Author Archives: Mary

Please prepare yourself for what is maybe the funniest/most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me. No, really. I think it’s better than when the pen exploded in my mouth and I didn’t know it, better than the situation in Utah last summer.

So there I am at the Trader Joe’s.

I’m passing by the avocados. But wait: I need avocados. I reach my hand over the display to grab a couple and I’m kinda going at this on a diagonal because I want to try and get out of the way of the woman coming from the other direction. She can’t get through until I move.

I make a face like, “Eek, sorry, just a sec,” and the woman says, “You’re fine!”

But then she just stayed there, watching me. It was a lot of pressure. Because you can’t just grab two avocados. You have to select avocados. You have to make sure they’ve ripened to your liking. Me, I like to buy one avocado that is quite firm because it’ll stay good in the fridge for awhile. The other one needs to be soft so I can eat it now, but not too soft so it goes bad before I put it on my dal tadka or whatnot. I’m one person. I can’t eat all these avocados right away. I need to stage my avocados and I’ve done this enough to know to stick to protocol.

How do I find these specific avocados? I squeeze ’em.

So this woman is standing there, not going around me, and I’m squeezing avocados with my thumb and forefinger. Squeeze, squeeze. Nope. Hm. Squeeze, squeeze. But this is weird because she’s watching me. And then, because I apparently cannot let there be a moment of silence ever, I say, “Squeezin’ the avocados!” and my tone is sing-songy and chipper, like I’m saying, “Just doin’ the chores!” to a neighbor because I realize as I’m saying it that “Squeezin’ the avocados” sounds like a euphemism for something and that is not good.

I didn’t stop there. Oh, no.

Because yes, yes indeed, saying, “Squeezin’ the avocados!” as I molested the avocados did sound super creepy, so in .05 seconds I decide to push further into this “I’m just a friendly neighbor at the store! Doin’ the shoppin’!” so I say, “Must be Saturday mornin’!”

Squeezin’ the avocados, must be Saturday mornin. That sentence came out of my mouth. I have never picked avocados faster in my life after that. I still don’t know what I ended up with.

By the time I got to the dairy case, I realized it wasn’t morning at all. It was half-past noon.

Somewhere in Chicago, a woman is shaking her head at her husband and unpacking groceries. She’s telling him how living in a city is really getting to her.

Today, a look back to a post from July 2014. It’s two years later, and though there have been changes in locale (I was in NYC when I wrote it) and love (oh, the stories you and I could swap) this is pretty much how this still goes. 

(I saw Yuri, by the way. He’s still pretty cool.)

I have found my calling. From this day forward, I pledge to have an eraser with me when I visit the library so that I can erase, page by page, any pencil marks found within the books I select. I have surprised myself by how grumpy this makes me. I’m a lil’ grumpy.

Generally speaking, if you read books you’ve checked out of the library, there’s a high probability that we’ll find some common ground, even if the books we read are different. (If they’re really, really different we might have to work at it, but I’m willing if you are, WWII-submarine-engine-repair-handbook-reading guy.)

But you cannot mark up that book. People who markup library books do not realize that when you go into a library, acquire a library card, check a book out at the librarian’s desk and get a slip of paper that tells you precisely when you are to bring that book back, that book is not your property. Not permanently. It’s your property for the length of time you have it checked out, but after that, it’s someone else’s, and this is the beauty of the library. You need to bring the book back so other people can use it – other people who might not want to underline that particular passage that you just underlined, starred, and put a smiley face next to. I know! It’s really good! But you don’t have to do that to make it more good than it already is.

The only productive thing I did yesterday was to amble up to the library to get a copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. It’s a great book for writers and I wanted to locate a couple things in it for my class this week. I opened up the only copy they have and wouldn’t you know it: pencil marks on almost every page. Underlined passages, asterisks, and an excruciating “Imp.” absolutely everywhere. The “Imp.” meant “important”, surely, though one could argue the entirety of Bird By Bird is important, seeing as how it’s still in print after several decades, so couldn’t one just consider the entire book underlined and save a little time?

Of course, the underliner might have a good friend named Imp whom she knows would love this snippet and that one and if she doesn’t underline it and put Imp’s name next to it, why, it might be lost forever. What I like to do is have my journal nearby when I read. This is so I can copy down good stuff into its pages. I recommend this because then I have all the things I want to share with my good friend Imp in one place, you see. The difference between my journal and a library book is that I own my journal. Also, no one can check out my journal and read it. That would not be good.

You know what’s really funny? In every single book I’ve ever found that has markings in it, the markings never go all the way through. They always, always stop halfway (or even part-way) through the book. I’m not sure if that means the marker lost interest in marking or lost interest in the book; I’d like to think it’s the former, but I also would like to think I can have ice cream for breakfast every day without negative consequences.

Horace Mann said, “Until you have done something useful for humanity, you should be ashamed to die.” I have my Pink Pearl eraser in my library totebag, now, and I have already used it in Bird By Bird. I’m ready, Horace.