to the very firm conclusion that I was suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning. Can't quite remember why, except that my cooking stove wasn't working well, so I dashed off to a clinic and had blood tests done at great expense. Needless to say, I did not have carbon monoxide poisoning, but the tests worked in that they made me feel much better. So, just to be sure, I bought a carbon monoxide alarm - like a smoke alarm. But I didn't want to make holes in my walls, so I just set it on my bedside table and forgot about it. It blinks reassuringly from time to time, and there is no carbon monoxide there.

Well, last night, in the middle of the night, right in the middle of a detailed dream about splicing sound recordings as if they were errant DNA, I got so excited that I turned over, flipping my duvet, and knocked over my trusty glass of water. I started dabbing at it - it was only water after all, and there was nothing water-disastrous, (like metallic sodium, for instance, which would have violently exploded immediately) - nothing water susceptible on my table, just a mundane set of 3 alarm clocks (my paranoia has not abated yet) and a few little things that are still there because I cannot figure out what they are, and therefore do not know where to put them. So I dabbed and got up to find a cloth; when SCREEEEEEEECH! This loud piercing scream started and kept on. I don't know how most people react when things like that happen, but when 98% unconscious, my analytical mind just doesn't seem to work at full capacity. Once, years ago, a piercing screech in the middle of the night got me to leap out of bed, run around my room looking for the source of the pure malevolence, and try to figure out what was capable of making such a noise. I had fitted hi-fi loudspeakers to my wall, so I ripped out and cut all the cables for that system, ruining it, and not fixing the problem. I opened the window to see if it was a general catastrophe afflicting the whole of the Trent Valley (which it wasn't) and then, gradually awakening, discovered that I had left my radio on. Back in England in the 60s, after the broadcasting day was over, the radio would carry a pure sine-tone note A - 440, for just ages. This is an insanity producing sound, and it worked. But as I gained sentience, I calmed down, reached over to my radio, and turned it off, finally able to relax amid the ruins of my hi-fi system.

Well, there is something about those pure notes that makes it impossible to figure out where they are coming from. Simple audiological fact. A crackling sound is easy to locate, a pure-tone siren isn't. That's why the beeping sound that comes from the back of trucks and busses to warn you that they are backing up is the Worst sound that could be chosen. The about.to.be.run.over person has NO way of knowing what to run away from. Same thing, of course, with smoke alarms. And, I am sure you will have guessed, carbon monoxide alarms. Maybe more so, since if you need the warning, you are probably freshly stupefied anyway.

Add to that the fact that this was about 5:45 am, and I was dashing around trying to think what the hell could be going on, as it Absolutely Could Not Possibly Be anything to do with mere water. And since my apartment is in a hotel I feared staff would appear at any moment. And since I could not yet awaken myself sufficiently to figure out where any of my clothes were, I imagined staff bursting in and taking swift, unknown, unanticipateable actions with me flailing around appalling them both by my nakedness AND the slight untidiness of the kitchen. Horrors.

As the first light of rationality dawned, I started going around and listening to things carefully, seeing if I was getting colder or warmer, - as if it were a solo version of an Easter Egg Hunt with encouraging parents hinting at the wisdom of the locations I was checking. It wasn't the TV. It wasn't the smoke alarm. There was no sound from outside the windows. I located a pair of jeans just in case. Surely the staff were about to burst in through the doors. The radio was off. It seemed to be coming from my bedside lamp! Impossible. And the only other thing near that was - - my monoxide alarm. YES!

But it had no off switch. I tried clutching it to my chest to smother it, but I don't have that sort of a chest. I poked my finger in its eye - it's little light. That helped a bit. I poked its eyes and covered its ears (the little grill it tests with.) That helped, but it wasn't a good solution to clutch as tightly as I could to a screaming device that I now realized was also radio-active, since that's how they work. (isn't it?)

Two more degrees of consciousness, and I decided to take out the batteries, after checking the cooker to see if by any chance this was the most amazing coincidence, and it just so happened that I had tipped my water over at the EXACT moment when some inexplicable cloud of carbon monoxide wafted from the kitchen, past my open windows, and lodged beside my bed right next to the spilled water. Unlikely on the whole, I thought. So I proceeded with the battery plan which seemed, on balance, both promising and not too terribly foolhardy.

Off with the battery cover, but the batteries were jammed in tight. No way could I get them out. I stuffed the alarm under the bed covers while I found a screwdriver to pry them out. I was beginning to feel quite confident in my resourcefulness by this time, and that warm, encouraging sense of competence was bringing a little color back to life. Pop! one sprang out. And then, as if by some benign magic, as the awful sound stopped, clarity returned, and I was just in my silly room again.

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I suppose these alarms work, but I find it hard to believe anyone would just wake up and do what they are supposed to do when an alarm goes off for a legitimate reason. The only times I can remember such things happening, I have always gone to the most immense lengths to find an alternative explanation for the alarm, prove my new theory, and then disarm the whole thing. When in extremis, always go for denial first.

Anyway, I was clearly up now. So. Breakfast? I had bought a stove-top espresso maker the day before, on the theory that one great cup of difficult-to-make coffee would be better than slowly downing a whole pot of the mediocre stuff and twitching all day long. So, confident that the carbon monoxide coming out of the cooker was now my friend, not my assassin, I got the coffee going, and even cooked up some potatoes and fried an egg.

Now - at last, - we come to today's serendipitous cooking tip:

The coffee was Wonderful, I am about to make more (thus defeating the purpose of buying the gadget) and the potatoes and egg were OK, but a little dry. I did not have any ketchup to put on them to moisten them up a bit, so I used whatever I could find that looked like ketchup, which was Shrimp Seafood Sauce.

I do not recommend this. Shrimp Seafood Sauce on Fried Egg is not good.

This is what I learned this morning.

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MEN

Something caught me by surprise on the anniversary, this year, of 9/11. I hesitated to comment on it at the time as it seemed disrespectful and possibly flippant in view of the enormity of the event that was being commemorated. But I found it startling, and it lodged in my mind. I suppose the surprise came from the fact that there should have been nothing surprising about it at all. It was my own reaction that surprised me.

During the ceremony in which people, mainly widows of those killed, read out the names of all the victims of the attacks, there was a long series of name-readers, each with perhaps ten names to read. Usually there were two women, alternating. And almost always the last name each spoke would be the name of the speaker's husband, or boyfriend, or son, or father, who had died.

And there they were: women clearly in the prime of life, physically, mentally, emotionally, not weak people in any way; women of commanding presence and competence and assurance, each expressing, after five years, the deep grief and love they felt for the man they had lost. And this is what struck me: it was there, it was genuine, and there was no explanation whatever given as to why they loved this man, or what he had done to deserve their love. It was just a statement of love, period.

It did startle me. I know it was television I was watching, and just that fact alone spreads the veneer of triviality and unthinking convention over everything, but this was reportage too, in stark contrast to the peppy backdrop of popular culture, of TV-commercial-land in which every man is a pompous fool and every woman is cute and amazingly smart. But even setting aside the clichés of the commercials and the sitcoms, there is a standard respectable way that TV handles tragedies and anniversaries of this type. And therefore, insofar as the TV anchors are in control of the content, there has to be an angle, a reason, a hook to stimulate our vicarious melancholy - to keep us all on board with the appropriate degree of collective grief.

So we see pictures of beautiful young women killed, mothers desperately missed by their equally photogenic children. And we get detailed narratives of the heroism and fate of fire-fighters lost, of police and rescue workers, and other performers of brave compassionate deeds, often at the cost of their lives.

This is why I was reluctant to write about this, because these are all real tragedies, real mothers lost, real heroes destroyed, and I don’t want to draw away from those. But these stories, sadly, are always with us, and so perhaps there is a little room for a more puzzling observation. One that really has nothing at all to do with 9/11, except that the mourning ceremony revealed it to me and, surprisingly, surprised me.

For when the TV anchors were not in charge, and the cameras were simply rolling, then it was not only the firefighters and rescue workers who were mourned. It was also the husbands of this series of widows, men about whom we knew nothing at all except that each one was a man, had a name, and had been very much loved.

I am absolutely not making any comparison here with the mourning for lost women, children, or anybody about whom we know a great deal. But I am a man, and I speak as a man of my reaction to the grief, without further explanation, over these lost men. It truly caught me unprepared, and was like scales falling from my eyes.

We are all to some degree trapped inside the stereotypes of popular culture and unthinking assumptions, especially when filtering the world through television. And in that unfairly simplistic world, just as to be a woman is to be oppressed, so to be a man is to be guilty. Women struggle against their oppression, and men struggle with their guilt. Sometimes it is real and sometimes it is piffle, but it’s a wallpaper background against which we live our lives. And the 9/11 ceremony inadvertently showed me a chink, giving a glimpse of something else. The possibility that it might, after all, be possible to live as a man without having to spend my entire life apologizing. What a benefaction!

I wonder, when you saw my title: “Men”, did you expect the tenor of this essay to turn in a different direction?



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