Fold

I work with a lady still wears a folding rain-cap, the kind they used to give away in beauty shops.  Maybe they still do.  Every woman I knew as a child had one or more of these in her purse.  Designed not so much to keep off the weather as to protect the architectural integrity of the lady's hairdo. Clear plastic, sometimes with a trim, sometimes not, the shape varied I suppose according to the height and style of the hair, but basically it was a kind of coal-scuttle bonnet with a flap at the back and a brim that extended out over the brow.  When I was little, the great fascination of these articles was in the fold.  Making an origami lotus from a sandwich-bag would be simpler.  I remember dozens of these caps being in a big bowl on the counter by the door; each in its little plastic pouch, with a flap and a single snap on the fancy ones, and each measuring no more than an inch or two square.  It was the sort of thing one fished out of grandma's purse, but unfolded at some peril as only a practised hand could ever get it square, and back into the pouch again.  (Not to resurrect a sexist assumption of my youth, but why only men were meant to be able to fold a map seemed to me even then a ridiculous assumption when every lady had a beauty shop rain hat.)

Saw the lady I work with step out onto the street yesterday.  Sure enough, this being Seattle in January, she unfolded her rain-cap and tied it under her chin, "Just in case."  I asked how long she'd had this article in her purse.  "This one must be twenty years old, at least!" she said.  Still worked admirably, may I say: her coiffure was pristine when I saw her sail back into the bookstore some time after.

This being Seattle, one tends to see more grey braids than actual hairdos on the street.  The preferred January headgear of most local ladies of a certain age seems to be a canvas fishing hat.  Not that there are actual fishing-flies hooked to the band, you understand, but the look of the thing does suggest at the very least a walk in the woods rather than a stroll out to the shops.

We just got a new cable-box.  Practically, this means we can now record up to four television shows at a time, which we may or may never watch.  Very exciting.  What this means in terms of actual hardware in the house is more than one might think.  The cable-box proper is, if anything, smaller and sleeker than it's predecessor.  With this however comes not one, but two new router boxes / thingummies, both bigger, blacker and with even more powerful blinky lights on them.  We take our cable with "wireless" service for the computers.  Thus the additional technology, wires and lights, you see.  (I don't pretend to understand any of this.)

Our house is a 1970 split-level.  Getting a modern cable-connection when we moved in a decade ago proved complicated.  In the end this involved no less than three representatives of the cable company coming out to drill holes in the walls and running cable through unlikely places along the floorboard.  We put the TV in our bedroom. We decided two houses ago that this is easiest and best.  Don't have to  wake one another from a couch in the living room anymore, or spend the night in a chair.  In the Seattle house this also turned out to be easier when it came time to route all the cables through the front, rather than the back of the house. Our bedroom faces the street.  It's been a popular decision with all but our very occasional house guests, who can be made uncomfortable when encouraged to climb the giant, California-King-sized bed and settle in to watch a movie while wedged between their ample hosts.  Put it another way, we like it.

The problem now is those damned blinky lights.  All those black boxes in the corner of the bedroom at night blaze like the mice are having a rave.  We sleep with the curtains drawn and the door closed.  In the best of all possible worlds, bedrooms are quiet as tombs and black as the grave, for me at least.  (The beloved husband, left to himself, sleeps with the television on, lights blazing, corn-chips, newspapers and whatnot scattered across the duvet.)  Maddening.

Various solutions were that night proposed: everything from books to bath-towels to "cable-cozies", that last being either a real thing we remembered or something we made up because it should be.  But, electronics must breath, it seems, as they generate considerable heat, thus the side-panels looking like designer cabbage-graters.  No towels then.  Finally, I hit on an idea, got up and went in search of construction-paper.  I haven't cut a silhouettes in years, nonetheless black paper I have.  The solution turned out to be single sheets, folded roughly in half and tucked over or standing in front of the annoying lights.  Works a dream, or near enough.  There's still light, but less, and no blinking!

Simple.

We've also acquired a new waffle-iron, by the way, our first waffle-iron in years.  My beloved husband, A. having in retirement become an expert, online shopper, a need I did not know we had was met last Sunday when I awoke to the heavenly smell of waffles and butter, walnut-infused maple syrup and deep and abiding love.  The new waffle-iron, unlike out last is not some modernist, multi-purpose grilling device, but instead a curved chrome beauty not unlike the one that proved so comically hard for Katherine Hepburn to operate in Woman of the Year.  Seems the beloved husband is still a dab hand at using the kitchen appliances of yesteryear, just as I can, when called on, crease paper.  "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need", as ol' Louis Blanc used to say when his beloved made him waffles.


Whenever I hear, yet again the now tedious debate between the partisans of the new technology and the defenders of the book, I will be reminded of that single fold of black paper, of ladies' rain-hats and of waffles.  Appearances to the contrary, I do not read by whale-oil, or mill myself the wheat for my waffles.  True, my copy of The Poems of Walter Scott is from 1904, and I am reading Marmion, but the light is electric and when I look up it is to watch o'er my waffles Teraji P. Henson fight for a Hip Hop Empire on an HD TV.

It's all good, or near enough so that we can fix it with construction-paper, at least for now.