THE JOURNAL

23 January Friday

I went to have my hair cut.  The Waiting Until It Is Your Turn couch at the hairdressers’ was covered with boxes and bags and Christmas decorations.  The woman in charge directed one of the girls to clear the couch so that I could sit down.  The girl moved most of the stuff to the floor. Just as I was about to sit, another girl came flying out from the back and jumped up onto the couch.  She stood there in her heavy boots wrestling with the last of the lights and the tinsel in the window.  She was oblivious to anything except the job she was doing. Lucky for me, my turn in the cutting chair came quickly.

24 January Saturday

The more seed I put out for the wild birds, the more the birds come.  I keep finding new places to put the seed.  I continually seek the safe places where I do not think the rats will go. I know that rats can go anywhere.  I know they can and will go anywhere but still I try to find good feeding spots. And, so far,  the birds are happy with every single place.  I cannot stop putting seeds in the places where I already placed the seed because now the birds expect to find it there, so the number of deposit places gets more and more.  The amount of wild birdseed I need every week grows and grows.  Tommie was scornful.  He told me that it is a bad idea to begin feeding birds because they will never stop eating.  He said you can feed them as much as you want and you will never get anything back.  He said if you are going to feed animals you should only do so if you are going to get something in return.

27 January Tuesday

Thread is not called thread.  Thread is cotton.

31 January Saturday

Michael was pleased with himself.  He stepped into the bar.  He came in with something to tell.  He had seen the advertisements for the special silver paper with adhesive backing.  He had noticed the advertisements for years now.  The advertisements were always in the back of the shiny magazine that came with the newspaper on Sunday. The silver paper was expensive but it promised to save money.  Even more important, it promised to save heat.  The silver paper came in a package of six sheets. The advertisement claimed that by sticking the sheets on the wall directly behind a radiator, the heat would reflect back into the room.  Michael said he had always wanted to try this silver paper but he always felt it to be Savage Dear.  He felt it too dear to take a chance on.  Last week, he came across a whole roll of the paper in a shop.  The roll was not expensive and it promised to do the exact same thing as the stuff in the magazine.

He had to buy it.

He bought the roll and he took it home.  He cut pieces to fit behind several radiators.  He and his wife were quickly impressed with the results.  He claimed that the spare room had never been so warm.  His bargain roll provided so much silver paper that he began to stick it up in other places.  He cut pieces to size and put the paper all around the window surrounds, first in the spare room and then in other places.  The problem he then had was that there was a lot of silver to be seen.   His wife said that maybe he should slow down until they decided if they wanted to live with shiny silver window surrounds. She was not certain that the heat would reflect into the room anyway if there was no radiator in front of the silver paper.  His next step was to paint the window surround with white paint.  He said that the heat difference was maybe not so good with the silver painted over but at least they were no longer overwhelmed by silver.  And his wife did say maybe he should have used a ruler to make the pieces straight when he cut them.  But he said the white paint kind of made everything look more even and anyway they were probably warmer than they had been.  When he was further quizzed by other people in the bar, he said Sure, but who sits and looks at the window all day?