Point of View: Haz Llover

“Let it rain!” I said to the guys who were putting up new seamless gutters whose downspouts and discharge pipes were arranged under our deck in such a way as to inspire hope that the annoyance of periodic basement floods would once and for all be ended.

Haz llover! Let it rain! Open the floodgates of heaven. Well, perhaps not quite so wide, but I do want to see if the new system works, if we’re on our way to, if not bone-dryness, less dankness. Yes, less dankness, fewer spiders, less mold, a little less of the entropy against which we are struggling.

My late stepfather, who was handy, used to say, with a shake of the head, “There’s always something.” I gathered he rather liked having it that way, though. Not being handy, I tend to avert my eyes until the storm of deferred maintenance that has gathered while I slept can no longer be ignored. It is only then that I take interest in stemming the tide.

You’ve noticed perhaps the allusions to Churchill’s writings. I’ve been thinking of him of late and of the Roosevelts, who were the subjects of a fascinating seven-part Ken Burns series recently on Channel 13. All of them did great things. I’m sure, with the Panama Canal, national parks, the Great Depression, wars, imperial and otherwise, and the improvement of society on their minds, they didn’t worry about things like dank basements.

Teddy was an intriguing cross between Genghis Khan and Eugene Debs. The Roosevelts were energetic, intelligent, and brave. They all struggled very well against entropy. Not a whiner among them.

Without drawing a direct parallel, I think I can say, without fearing contradiction itself, that the foundation of our society — as is the case with our basement — could stand some improvement, and that the sense of fairness that was so evident in Teddy, Franklin, and Eleanor (especially in her, though not exclusively) is sorely missed.