Dayswork by Chris Bachelder EPUB & PDF

Dayswork by Chris Bachelder EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online

• Status: Available for Free Download
• Author: Chris Bachelder
• Language: English
• Genre: Marriage & Divorce Fiction
• Format: PDF / EPUB
• Size: 2 MB
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Dayswork
“Bon voyage,” my husband said last night as he turned out his light.
It’s something he says to me, an edict inside a valediction.
“I wish you luck,” he says, and said last night, I think.
Earlier he said, “Is it recycling night?”
“It is, isn’t it?” he said.
“Shit,” he said.

“You know how to do this,” he told our younger daughter as they sat in the
kitchen at what he calls the island, though it is in fact a peninsula.
(He’s generally so careful with his words.)
“Combine your like terms,” he said to her, I remember.
He asked our dog, rhetorically, if she was hungry.
He asked me, rhetorically, how much longer we would be disinfecting
boxes of frozen waffles.

He said is an acronym, and , too.
When I found him at a window and asked him what he was looking at, he
said, “A big groundhog.”
Even a quiet person says a lot in a day, almost all of which is forgotten.
Not forgotten, I suppose, but unremembered.
Some mornings I revisit a 2015 blog post titled “Words Herman Melville is
Reported to have Spoken.”

The list is long, and surprisingly short.
Melville said, “I do” at his wedding, reportedly.
He asked a barmaid in Liverpool, “How much?”
“Man overboard!” he shouted in 1849 on a packet ship, the Southampton.
This morning I see that Melville nearly missed his voyage on the
Southampton, having waited so long to apply for his passport.
And that seven years later he nearly missed his voyage on the Glasgow for
the same reason.

(Melville’s older brother, Gansevoort, once lamented Herman’s habit of
procrastination, “that disinclination to perform the special duty of the
hour.”)
Curiously, Melville’s delinquent passport applications indicate that he
shrank nearly an inch and a half in seven years—

He was 5’101
⁄8
”
at age thirty but 5’83
⁄4
”
at age thirty-seven.
According to ships’ crew lists, he was 5’81
⁄2
”
at age nineteen but 5’91
⁄2
”
at
age twenty-one.

If you had less evidence, my husband said, you’d know how tall Herman
Melville was.
Or if I had more, I said.
My husband says that I seem to have contracted Melville, and it’s true that
some mornings we find one of my crumpled sticky notes in the sheets like a
used tissue.
This blue one says, “tall and imposing,” quoting Melville’s granddaughter
Frances.

And this green one, quoting Frances’s sister, says, “Many who knew him
would have said he was six feet tall, whereas he was two to three inches
short of that.”
While some scholars offer commonsense explanations for the discrepancies
in Melville’s recorded stature—errors in measurement, exaggerations in
self-reporting—a medical doctor suggests that his apparent loss of height
may have coincided with a loss of lumbar lordosis caused by ankylosing
spondylitis, an autoimmune disease.

That doesn’t sound right, my husband said.
According to a poster in his physical therapist’s office, lordosis is curvature
of the spine, so a loss of lordosis would have made Melville taller, not
shorter.

I conceded that Melville’s acquaintances noted his erect bearing.
This morning I see that John J. Ross, MD, hypothesizes that Melville’s loss
of lordosis was likely accompanied by compensatory hip flexion

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