Lawrence Block & Life Lessons

          What’s the difference between mashed potatoes and pea soup? Anybody can mash potatoes.

            I was looking for something to read in one of my bookcases and pulled out a weighty Enough Rope, a collection of stories by Lawrence Block. By “weighty” I don’t mean deeply meaningful or with heavy insight. I mean the sucker must weigh about ten pounds. Lawrence Block is one of my favorite authors, especially in the Matt Scudder series, but he, like Stephen King, is a driven spinner of tales, a weaver of word webs, and he just keeps churning out novel after novel, story after story. Tucked in the book was a slip of paper that I must have placed there several years ago, with tiny notes to myself referring to interesting things in one of the Scudders, one of which was the joke at the top of this page—short, funny, a little dark, just like Matt Scudder or Keller the hitman. I’m now reading all the stories about Keller, who, like Scudder, is efficient, plodding, stoic, and somewhat humorless despite the joke at the top. Keller is such an interesting character, a sensitive, likeable fellow who collects rare stamps when he’s not on one of his jobs doing a snuff for the mob. After the stories in Enough Rope, I may have to go back and reread all the novels about Keller. I may have enough rope, but I may not have enough time for all the things I want to read.

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I just switched our cable provider from Direct TV to Dish and our phone and internet service from Century Link to Cox. Why did I do that? I was unhappy with Direct because they didn’t have a connection to Netflix and Dish did. I wanted to watch Netflix movies and series on my television instead of just on computer and IPad. And the price, at least for two years, was considerably less than what I was paying. I didn’t realize that Dish had to take down the Direct TV dish and replace it with theirs. I called Direct to see what I was supposed to do with their dish, which was now lying dead on its side up against the house. “We don’t want it back,” I was told. “It’s yours, so you can do anything you want.” So, I can either leave it where it lies or I can hope our garbage service will take it. What a waste. And this morning the service man from Cox showed up. I had no idea the switchover was going to be so complicated. He was here for nearly three hours. He had to run a new cable from the phone box to the house. I scratch my head. Why couldn’t Cox have used the same line we’d had forever? I thought this would be a ten-minute job of switching my old modem to the new and the phone switch handled seamlessly at the Cox office. Wrong, by almost three hours.

Why do we learn life’s lessons only after it’s too late and not before? At my age, you’d think I’d already learned all the lessons I’d ever need. Not so. And with the speed of technical advances, I’ve probably still got a lot to learn.