59: 100 Days in Omaha
“One or the other of us …
has got to go.”
Oscar Wilde died in Paris in 1900, after a long “duel to the death” with his wallpaper. The wallpaper in our Potter’s House room is hostile, insistent and yet meek. But I survived it. I hope I never count its plant pots again or sit in that Popsicle* chair.
We are now out on parole, having given our word that at the slightest sign of graft versus host disease we will rush back to Omaha. I’m also committed to a weekly session with the Doctors. These are something like weekly sales meetings where the encouraging fictions of last week are displaced by the current hard numbers which are then softened by the encouraging fictions for next week. The implicit threat underlying the exchange is, of course, that wallpaper.
Finally, 59 seems like a nice, round number to me, because I was never strong in math, and a good place to pause and consider the road. Now that we are in Des Moines and I am no longer The Patient, I expect to be distracted with details — the vacuuming and the dishes, for example. In other words, I expect things to get boring again.
There’s still the question of whether all this is working and I’m certainly not prepared to abandon a story with such a facile suspense. The best choice, it seems to me, is to change the rhythm and slow down to a weekly schedule. My next message will be on April 23, the Wednesday after my Tuesday session. As Oscar also said, “It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.” I will do my best to set that aright.
* Popsicle is a registered trade name of Unilever United States Incorporated. See? This is easy.