Saturday, June 1, 1996
I did. I finally got up today after noon. I’ve got a nice room here. It’s upstairs with a slanty ceiling on one side and dormer windows jutting out. There’s just a double bed with shelf headboard and a lamp on top, a small chest of drawers, a watercolor and framed poster of “Intimate Landscapes” hanging on the walls, and a ceiling fan. It’s been chilly at nights here, but by the time I get up by eight, the sun makes the room a lot warmer, so I keep a window open. I’ve got the keyboard I brought stacked on top of the couple of Roughneck containers I packed my clothes in at one end of the room. There are something like 5 rooms upstairs, one of them being used for storage. There are two bathrooms with two sinks each. I get one to myself.
The Wallaces have a neat big house. I think Cape Cod style is the way to describe it.There’s a circular driveway that leads to some stairs up to a small porch with rocking chairs on it. The door opens up to a hall with a parlor on the right and dining room on the left. The hall ends in the kitchenbehind the dining room and a living area over to the right. On the far right side of the house is the master bedroom. The far left side is a sun room with a couple of bookshelves and a desk, where I sitting right now. One of the shelves is devoted to Charles Dickens and classic Christian authors like Augustine, Martin Luther, Bonhoeffer, and Kierkegaard along with some more recently written books and Bible stuff. The other bookshelf has a bottle of Russian Pepsi on top of it. Beneath that is a shelf full of books on or by Dostoyevsky followed byother Russian writers.
There’s also a basement. I found an ironing board down in the laundry area and pressed all my clothes that had suffered the rigors of travel. A big open area houses a disorderly stack of board games and puzzles and a ping pong table folded up against one wall. What this house reallyneeds is a pool table. But the Wallaces are moving to a smaller house this fall. There’s a small office downstairs also that looks like it belongs to Doug. Joanne is his wife, and she’s 48 according to a newspaper clipping on the wall about a marathon she ran with her twin sister. They seem to have one daughter, Jen, who’s married. They went to visit her this weekend, leaving me and a mostly absent Alice here by ourselves.
I just discovered a trial disk from AOL on the desk next to the computer. I didn’t ask if I could use the computer, but then, no one is here to ask permission. When Ken suggested Jenna bring me over and tell me about all the house rules at the Wallaces, she replied, “There aren’t any.” She and the two other members of Mars Hill in Charlottesville came over for supper on Thursday night. Ken has some property he wants to build a new house and office on over in Charlottesville, but he has to sell his current house. It’s been on the market since October. They got their first offer, an incredibly low one, the day I arrived. So in the meantime, he works in his office and studio next to his house in Powatan, and the rest of the staff works at the officesin Charlottesville.
Jeff and Jenna are the two other full time employees along with Ken. Jeff is soft spoken and laid back but with an edge to his humor. His shaggy blond hair falls down above his small oval glasses and well established Van Dyke. Jenna is just the way I imagined her, which, along with being odd, means I can’t describe her appearance at all. She just looks like a typical college student with shoulder length light brown hair. She’s actually graduated from college and is preparing to enter Regent College in Vancouver this fall. Jeff is also leaving; I think he
s getting married and is going to grow vegetables and work with cows. Bart is the other intern. He’s going to seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina but not to become a minister. He evidently wants to start a magazine dedicated to the sort of things Mars Hill Audio does. Severalpeople told him, “That’s what Ken Myers tried to do with Eternity Magazine.” So Bart thought he’d come see what Ken did wrong. Bart is a fireball of cutting wit. At the dinner table he was asking Jeff to warn him when he hit Jenna’s breaking point. “That’s something you’ll have to discover on your own,” Jeff grinned softly.
After someone said something nice at one point during the evening, Jeff turned to me and said, “Sometimes a bit of kindness actually creeps into our conversation. “Oh, I answered, “So I won’t be caught off guard when it happen.” “You won’t be caught off guard if somebody says something kind?” he repeated and then paused and added with approval, “Good.”
“Do you like Star Trek?” Ken stopped what he was doing in the office and asked me. He has a friend who writes scripts for “The Next Generation.” “We have all but two of them on tape,” he grinned. I suppose it should have been of no surprise when the subject of Star Trek came up at the dinner table that night. Bart made a fatal flaw of asking, “Is there more than one?” Well, yes, everyone explained to him. There’s the original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, not to mention all the movies. Ken told us about one Voyager episode where the crew finds several beings trapped in suspendedanimation. “What’s that?” asked Bart. “Statis,” answered Susanna. “Cryogenics,” I added. “All these words you’re throwing out,” Bart spread his hands in frustrated amazement.”
“Are you going to stay at the Wallaces all summer?” Jeff asked me over dessert. “Unless they throw me out,” I answered. “They won’t throw you out,” said Jenna softly, “Not the Wallaces.” She stayed with them for several weeks when she first worked for Ken as an intern. I followed her over after supper on Thursday. The Wallaces live about 15 minutes away from the Myers. They were really glad to see her. I sat in on their conversation as they caught up on stuff. Later as I removed clothes from the Roughnecks and hung them up in the closet, Jenna came in and sat down on my bed. “You live at home with your family?” she asked, “And you have brothers and sisters?” When I assented, she went on, “I was always with other people at college. Then when I was home, I had a seven year old sister who was always running around.” She paused and then said, “It’s a lot quieter here.”
Alice came home late this afternoon, and we watched _Babe_. What a great flick. When it was over I asked, “So, how about some pork for dinner?” We made chicken vegetable stuff over pasta instead and had that with cantalope for supper. I think Alice is originally from Taiwan. Her family lives in Baton Rouge now. She just graduated from the University of Richmond or University of Virginia in Richmond or something. She invited me to go to church with hertomorrow morning. She’s groaning about having to get up at 9 to get there in time. Alice hasbeen staying here for the last week and a half or so studying for the Certified Financial Analyst test, which she just took this morning. She’ll leave tomorrow or Monday to move in with several other people in an apartment.