Me and some of the girls, waiting for the bride. Photo: Sew Creative, Lincoln, NE
The sewing retreat in Sioux City was wonderful. My students were brilliant, new friends were made, and all the sponsors — I’m looking at you, BabyLock — were more than generous.
During the morning portion of my Log Cabin paper-piecing master class yesterday, we heard a lot of activity in the courtyard outside our classroom. We looked out to see men setting up chairs and tables for a wedding. As the morning and early afternoon went along, the wedding took shape and we followed the action between quilt blocks.
People began to arrive and music began around 2:00pm or so. When the bride was imminent, those of us in the room threw our patchwork to the side and ran to the window to see her.
My brand new brother-in-law is making something wonderful.
Jack Newell (that’s the brother-in-law) and his partner in this project, designer Seth Unger have been working for four years on a public art project. They are very close to making this big, big, BIG idea happen and I’m shaking my head in wonder. Jack is cooler than Paul Newman speaking French while riding a motorcycle up to a valet guy at the backdoor entrance to a Rolling Stone (circa 1972) concert. Something like that. I recently spoke to Jack about The Wabash Lights.
Let’s talk about Wabash Avenue. What’s it like?
It embodies Chicago. It’s gritty, hardworking, overlooked, sometimes avoided, but crucial. It’s not touristy Michigan Ave or State St. It’s a place in a very segregated city where you find people from all over converging. Students from one of the seven colleges that touch Wabash, restaurants, bars, hot dog stands, jewelers, hotels and residences. If you were to walk down Wabash, you would find it dark, dreary and loud. We want to make it less dark.
I love Wabash Avenue because the el tracks run over the top. You get to walk around underneath — but I love the idea of transforming it. So give it to me: what’s The Wabash Lights?
The Wabash Lights is an interactive light installation on the underside of the elevated train tracks on Wabash Avenue in the heart of Chicago’s Loop. Designed by the public, this first of its kind piece of public art will give visitors to The Wabash Lights’ website and future app the ability to log in and design the lights, making it entirely interactive.
That is so great. It’ll be great for the street, obviously, but also civic pride and local business. And tourism! This wouldn’t be that far from The Bean. Wow. You’ve traveled all over the world with my sister Rebecca. Thanks for keeping her safe, by the way. You’ve seen a lot of public art in all these places. Talk to me about public art for a second.
There’s two types of public art, broadly speaking; temporary and permanent. Each of these can evoke a different experience. Sometimes the beauty of a piece of public art is the ephemeral nature of it.* The permanent pieces of public art need to do something different — they never change, but you do. Each time you interact with them your experience might be different. It can be an interesting experience in reflection.
Jack, I’m sorry. I have to ask. You say in the video that you’ve been getting permits and city clearance for four years. Did you have to engage the mob to get this kind of thing done in Chicago?
Funny question and we get questions in this vein quite a bit. We’ve found city government and the agencies we’ve been working with to be full of passionate, hard working people who have very difficult jobs. These organizations are most of the time underfunded and overworked. People usually only know of the CTA or CDOT when there’s something broken; they’re perceived one way, but our experience has been the opposite. They get what we’re trying to do and have been incredibly supportive and honest throughout the whole process.
Do you ever wake up in the morning and go, “When did I become an adult who does huge, ambitious, city-changing projects?”
You either do stuff or you don’t. You are defined by the stuff you do and by the stuff you don’t do. I want to be defined by having done this.
You’re so close to funding the huge, ginormous first step for the Lights. The videos about it are amazing. There are four days left in the Kickstarter campaign. What’s the website?
The main website is right here; the Kickstarter campaign is here.
Will you engrave my name on one of the lights? Don’t tell me you can’t do it just because the thing is made of thin glass with gas inside it! If you can dream it, you can do it, right, Jack?
No!
The point of this, and one of the reasons we wanted to get the public on board before corporations (and in our corporate partners we will be looking for folks who agree with this) is that we want to maintain the artistic integrity of The Wabash Lights. The Wabash Lights is an art installation. It’s not a way finding installation or a commercial digital billboard. It’s a piece of art that is created by the public.
Fine. Thanks, Jack. I’m so glad you’re my brother-in-law.
*Google “Pink Balls in Montreal” or anything by Christo.
Tape it up in your laundry room and promptly forget you did that. Photo: Internet. Please contact me if this is your image.
I attended a lecture this evening where a couple universal fabric care symbols were shown on a slide. Everyone laughed because though a number of them live on many of the garments in our lives, no one knows what those laundry instruction icons mean.
The ones that should be self-explanatory aren’t. The “Hand Wash” icon looks like it could mean “Hand Burning”, as though the tub of liquid you’re washing your clothes in might be hydrochloric acid. And gym clothes need that, sometimes. The tubs with temperatures on them look like they might be pretty straightforward, but those temperatures are in Celsius. They don’t always say that.
Other icons are unknowable without help. The dots in the washbasins: apples? Bleach is a triangle, okay — but why? As for the last row up there, I just get angry. It’s hula hoops and sticks! What is this, Norman Rockwell’s sketchbook?? The whole thing looks like the language of a people who use a pictorial system to communicate with each other in writing.
You do have to respect that people for their language, though. There are no dirty words!
“Bing” is for bing cherry, by the way. Photo: Internet
Greetings from fabulous Sioux City!
When’s the last time you were in Sioux City? Yeah, me neither, but I’m glad I’m here. Sioux City is pretty cool. The downtown makes a good first impression as you roll in with its copper-colored bricks, clocktower, and a few tall buildings. I consulted the oracle* to learn a bit about this town that is almost in South Dakota and almost in Nebraska.
Here are 5 notable things I’ve learned about Sioux City:
1. In 2010, Money magazine named Sioux City one of the best places to live in the world. I can’t find the article but that’s a very nice thing to say, Money, and I’m sure you had your reasons.
2. There is a creek here called Bacon Creek. Not Beacon. Not Macon. Bacon.
3. Try as I might, I cannot stop laughing over the fact that the airport code for Sioux City is SUX. It’s just not fair. Someone, please do something about this. It’s time.
4. The Twin Bing candy your ancestors ate? Made in Sioux City. It even says so on the wrapper. I feel like the Twin Bing is primed for a comeback via the post-hipster set. I can see a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Chicago working a Twin Bing foam into the pork chop dish; I can see an all-natural cosmetics company making a Twin Bing exfoliant.
5. Guess who was born here? Pauline Esther Friedman and her twin sister Esther Pauline Friedman, better known as Abigail Van Buren (“Dear Abby”) and Ann Landers, respectively. Yes! The advice columnists known for the sassy, brassy advice they gave the American people for over two centuries. Did you know those two women were sisters? Twins, even?! And did you know they hated each other and though people said they reconciled their bitter competition at some point, they totally did not? You can’t write this stuff!
And I am falling asleep in this chair, proof that you can write this stuff, but not anymore tonight.
I’m headed to teach and lecture at a new event in Iowa, Joi’s Sewing Holiday. I’m impressed at all that Ms. Joi — an accomplished garment sewist, author, and designer — has arranged and coordinated. I imagine creating a new retreat with sponsors, classes, events, vendors, and big attendance is like planning a birthday party for over a thousand children born on the same day. That’s a lot of cake (with fire in it) to bring out at the right moment.
I’m at my gate at Reagan National Airport right now. After dropping my bags and getting through security, I went to my usual coffee spot in the terminal, but it was gone. In its place was a huge bar in the round in the center of the circular terminal. There were iPads at every high-top chair, six television screens nestled into the structure a la Frank Lloyd Wright, and a big sculpture-ish jobby rising out of the center; the whole thing looks like a spaceship.Wow, I said to myself, that is one fancy bar. But I wanted coffee, not scotch. I turned 360 degrees, looking for my coffee gals, who kind of know me at this point. No dice.
Gingerly, I approached the bench. “Hi, I said to the black-clad…team. “Do you all serve coffee?” Practically in chorus, they answered in the affirmative. I was to sit down in a chair and use the iPad to order.
“Do I have to?” I said. “Can I just get a large coffee to go?” No, I learned; it was iPad or die. All right. I sat down and began to tap. The first screen I got was a prompt to enter my flight information so the robot could “keep me updated.” I did not want to be updated. I’m an adult, for one thing, and plus, I could see my gate from my chair. I flagged a nice lady making the rounds of the spaceship who let me know that I didn’t have to do all that; I could just punch the miniscule button that said, “Skip This Screen.”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Getting a coffee to go with cream and sugar took about five minutes. There was only one size to select but, as the nice lady told me, there are free refills. I suspect when I am done drinking the ambrosia that is the first cup of coffee of the day, I will be forced to tap again. Just speaking over the counter to the people working there, I will have to use an iPad.
I hate this so much. So, so, so much. Does this make me old? How can it, though? It’s not efficient! It is the opposite of efficient? Ordering and receiving a cup of coffee should not take over 2.5 minutes, top to bottom. They’re collecting data, surely, tracking how much coffee people pour down their throats between 7:50 and 7:55 at Reagan National.
Moving to NYC last year was rough. I went in for all the right reasons (love, adventure, curiosity) and there were good times, but I fell flat on my face. Nothing went the way I thought it would. As the relationship thrashed in the East Village apartment, the temperature outside dropped. By November, everything was upside down and backward, out in the icy rain with no house keys.
The move to D.C., surprising as it might have seemed to some (hi, Mom), really did make perfect sense. I couldn’t go back to Chicago, I couldn’t stay in New York. This series of posts detail the entire decision-making process and after going through the logic, even my mother understood what had to be done.
The boxes. The rats. The more boxes. The leases. The rent. The trips to Chicago to get stuff I needed from storage. The cost. The flights. The rats. The broken plates. It’s all been pretty real.
Tonight, I swam in the pool in my building. It was around 9pm and I had the whole place to myself. You know how great your voice sounds when you sing in the shower? Every female is Mary J. Blige, or Celine, or Whitney; every dude is James Brown or Hall or Oates. If a shower is good, let me tell you how good an entire indoor pool is. I paddled around like a fish and sang my heart out. I was winning Grammys in there.
And there it was. Singing in the pool, tonight, it all makes sense and it’s all okay.
The sketch I made of the whole incident. Hey, that’s my letterhead!
I haven’t told anyone this story from the road trip yet because there is shame involved. It’s a tad longer, but stay with me because it’s got a great payoff.
One night in Utah, I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. This was not unusual, so before lights out, I had done my preparations. That night was a sleep-in-the-car night, which meant that once the seats in the SUV were released and the make-shift bed was made, I put my flip-flops, Handi-Wipes, and fluffy roll of TP into the cubby in the passenger-side door. On the hook above the window, I hung my hoodie and the car keys.
When you are inside a locked car and then try to leave it, unless you first unlock it, the car alarm will sound when you open the door. You must then stab your fob’s “Alarm Off” function, sixty times to get it to stop. When we camped in the car, of course my friend and I locked up once we were inside. This meant that in the middle of the night, when I would get up and go to the bathroom (read: bush), I would have to locate the keys in the dark, make sure I unlocked the car, then exit. Exiting, by the way, was a Ringling Bros. & Barnum & Bailey Circus clown car routine: I squeezed out the door and essentially did a sommersault onto the grass.
We were in a public park that night, so the spot I found was near the public bathroom facilities. I say “near” because the facilities were locked up at sundown, something I found out when I tried to open the door. Okay, no problem. The lights inside the brick structure appeared to be motion-sensored, so I jumped up and down and got the lights to go on, which threw light onto the grass behind the building. It wasn’t a lot of light, but it was enough to “go” by, heh, heh. So I went. Because it was 3am and there was only a dim light by which to see, I covered up my…visit with leaves and sticks and earth matter with every intention — this is important — with every intention to clean everything up in the morning. I respect my National Parks! Bleary eyed, sleepy, with grass in my hair but much relieved, I tumbled back into the car and went to sleep.
In the morning, I looked for the keys to unlock the door before Claus and I got out and made tea. No keys. Not under the sleeping bags. Not on the floor by the seats. Not in the front. Not in the back. We were trapped in the car. If we opened the door, the alarm would scream and, not having keys, there would be no way to turn it off. It was getting really hot inside that car. We finally determined that we could open the car doors because the dashboard screen said, “No fob detected,” which, considering the situation, is the best example of a “mixed blessing” ever.
We took a deep breath and opened the doors. No alarm sounded. The keys were nowhere. They were really, really nowhere. I combed the park, convinced I had sleepwalked the perimeter in my pajamas and dropped the keys. Claus looked under the car twelve times. We looked for an hour and then I began to cry. Those keys, impossibly, were Gone. Do you know how much it costs to get a replacement key for a rental car? Both cell phones were dying. This was a bad, bad situation. Oh, and one other thing: I looked many times around the makeshift bathroom area I had created at 3am. Not only were the keys not there, but my bathroom, such as it was, was not there. I didn’t have to clean anything because there was nothing there. No paper, no leaf cover. Someone had cleaned.
I called the Park District. Had someone been by? Had they found keys at XYZ Public Park near Zion?? I was going to clean up! Please! Don’t judge me! And okay, judge me, but did someone find keys for heaven’s sake?? Nothing here, they said, but you could talk to the police. I was patched to the station and I blubbed the story to the officer there, that I have a condition that makes me have to poop all the time [sorry] and I have to go in the night, and was it at all possible that a Park District person came through, saw that there was an…incident, and cleaned up and maybe found car keys nearby?? Somehow??
There was a silence. Then:
“Well, I’ve got your keys,” the officer said.
I almost fell off the memorial stone slab I was sitting on. “You do??? You DO???” I flapped my hands at Claus. “You have them?? But…but how? Oh, god… Someone found my… Oh, no, oh no…” And I began blubbing again that I’m not a bad person, that I’m a law-abiding citizen (mostly) and, “I’m so, so sorry that –”
“First of all, you can’t be campin’ in the park,” he said. “And yeah, the guy who does the bathrooms over there found the mess. He waddn’t too happy ’bout it, either. Stepped right into it. He found the keys in the grass there and brought ’em over to us. I can get ’em over to you in about an hour when I’ve taken care of this other thing.”
I wept. I told the officer that I would pay any fine he’d slap me with and would enjoy paying it. He said that wasn’t necessary. When he brought the keys I again begged him to let me give him money. He declined and said it was all no big deal and to get along, now. I think he took pity on a girl who had slept in a car and had to poop in the middle of the night.
Later, Claus said that in the early morning, he had heard what he thought were two men arguing. We figure it was the cleaning guy, shouting and hollering when he discovered the situation. I’ll have you know from then on, I did not wait until the morning to clean up any bathroom area I created. Turns out there are these things called flashlights.
Jefferson on the $2-bill, circa 1869. Photo: Wikipedia
There’s a special pleasure in reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson while living in the city he lived in for many years in a country he basically designed. The biography is a slim one, I must confess; I love reading about the early years of our nation, but there are only so many Shay’s Rebellions and trips back and forth on the Atlantic I can put in my head before I need a snack.
Here are three things you might not know about Jefferson. Two of them come from reading this biography; one of them does not. If you can guess which fact was not included in the book I’m reading, I’ll make you a bowl of macaroni and cheese.
1. Maybe I’m outing myself as a boob for not knowing it, but I didn’t know that for about five years (1784-1789) Jefferson lived in Paris. It wasn’t a vacation: he was serving in a kind of ambassador position alongside Ben Franklin and John Adams as America got itself together. As you probably do know, France was pretty important in the whole “America” thing and there was plenty of stuff for the three bigwigs (ha!) to do in Paris. Not surprisingly, Jefferson loved living there, and I just love thinking about one of our founding fathers eating pan au chocolate on his way to the office.
2. On lists of “Fascinating Facts About Thomas Jefferson”, you’ll often find that Jefferson owned thousands of books. You might even learn that he sold them to replenish the Library of Congress when it was sacked in the War of 1812. This is all true. Jefferson sold nearly 6,500 of his books to the Library for $24k. What isn’t mentioned is how he organized his library; he put all those thousands of books under one of three categories: Memory, Understanding, or Imagination. How cool is that? It was a concept based on a Francis Bacon book, apparently. I like that everything he read — and everything we read — can be put into those three categories.
3. Thomas Jefferson invented macaroni and cheese. Well, he didn’t invent it. But he really liked macaroni noodles with cheese baked in the oven; he probably had something similar in France (see No. 1) and it appears everyone who came to dinner at Monticello was served macaroni pie. The Jefferson-mac n’ cheese connection is a thing; there’s a lot about it on the Internet. I’ll leave it to you to explore further. We can all be very, very glad there has not yet been an ad campaign for mac-n-cheese featuring Jefferson’s face.
This weekend I have to get everything ready for a big event in Iowa, but I have promised myself to take a break and go to the Jefferson Memorial. It’s a 20-minute ride on the subway to get there, one more reason why I adore my new hometown. I will lay a pan au chocolate on the steps, Mr. President.
Me, looking at mountain, somewhere in the American West. Photo: Claus.
You don’t have to be devastated by the beauty a grand, famous, “so-amazing-you-will-freak-out” landscape. Your heart may not burst out of your chest at Observation Point X, you may not burst into song when you see a big wave. You may hate Grand Canyon. You might think it’s sort of monotonous. I’m not looking to defend a person who looks at the sea lions at Ano Nuevo and says, “Whatever. Can we go to Burger King?” I am looking to defend people who respect the Titans but feel guilty when they’re not devastated by the “raw, eternal power” of them.
There were times on the road trip when we’d be driving, leave a mountain pass and bam! some HD vista would open up before us. We’d stop mid-sentence and just gape. The basin before we got to Grand Canyon was like that for me. The rolling hills, the endless blue of the sky, the ghosts of all those buffalo… That swath of earth touched me so much — felt so familiar to me — I couldn’t stop crying. It was weird.
But Yosemite? I don’t know. It was cool. But the camping, camaraderie, and cookstove, well, that was what was great about Yosemite for me. Yosemite is brushy pine trees and a lot of grey-white rock. Not my thing, really. The tour guides (we had three to choose from, all very useful) are full of words like “breathtaking” and “stunning” and “awe-inspiring,” but this is dangerous. One reads these things and hears about places that are “must-sees” and it creates great pressure to feel something when we get to Yosemite, or when we gaze out into Grand Canyon.
But you don’t have to be awe-inspired. You might be more inspired walking through your neighborhood at dusk on your way to the store for milk. The light might be just right, the nice lady who lives on the corner might wave from her porch. This can be more beautiful to you than a big mountain.
I say it because it took me a long time to learn that. I saw the Mona Lisa once and I just didn’t get it. I felt terrible, thought for sure there was something wrong with me. But I like so many paintings so much more, and it’s okay. I liked Zion way better than Grand Canyon. Anyhow, the unsolicited advice tonight is to not let People tell you what’s Beautiful. You decide. No pressure.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The woman in the image above finds the landscape she’s looking at to be very, very beautiful.]
Rosie The Riveter, put up your dukes. Oh, wait. You’ve got one up already. Okay, put up the other duke! Photo: My neighbor Mark
I want to tell every last story from the trip — but where to start? Should I talk about the delicious meals we made in our wee cooker? How we added parmesan cheese, diced apples, and salt and pepper to Trader Joe’s Roasted Red Pepper boxed soup and made it taste like something you’d get in a 4-star restaurant? I should probably tell that story because right now, no one can believe me. But it’s true, we did that.
Maybe I ought to bang out the post I promised someone I’d write asap, how a Crohn’s/Colitis person can go camping. How they can give one of their biggest fears the what-for. There’s not much info out there for gimpy GI people on how to camp successfully; I know because I looked. For those without problematic intestinal conditions, prepare for TMI. But the post will have value for people who do suffer from all that and sharing what I learned is of utmost importance.
But tonight, I’m overwhelmed. Can’t pick. Therefore, I offer this picture of me in my hallway at the Kennedy Warren. I bought a huge, fabulous area rug at Mom & Pop’s Antiques yesterday and man, did that rug need to be vacuumed. But I don’t have a vacuum because I stupidly left it in New York. Undaunted, I went down to the front desk and asked if I could borrow one. Just as I was inquiring — that very moment — a maintenance guy came from around the corner with his awesome Ghostbuster vacuum. I asked if I could borrow that vacuum. The guys were like, “Uh…yes. This has never happened before.”
Man did that vacuum suck. My rug is like new! It was so fun to wear. Wow. Just like a backpack! As I was taking it back down to the office, my friendly neighbor Mark passed by with his daughter. Every time I’ve run into Mark he’s wearing expensive-looking red-framed glasses and a ball cap; I like Mark a lot. I told him how much the vacuum sucked and how everyone should get one. We laughed and Mark said he’d love to take my picture.
“10.000 auf Facebook,” 2014. Photo: Wikipedia, of course.
I have no idea who these people are. When I searched Wiki Commons for “Facebook,” I got pictures of gorgeous landscapes in Bejing and pictures like this, none of which made any sense whatsoever. Is this a Facebook conspiracy? to delete photos of itself on a public domain image repository? Is that a ridiculous thing to say? Not if you saw Facebook headquarters in Silicon Valley two weeks ago, like I did. I’m here to tell you: Facebook is creep city.
(Also, I can’t login to my public page, so all of these posts are going unseen unless you’re a PaperGirl subscriber. Could you drop a line to a fellow reader that I’m back and better than ever when it comes to typing? I’m trying to get the problem fixed, but as Facebook appears to have no actual customer service, this has been difficult.)
One of the stops on the road trip was Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley, as you may know, is not really a valley, just a region in the Bay Area where for every 9,000 startups there is one that makes it and the one that makes it makes billions of dollars, like Uber.
Facebook, too. Facebook’s headquarters are in Silicon Valley, and my friend and I thought it would be fun to check it out. Facebook affects our lives in significant ways; why not see where they make the profiles of all those donuts? We actually went to the Googleplex, first and rode around campus on Google bikes until someone caught on that we weren’t employees and we thought we’d better jam. Google was cool because we could actually bike around the campus a little, but unless you have a friend or family member to get you a visitor pass, you should probably skip a trip there. You can’t go anywhere you would really want go, like Sergei Brin’s helipad.
Then it was onto Facebook headquarters and I’m here to tell you: never go there. Never go there not just because you can’t get in but because it’s terrifying. The building, first of all, is chillingly nondescript, all smooth walls and smallish windows. Is it a privately funded medical laboratory that tests things (read: brains)? perhaps a Quantico’s satellite building? Maybe it’s where they make the big red buttons folks push when they detonate atomic bomb. Someone has to make those things.
People were milling about outside, snapping pictures and generally clogging the walkway to the door and when they got to the door, they turned around immediately and clogged their way back. Because no one gets into Facebook. No one can enter the vestibule, so no one can enter the lobby — not even for the bathroom, which I know because I asked. I could’ve whipped out the “I Can’t Wait” card I carry from the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation that allows me to use a bathroom pretty much anywhere (i.e., the Gap) if I really need to. It’s great fun to watch a snide salesgirl go from, “Sorry, there are no public bathrooms,” to a panicked, “Oh, sure, yeah, come with me” change of heart.
Anyway, Claus and I saw this “visit” was going nowhere, so we made our way past the security guys to the parking lot. I swear, there was a small fleet of camouflaged golf carts at the side of the building where our car was. Camo. Because Silicon Valley (and the Facebook campus) has a lot of tree lines. Look, I realize Facebook and Google aren’t there to entertain tourists; these are places of business. But the citadel thing left a nasty taste in our mouths.
Surely, there will one day be a Facebook theme park with a Zuckerberg Zipper rollercoaster and an I Like This Castle; when that happens, the tourists can get their Facebook photos at Facebook, something that would be so popular I’m surprised Facebook hasn’t done it, yet. Until then, I’m Mary Fons, reporting: Facebook is watching you, but you can’t look.
Golden Gate Bridge, 2012. Photo: Heather Grimes via Wikipedia.
Our car was broken into in San Francisco. The burglar got Claus’s laptop and his laptop case, which contained important documents and backups of his photographs. The experience was bad and weird but there was an extra, super weird thing that happened right before we discovered the robbery.
We got to Golden Gate Park around two in the afternoon. We parked the car on a street just outside the park along with hundreds of other cars. The street wasn’t teeming with people, but couples and families with strollers were walking to and fro enough to make the parky-streety area as safe as an area could be. We locked all the doors and headed off to the Botanical Garden entrance a quarter-mile away or so.
Just inside the entrance, we walked up to the visitor kiosk and spoke to the friendly young fellow manning it. Golden Gate Park is not free (like all the parks and museums in D.C., take that!) and we were trying to decide if we should do it. We didn’t have a lot of time and it was chilly that day. Was the Japanese Tea Garden blooming? Was the Dutch Windmill up and running? Would it rain?
The young man told us that though it was overcast and chilly, we were in San Francisco, after all. He showed us a map and encouraged us to get tickets. “You’ll enjoy it,” he said, “I promise.” And then he said something else that, if I were writing a fictional story about a car break-in, no one would let me get away with it. They’d call foul on way too obvious foreshadowing.
“Where are you parked?” the young man asked.
“On the street out there,” I said, gesturing to the gate.
“Well,” said the young man, appearing to determine if his next comment was appropriate or not. He leaned in. “You might want to go make sure your car is locked up and stuff. There are a lot of break-ins around here, on the street. You might want to check before you go into the park for awhile. Just a suggestion.”
Claus and I looked at each other. Really? Break-ins on the street frequent enough to warrant a warning from the kiosk guy? In the afternoon? Wow. Okay, we said, we’d go make sure the car was secure and then we’d take our stroll.
When we approached the car, we couldn’t believe our eyes. The passenger side backseat window was empty. Did I not roll the window up? What am I looking at? When you’ve been burgled your first thought is, “There’s something wrong but my brain does not understand what that is. Standby.” In a few rubbery, wobbly seconds, we realized what had happened and I covered my mouth and Claus stood there, gazing through the broken window, blinking and not saying anything. We saw the absence of the computer. (Mine was under the seat and was missed.) And we suddenly had a plan for the day: return the rental car and get another. Commence insurance, rental agency, and police phone calls. Shake respective heads for the next two days.
The only consolation is that Claus’s computer was old and ran all Windows programs in German.
Wait a second — is that a hamburger down right? Still life by Clara Peeters (fl. 1601 – 1621.)
Ever wanted to gain something like 5-6 pounds in a hurry? Sure, we all do! Follow my simple steps below and you’ll be on your way. Be sure to read all the way to the flabby bottom to learn how to lose it, too!!!
Step 1: Sit in a car for 3-7 hours a day for three weeks.
Step 2: Tell yourself that hiking and camping are basically exercise.
Step 3: Eat lots of cashews, dates, small chunks of parmesan cheese (your favorite) and banana leather, telling yourself that none of these foods are processed and are therefore basically calorie-free. Travel with a European so that you get plenty of full-fat yogurt with muesli, even though you never eat, nor spell correctly, muesli. Eat chocolate and tell yourself that because it’s the expensive kind and you’re sharing it with someone, you’re not really eating that much.
Step 4: Consume Pringles because your travel companion has a “thing” for them and though you have not eaten a single Pringle since freshman year in college, this is a crucial step. Do you want to gain 5-6 pounds in three weeks or don’t you?? Motivation, determination. Note while eating Pringles that the slogan on the can, “Once you pop, you can’t stop” is accurate.
Step 5: Feel exceedingly happy. Feeling happy will cloud your awareness that you are on your way to gaining 5-6 pounds in three weeks.
Step 6: Repeat steps 1-6.
Now that you’ve gained 5-6 pounds in three weeks, aren’t you wondering how to lose it?? Sure, we all do! I’m here to tell you the secret to losing 5-6 pounds not in three weeks, not in two weeks, but in one week with almost zero effort! Probably! Maybe not! But this secret step will unlock your potential to lose 5-6 pounds before you know it! Here it is:
Step 1: Stop doing all those things.
Step 2: Resume your normal life, which includes walking to the store and stuff.
Now get going, and remember: your weight is in your hands! And on your hips.
My friend and travel companion is an accomplished philosophy professor. He’s German and has written a lot of books. We traveled 5,000 miles together, all in. We made Kant jokes and I finally learned exactly what the term “hermeneutics” meant (don’t ask me right now.) He learned quilt history, the scoop on my upcoming project — he won’t tell and neither will I, but prepare! — and all about my family, just as I learned all about his. Five-thousand miles is a lot of miles. Dollar Rent-a-Car hates us.
My friend is a good driver and drove every mile himself, as the car was rented in his name. I was the full-time passenger, then, and let me tell you: it’s an art. Here’s what you Kant do:
– talk incessantly
– sing loudly (or at all, unless your companion likes to listen to someone singing in close proximity, which is highly unlikely)
– bite your nails
– clear your throat a lot
– toot (a lot)
– eat ice all the time from your drink
My passenger self did none of those things, except for the last one; I love eating ice and I think my friend was slightly annoyed in Week Three, but it’s a minor offense compared to tooting. But aside from all that, there’s something a passenger on a long road trip has to do: you must entertain yourself. The landscapes out the window will do most of this for you, but if you like to draw, sit quietly and think while you look out the window, or read — if you don’t get carsick — you and your companion(s) will be much happier.
Above is one of the many drawings I made on the road; each is a scene from the journey. I only had a pen and a pencil and I liked the limitation, actually. I haven’t drawn so much since high school. It was one of the gifts of the trip.
Women washing clothes. Somewhere in Eastern Europe, 1962. Photo: Wikipedia
Here’s the thing about washing your clothes in a creek or river: when you’re done, they’re not clean.
Oh, they’ll be cleaner than they were, especially if you’ve been wearing those clothes three days in a row. But they will not be clean in the way most of us are used to. Our laundry, if we’re lucky, is gently, soapily agitated to purity and freshness then puffed into fluff by the warm air of the dryer. The river-wash (and subsequent tree- or rock-dry) is a world away. Indeed, one must be a world away to wash one’s clothes in a river; in a faraway country different from ours or, you know, in the country.
The road trip was three weeks long. I planned to go for two weeks with a possible one-week extension, but when I set out I didn’t figure I’d take the option. I don’t camp. I don’t rough it. I need things.
But then I found myself sitting on a rock on the bank of a real-life babbling brook outside Zion, hand-washing my dress. The sun was shining on the water, my skin, the water. Rub, dunk, swoosh, rub, dunk, swoosh. This was Week Two and it was right then that I decided that I wasn’t going home, that you’d have to drag me by my sleeping bag the whole way. No way, not yet, not leaving this.
Because Zion National Park is paradise. The early Mormons, when they were heading west, stopped the entire journey when they hit Zion because they looked at each other and said, “Yeah, so…it doesn’t get better than this.” They were not wrong. Lush vegetation, the modest-but-mighty Virgin River, the red mountains, the rich soil — it’s almost too much, especially if you’ve just come out of Death Valley, which we very much had.*
Butterflies were flitting around my head, goofing off as butterflies do, and I hung my clothes on the tree branches in the sun, basically creating a scene from an Ang Lee movie. The place and time, the reason, and the task were all in harmony. Harmony, as it turns out, is great.
Standard-issue life began yesterday. Sitting here, now, finally, I am glad to be back. Because washing clothes at the riverbank is good, but it doesn’t mean I didn’t miss you.
*One-hundred eighteen degrees our second day there.
Death Valley stories to come. Prepare to be entertained.
UPDATE!! I’m back but my Facebook isn’t working! Being gone so long, I got logged out and now I can’t get in. PaperGirl is back and I’m posting daily; please bear with me while the Facebook People help me. I think they will.
Could you tell?
Uncle!
Obviously, out here on the open road, I’m finding it pretty tough to a) get to a computer and b) get my head around any of the 1,000 beautiful things (and more than a few creepy/crazy things) that keep happening. I shouldn’t try to make sense of my trip until it’s over. It’s that important.
I’ll see you in a few days. I will probably still have dirt on my feet And in my flip flops. Time stands still, for once.
I was almost going to break my “one image per post” rule, but if you don’t stand for something, you’ll post anything.
When it was certain I would come on this road trip, I had a matter of days to get everything together. I immediately made a mental list of all the thousands of items I would need to go out and get (e.g., leather jacket, campsite hand-wash detergent, a carton of Gauloises, etc.) but I decided to buy nothing that wasn’t absolutely, positively necessary. I’ve been making a lot of purchases recently — a gal’s gotta watch her pocketbook.
But one of the things that seemed absolutely, positively necessary was a robe. I have a robe, but it’s big and fluffy. “Big” and “fluffy” are not words welcome when you’re driving across Death Valley in a Subaru. I was having fun with the “buy nothing” preparation tip I was on, so I decided to make myself a packable, pretty kimono. And so I did.
Quilters have “unfinished objects” (UFOs). UFOs are portions of patchwork that have not yet been turned into a quilt and therefore sit on a table or in a tupperware container, waiting to get their day in the sun. Patchwork is much happier in a quilt, so I keep my UFOs to a minimum; still, I have a modest collection of orphan piecing. So I took blocks and patchwork units from my UFO bag and incorporated them into my kimono — and by the way, cutting into finished patchwork is horrifying and exhilarating and every quilter should try it once. The “pattern” for this thing was just figuring out how to make a back and two front pieces. Then I double-lined it for softness/durability and voila! The patchwork kimono. I made an obi, too.
I cannot express to you how perfect this thing is. I mean, in general, it’s perfect to me because I made it with my hands and my brain. But on this trip in particular it has been astonishingly useful. It’s a picnic blanket. It’s a robe. It’s a towel. It’s a blanket for the car. It’s padding for a seat. It provides shade and wind cover. And it’s a quilt, of course; many women (and men, and children) have traveled this westward route over the centuries with a quilt at their side. So there’s some kinship going on.
If you’d like to see more pictures of my kimono (including several with me actually inside the thing) please visit my Facebook page.
One forgets gentleness in the city. And you don’t realize it because there’s nothing to compare it to. The city’s hustle and flow, the glass windows of banks and cafes, the wait for lights at street level and trains in tunnels; this environment isn’t hostile unless you want it to be but it would be hard to argue for gentleness on Broadway and 4th St., say, or K. Street and Massachusetts Ave.
Now, my new home at the Kennedy Warren overlooks the Klingle Valley (I’ve probably mentioned this too many times but if you saw it you would see why I do) and this affords an exceptional opportunity to be in nature in an urban environment. I chose well, finally, this year.
I’m writing this outside, inside a tall pine forest. Right now, a forest! and I promise not to look at a computer screen for long; I know better than that. But it was lunchtime, so Claus and I drove far, far up a mountain over Lake Tahoe and found a shaded spot in the trees. We ate a lunch of muesli with fruit and yogurt, apples and Nutella* and we were so hungry it was therefore the best meal I’ve ever had, of course.
(Oh, please, please forgive me for being obnoxious, but I have never had the occasion to use the French term en plein air and this is my chance. We ate en plein air!)
We finished and now we’re just sitting here, breathing, noticing how the wind through the trees sounds just like ocean tide. When we close our eyes we are amazed; if you only heard a recording of this sound, you couldn’t possibly tell the difference between wind in trees and oceans.
I wear a Fair Isle sweater over my romper. My feet are up on the crate that contains our dinner tonight. Silence. Green. Blue. Mountains with snow and a big, fat, sapphire glittering thousands of feet below it. Gentleness is a word that works, but “tender” might even do.
I grew up on a farm, seven miles out of a town of 5,000 people.
You could argue that nature is in my blood, that this tender moment should awaken a yen in me to abandon city life and get back to the garden. Nah. I’m a city dweller; I’ve spent more years in tall buildings than in treehouses. This trip is a pause and an important one, just as a country mouse should visit some metropolis from time to time for a pause of a different kind, look up at homes in the sky, down at miles and miles of sidewalk, women in smart shoes clipping along to meet for dinner at the best French place.
This was the right idea. Anxiety about email checking dogs me, but trees are so much bigger, so much stronger than emails.
Go west, young woman. All right: youngish woman. Photo: Wikipedia
I’m going on a road trip. Today. I’m at the airport right now.
Many months ago, my friend Claus planned a 4-week trip through the American west. He would hit Rushmore, he would hit Yellowstone, Tahoe, San Francisco, and many points in between and beyond, ending at the edge of California. He would then turn around and head straight back to Chicago. We talked about me joining him, but I do not desire — nor do I have the ability, schedule-wise — to go west for four weeks. I’m a clean linen, coffee-in-the-lobby gal. I like showers.
But what if I joined the trip for ten days or so? Maybe I could do that. Maybe it would be fun. What if I hooked up with Claus in Salt Lake City and did the San Fran, Death Valley, Tetons, etc. part? Maybe I’d stay on through Berkeley. For the first time in a long, long time, I have two weeks without travel for work. I believe people do summer vacations, don’t they? Interesting concept.
And so, after much deliberation and anxiety (I have different bathroom needs than most people and there is some camping involved over the course of the trip, which puts a great fear in my heart) I decided that yes, I would add a woman’s touch to the “Go west, young man” thing.
I’ll be checking email and blogging, though there may be a few off-the-grid days. Claus thinks I should leave my laptop behind but a strange rash appears all over my body when I think doing about that. I can’t make sense of beauty (example: Ano Nuevo California State Reserve) or pain (example: middle-of-the-night trip to a campground bathroom with a flashlight)* without writing it down. So the journal comes with and the laptop comes with.
Also coming with: Wet Ones wipes, a bandana, a hoodie, books, sunglasses, sunscreen, sneakers (you actually cannot wear heels in Death Valley, I hear), deodorant, and my favorite snacks that will surely be gone by Day 2. I’m really, really excited now. I see a lot of this country with the work I do, but I’ve never been to Yellowstone, I’ve never seen the Grand Tetons, I’ve never camped in California.
Let’s do this. Let’s have an adventure. I board the plane in ten minutes.
*I may possibly have lost my mind.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: I stayed on the trip for three weeks. Posts to follow explain and detail.]
I couldn’t find a good picture of the Porsche; James Dean is as cool. Film still from East of Eden (1954). Photo: Wikipedia
If I have one iota of coolness in me, I learned it at the Motley Cow Cafe in Iowa City.
When I was a junior, the guy I was seeing wanted to get a bartending job at the newly opened and clearly rad cafe, so we went in one day so he could talk to the owner. They didn’t hire him, but they hired me. (Sorry, Wes.) I worked there for the next two years as a waitress and sometime prep cook and I can say with certainty those were two of the best years of my life thus far. I learned about food, about wine; I learned how to dress, honestly. Everyone in the Motley Cow orbit was cool and soaked up the codes.
The cafe was named for a town in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, which tells you half of what you need to know about The Motley Cow. The other half is that the food was incredible and the spot created a community: small restaurants in small towns tend to do that. There were many regulars and it was part of the magic of the place.
One of my regulars was Hans. Hans looked like Ernest Hemingway and was a big deal in town because he started the Intermedia department at the University. He taught there from 1966 until 2000 and has been an influential artist in intermedia and performance art in America for decades. I think there was a sandwich on the menu named after Hans. It was basically a croque-monsieur, if I’m remembering correctly.
One day, Hans asked me if I was interested in working on a project with him. I was floored. I was also intimidated and scared because a) Hans! and b) he wanted to record me screaming. Look, he needed audio of a young woman screaming — this is what intermedia artists do. Who am I to question? And I said I’d do it. He also wanted to take pictures of women in the woods, which I would’ve done except the women needed to be naked. The scream was all I was brave enough to do at the time, but it’s a bummer because the naked-women-in-the-woods project on went on to be a seminal one in for Hans. Just think: a picture of my naked, nubile, twenty-something body could be on the walls of MoMA right now. Dangit!
Hans picked me up from the cafe after my lunch shift one spring day in his vintage Porsche Targa ragtop convertible. I had never ridden in a convertible and the Targa was a decent one to break me in, I guess. I was wearing a long, pretty scarf (I had agonized over my outfit; what do you wear to a famous artist’s house to scream into a microphone? this is a wardrobe choice that would stump the most experienced stylist, I feel.) Hans told me I’d better take off the scarf because the famous dancer Isadora Duncan was decapitated when her scarf got caught in the wheels of a convertible.
“Thanks for letting me know, Hans,” I said. I was very pale.
The house was a farmhouse out in the country, every room filled with camera equipment, photography equipment, lighting, etc. I went. I gaped. I screamed. It was fantastic. And the lesson is that all you have to do is get out of bed in the morning and stuff will happen to you. If you show up, you will encounter adventures. If you say yes, you can go on them.
The Motley Cow Cafe is still serving beautiful food on Linn Street and if you’re in Iowa City, do yourself a favor and eat there.
I just can’t do it. Apparently, Google ad revenue for a site with decent traffic is sizable. But it’ll never happen because PaperGirl is an online oasis for me. Over the past (many) years, I’ve tried to make it an oasis for you, too. There are no ads here, no pop-ups, no videos, not even any outside links. (You may have noticed that I only link internally, mimicking the endless loop inside my head.) All this makes PaperGirl a quieter place to be online, even for a few minutes.
Stopping by PaperGirl means escape into a clearing, a meadow! You will be free, if only for a moment, from ninety-three links within a single paragraph, luring you away from what you’re reading; you will never endure the spookiness that comes from seeing an ad in the margin for the 6-pack of socks you left in your Amazon shopping cart fifteen minutes ago. I’m not letting the bots into our blog, comrades. No. Way.
So.
Everyone wants your money. I know; they want mine, too. But here goes nothing: if you enjoy PaperGirl, would you consider clicking the “Donate” button and throwing a few bucks in the hat?
You will never, ever see ads on this blog. There might be advertisements in other places/pages in my online life, but not here. PaperGirl is sovereign. I need it to be. Maybe you need it to be, too.
Women in bird costumes at Mardi Gras, 2008. Photo: Wikipedia
A bird pooped on my head yesterday.
Hang on.
A bird, high in a tree over the Klingle Bridge, pooped. I was crossing the Klingle Bridge and happened to be directly — and I do mean directly — under this pooping bird, so I got poop on my head. “A bird pooped on my head” makes it sound like the bird pooped on me on purpose and I don’t think birds choose where they poop.
Or do they.
I was walking back home from a quick trip to the grocery store. Time: nine o’clock. Weather: pleasant. General mood: excellent. On the way to the store, for some reason I recalled the night I found a $100 dollar bill on Clark Street. It was the night before my 31st birthday. I was riding my bike and there it was, right in the bike lane in Wrigleyville. This is relevant because it shows that last night I was already thinking about odds.
I’m just at the start of the bridge when: ploop!
I gasped. No. No, no, no. That was not a bird, I thought to myself. I did not just get pooped on by a bird, I thought. No. Oh dear Lord … It was an acorn. An acorn?? No, it was water. I don’t know why it would be water and be … heavy, but it was not bird poop. This is what I thought to myself, what I tried to think.
Slowly, I raised my hand to my head. Wet. I brought my fingers down, looked, and yes, ’twas poop. Have you ever recoiled from your own head? It’s pretty weird.
I was about two blocks from home and there were a lot of people out walking; I immediately quickened my pace to escape their eyes. I was sure — sure — someone would see that my number was up, that I had been pooped on. The shame! Though even in my pain and disgust, I found it amusing that I was literally holding my head up high. When in disgrace, it’s good to keep your chin up, your head high, right? Yes, but last night I held my head high so that maybe no one would see that poop on it.
“It’s a good thing you’re so tall, Mary,” my friend Marlene said on the phone today. “Unless someone was way taller than you, there’s no way anyone saw it.”
The odds that someone taller than me would have passed me on the bridge last night are pretty good. Better than finding $100 bucks, better than getting pooped on by a bird. But no tall man came. This is why we roll the dice.
Up on Washington Island we have a copy of a book edited by Shawn Usher called Letters of Note. Both Mom and I had an interest in the book; she bought it and I read it all during the week of the wedding. It’s a compendium of “letters deserving of a wider audience.”
There are scanned-in images of actual letters from actual people, e.g., Elvis to Nixon (he wanted to come over in the middle of the night), Aldous Huxley’s wife to her daughter (she administered LSD to Aldous, at his request, as he lay dying), Michaelangelo’s shopping list from 1518 (this is in Vol. II, actually, which I cannot wait to get.) There was one letter in the book that I cannot, cannot get out of my head. I found it online and I read it over and over again. If I get in big trouble for including it here, it’ll be worth it and of course I’ll delete this post.
Writer Rebecca West was in love with H.G. Wells. They eventually got back together and had a kid, but earlier in their relationship, Wells dumped her. She wrote this letter to him in 1913 and it is the most heartbreaking, beautiful piece of writing, I can hardly stand it. Take the time to read it. You will probably never forget it, especially if you’ve been in love and dumped. Most of us have been.
Dear H. G.,
During the next few days I shall either put a bullet through my head or commit something more shattering to myself than death. At any rate I shall be quite a different person. I refuse to be cheated out of my deathbed scene.
I don’t understand why you wanted me three months ago and don’t want me now. I wish I knew why that were so. It’s something I can’t understand, something I despise. And the worst of it is that if I despise you I rage because you stand between me and peace. Of course you’re quite right. I haven’t anything to give you. You have only a passion for excitement and for comfort. You don’t want any more excitement and I do not give people comfort. I never nurse them except when they’re very ill. I carry this to excess. On reflection I can imagine that the occasion on which my mother found me most helpful to live with was when I helped her out of a burning house.
I always knew that you would hurt me to death some day, but I hoped to choose the time and place. You’ve always been unconsciously hostile to me and I have tried to conciliate you by hacking away at my love for you, cutting it down to the little thing that was the most you wanted. I am always at a loss when I meet hostility, because I can love and I can do practically nothing else. I was the wrong sort of person for you to have to do with. You want a world of people falling over each other like puppies, people to quarrel and play with, people who rage and ache instead of people who burn. You can’t conceive a person resenting the humiliation of an emotional failure so much that they twice tried to kill themselves: that seems silly to you. I can’t conceive of a person who runs about lighting bonfires and yet nourishes a dislike of flame: that seems silly to me.
You’ve literally ruined me. I’m burned down to my foundations. I may build myself again or I may not. You say obsessions are curable. They are. But people like me swing themselves from one passion to another, and if they miss smash down somewhere where there aren’t any passions at all but only bare boards and sawdust. You have done for me utterly. You know it. That’s why you are trying to persuade yourself that I am a coarse, sprawling, boneless creature, and so it doesn’t matter. When you said, “You’ve been talking unwisely, Rebecca,” you said it with a certain brightness: you felt that you had really caught me at it. I don’t think you’re right about this. But I know you will derive immense satisfaction from thinking of me as an unbalanced young female who flopped about in your drawing-room in an unnecessary heart-attack.
That is a subtle flattery. But I hate you when you try to cheapen the things I did honestly and cleanly. You did it once before when you wrote to me of “your—much more precious than you imagine it to be—self.” That suggests that I projected a weekend at the Brighton Metropole with Horatio Bottomley. Whereas I had written to say that I loved you. You did it again on Friday when you said that what I wanted was some decent fun and that my mind had been, not exactly corrupted, but excited, by people who talked in an ugly way about things that are really beautiful. That was a vile thing to say. You once found my willingness to love you a beautiful and courageous thing. I still think it was. Your spinsterishness makes you feel that a woman desperately and hopelessly in love with a man is an indecent spectacle and a reversal of the natural order of things. But you should have been too fine to feel like that.
I would give my whole life to feel your arms round me again.
I wish you had loved me. I wish you liked me.
Yours,
Rebecca
P.S. Don’t leave me utterly alone. If I live write to me now and then. You like me enough for that. At least I pretend to myself you do.
This picture has nothing to do with this post. I just love it so much I had to select it. Iberian Airlines stewardess and pilots Sexy, classy, and bygone. Photo: Wikipedia.
My older sister once said to me, “Mar, you’re getting a little…eccentric.”
I took offense, naturally. But then I looked up the word (always a good idea) and yeah, I totally am eccentric. I like it. “Eccentric” means “away from center” and that’s me. I’m not a joiner. I’m super weird: too familiar with strangers, too bold when I ought to chill, etc. But my eccentricity leads to memorable encounters because I’m weird enough to engage them, even pursue them.
To wit:
In a taxi the other day, I needed to go east and my driver turned west. “No, no,” I said, “You’re going the wrong way; I need to go east.” The driver was like, “No, this is the way.” And I was like, “No, dude. East. You’re going west.” He insisted he was right and I insisted that I was right. We actually started shouting at each other. Shouting! I was like, “Look, man, I lived over there! I’m telling you! H Street! East!” and he hollered back at me until he realized he was absolutely going in the wrong direction.
“Ha!” I shouted. “See? You see? Ooh, I am so mad at you right now! I told you, east, man!”
Then he backpedaled like crazy, saying, “Oh, I thought you meant,” yada-yada. Then we hollered at each other about that, too. Then, in the middle of shouting at each other I started laughing. It was so funny, yelling at each other like that. “We’re like family right now,” I said. “Like brother and sister at holiday time.”
The driver looked at me like, “Okay, this is a change.”
Then he laughed with me and was like, “You are right. We are family right now, brother and sister arguing.” It was a great cab ride. When I got to my destination, I smiled and patted him on the shoulder and said, “Bye, bye, my brother. I’m telling Mom I was right.”
He hooted. “God be with you, Miss,” and we were both in a great mood.
Then, the other day there were movers working from a big truck outside my building. As I turned the corner to head toward the grocery store, I heard one of the guys sing the first line of “Ain’t No Sunshine.”
“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.”
And I was right there, right then, so I sang back — on pitch, I might add — “It’s not warm when she’s away…” *
I might as well have flashed them. They were like, “Whaaaat?!”
I smiled big, gave them a little wave and kept walking. And … Well, I might’ve given ’em a little wiggle.
The singing guy called after me, “Girl, you know the rest of the lyrics?”
“Of course!” I called back, but I kept walking. That was all really weird, right? I think so, but I can’t tell anymore.
*This encounter spurred a Bill Withers binge for the next two days. Glorious.
Some time ago I found an image of a children’s book from the 1930’s that began, “A is for Anchor, B is for Boat.” It was so cool the way it went through the whole alphabet, telling a story in rhyme about a child’s ocean voyage. It was a deceptively simple structure; when I messed around with it a little I found it challenging to find an appropriate word to come out to the right number of syllables and rhyme with the next line and keep it all relating to one theme.
So I really wanted to seriously try my hand at something like it but had to put the project aside for awhile. I’ve also been wanting to write on the subject of money. Now that I have a chair to sit in, I picked it up again in my morning writing time. It’s been so fun and as tough as I thought it would be. But I’m finally happy with it after a week of work and I think you’ll like it, too. Read it out loud to a friend — it’s great fun.
A few quick notes:
1. “Regan” is pronounced “REE-gan,” referring to rich King Lear’s daughter.
2. For the letter “P,” you need to use your prurient imagination. I’ve censored the word here but the truth is, the word I chose is the perfect word for that letter and it has to stand. I apologize if you’re scandalized, but in a poem, every word is important.
3. For those uninitiated, “yayo” is cocaine.
Now you really wanna read it, right?? Have fun. I sure did.
