12.37 Ali's Alone Day

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37. Ali's Alone Day

Even though Ali and Dan become close, she still likes what she calls her Alone Day, when she goes down to her apartment 1A. Also it gives Dan his own time. They do not need discussing it; she determines when. As an advent in Dan’s life, Ali is a blessing, and he, thankful, does not question her solitude.
   She goes out to attend classes, to do her forest study, to interact with The Young Knights in her Hobby Club and to educate Brenda. Otherwise she is up at Dan's 2A or alone in 1A.
   Alone Day starts morning 6 AM. She divides it up by hour, using a Swiss alarm timer on wrist. It starts with morphine into her thigh and she on the sofa in low light and quiet, with right arm flung over eyes, crook of elbow on bridge of nose. She finds that low sensory stimulation, especially low light, gives best effect. Also empty stomach but not so much so that hunger disturbs.

"Bzzzzz!" goes her timer. Instead of jumping up, she says to herself, "Slow. Everything slow."
  The "everything slow" comes from her study of healthy longevity, which she means to achieve and succeed at. "Succeed" means the one-million hour healthy life, or circa 114 years achieved on one's feet, with one's wits and wit.
   She stays relaxed and sits up, stretching arms rigidly upwards, feeling morphine pleasure in the muscles. Slowly she looks around.
   Her sofa in living room is along the west wall. The south wall has 2 windows that look out on the Parkway. By the window in right corner (Southwest) is a black leather-top bridge-table with folding legs and an opened folding chair by it so she can view the Parkway and contemplate everything as she studies, eats and drinks,
   The new floor is straw-color Japanese tatami in rectangles.
   A low table is in front of the sofa, and a folding chair on the other side of table. In the other far corner by window is a silver painted radiator and separate floor-to-ceiling pipe for steam heat. 
   Ali goes to kitchen and gets hot tea in a big clear glass with wedge of lemon, then goes back to living room and sits at the window table. Her first study is Edith Wharton's Summer, which she wants to read to get ideas for writing her novel. She does not believe in being a writer because she does not approve it as a way of life. Except a very few like Tolstoy or Hemingway, who obviously were meant to do nothing but write, she thinks the rest are social parasites - overpaid, overvalued, over admired. Writing, she thinks,  is what a person does to communicate; it has its technique but it is not art. Rarely, one may write so well that the public will demand more. Ali believes in amateurism rather than professionalism and specialization - but by amateur she has in mind one like Sherlock Holmes, who is described by Dr. Watson as amateur detective.

She turns the cover and reads the opening short paragraph of Chapter 1:

A girl came out of lawyer Royall's house, at the end of the one street of North Dormer, and stood on the doorstep.

   She exclaims and explains, “Wow, what a way to start a novel! Two lines whose first words are the girl of the story, and next her location. But a hacker like me and a thousand other aspiring authors would go into a complicated string of long-winded words in describing the girl’s clothes, her face, her tits tight against the bodice, and a million other, totally boring details. What economy of storytelling!” Ali scribbles on the page, using pencil because she may wish to erase.
    She reads the second paragraph:

It was the beginning of a June afternoon. The springlike transparent sky shed a rain of silver sunshine on the roofs of the village, and on the pastures and larchwoods surrounding it. A little wind moved among the round white clouds on the shoulders of the hills, driving their shadows across the fields and down the grassy road that takes the name of street when it passes through North Dormer. The place lies high and in the open, and lacks the lavish shade of the more protected New England villages. The clump of weeping-willows about the duck pond, and the Norway spruces in front of the Hatchard gate, cast almost the only roadside shadow between lawyer Royall's house and the point where, at the other end of the village, the road rises above the church and skirts the black hemlock wall enclosing the cemetery.

 
   "Now you want a loving, lovely description? Here it is!  I mean that rain of silver sunshine! Only Edith Wharton could get away with that and not only get away but reach a peak higher than Darien. Wow! Wow! Wow! If I tried something like that, the readers would laugh me out and ship me to China.”

   Ali's morphine'd sensibility gives her reading a more appreciative edge.

   Another thought she has over this Whartonian description comes from her experience in Tokyo teaching Japanese students literary English.
   Edith Wharton is the absolute least favorite writer for non native readers of English!  Reading her they need a constant dictionary. But they love Hemingway for his sparse wordage, lack of adjectives and brevity.

Ali spends ten minutes over Summer and goes on to several other readings.

Opiate users from De Quincey on down have noticed the opiate's superb drug effect for readers. In fact, a sign of Victorian period addicts that – Ali thinks – ought to have been used by Sherlock Holmes is their books' telltale brown stain of laudanum on most pages.
   She guesses the reason her morphine improves reading is its psychological effect on one's sense of time's passing. It makes one feel the actual minute is inflated, which eliminates impatience and, combined with the general increase of pleasure in whatever you do, makes the reading good. At proper dose – 2 milligram – it also sharpens the mind.

After 30 minutes, Ali switches to her chores.  Morphine at proper dose gives her immense motivation to do what needs to be done. Now she goes over the apartment, making it neat and trying to conserve things. She is conservationist, which in 1942 is a name given to people who try to conserve water, electricity, food. And her motivation is not a worry that supplies will run out in near future but rather a Utopian desire to be, as she calls it, a science-civilization person – one who will be like her hoped-for-future people, whom she calls the New People, who will use resources with maximal efficiency according to need not greed. Her life is powered by a dream of efficiency, she hates waste. In that dream, the future science civilization is a much smaller population than today's, using resources at maximal efficiency for greater enjoyment of life and progress of science.

   Right now she combines her cleaning with reviewing her efficiency of living. First, her living-room tatami floor. In a Bronx flat it is artificial; but it represents in Japan a more natural, less processed floor than wood. In cleaning, she does not need electric floor cleaner, and the tatami's not needing it is a plus for its use. Not only does a hand broom conserve electricity and the fuel used to make it, and reduce the pollution caused by the fuel, but it is an efficient, healthy use of one's body energy.

   She only needs to do a quick dust sweep because her living generates few floor droppings and the room is only sparsely furnished. After dusting, making it neat and the broom sweep, she checks the electricity use. At this moment, mid morning with windows clear, the ceiling electric light is not needed. At night she uses a single 60-watt ceiling bulb and 20-watt for table reading. It is dim but good for her; and the low light, she knows, is better for close-up reading.
   Its being summer, the room temperature is mid 70⁰s Fahrenheit (c.24⁰C) but she refuses to use room cooler or fan, relying on going bare and also creating a wind current in the apartment by having windows and doors slightly open. She is not against the use of electric cooler in public rooms or at home if it has a group or health need.
   Her room walls are faded and peeling. But Ali refused painting; she considers it unhealthy from the toxic metals - the mercury, the lead and the cadmium - fumes. Were she in control of the building she would prefer paper or fiber or a cloth wall cover with pleasing design and easy wash. Her present walls she washes once a month. Windows get a weekly wash. Ledges, tables and furniture are run over with a hot water cloth once a day.
   She keeps a minimum of books, using public library for regular reading. Certain reference works for daily use she has. Recently, on a morning walk she spotted a full 25-volume set of the 1940 Book of Knowledge put out to garbage by a private home owner, and with great happiness she carted it home and now enjoys and benefits from its entries. And also she uses Dan's books. Dan is no Utopian; he has the book buying habit.

   Ali says out loud, "Now that he knows me, I'll make his book buying more efficient. He reads once only and the books gather dust for 50 years. I'll make use of them and if they turn out not worth saving, I'll use them for fuel in my forest glen."

Having cleaned the living room spic & span, she goes out through the French door into her hall and turns left and goes down the hall into the bathroom. She likes a quick morning cold shower to alert herself but only rarely takes a tub bath. Turning to the toilet commode she does its morning flush after sitting to pee. Living alone, she prefers not to waste water by flushing. Even her shitting she leaves unflushed for awhile unless her eating has caused it to be smelly. Next in bathroom she does a quick efficient dusting of fixtures, sweeping the floor, then on her knees washing the tiling. Overhead she uses a 40-watt bulb. Also no toothpaste or mouthwash; she prefers to substitute pleasantly hot germ-killing tap water.

   She goes back, out to the hall, which is a little less than 1-meter wide. It is old, shellacked wood floor boards. The walls have the usual fading, peeling paint. She has got rid of all the previous hall furnishings except a small table with big oval mirror that persons going in-and-out of the apartment need. She uses a 100-watt overhead light bulb because the narrow hall is cut off from outside light.

   She also checks the hall closet. She does not admire a Fibber McGee closet, overfilled with stuff that should have been thrown out long ago, as on the famous radio comedian show.

   Finally her kitchen! She needs a small refrigerator for her morphine vials and a few foods and the purified water. The landlord supplies the big kitchen equipment like the big fridge and hers is now half empty and set to low cooling. A gas range and oven she uses sparingly. And cupboards.
   These Bronx flats have cockroaches and mice, and occasionally rats. She learns that the cockroaches love to hang out under old newspapers and inside old open cartons and multiply much in an unclean littered kitchen so she keeps her kitchen clean and neat. Also when she moved in she found a type of tiny cockroach that lives in the refrigerator under the rubber edging of its door. Cleaning there ended the tiny fridge roaches.
   On rats, she had spotted one at night and then studied its habits. She learned that the sign of a kitchen rat is a trashcan knocked over mysteriously when you get up and go in kitchen in morning. And the wainscoting needs to be inspected for rat holes, especially behind the fridge, kitchen sink and stove. She found two holes and following Dan's advice closed them with plaster mixed with Brillo cleaning wire to prevent the rats from gnawing their way back into her kitchen. And since then the flat is free of rat.

  Now in kitchen she makes a snack a little different from her usual: a large sunfish caught in the lake the other day and by bad luck swallowed her hook. Although she had tried to disengage the hook carefully, it damaged the throat and the fish died in her tank so nothing else but to eat it. She kept it in the fridge overnight and now she takes it out and prepares it.

   First a hot water wash, She does not scrape off the scales. Scales have good calcium. With scissors she snips off all the fins then makes a slit in the belly and finger-forces out the internal organs, noting the fish is female. "Got to include that in my study notebook," she says out loud. Her notebook already has this fish's outer coloring and other marks. It will help to determine sunfish gender by its surface look.

   Now she filets the fish as she learned recently from an old Bronx sea fisherman. Using her sharp knife she makes running wedge incisions over the backbone on each side of head-to-tail fin, then she cuts out the wedge and using knife-blade with her thumb and index finger she strips away the flesh on both sides from the underlying bones. This leaves two steaks of sunfish about 15 cm long 8 cm wide and 1 cm at thickest (c.6 x 3 x 0.4 inch).

   Before starting, she takes a Pyrex glass pot, puts in 2 cups of water, and sets it on the kitchen gas range already flamed with a match. It takes a minute to boil and she counts out 100 thin spaghetti cylinders breaks them in quarter lengths, dumps them into the boiling and turns off the gas heat. Then she returns to her sunfish, but every once and awhile giving a chopstick stir to the spaghetti in the just previously boiling water in the pot. This is a technique of cooking by using what she calls residual heat, that is, Instead of constantly boiling an excess of water with the spaghetti as everyone else does, she uses the heat in the just-finished boiling water and also uses a minimum of water. By experiment she discovered that cooking this amount of spaghetti is as tasty and timely as cooking the usual way but does not waste energy or water or require attending to.

   She fries her fish steaks in cottonseed cooking oil without breading or spice. She says to herself as she turns the steaks over in the pan “This is why they call them panfish.”

   She pours off the excess hot water, dumps the soft-cooked spaghetti onto a blue plate with a Chinese picture of the famous lovers' escape scene and puts the 2 fried sunfish steaks atop the heaped spaghetti. Now she takes Mitsuba herb and with scissors cuts it on top of the fish and spaghetti. No sauce. No salt. No sweets. Not even vinegar.

   Using a tray, she assembles her plate and puts on it a carafe of purified cold water and also a pair of chopsticks, and carries it into her living room.
   She puts her food and drink on the window table and sits. The reading this time will be an old National Geographic from Dan's. She finds that reading while eating is easier with a magazine because books are hard to hold in one hand and turn the pages at the same time as she eats.

   She does her eating slowly, adjusting her chopstick food-bites to what she calls a read unit, which, right now, is one-side of a column on the page. She first eats the cut herb leafs atop her plate, leaf by leaf with chopstick pick up, and savoring the distinctive taste with no need for vinegar or other dressing. Then she uses the chopsticks deftly to pull off pieces of the fried fish and eats each piece with the spaghetti. The fish has a tang from the cooking oil, the frying and its natural taste.  
   Ali's eating takes about 40 minutes and she reads 10 pages of a fascinating article on the Maya of Yucatan.

There is more to Ali's Alone Day – each session differs a bit but this one shows its study, conservation, chores, eats and Morphine.   For next, click 12.38 Educate Brenda 3