There was nothing unusual about the fact that nothing happened today. I worked on the sites in the morning, ordered in a late lunch (pork lo mein), and I was just about to start in on a basket of paperwork when Quatorze paid an impromptu visit. He had run over to the far end of Park Slope, in Brooklyn, and brought back a chunk of peach-colored stone for our approval. My approval wasn’t good enough; Q wanted to be sure that Kathleen liked the sample, too.

And she did, just as I told him she would. So that takes care of the last home-improvement item on the short list. A top for the rump of the decapitated breakfront will be fashioned from the peach-colored stone, and at a very good bargain, too, because, to make a long story short, Quatorze really knows what he’s doing. We should have paid three or four times as much as to have the topper made out of lesser material at, say, Home Depot. Instead, Quatorze found a fabricator of kitchen counters who happened to have a large-enough remnant. It seems that he had four remnants, in different kinds of stone. The other three wouldn’t have done at all, but the fourth, the one that Quatorze couldn’t wait to show me, was just rigbt.

And part of what made it just right was our not having had to choose it. It chose us. It happened to be available. It was what was on offer. On the scale of everyday purchases, I don’t at all care for serendipity. I’ve never been to Trader Joe’s, for example, precisely because people tell me that you never know what kind of bargains you’re going to run into. Once upon a time, I might have found that amusing, but now it’s only tedious: when I go to the market, I’m armed with a list of things that I expect to find on the shelves. Even pleasant surprises are only distracting at best. But when it comes to plunking down a few hundred dollars for a piece of custom-carved stone that will undoubtedly see me through my remaining days on this planet, I prefer to throw myself upon the mercy of what’s available. Analyze that.

Mindful of all the paperwork ahead of me, I asked Quatorze if he’d like a cup of tea, and, the next thing you know, two hours had flown by. I was to have taken a de-commissioned bookshelf — a simple but not especially lightweight number from Bean’s — up to Ms NOLA’s, but I asked for and was granted a postponement. Kathleen came home on the early side for once; having had a few wearying days at the office, she wanted to watch one of her favorite movies, Ruthless People. The scenes that drew the biggest laughs invariably showed Bette Midler manhandlling Judge Reinhold. Like the late Anita Morris’s character, I began to fear for my safety. So far, though, nothing has happened.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Gotham Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.