Sixfoot6.com - Putting Stuff Away.

Just now I spent a half-hour talking to my friend Dave, who works at a to-remain-nameless Initech-esque company in the Boston area. Dave wanted to make fun of the ladies in the next cubicle (who had spent half the morning talking about the great features of the all new AOL 8.0) so he had to transfer out of earshot, me to another phone.

I prepared to wait patiently. And as the hold-music kicked in, all at once I thrown back to the summer of 1992 by the sounds of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. It's been years I've listened closely to classical music, and longer since I last heard Vivald... long enough that I can't even say which season was playing. Joshua and I spent a few weeks of that summer (just before 10th grade) in my backyard, working on a self-conceived gardening project: we cleaned out and groomed a rectangular area surrounding a giant boulder that sits at the edge of the woods behind my house. We trimmed, raked and planted, all the while listening to Four Seasons through the right speaker of my parents 20-year-old component stereo, positioned behind the sliding screen door atop our deck. One of us had to run up to the house every 20 minutes to flip the records over. Lots of laughter and chess, that summer. Incense, music and walking.

Dave clicked back on the line after only a few seconds. He told me again about how yesterday his company had given him 60 days layoff notice; about how he had been rear-ended by a fella from Idaho during this morning's commute. A bad sign, we agreed. But he couldn't deny the comedic good fortune that came during the call he placed to his insurance company: when they put him on hold, the phone kept him occupied with a musak version of Dave Mathew's "Crash".