BABE RUTH & STOVEPIPE

Weekend of the type they describe at length in all the books about paradise, and at the end a moonrise over the Lake at dusk that sent poets scurrying for their pens, photographers for their cameras, painters for their tints and everybody else just standing there saying "Look at the moon!"
Major weekend activity comprised cleaning the woodburning stove and disassembling and cleaning the stovepipe, then reassembling it, which involved yours truly's service as an astronaut in orbit some 20 feet above the floor, holding on for dear life to a thing that turned out to be unattached to anything else, which made for a realization I'd realized but ineffectually before: that I am no longer as young as I once was, no longer able to nonchalantly do spinning handstands atop crossbeams while assembling complex gadgetry and thinking of something else; rather, I realized, this damn ladder could very easily jump out of place and send me hurtle-spinning helplessly through space into the grip of the field of gravity, whence I would plunge to earth bearing a soot-laden section of stovepipe as an ineffective heat shield toward an oak floor many stovepipe lengths below, where I could just make out the outline of Japan through the clouds, and there in the rapidly nearing central area my house by the big lake, and down through the chimneyhole the oak flooring with its lovely grain that would refuse to embrace me with the hardness for which oak is famed, and I leaned from the ladder way way up on the wall there beyond Mars, and to hold myself up in space grasped the fixture attaching the long stovepipe to the chimney and found that it had been incompletely attached, and a good tug such as by a heavy foreigner leaning out from a ladder based on another planet would disattach said fixture completely, and a frisson went through me like when not only does your parachute not open but even worse, there is no parachute, and all the while Keech was on the crossbeam not far away helping me concentrate by nonchalantly doing spinning handstands and balancing from one toe on the ceiling while asking why didn't I do it this way, or that, and how much did Babe Ruth make, and if I fell did I think I'd land on my feet and what if I didn't and such adolescent wonderings that are, in general everyday situations, truly ever so dear to my heart and always have been but this was no time for dearness or crowding of the heart, this was no time for has-been, or generalizations or nearness or adolescence, this was a time for precision regretting, of all the things I'd left undone in my life, and for realizing too late that I should have made a will, when suddenly out there in orbit as I leaned out from the ladder over the nothingness that lies between solar systems the fitting slipped -- into place -- and the fastening collar slipped -- on and clicked shut -- and the stovepipe slipped -- right onto the attachment -- and it was all done and I was back down on the earth in life again in a comfy chair having the rest of my coffee, gazing at the sunset on the Lake and it had been a breeze, a snap, nothing to it, next year it would be even easier I assured Keech as he spun along the bracebeam and came down the ladder on his hands asking about salaries in the entertainment business.