This year marks the tenth that Jill and I have been working on our old house. When we took on our Queen Anne, it was a wrecked frat house — condemned property that had sat empty for nearly a year. Jill loved it at first sight. I said, “No way.” She was absolutely convinced that we could bring the house back from the brink. Never mind that we knew nothing about fixing a house. Painting — that’s all we knew. We could paint really well. Let me say it again: condemned property — no electricity in half the house, no plumbing, no ceilings in three rooms, no lights, garbage piled high in every room, and so on ad nauseum. It took three 30-yard Dumpsters and 79 industrial-sized garbage bags just to clean the place out. Still, we didn’t imagine that it would be two years before we started painting the walls.

I have always loved old houses. But I would not have bought this ruined frat house had Jill not wanted it so badly. That’s how far gone in love I was with her. We had been dating for only six months at the time. Call me impulsive. Is it remarkable that we saved the house and stayed together through all that mess? A sense of humor helps. The ability to live with chaos helps too. As we share the house with two dogs and two cats, chaos has become one of our specialties.

We have a website dedicated to our ongoing adventure: houselove.org It’s a big site because it tracks ten years of renovation. A decade seems a long time until you find yourself at the end of one. When we moved into our wreck, our new friends down the street kept reminding us that their spectacular home was the product of twenty years’ work. Twenty years? I thought. I’m not working twenty frigging years on a house. But I’m halfway there already.

Jill and I got married in our old house, by the way. That was the third year in. At the time, we thought the house was looking pretty groovy. But, the truth is, it was just starting to look livable. NOW it’s looking groovy. But you see how it goes: it’s all relative. You start with an Animal House wreck and pretty soon you’re willing to give yourself a lot of credit for living in something that looks only somewhat wrecked. There are people — a few of my in-laws, for example — who think that we live in a slum because all of the houses are old. Only in America will you get that attitude. Did you know that strip malls across the nation are being abandoned in favor of newer strip malls? We’re creating a landscape of deserted — zombie — strip malls. Something similar is happening with subdivisions.

But I digress. Is 113 years really old? Relatively, I mean. Think England, think France. Think George Washington.  Apparently, Jill and I will grow old in this oldish house, tinkering with it and improving it. I should confess that the only reason we keep working on the house is that we keep learning how to do this work better. We could have stopped years ago and the house would have been good enough. But, if you believe in progress and the advancement of humankind, good enough is never good enough. Take a peek at houselove.org and you’ll see what I mean.

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I love watermelons. In the summer, I will eat one a week. All by myself. If the day is particularly hot and I’m especially thirsty, I might eat half a watermelon in one sitting. So imagine my surprise and dismay when, just yesterday, I realized that I haven’t eaten a single decent watermelon all summer. Then I realized this: every watermelon I’ve bought this summer has been seedless. These are the only melons available in my two nearest grocery stores. So, what gives? Do the grocers think that seedless is best? Is this some kind of watermelon conspiracy to support corporate farms that are manufacturing the inferior but costlier seedless melon?

Let me be clear: seedless watermelons suck. Before this summer, I’d buy one occasionally on a whim. Every time — every time — I have been disappointed. Seedless watermelons are a) too dense and sometimes downright tough — you don’t get the textured chew that you get from a seeded watermelon, whose flesh has more air in it and, as a result, melts in your mouth;, b) too sweet but without any balance of flavor, like they’ve been infused with glucose or, in surrendering their seeds, have surrendered their flavor; c) or too sour — there is something wanting at the heart of these melons: their sourness seems an expression of loss. So, we get all of this melon failure in exchange for what, the absence of seeds?

Are you kidding? Seeds make eating watermelon fun. What’s more, that little bit of work augments the joy of eating — our mouths take delight in the exercise, which only increases our appetite. So let me say it straight: traditional — seeded — watermelons are more robust in size and flavor and, significantly, better looking, a rich dark green, which seems to say it all about their goodness. With the rise of the bloated, tasteless seedless watermelon, is my old favorite going the way of the tomato?

Here are a few fun facts from the Watermelon Promotion Board:

• The first recorded watermelon harvest occurred nearly 5,000 years ago in Egypt.
• Over 1,200 varieties of watermelons are grown worldwide in 96 countries.
• In some Mediterranean countries, the taste of watermelon is paired with the salty taste of feta cheese.
• Watermelon is 92% water.
• Watermelon’s official name is Citrullus Lanatus of the botanical family Curcurbitaceae. It is cousins to cucumbers, pumpkins and squash.
• By weight, watermelon is the most-consumed melon in the U.S., followed by cantaloupe and honeydew.
• Early explorers used watermelons as canteens.
• The first cookbook published in the U.S. in 1796 contained a recipe for watermelon rind pickles.

Mark Twain had this to say about the watermelon: “The true southern watermelon is a boon apart and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world’s luxuries, king by the grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat.”

One old college prank was to wager than nobody could eat a whole watermelon in a single sitting, rind and all. If you attempt this in the usual water-eating fashion, you are doomed to lose the bet. The only way to win is to squeeze all of the water out of the melon first, eat the solid parts, then drink the liquid.

Here’s a watermelon story: when I was in my twenties and living in Berkeley, CA, as a musician, I rented rehearsal space in an sprawling old building that had once been a laundry plant. It was made of wood and should have been condemned. Two brothers, recent immigrants, owned it. The elder was trying to refurbish the place and rent out space to various enterprises. His dream was to turn it into an arts center. The younger brother, let’s call him Joseph Fong, spent his days driving around the Bay Area collecting old pianos, which he’d bring back to the plant and fix up to sell. He must have had fifty old pianos crowding the front part of the building.

One evening, Joseph arrived with an old-style farm truck and unloaded about one hundred watermelons onto the concrete floor just beyond his crowd of pianos. I assumed he had come upon a wholesale melon deal that he could not refuse. When he left, I inspected his coup: in the gloom of the building’s center the 100 melons lay, huge and ripe, like dinosaur eggs nearing their time. A poor musician (and mad about watermelons), I was sorely tempted to take one. But I did not.

Every day I would arrive at the laundry to practice my instrument and every day I’d see the watermelons sitting in their gloomy repository. By the weeks’ end, I began to worry for them. What did Joseph Fong have in mind? By the end of the second week, the melons were odorous. By the end of the third, they were blackening. They stayed, and rotted, for three months until they puddled the floor and that part of the laundry smelled like a meat-processing plant on a hot day.

Then one day, it was all gone, the concrete floor scrubbed clean, though the smell lingered for a while. To this day I wonder what went through Joesph’s mind as he wheeled his broken pianos into the laundry every day and smelled the rot of his forgotten watermelons. And what did he say to his serious, enterprising brother? It seems an example of good intentions — and dreams of commerce — gone awry. If you got one hundred watermelons tomorrow, could you get rid of them?

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I brought home a doorstop from an auction recently. Jill doesn’t like the doorstop but I’m not sure what her doorstop aesthetics might be, since we never see doorstops anymore. Who’s to say what a doorstop should look like? Mine is cast iron, probably made about 1920, and in the shape of a clipper ship — an adventurer’s ship, apparently. It’s hand-painted, as they all were back in the day.

It used to be that every household had doorstops. From 1850 to 1950, hundreds of varieties were made in cast iron, most of them of animals, but also in the shapes of light houses, baskets of flowers, stage coaches, gnomes, soldiers, Southern belles and so on. My country grandmother had three doorstops in her rickety, little house: a terrier carved of stone (maybe chalk), a fabric-covered brick, and a pale oblong stone that, for reasons no one could explain, smelled of rot. The “rotten rock,” we called it.

A few years back, I gave Jill a doorstop as a gift. It’s a Boston terrier of cast iron, made about 1900. It must have been the most popular doorstop ever made because it is, without question, the most numerous in antique shops and online and, even now, reproductions of it are coming in from China. The appeal of the cast iron Boston terrier resides in its startled, slightly disturbed doggish gaze. The reproductions don’t capture this expression, but the originals are quite fetching.

You may wonder what ever happened to the doorstop. Or maybe not. The explanation is simple and twofold: 1) In the 1950s, people grew less inclined to lug doorstops around because Americans started moving more than ever. Cheap, lightweight, and unobtrusive doorstops came into fashion–those springy pegs jutting from baseboards, those rubber-nubbed kickstands on the back of doors, and those bulbous bumpers screwed to the wall. In short, those quaint, heavy, often garish doorstops seemed way too old-fashioned. 2) Then air conditioning all but eradicated the need for doorstops because, thanks to air conditioning, we now seldom open our windows wide for a breeze. It’s the breeze, of course, that makes the doorstop necessary.

A brisk breeze reduces the air pressure on the exposed side of the door. This causes the stronger air pressure on the unexposed side to push the door shut. Or slam it shut. Since Jill and I have only window unit air conditioners, we avail ourselves of mild weather more often than not — and then we “open the house.” All the windows up, all the doors open wide. You better believe you hear doors slamming in our old place. So we have need of doorstops.

I’ve installed my ship at the most problematic place, against the third floor guest room door, which often slams shut with a thunderous crack! as a wicked breeze banshees its way from the top of our house to the bottom, finding egress at last through the kitchen door, which we open wide to our back yard.

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Let me put my problem simply: I puke on planes. Not frequently. Not every time. But enough to make me finger through the jetliner’s seat pocket, every flight, to make sure there’s a tidy white barf bag. Just in case. Recently, I returned from a trip that made me sick both coming and going. And I continued heaving in the car after each flight. That’s never happened before. Jill  suggests that I may be getting more prone to air sickness as I grow older. Oh, joy.

I first discovered that I suffer from motion sickness when I was nine and attempted to ride The Octopus at an amusement park. I had come to the park with my third grade class for just that kind of turn-‘em-around-and-upside-down fun. As The Octopus began its gyrations, rising and tilting and spinning, I was abruptly surprised and dismayed at my body’s reaction: my dizziness was not a fun dizzy, it was a brain-mashing, stomach-wrenching, limb-quivering dizziness whose analogue I would not discover for another nine years, when reeling with drunkenness, I would puke most of the night into the bushes at the front of my parents’ house until I was weak and weepy from the ordeal. Instead of screaming my delight, like my fellow Octopus riders, I flattened myself against the seat-back and gripped the rails and prayed for the ride to end soon, please, very soon. When the ride ended, I stumbled to the nearest bench and lay down for a good twenty minutes until my pulsing stomach, my spinning head, my trembling limbs settled at last.

I made some experiments. I was fine on the roller coaster because it moved fast in a relatively straight trajectory and its dips and rises were short-lived. I couldn’t tolerate anything that spun me in a circle. This prevented me from enjoying 95% of the rides. It was a devastating discovery not only because it stifled my enjoyment but also because it set me apart from my peers. It marked me as a weakling. On that same school, Ellen Sloan — a sickly mama’s girl — threw up in her cupped hands just as the bus arrived at the amusement park. She was notorious for getting car sick, sometimes after only a few miles of riding. As she rushed out of the bus ahead of us, her cupped hands brimming with her half-digested breakfast, the rest of us exchanged looks of disgust to confirm what we already knew about Ellen: what a loser. Little did I know that twenty minutes later, I’d have more in common with Upchuck Ellen than with my unafflicted buddies.

My oldest brother, Mike, was plagued by motion sickness until he was a teenager. Every car trip we took for the family’s summer vacation guaranteed that Mike would be puking out an open window. This usually happened in the mountains, where winding roads did him in. I had no trouble with car sickness as a child. When the road got too windy, I’d lie down in the way-back of our station wagon. As for air sickness, I was thirteen when I took my first flight. When a too-bumpy flight flattened me finally and I handed my bulging barf bag to the attendant, I was humiliated. Since then, every flight has been a gamble. The worst parts are take-offs and landings. Most of the time, I can ride out the turbulence because most of the time it doesn’t last long. If it persists, I must descend into several circles of agony before I reach the frozen, black lake of absolute air sickness. I am in awe of airline attendants and their ability to work and walk about so casually on a bumpy ride.

I am discreet about vomiting. I open the bag, place it to my mouth as if to inflate it, then let go. I am not loud. I do not cough or spit or retch. That comes later, after I’m on the ground –if the flight has been particularly bad. If, upon arrival, I have to rent a car and get somewhere, I am good to go because I have focus. If, on the other hand, I must ride in a car, especially a long distance and, heaven forbid, on winding roads, I am in danger again. Those who do not suffer from motion sickness may think that this is all in the sufferer’s head. That’s why, as children, we considered the motion-sick to be weaklings. They should have more control. They should tough it out. There is in this assumption something fundamental to evolutionary biology: the sick one must be left behind if he or she cannot keep up with the tribe. That’s why the kid sitting on the bench morosely watching his classmates ride The Octopus with giddy abandon is the kid most likely to get his lunch money stolen and his pants yanked off and tosses into the nearest Dumpster. He’s one who can’t keep up. Twenty thousand years ago, he’d have been left on the veldt as the tiger’s next meal.

You may wonder at my ability to recover if I have to drive a car, for this seems to suggest that motion sickness is just a head game. The most persuasive theory about motion sickness is that it arises from physiological confusion. When the plane starts to buck and pitch, my body can’t reconcile the conflicting signals it receives in three areas: visual, aural (inner ear), and tactile (how sensors in our skin perceive movement). My inner ear — which contains the tiny gyroscope that keeps us balanced and lets us know when we are standing up or lying down — is getting signals that I’m being turned upside down. But my eyes are telling me that I’m maintaining a steady, if a bit bumpy, course. And then my body as a whole is perceiving jarring movements in a different way. The result is nausea. If you’ve ever gotten dizzy from watching an I-MAX movie of flying into a canyon, it’s the same phenomenon: your inner ear is telling you that you’re rock-solid stable while your eyes are telling your brain that you are flying. This contradiction confuses your body. As a result, you get dizzy. If the confusion persists, your body may bail on you altogether and you get sick. This theory seems to explain why I recover more quickly after a bad flight if I have to drive: driving a car realigns my senses as nothing else can.

Apparently most mammals are susceptible to motion sickness. You may have a dog that has trouble riding in a car. There are many remedies, none of them perfect. One scientific study shows that the removal of a part of the brain alleviates the ailment in monkeys. I’ll opt for something less dramatic. Dramamine and its associates suppress your nausea by depressing your senses. Essentially, as it makes you drowsy, it puts you out of your misery. My brother Mike swears by those beaded acupressure wrist-bands. I don’t believe it but I’ll try it. Ginger capsules seem promising but the medical community considers them unproven so far. Supposedly, you can train your body to withstand motion sickness by exposing yourself regularly to turbulent motion. It’s like exercise. But who would want that kind of exercise? By the way, you can go online and buy your own supply of airsick bags, some quite fashionable. The need to carry that large a supply suggests that there are some serious sufferers out there. If you’re interested in the barf bag as cultural artifact, there are many online museums: airsicksack.com

The most sympathetic response I’ve received from an in-flight seat mate after I’ve apologized for puking was: “Hey, you can’t help it.” The least sympathetic was an appalled stare from a teenager. Children are afraid of losing control and don’t want to believe that a normal grown-up like you or I could be reduced to a trembling, sweating mess as a result of a bumpy flight. It’s nothing I can explain easily to a youngster, especially under those circumstances. I can only sit there, barf bag in hand, and wait for deliverance.

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