Prelude to a Hobbit
Today was a big day for my back hillside. On the occasion of our friends from Sonoma being in town for the weekend, we gathered my local family (all of whom know our friends very well) and had everyone over for a bagel brunch. I will start by explaining that I have a wonderful bagel deli here in Escondido, which makes life much nicer for me since 50 years of living in New York (including my college years in Ithaca) has placed the humble bagel squarely in my list of favorite foods, especially the “Everything Bagel” which is sometimes referred to as the “Long Island Bagel”, presumably because some people think people from Long Island always want everything in life anyway. That deli is owned and run by a very nice German man of about 45 or 50 years old who has an extremely pleasant way about him (which is decidedly not a common German trait from my experience). Bagels come originally from Krakow, Poland and have been around since about 1610. That whole area of what I will call Middle Europe is more or less a blend of Germanic, Russian, Polish and a snick of Mongolian (they attacked Krakow in the Twelfth Century), so getting fresh bagels from a German guy seems entirely appropriate. For New Yorkers, we always assumed they were ethnically Jewish in origin, which may be the case since the “Old Country” that is comprised of the Prussian, Polish and Russian Empires for the three hundred years leading up to the First World War was where many Jews lived and trace themselves back to. Whether it is Jewish or not is largely irrelevant now since almost everyone enjoys a good warm bagel with any number of additions on top of it, ranging from cream cheese to lox and capers to almost anything you can imagine.
I had gone to the deli two days ago with my day laborer Angel to get us both some breakfast before the work day. When I went to pay for our bagels and drinks, the woman behind the counter told me that Angel’s coffee was on the house as the deli believed in giving all working men (I assume she meant day laborers) a free coffee to start their day. When I went this morning to buy several dozen bagels for our gathering, the German owner was there and he rang me up for my purchase. I gave him a large tip and told him that he deserved it for his policy with day laborers and because his native country, Germany, had stepped up overnight to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to halt the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and to agree to sanctioning key Russian banks from using SWIFT. Those were all notable things I felt grateful for this morning and my German bagel maker was the symbol for what I want everyone in the world to be like, both individually and nationalistically…or, better said, globally and democratically.
The underlying theme of the gathering today, besides seeing our Sonoma friends and enjoying bagels galore, was to premier the Hobbit House with the latest generation of grandchildren of my sister, Kathy. Kathy and her husband Bennett have managed to end up with their two children living nearby and we see them all quite regularly. The two have three children with another on the way in-utero. They are 5, 4.5 ( very important half year to him it seems) and 2. They have all been anxiously awaiting a visit to the Hobbit House even though they really don’t know what exactly it is. I’m guessing none of them have yet read J.R.R. Tolkien, even in the preliminary Hobbit prequel to The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I viewed today as a dress rehearsal for the Hobbit House Grand Opening when my granddaughters come for their visit in April.
The only thing not yet done with the Hobbit House is the copper roof edge and the planted green roof. My schedule was for the copper to be installed tomorrow and the green roof to be planted Wednesday when Joventino comes. Well, that won’t be happening and I now am just hoping it can all happen in the next week instead. My copper guy, Hans, a German copper craftsman of significant reputation seems to have lost his client service touch. In fact, my call with Hans of Friday was quite disconcerting. To summarize, he seems to have been let down by one of his long-time suppliers and he has to “fix” the copper edging in some way that doesn’t seem to translate easily from the German. When we spoke on Friday, Hans said with an uncomfortable degree of angst, “I am somewhere between suicide and homicide.” I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that, so I told him to just relax and come to see me Monday and that we would work it out. After all, no matter how important my Hobbit House is to me, no matter how important my schedule might seem, and no matter if I have to have Joventino come yet again, I cannot put a silly Hobbit House ahead of a man’s mental health. But we will sort that all out tomorrow.
In the meantime, I had the opportunity to see how three children responded to my latest back hillside attraction. I actually sat in the Hobbit House to monitor the reaction. It turns out that my Mouth of Truth will need to be renamed The Nose of Truth. It was easier to get the kids to put their finger in Oceanus’ nose than into his mouth. But there was another special effect that I hadn’t anticipated. As the kids were toing and froing about where to stick their hands and fingers, I got the idea to use the remote control to turn the battery candles beneath the stone face on and off to whatever Abracadabra they mentioned in approaching the stone. That was a useful test, because being able to amuse children is a very big challenge for more than a nanosecond at a time. Even that wore thin when the 4.5-year-old asked what I was doing with the remote…how do they figure these things out?
I also learned that my little funhouse was less than fun to the 2-year-old who wouldn’t so much as step across the threshold. It seems The Mouth of Truth carved in a granite boulder with cobalt blue piercing eyes can look more scary than fun to a 2-year-old. Luckily, my granddaughters are beyond the scare age and should be more interested in Oceanus’ nose and mouth than the scariness of the eyes. The main event of the bird feeder on the window sill was only good for running their fingers through….I’m unclear how that will go down with the birds.
Spending some time sitting and contemplating the attraction has also given me that idea that the Hobbit House needs some external adornment to make it all look more Shire-like, which means more verdant and overgrown. That all goes to show you that I am ostensibly done with the Hobbit House if I am tinkering like this. I should think of this as a good thing. I have a week with my son in town coming up. I have a house renovation to complete so I can sell the joint. I have a book proposal to rewrite. I have a trip to Italy to take. And I have a Ukrainian Invasion to worry about. So, this prelude to a Hobbit has done wonders to reassure me that I am ready for showtime in mid-April and can start attending to other matters for the first time in 2022.