In 1952, experimental composer John Cage composed this three-movement piece called 4’33”. Written for any instrument or combination of instruments, the score instructs the performer(s) not to play their instrument(s). At all. It’s just silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Nice.
My voice has skipped town. Three days, now. No word from her. Very concerned.
In her stead, this bizarre, rather spooky sound is coming from my throat and it alternates between a barely audible squeak and an alarming baritone. The baritone only happens when I decide I absolutely must be heard and the only way that will happen is if I drop my voice down to my chest, furrow my brow a bit, and push sound out with a full-on bark. I was in the airport yesterday and did this while on a phone meeting and I visibly frightened three grown men who were reading newspapers at Gate A9. They all jumped a foot and looked at me like, “What in God’s name is wrong with that woman?!”
It’s a cold, brother.
Which I don’t get very often! I’ve been smote by far worse maladies in life and thus I like to think I’ve been given a pass on the other stuff, the little stuff, like colds and the flu. But that’s silly, and the proof is in the mucus. The real problem is that I am in Oklahoma today and a whole lot of people are coming to hear me speak. I know, right? THE IRONY. I’m speaking alongside my mom on this trip and she can help translate any interpretive dances I need to do to communicate with the people, but seriously: I need to be able to talk. Really need that talking thing. So I sent a high-priority email to my friend Kristina The Actress. She’s been onstage her whole life and she’s done Broadway and all that, so she knows a thing or two about losing one’s, er, moneymaker.
“Kristina,” I feverishly typed. “I’m [REDACTED]. My voice. Gone. Totally. Lecture tomorrow. HELP ME.”
This morning, my voice is a 1,000 better and it has 90% to do with her sage wisdom. (The other 10% of improvement can be attributed to time and rest.) So mark the following practical advice in your mind, fair reader, and when you lose your voice at a bad time — isn’t it always? — you can say, “Well, a Broadway actress told me once…”
“Sweets: able to help…speaking to missing voice (which I totally thought was a metaphor at first): If there is mucus, Broadway agrees you must take Mucinex. Then chew/suck raw ginger and also put it in your tea. Then there’s a brand of cough drops called “Fisherman’s Friend.” Sucrets for pain. And then some doctor comes and injects steroids in your throat…I love you.”
See what I mean? That’s a serious assault from all corners and it worked for me, folks. I didn’t have the steroids in my throat (ew) but it’s good to know about the big guns. Thank you, Kristina. You are beautiful in many ways and lots of people love you, but now large crowds of quilters in Oklahoma will love you and when you woke up yesterday morning I bet you didn’t see that comin’.
Yesterday was delightful. Our sunlit space was a workshop slam dunk. You students were friendly and talented. Lunch was excellent, dinner was excellenter, and though my voice left me, the language of quilts carried the day.
As promised, a few images from the lecture. Many thanks again for a lovely day with every last one of you. Quilters are the best sort of people.
Sincerely,
Mary “Whispering Mouse” Fons
My mother in 1980 with a newly born me. She won a blue ribbon for that quilt, there and she’s wearing a hand-sewn patchwork apron. How is that I am wrapped in a non-quilted blanket?! Seriously! Mom! Come on!Look again at the first picture. See that button I have pinned on my lame blanket? Here’s a closeup shot. I didn’t have a chance. I was doomed. Doomed!On the set of Quilty. It’s a very good show. Watch it at HeyQuilty.com.The first issue ever of Quilty magazine. You can’t get it now! It’s sold out! Is that good??Me and Mom, at the tip table on LoQ. Don’t we look sweet?
p.s. Don’t forget: compassion for the beginner quilter always!
The question, “Who am I?” is laughably vague. Are you supposed to answer that in specifics? Example: “I am male. I am 60-years-old. I am 6’2.” Or is it meant to be answered abstractly, even dramatically? Example: “I’m searching. I’m broke. I’m only flesh and bone.” Sometimes that question is just plain cruel, given to high-school freshmen to determine too early a career path.
If I were asked to take a stab at it, though, I know what my first answer would be. I’ve known it for a long time.
I’m an American.
Being an American is the characteristic that comes first in my “Who I am” book. My family does not identify strongly with ancestry. I’m a little Norwegian (Dad’s side) and a little Scottish (Mom.) I’m a Fons for sure (it’s the nose.) So I feel American before I feel much else. It’s in my core. It is my core. The spirit of my country pulses in my veins. I work hard to make sure I’m good enough for this blood.
How do I try? I work hard. Even when I’m afraid, I try to be brave. I am a total idiot, but I try to learn from the head-over-heels tumbles I take and when I crash into someone else in the process, it feels right to help them back up and fix it, and I try to do that. American is a wild horse and I feel like a wild horse: out of control, ambitious, messy, able to use my powers for good if I focus. And I like to have fun.
All the sailors, all the flowers. All the wagon trains, the butter churns. All the novels, the rivers of money, the mistakes, the disgraces, the candy stripers clicking heels down the hallways. The mud spatters on the boots. The unregulated masses, all the glittering city blocks. Kansas. Every outdoor concert venue, every blackberry bush, all the kids in the high rises. The medication. The journalists, the crates of fish, the lawns. All the pig troughs, the seashells, the test tubes and the sewing machines. The elderly. The algae. The ox.
America, I love it all. And people just like me and you and my neighbor in the next unit over died for it all and are dying for it all right now. They do it so we can glimpse the fawn and buy the car and smile at the baby in the ICU; so we can listen to Madonna records and open a bakery. Start a bridge club. Film a movie. Get a job. Keep it. Get a raise.
Thank you. I will probably not sacrifice my life for my country, but I promise to live for it.
I wrote a poem yesterday morning and I’d like to share how that happened. The generation of “Trashy Is The Lime” is proof that as a writer, I must read writers who are better than I am every day. (The good news is that there are many, many writers better than I am, so I shall never be done reading. A good problem to have.)
It’s like wrestling. You wanna be a better wrestler, you gotta wrestle bigger dogs. You gotta hustle your way into the next weight class and get mopped up by Brutus a few times until you get strong enough to give him hell. You might not win, but look at your triceps! Writing is the same. Read the classics, read the best of the best. Your brain has to run pell mell to catch up and you will trip, son, but in the running you get faster and in the running you are running, which is far better than sitting.
Yesterday morning I closed the latest big dog (Dr. Faustus, for class) and took from my coffee table one of my favorite books ever: the latest (18th) edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. I flipped to a random page and discovered a stunning entry about my favorite place on earth, Chicago, USA. Check it:
“Gigantic, willful, young.
Chicago sitteth at the northwest gates.”
The quote was ascribed to writer William Vaughn Moody from a poem he wrote in 1901 called “An Ode In Time of Hesitation.” I snatched my iPad off the couch and tippity-tapped my way into the life of Mr. Moody (no relation to Dwight L. Moody, the famous Chicago preacher, FYI.) Moody’s poem is crazy good, inspired by the statue of a black soldier who served at the head of the first enlisted negro regiment in Massachusetts in 1863. It’s long, it’s intricate, and that line on Chicago is dope. As I read the full piece, I tried to figure out the rhyme scheme; before long, I had to get out paper and pencil to suss it out. It’s wild:
A-B-A-A-C-D-D-B-E-C-C-B-E **
“That’s bananas!” I cried, to no one at all because I was sitting in my living room alone. Saying “bananas” made me think of my collection of fruit poems. It’s an ongoing project; I’ve shared The Cantaloupe Poem here and the first half of The Preposterously True Tale of Pru Huntington’s Pineapple. Well, Mr. Moody’s crazy rhyme scheme was too tempting to ignore, so I set about writing a new fruit poem in the style of “Ode to Hesitation.” First, we must take a look at Moody’s opening verse, so you can see how the man did it.
I.
Before the solemn bronze Saint Gaudens made
To thrill the heedless passer’s heart with awe,
And set here in the city’s talk and trade
To the good memory of Robert Shaw,
This bright March morn I stand,
And hear the distant spring come up the land;
Knowing that what I hear is not unheard
Of this boy soldier and his negro band,
For all their gaze is fixed so stern ahead,
For all the fatal rhythm of their tread.
The land they died to save from death and shame
Trembles and waits, hearing the spring’s great name,
And by her pangs these resolute ghosts are stirred.
Awesome, right? Yeah. So, rather than do the 9,000 other things that I desperately need to do, I wrote a fruit poem. The poem is entitled “Trashy Is The Lime” and it’s about how limes are kinda gross, definitely ubiquitous, and, yes, trashy. It’s a rude thing to go from Moody’s gorgeous verse about the noble soldier to my attack on defenseless limes, but this is what I consider fun. This is my entertainment, what I do in my time off. And I would like to thank W.V. Moody, Bartlett’s, the Academy, and the editor of Love of Quilting, who is about to kill me because I’m late on an assignment. This is partly why. Enjoy!
Trashy Is The Lime by Mary Fons
Limes! limes! It must always be. The drinks we pour
Are sticky, and our garnishes are green
And sour, and this is what they’re for:
Lick, drink, suck; the lime be the cocktail’s whore.
The manner-est born in the family dwell
In Florida, armpit of our nation;
“Key” limes prized from this location,
But the compliment is mean.
Acrid, useless without supporting cast,
A wince on the tongue, a straight-up hard sell —
The lime behind the bar at the Hilton hotel,
Crushed with the coconut and everywhere seen,
Like roaches, limes shall humans outlast.
** If anyone knows what this poetical form is called, please, please tell me. I do not have a degree in English and I’ll be 70 before I will have the time/talent to get into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop MFA program in poetry where you might actually learn stuff like this.
I do these from time to time with Quilty, but this is a straight-up Mary Fons giveaway. Look, I really appreciate all the emails, the comments, the Facebook love. I’m very close to 5,000 likes, and while I know that age and Facebook likes ain’t nuthin’ but a number, it still feels good to be 33 and way more popular than I was in high school.
I also have a lot of books. A lot of books. I’d like to give you one. Share the link to my blog on Facebook. Comment here on the blog. I don’t know how to do these things. I’d like to tell you that it’s very scientific and I do have a system that I intend to follow to pick a winner, at random. But basically, let’s just have a little blitzkrieg love fest and somewhere in the mix, someone will get a book.
I’ll write you a hand-written letter, too. A nice note on some nice Mary Fons letterhead. I’ll give you advice to a problem you might have. [NOTE: No purchase necessary and no problem necessary. If you don’t want advice on a life problem, don’t worry about it — you don’t have to have problems to win.*] So comment away, and share away, and perhaps you’ll get a book! Look, someone will win. It might as well be you. Let’s jack up those Facebook likes. Let’s get a few more readers on the ol’ P-Girl. And then at least one other person on the planet can talk to be about Lee Miller’s War. Or Encyclopedia of the Exquisite. Or Babbitt. Or Binky’s Guide to Love.
Two words: Treasure. Trove.
Good luck. Spread the word. This blog is real life!
*”you don’t have to have problems to win” = suddenly in the running to be the copy on my headstone
There are fires to put out and people to give things to. There are tasks need done and a clock that’s ticking in the halls of my brain. There’s a hard stop for it all on Wednesday morning, when I leave for Oklahoma for a several day-long lecture series — but that’s a hard stop no harder than a day all-too-soon when we sign off on the latest issue of the magazine.
My kingdom for a kingdom. Then I’d have help.
And all of this while the sawing and the buzzing and tour de force takes place in my home and the men shout, “‘Ey, Ryan! Bring me that pipe?” from the other side of the house and I can’t write. So I leave and find the best place to be homeless today. The coffee shop on Tuesday was good, but a weirdo was staring at me so I couldn’t edit. The common room in my building yesterday was okay, but there was a chill and I felt sad.
Today, I’m here at the Hilton. It’s just around the corner from the cavity they’re drilling in my bathroom. There’s fresh coffee to scam off the buffet and there’s a convention going on with free wi-fi to be had. And I found this hall-slash-ballroom upstairs from the lobby where the sun is streaming in and the chandeliers have been dusted recently. It’s vast and paneled and there’s not a soul in sight.
When you work from home and you can’t be home, you can work in a ballroom. And that makes all the difference.
I locked myself in the bathroom Monday night and against all odds, with nothing but human ingenuity and good old fashioned fear, I escaped.
The bathroom I was in is the one that today is absolute rubble and exposed pipe and tufts of insulation. Before it was rubble, though, it had to be a bathroom without any stuff in it. This is an important detail.
“Get everything outta there,” my contractor said on the phone, “’cause on Tuesday the whole thing’s going into a dumpster.” My eyes got real big and I began at once to move my belongings into my back bathroom with visions of Danny and his crew tossing my perfume samples and sea sponges into a bin with the old tile. By the end of the day, the bathroom was denuded, empty of mouthwash bottles, bobby pins, half-rolled up tubes of Ben Gay (when did I buy Ben-Gay?) and contact lens juice. I did leave a roll of toilet paper in there, however. Until they removed the toilet, the bathroom was still functional in that regard and I might as well use that part of it, right?
No. Dumb.
On Monday night I went into that bathroom to pee. (Well, it’s true!) I shut the door behind me, heard a tiny click, and A Great Dread passed over me. There was no doorknob on that door. What there was was the inner apparatus where there is typically an attendant doorknob. This meant that the door’s internal tumbler latch thingy was latched but there was no knob to turn the works. I stuck my finger in the metal and wiggled it. Okay, wow. I was locked in my bathroom. An empty, tool-less bathroom. Had I not taken every last item out of the space earlier in the day, I wouldn’t have been terribly worried. A toothbrush would jimmy the latch all right; one of those bobby pins would’ve worked great. But I had nothing. And I would need something to work in that door latch. Immediately.
I spun around. Ah-ha! The shower curtain! I hadn’t taken it down! I seized the curtain and pulled off one of the hooks. Yes, a piece of skinny metal! But it was useless; the curve of it was too thick and tight and it wouldn’t fit where I needed it to go. I tossed it to the floor. What else, what else? Ah! There, by the sink, an empty matchbook! I grabbed it and tore it into a hard little cardboard stick and jimmied at the latch. The stick bent. It bent into a wad and the door laughed. I was getting concerned. My ultimate “I will do anything to get out of here” plan was to body slam myself against the door again and again and again until I broke it open, but getting a running start from the tub was not going to be easy. It would be more of a flying leap from the edge of it and I foresaw a chipped tooth and a concussion, but I ask you: What price, freedom?
Just as I was about to start my flying leaps, I saw it: the doorstop. One of those spring metal ones. I wrenched it off the door and uncoiled it, bending it back on itself, fashioning a dandy and rather dangerous-looking tool. I worked it in the latch. Worked it some more. Turned. Jiggled. And then…
Ah.
There was no fanfare. No picture in the paper celebrating my derring-do. I had but the personal satisfaction of a job stupidly done (locking myself in my empty bathroom) followed by a job well done (getting out.) Incidentally, I had an appointment with my shrink yesterday and when I got there, he had locked himself out of his office — the key had broken in the lock. The session would likely not happen, he said, which was fine with me. Sometimes I don’t feel like digging through the dirt. The weather was so rainy and cozy, I just wanted to drink cocoa and read a book.
“I’m so sorry, Mary. I’ll call you to reschedule,” said Dr. Herman. “Twenty years of practice, this has never happened to me before.”
“You’ll figure it out,” I said, opened my umbrella, and walked out into the rain.
“Master bathroom” sounds awfully fancy, like there’s room for a helicopter pad in there. I assure you there is only room for a sink, a shower, and a loo. And a towel rack. But it’s my sink, shower, loo, and towel rack and dammit, I deserve to enjoy them all while standing on tile that isn’t cracked. When I got my condo, both bathrooms were clearly quick fix, Home-Depot’s-havin-a-sale, let’s-move-this-unit jobbies, and a few months back I decided it was high time I do something about it. The cabinet under the sink is (was) this icky laminate and over time, the sprays, soaps, and powders from my morning toilette took their toll. ‘Twas getting a bit sticky, you see, and no amount of 409 could help it.
The bathroom is’a gonna be’a sweet. The sink is getting downsized. The shower is getting upsized. The tile will be custom; small white squares with an inlaid black Greek key thingy that will run from the floor into the shower and back. And I’m wallpapering, which might sound cray, but it can be done with the proper treatment. The zebras up there? That’s my wallpaper. It’s made by a company called Scalamandre and that’s half the reason I like it. I say it all the time with lusty flair when I walk past the sample tacked to the wall: “ScalaMANDRE!” and I gesture like an Italian.*
The work has begun and boy is it weird have three big, sweaty dudes in my house. I notice it most at lunchtime when they bring out their sandwiches and cans of pop. They all sit down on buckets in the cordoned off portion of the main room and they’re just in there, munching and talking about the game, the girl, or the government. I work at home, but we’ll see if that will remain to be true. I may have to do a coffee shop tour of Chicago for awhile; when they start cutting tile, I might start biting my nails. Which certainly won’t do. I have to save those. I have to save them because as soon as they finish the bathroom?
DUDE!!!! This photograph was taken by one Mauricio Mejia. My compliments to you, sir.
My friend Yuri had a birthday this weekend. I told him I’d take him out. Sometimes, you need to do something nice for someone and really take it to the moon. Everything was a surprise, and we started at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for a concert.
I now present Ten Reasons To Visit The Chicago Symphony Orchestra for a concert the next time you’re in town. If you already live within a 25 mile radius of the CSO and have never been or haven’t been in a long time, for heaven’s sake, what is wrong with you?? Pardon me, but down that sandwich, finish reading this, and then click over. You will thank me — not that that’s why I’m doing this.
Let’s do this!
1. Tuxedos. Not on you, necessarily. But on the dudes. Hot.
2. Concessions for sale before the show and during intermission include sparkling wine, good chocolate, and cheese doodles.
3. There’s a big floating thing above the symphony stage that looks like a UFO made of lace, light, air, and wire. It’s my favorite thing in the whole theater. Research reveals that it’s referred to as “the artwork” and its job is to bounce and distribute sound from the stage out to the audience. Fact: the crispy white wires and pale green glass “artwork” weight seven tons. Seven tons!
4. My friend Charlie plays the trombone! Hi, Charlie! You killed it the other night! Way to go, buddy! I waved to you and got in trouble!
5. Hey, man. Take a nap.
6. It’s freaking hilarious to listen to all the coughing in between the movements. People wait…wait…wait to hack up a lung until the sonata is done or whatever and then its just “COUGH! COUGH! HACK! HACK! BRAAHHH! HORK! HORKHORKHORK!” and then the music starts again and everyone falls silent. Very entertaining.
7. There’s always someone who is clearly either a musician or wannabe musician who wants everyone to know they know the music backward and forward, so they make these funny faces and roll their eyes back in their head and wiggle their finger in time and shake their head like they’re in exquisite pain at moments in the score. You can make them feel good by giving them a nod and a smile when they catch your eye. They will try because they want to feel like an expert. It’s okay, we all do that kind of thing in some way.
8. Fancy.
9. You can go to a crappy bar afterward and balance out. It’s a big world. You can do the symphony and a crappy bar in one night. That’s not just something people do only in the movies.
10. Your symphony is the same symphony everyone else gets, if you want it. Cheap balcony seats? Same symphony as the season ticket holders. Half those people are asleep anyway or thinking about their condo in Sarasota. You go get your experience and you put it in your heart and keep it, you hear me?
Blame it on Halloween last week: I got “boo” on the brain. Not the go-to ghost word “Boo!” but the slang term for a quasi-girlfriend/boyfriend, as in “I love my boo” or “It’s just me and my boo.“ I think boo is the best thing to happen to the English language since chortle.**
Doing research on the Internet is great and all, but from time to time it reveals its limitations. To truly get to the bottom of the etymology of boo, I would need to speak to a linguistics professor or a cultural anthropologist — the web didn’t help much. I found the following possibilities for the existence of boo:
– it’s from the French beau (pronounced “bo”) meaning “boyfriend or male admirer,” which found its way into Afro-Caribbean language through French colonization
– it’s a Southern-bred, derivative term of endearment, lineage going something like this:
poppet –> poopsie –> boopsie –> boo
– it’s just short for “booty”
Who can say? Well, Yahoo question boards can try (boy do they) but I’m not sure about any of these answers and that last one is straight up dubious. I feel confident that boo is a word born in black culture, though. The first time I ever heard it used was in that song “Dilemma,” by Nelly and former Destiny’s Child singer Kelly Rowland. The chorus went: No matter what I do/All I think about is you/Even when I’m with my boo/You know I’m crazy over you. Tsk-tsk, children. But until I meet a cultural anthropologist at a cocktail party whose studies include American Ebonics, it could be a long time before I know the true origins. I can still love the word, though, and I sure do.
I love boo because it names a real thing and it’s phonetically perfect for what that thing is. Let’s say, hypothetically, that I have a boo. You and I are having lunch and you ask me what I did over the weekend. I say, “It was me and my boo, just hanging out.” You could infer that my boo was male, because I am straight. You would know that this fellow is involved with me romantically, but you also know I don’t have a boyfriend. So is this person just a random, um, date? (We’re speaking hypothetically, remember.) No, boo implies a tenderness and a familiarity that elevates the subject into something more special than a frivolous fling. I mean, I wanted to hang out with him all weekend, so he must be worth hanging out with.
So I like the word because there do exist these kinds of relationships in the world: something not official, but not pointless. Something important, but not call-your-mother about it. My boo, my boo, my boo.
And then there’s the darlingness of it, the baby-like sound that the word is. It’s close to “goo,” as in “goo-goo, ga-ga” and close to “baby” and it’s also slang, which means you feel pretty street when you say it. I don’t know many people who wouldn’t respond positively if their partner, spouse, lover, etc., affectionately put their arm around them, pulled them close, and said, “Hey, boo.”
Try it. Don’t try it on someone you don’t have genuinely tender, romantic feelings toward, though, because it would be way too familiar. Kinda like calling your 60-year-old Spanish teacher in high school “senorita,” it just makes everyone a little antsy. And to all the boos who had good weekends together, hats off to you.
(But put your pants back on.)
** The word “chortle” did not exist in the English language before Lewis Carroll wrote Jabberwocky in 1871. A hybrid of “chuckle” and “snort,” it is but one of almost two dozen entirely new words introduced in that legendary poem. Now that’s a writer who can write. Check it out.
Lots of adult people “have” sock monkeys, but their monkeys are mostly in tupperware bins with the rest of the stuffed animals and toys they chose to kept from childhood. Those monkeys are not in rotation. Mine is.
My monkey’s name is Pendennis. It’s true that Pendennis is a novel written in the mid-19th century by William Makepeace Thackeray, but that book has no bearing whatsoever on why my monkey’s name is Pendennis. I haven’t the faintest idea why I named the lil’ sh-t Pendennis but when I received him as a gift in high school (?) that’s just what I did.
I take pictures of Pendennis all the time. All the time! Almost every day. He is a veritable font of joy and he does nothing but lie there — he’s incredible. His goofy little body is so funny and is weighted just so with stuffing that whether he’s been tossed to the ground when I’m making the bed, or maybe he’s tangled up in the covers, or he’s been whipped into a chair for some reason, his gesture is priceless. Every time. And it’s crucial to understand that I do not pose him. The pictures I take of him are never styled. I just choose my angle and shoot. Look:
Pendennis is pinned.Pendennis, unable to take it anymore.Pendennis, fallen from a great height.Pendennis in, “SHAME, The Rock Opera.”
I’ve registered a domain name: PendennisObserver.com. One day, when I’m not so busy, I want to put a simple site up and post at least one picture each week of my monkey. Surely someone else in the world thinks he’s as funny as I do. The website would have a tag line, too, something like: “Never posed, never duplicated. The Pendennis Observer. Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur.”
That Latin part? Translation: “That man is wise who talks little.”
Until tonight, I had not seen a scary movie in fourteen years. Fact!
The last one I saw was The Blair Witch Project in 1999. I waswith my friend Sarah in this huge, crumbling old theater in Minneapolis in the middle of the summer. Halfway through the movie the air conditioning broke, which meant you had a packed auditorium of terrified, sweaty people watching a movie that takes place in the freezing cold. It was surreal. It was also scary, because that movie is hella scary — or it was, before the whole controversy about the movie being [REDACTED] went viral, which in case you didn’t know, children, was before anyone really called that “going viral.” Back then, it was just memes and land lines for most of us. Word still got around.
But see, I don’t like scary movies. Life is horrifying enough on its own. It’s incredible to me that perfectly sane, healthy people pay money to see scenes of fake murder and mayhem. However, my younger sister loves scary movies and she’s got a good reason for everything she does, so when she asked me if I wanted to go to a showing of the original Halloween tonight, I said no but then I said yes. She almost fell over.
“Scary movies are so goooood!” she texted me. “Not gross ones like Hostel or Saw, but like, truly classic scary movies are the best and this one is tops.”
Not knowing the ins and outs of the genre and with only a perspire-y viewing of Blair Witch* under my belt, you don’t have to take my word for it, but man Halloween is good. The movie came out in freaking 1978 which makes it older than me: there’s a reason we’re still able to watch it on the big screen once a year. The only person on earth affected by a Halloween spoiler would have been me until last night, so I’ll go ahead and say it: the fact the first death doesn’t happen until there’s a half-hour left in the film is crazy awesome! It’s good filmmaking.
After the movie, I walked home in the rain. I looked behind me a couple times, but mostly I just felt glad to be alive.
I dated a vaudevillian magician. Talk about confessions!
This was an astonishing eight years ago, before I got sick, before I got married and divorced, before all of that.
The Magician and I met at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, a legendary jazz club here in Chicago. If you are good at jazz, you work a long, long time to get to play at the Mill — all the known greats have done so, all the future greats will. But every Sunday night for the past twenty-five years, the Uptown Poetry Slam takes over the club and it’s “See ya later, jazz, hello, poetry.”
The show’s format includes a half-hour set from a feature performer. The night I met The Magician, he was that act. Usually it’s a poet in the slot, or on rare occasions it’s a music group, but because The Magician was/is a bit of a lyricist and, as he would tell you, a sesquipedalian, (lover of big words) he fit right in and his act was quite popular with the slam crowd. He wore a three-piece suit and he was in his thirties and he had this broad smile and a head of thick black hair and I was smitten. He saw me be a bloodsport poet onstage that night. I saw him pull a Queen of Spades from his shoe. We met and were laughing with each other in under twelve seconds. Et voila: le boyfriend.
One morning months later, I was lounging in his spacious apartment in Logan Square, beaming at him as I watched him rehearse. He was always rehearsing because being good at magic was his profession (it still is.) Magic is all that he does, work-wise, and he’s made his living doing it for over twenty years. I was admiring his dedication and also his jacket and tie; he always wore a jacket and a tie, always. He didn’t own bluejeans. I thought that was so cool.
“Would you like to see something special, Mary?” he asked me. I nodded and clapped and bounced in my seat. Watching magic tricks makes you seven.
He took a rose from his magic case. He kind of shook himself once to loosen up and focus. Then, talking to me sweetly while he moved, he tilted his head back and brought the stem of the rose up to the tip of his nose. That is where he placed it, the tip of the long-stemmed rose, right there on the end of his nose. And then…he let go.
He was balancing it. I couldn’t believe it. He made microscopic movements to the right, back, left, left, backforward, backright to keep the rose upright, right there on his nose! He had definitely stopped talking. I didn’t even breathe. This was not a fake rose, a trick rose. This was a rose rose, and he was magnificent, like a seal or a cartoon come to life. My boyfriend kept it there for fifteen seconds or so until “ah!” it tipped over and he caught it and bowed deeply.
“Wow,” I said, mouth hanging open. “That was so cool! Do it again! Do it again!” And he did do it again for me and many times after that. But I’ll never forget what he said when I asked him how long it took to be able to do it.
He said it took him about ten years.
“Ten years??” I pictured him practicing tilting his head back every day for ten years. All those roses!
“That’s right. Ten years of daily practice for ten seconds of your enjoyment,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. He turned back to his case and began to put away his tools. I sat and thought about the time it takes to really learn something, the years that we spend to get good at what we do, and how there are no overnight successes. Roses fall off noses for years and years and then, with a pinch of luck, we keep them up there. And someone sees.
Once upon a time, there was a girl whose alarm went off.
She fumbled for her phone and knocked it off the bedside table. Thus, she began her day the way she always did, with panic that she had just broken a piece of plastic that cost five hundred dollars. Finding that her phone was fine, the girl shut the alarm off and rubbed her eyelids for awhile.
She got up and shuffled to the bar sink in her hotel room. She took a little paper hat off a coffee mug and plugged in the coffeemaker on the counter. “Hello, coffeemaker,” she said.
The coffeemaker said nothing.
The girl filled her mug to the top with water and poured the water into the coffeemaker’s reservoir. She put the coffee pod in the coffee pod basket. She pushed a button that said BREW and then she stood there at the sink and thought about her job.
The coffeemaker burbled and steamed for a few minutes, and then with a rather rude “Pah!” it was done. The girl — who needed coffee very badly — was excited until she looked at what the machine had produced: a half cup of coffee. But she had poured a full mug of water into the reservoir! However much water was in her mug, when it ran through the coffeemaker, shouldn’t she get exactly that much coffee in her cup? Even adjusting for evaporation/inflation, there was definitely coffee missing. But where had it gone?
The girl drank the coffee, but it was gone too quickly and she was confused.
“Let’s try this again,” the girl said, and she studied the directions on the coffeemaker’s lid. She repeated the steps: mugful — truly full — of water, pod, BREW. Sure enough, “Pah!” went the coffeemaker when it was finished and her mug was again only half-full.
“Coffeemaker, whydid you not make a full cup of coffee?” the girl said in a stern voice. Again, the coffeemaker said nothing.
The girl picked up the coffeemaker and shook it. She unplugged it and plugged it back in. She read the instructions on the lid once more; she even tried making two cups at once to see if that might be the ticket, but every time, no matter what she did or how much water she poured into the coffeemaker, she still only got a half cup of coffee in her mug. Every time.
“I don’t like you,” the girl said, narrowing her eyes. “At best, you’re terrible at making coffee. At worst, you’re drinking it. If you don’t explain yourself in the next 60 seconds, I’m going to the breakfast buffet where there are faucets of coffee just waiting to fill up every cup in Houston. Do you understand me? Now talk!”
The coffeemaker was silent. The girl tapped her foot. Almost a minute went by.
“That’s ten more seconds you’ve got, Mister…Coffee,” said the girl, though really it was a different brand so she knew she had just weakened her position. After ten more seconds, after the coffeemaker had stubbornly refused any attempt to explain itself, the girl sniffed and turned on her heels. She promptly tripped on her bathrobe, catching herself on the closet door handle on the way down. The day was shaping up great.
It’s a baby bunny who is seems to be clapping? This is inarguably good. Keep reading.
There’s a Chinese parable I like. It basically goes like this:
“There once was a farmer whose only son grew up to be a great horse rider. ‘How good it is that my son is masterful with horses!’ the man said, and the villagers exclaimed, ‘Yes, it is wonderful that he is so good with horses,’ and no one could disagree.
One day, the boy was thrown from his best horse and injured badly. Both his legs were broken and his back was broken also. ‘A tragedy!’ cried his father, and the villagers lamented the crippled boy, agreeing that it was a terrible tragedy that the boy was thrown from his horse. The farmer cursed the day he taught his son to ride.
Not a week later, soldiers came to the village to take the young men away to war. When they stopped at the farmer’s house, they saw his crippled son and did not take him to fight because he was injured. ‘What luck!’ cried the farmer. ‘How good that my son was thrown from his horse!'”
The point is a question: what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’? I was diagnosed with a terrible disease several years ago; that felt pretty bad. But through my illness I found a sweetness to life that was until then unknown to me. Was it good, then, to be ill? Debatable, but…well, solidly debatable. Getting invited to my first cool kid party in high school was so very, very good for a nerd like me — but then I drank mass quantities of rum and apple juice, the room began to spin, and I wanted to die. That was, um, bad. (Rum and apple juice?? Oy. Youth is wasted on the young.)
But isn’t there a hard stop on this? Aren’t there some experiences or ideas or situations that are unequivocally good or unequivocally bad? Coming up with examples is not an easy exercise, but neither are squat thrusts and we all know how good those are for you. Just for fun, here are two straight-up “good” situations to be in and two clearly “bad” ones, at least according to me, at press time:
GOOD
– kissing the boy (or girl) you have a crush on for the first time
– getting a paycheck
BAD
– having to hide in a broom closet, quickly
– gum in your hair
Well played! Courtesy DailyDoseOfCute.net — no artist name was given.
Man! All the empathy and the bummed out fourth graders around here are starting to get to me. Today, a diversion. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you The Cantaloupe Poem, a little ditty I wrote awhile back and the first in my series of fruit poems.
Enjoy, and read aloud if you’re able. The meter is entertaining and you can do voices if you want.
The Cantaloupe Poem
by Mary Fons
Say, friend! Could you spare some time, For the timid cantaloupe? That humble fruit whose name don’t rhyme, ‘Cept with “antelope.”
Not fit for tarts, no good for pie, Pale melon sits, dejected. “I’m tasty!” you can hear it cry — But to whom’s the call directed?
The lady ne’er looks its way, While enjoying her fruit salad, “I’m sure the flavor’s swell,” she’ll say, “But the color’s rather pallid.”
The men all pass it up and shout, “Cantaloupe’s for fairies!” (Yet they’re always ready to flip out, For oranges and strawberries.)
The fruit tends to befuddle Those coarse and less refined, The pastel melon’s flavor’s subtle — Not counting, ‘course, the rind.
Do enjoy some, like with ham! Wrapped ‘round a slender slice! You’ll quickly say, “Well, damn!”
“Now that tastes really nice!”
Or smooth it in a blender On a hot midsummer’s day, Then sit back and surrender To a cantaloupe sorbet.
Oh, friends! Do reassess Any anti-melon feeling; Say not “no” but “Yes, yes, yes!” And soon I’ll hear you squealing:
“Cantaloupe, I love you! How firm and how delicious! There’s now no fruit above you! You’re yummy and nutritious!”
When I was in fourth grade, my parents got divorced.
It was 1989. Movies like When Harry Met Sally and Working Girl were out and they were funny but sad, too, because love was clearly hard. Erica Jong was writing divorced chick-lit with titles like Parachutes and Kisses; it was all Reagan and minivans in America back then and a failed marriage was kinda en vogue. Smart, devastated women had made foolish choices, okay sure, but maybe there was life after divorce and maybe that life included a wine cooler and a sexy, Mr. Right #2, if you listened to enough Carly Simon.
But divorce wasn’t a funny movie for Mom. And I was eight. For me, 1989 was Mrs. Brown’s homeroom and something disintegrating in my solar plexus. My sisters and I practiced our stiff upper lips. Mad verbal as we were, the word “adulterer,” was way too present in our vocabularies. We learned to use it because it was what Dad was; he was also “depressed.” He was also leaving again.
When it all came to an end in 1989, Mom bit the proverbial bullet and the marriage bit the proverbial dust. It was like a Western with a custody battle. One afternoon I got a note not to board the school bus home but walk to the library, instead. My mother and sisters met me there and we never went home. We never spent another night in the house where we grew up. It was over, and it was happening now. Mom had us; that was secure. But we couldn’t live where we had been living.
Minor glitch: we didn’t have anywhere to go. Which meant we were homeless.
There were family friends whose kindness and grace patched up some bullet holes. Each of us girls were farmed out to friends whose parents would take on a foster Fons for as long as they could while Mom wrestled with lawyers, the papers, and the wolves at the door. And outside of the weekends here and there in different spots, there were two different couples who took us in for several weeks on end, all of us, together. They interrupted their lives, their flow, their schtick, and they let three kids and a soon-to-be single mother into their house until the pack figured out the next step. There are acts of kindness and there are acts of kindness.
I was in North Dakota on Sunday when a ninety-three-year-old woman I’ll call J. was suddenly there, smiling at me. J. and her husband were one of the couples who sheltered my family. Her husband is gone; she lives in North Dakota now near her daughter. The ebullient, joyous, remarkably spry woman (a quilter, no surprise) laughed this glorious laugh and said, “Oh, my! Well, would you…! Kid! You’re looking awfully pretty for a kid — will you look…!” and her eyes were wet and she patted my hand and my hair and kept looking at me and laughing and patting and laughing.
I don’t cry as much as I used to. But I cried to see J. again. That woman helped us. She and her husband helped us when we needed it real, real bad. I left her in North Dakota after our happy, achingly awesome reunion and on the plane home I kept looping back to the conversation that must’ve taken place when she and her husband P. decided to help us. I picture them in bed, lights out, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling.
“Marianne and the girls, Paul. What we talked about.”
I don’t like you either, PETA. ‘Case you were wondering.
If I were a betting woman, I’d wager 95% of human beans are trying to do their best 95% of the time. The 5% of people who aren’t trying at all are sociopaths. The 95% of people who take 5% of their time off are just tired. I’m with you. These odds mean that I cut folks a break most of the time and I cut myself a break, too. No need to get worked up over a cup of church basement coffee. No need to shout. No need to be rude to the waiter. We’re all trying. Be cool.
However.
This love and compassion for humanity dictates that I must stand up for true wrongs where they arise. If I don’t, can it be said that I have love for humanity? If I don’t stand for something, I’ll fall for any grievous act committed by the Transportation Security Administration. For example.
I ride in airplanes more than most, a lot less than some. After researching the then-new TSA backscatter machines a few years ago, I decided I would always opt out of going through one. Every time. It wasn’t the threat of radiation: I’ve had so many MRIs and CT scans in my life, I probably already glow in the dark. What bothered me about the machines was that they were so clearly about business more than security. A handful of companies got mountains of money to sell new scanners to airports — airports with scanners that worked just fine already. Dig about six seconds into the story and you’ll find that the three backscatter-making firms have ties to lobbyists and U.S. Representatives on both sides of the aisle. I’m a proud capitalist (we always are) but the deal smelled dirty to me and I felt my fear being exploited. That never feels good.
And then there was the whole “someone’s seeing me naked” thing which only bothered me after it turned out that yes, people were looking at your naked body when you went through, despite all protestations from the TSA officials that they weren’t. Hey, I love being naked. And on the special occasions when someone gets to see me loving being naked, that’s dandy. But the filthiest word in the English language, hyphenated or otherwise, is non-consensual and it would take a full bottle of tequila and/or a lobotomy before I’d consent to letting a sloppy TSA dude in a room on the other side of the airport look at my bare bodkin. This bodkin is mine, pal. You gotta ask first. Besides: you have clothes on, and that means we’ve got an abuse of power. And I hardly need to point out that where I live — in America, dammit — peeping is against the law. Pardon my French, but I figure the appropriate response to the entire no-clothes imaging thing is “F-ck you.”
But then came the true offense. For a number of years, and on two separate occasions, I had an ileostomy. Translation: I wore a small bag on my abdomen and that’s how I pooped. I was a very sick girl and that ostomy saved my life twice so I never exactly hated it, but it was a tribulation. Now, the old scanner machines were never an issue for an ostomate like me. An ostomy bag’s parts are 100% plastic, so unless you put something metal into the bag, which you could theoretically do (ew) there is nothing at all that would be of concern to the metal detectors, therefore no security issues.
Ah, but the backscatters, they see all. Sort of. They sure see ostomy bags. If you are the owner of one and you happen to be in the security line with the gal who doesn’t know what she’s looking at on the screen? Buckle up.
It happened in Detroit. They saw my naked, ostomied body and freaked out. I was treated roughly, questioned past my explanation of my medical situation. I was taken inexplicably into a closet — not a room but a closet — and made to reveal my bag and show it to the pair of bovine TSA women who with every passing minute revealed themselves to be less intelligent than I had initially guessed. I was in tears by the end of it, when they decided I had an ostomy bag and not a pouch full of terror. It might’ve been something like that for them, had they kept poking at it. It was the one time in my life I wished for a defective bag. Is that mean?
So I opt out of those machines and it’s a real pain, man. The opt-out takes longer because you have to wait for someone to do the pat down and then you have to do the pat down. The TSA people hate you because you have an imagination and because you’re interrupting their flow. You are stared at. People in line behind you think you’re suspicious; other people think you’re stupid because everyone knows there’s more radiation in your cell phone than there is in a backscatter machine. They heard that on CNN so it has to be true! And sometimes even I think, “Geez, who cares? It’s faster. Just do it.” Famous last words.
So I go the extra mile, every time. It’s the principle of it. It’s my instinct. And it’s my right.
NOTE: The management realizes we’ve misused the word bodkin in the above post. We like it, though.
There are plenty of reasons to love The Peace Garden State. For your consideration:
the North Star Quilt Guild is here; I was invited by this guild to give a series of lectures this weekend. Ladies, it has been a delight — thank you.
Lewis and Clark saw their first Grizzly Bear not far from where I am sleeping this evening
Canada = spittin’ distance
you can get fresh roasted Bavarian nuts in the Grand Forks convention center
About this last thing.
I had three events today: two lectures and a Q&A session. After my first lecture, I stepped out of the room and into the hall and my olfactory senses were caressed? made love to? by the smell of roasting sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla. It was as if an enormous homemade caramel had plopped down on the roof.
“WHAT IS THAT?” I said, a little too loudly to no specific person. “WHAT AM I SMELLING.”
“Oh,” said a lady with a quilt show badge, “Roasted almonds. There’s a game today. ” She said this like it was no big deal, like warm, sugary, roasted nuts were as exciting rubber washers on sale at Home Depot.
“WHERE ARE THEY.”
My nose was pointing straight up in the air and I was whipping my head around — SNIFF! SNIFF! The aroma was mouth-wateringly great. Forget hot chocolate, forget burning leaves. The smell of roasted almonds in October trumps those autumnal scents. Indeed, there was a game on the other side of the big convention center and the almonds are a staple in the concessions sold on game days. I asked if non-game-attending folks could procure these magical treats somehow. The terrible answer came: no, you need a ticket to get past the gate, sorry.
But a hero appeared!
“I can take you up there,” said a young man in a blue convention center staff coat. His name was Kevin and he had overheard me freaking out. I latched onto Kevin at once and he lead me through the hall. The smell got stronger.
I really like roasted nuts. In New York City there are a lot of roasted nut vendors on the street with their steaming carts. You can get cashews, toffee almonds, sesame seed nuts — just about any kind o’ nut. When it’s icy and cruel in New York, you wrap your paws around that warm sack of crunchy, sweet nuts and it doesn’t matter that you can’t afford to live in New York or really even visit for more than three days; it doesn’t matter that you can only afford warm nuts for lunch. Really, like, just the nuts. Maybe a coffee.
I found the vendor upstairs. I paid $11 for the largest plastic cone. The cone was the size of a plumpish guinea pig and every bit as warm. Maybe warmer. A guinea pig with a mild fever, maybe. I cradled it to my breast and stole back down the stairs and to my room on the other side of the complex. I flopped on my hotel bed and I ate five. They were really hot and I have a loose filling, so I had to be careful. I was drowsy from my adventure, so I fell asleep with them in my hand. When I woke, I ate three more and thought up good names for roasted nut vendor carts:
Completely Nuts
Perfectly Nuts
Nuts About Bavaria
The Nutty Bavarian
And then I tried to think of names that would be bad:
She’s Nuts
What Are You, Nuts?! The Fevered Guinea Pig
The Nut Cup
I recently bought a bottle of St. Germain, a sweet liqueur produced in France. It was recommended to me for use in fancy cocktails and in the sly, delicious fortification of white wine. The bottle came in a gift box with a carafe and a 1′ x 2′ poster featuring scantily clad young girls, presumably photographed in France, presumably around 1920, presumably drinking St. Germain. I direct your attention to the scanned-in portion of the poster I’ve included above, in case you missed it. (You didn’t.)
When I opened up the poster that day, I hooted with glee. “What??!” I cried, and showed my friend Ben in town from Portland. He snatched it from me at once. He grinned. “Now that’s good marketing.” There were instructions on the backside (!) of the “pamphlet,” as Ben called it, on how to mix various drinks using St. Germain.
“If that’s a pamphlet, I’m a Freedom Fry,” I said, taking it back. Oh, the French. So obnoxious, so brilliant. Getting a maid’s nearly bare bottom smack in the middle of a poster when all I wanted was an aperitif is a little presumptuous and…well, plain sumptuous. The poster works beautifully. It’s a genius move on the manufacturer’s part. My friend and I poured a touch of the liqueur into our Chardonnay, sipping and staring, transfixed by the image of these two girls. He was fantasizing about happening upon the pair by accident; I was fantasizing about being one of them.
Look again. Wouldn’t you want to be there?
Two pretty, stockinged French girls in their early twenties are reading a book together. It’s summer, around four or five o’clock in the afternoon. Cicadas buzz in the trees and lazy bees dip and wobble over field flowers. Just out of sight is a picnic basket and the Peugeot bicycles they used to get to the clearing. The girls stole a tube of lipstick from a sister earlier and a bottle of — wait for it — St. Germain. They’ve been at leisure for several hours, dozing, drinking, laughing, telling secrets, taking long, deep breaths. It’s bright and hot but there’s a gorgeous breeze; the air feels so marvelous on the skin that they’ve allowed their skirts to get rumpled, their knickers to show without a single care in the world. They are floating in private, languid, countryside. Friends, kindreds, girls, girls, girls.
What I love most about this photo is what isn’t there: There is no man. If you’re a girl who has ever had a best girlfriend, you know the sweetness that comes from a perfect, sensual afternoon that involves zero dudes. It’s not sexual. But it’s sensual, best believe that. Indulgence of the feminine kind is one of my favorites. These days, I am mostly busy with my career, with dating the male sex, with stitching patchwork and setting (more) goals. But when my longtime friend Kristina comes over, she always spends the night. We talk till midnight, we sometimes have wine, we talk about love and books and the past and when it’s time to get into our jammies, we never care if the other sees us change. She sleeps on the couch, I go to my bed.
But oh, for a glade, St. Germain. Oh, for those lazy bees.
Everywhere I looked this past weekend, I saw human suffering. It wasn’t pity; my path continually crosses with people just like me who have their crosses to bear, just like me, and pity is gross. The difference was that for a few days I was a particularly raw nerve for some reason, and I felt the ache more acutely. Who can say why.
The three lame gaits I witnessed (one after the other, each more severe than the last) were the first taste of the tone of the whole two days. First was a young woman just ahead of me on Wabash. One of her legs was significantly shorter than the other and she walked with an UP-down, UP-down, UP-down rhythm. I wondered if she sensed that rhythm anymore, or if it has always been so normal that it’s long been absorbed. After her was an elderly man so corkscrewed by scoliosis he looked directly at the ground and was clearly not able to look elsewhere. I’m not sure how he gets around like that, but he was getting around, and he had a plastic bag from Walgreen’s.
Then came a fellow on crutches. He wanted to sign up for the Segway tour I went on but after much deliberation and discussion with the kindly tour crew, he didn’t. As it turned out, the young, attractive (Iranian? Turkish?) man had MS. The Segway machine responds instantly to even the lightest movement of the body riding it; since multiple sclerosis causes involuntary movements, riding the Segway would not be safe. A thigh that mutinies and jerks to the left would jerk the whole contraption to the left, too, putting the young man and the pedestrians around him at great risk. As he crutched past those of us gleefully practicing on our Segways in the park, he gave a big smile and said, “Have fun, guys!” and I nearly wept, absolutely, this is horrible, no, no, that is not right, I hate everyone, you gotta be f-cking kidding me, no, no… I recalled an infirm Virginia Woolf who wrote about resenting healthy people, resenting “the armies of the upright.” I felt ashamed at the surplus of health I possessed. I wanted to give him some and then we could both ride.
And the next morning, an old woman with rheumy eyes scrabbled up to the front of the bus to ask, repeatedly, “Is this 9th Street? Is this 9th Street? Do you go to Roosevelt? Is this 9th Street?” I knew the bus route well and so I went up to the front and said in a gentle voice that I was getting off where she was and I’d make sure she got her stop. And so I did, and she began to talk to me as we disembarked. She was going to the store a block or two away; I said that I was going to the same store (true) and that we could walk together. She liked this idea and we shared a good 15 minutes of conversation as we walked slow as snails. Her name was Jahuri and she wasn’t such a sorry figure — kind of a spitfire, honestly — but at 77 with severe glaucoma that had long gone undiagnosed, she would be blind within a year. Her cloudy eyes tugged at my heart and when I left her at the store, my whole body felt heavy.
And then at Starbucks, a little baby touched a plush toy to his downy cheek. “Mamah!” he cried, showing her his new friend. “Mamah!” The beautiful young Spanish mother picked up her son and said, “Ah! Carino!” and it wouldn’t be a moment of suffering at all except that I felt briefly, deeply devastated that I have no baby, that my bloodline will end when I do, and what a shame it is when the doors to possibility close.
That’s my folder this semester. But do I have a cubby??
And now, without asking for it and likely not wanting it, I present my grad school application essay. It’s a bit of a longer read, but it is essentially the story of how I was robbed in January and the story is pretty good. I labored so on this piece that my writer’s ego won’t allow me to let it gather dust in Google Docs forever.
Editor’s Note: WordPress doesn’t do footnotes, so I’ve cobbled together a blog version of the two I included; it should be clear. Also: I got into the program!
Fons Writing Sample University of Chicago MLA Admissions Spring ’13
“To philosopher and historian the madness and imbecile wickedness of mankind ought to appear ordinary events.”
– David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature
Kill a man’s family, and he may brook it, But keep your hands out of his breeches’ pocket.
– Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto X, Stanza 79
For well over an hour I stood, arched over glass cases, chatting with the guys at the fancy pen shop. We looked down at the different models. I learned about barrels and nibs, the difference between this Italian manufacturer and that German one. I was shopping for An Official Pen, the first in my life. I had decided to become a woman of letters even if I was the only one who knew it and I needed the proper tool for the job.
I auditioned several before I found an Italian rollerball made of heavy white resin with gold details and a nice heft. It fit my hand just right and streamed ink onto paper with an almost wanton quality. This sexiness, mixed with the solemnity and significance one expects from An Official Pen, ended the search. I paid, tucked my purchase into my handbag, and my new pen and I sailed through the shop doors onto the street. I do write so many words each day; now the already pleasurable act was getting this insane upgrade. How was it possible to be so happy?
Less than an hour later, my purse was stolen. Just like that, my pen was gone, and I went from bliss to panic. For a time I was inconsolable, but in the hours and days that followed, I considered an argument that challenged my reasons be upset. According to this argument, no one had actually taken my purse: in fact, there was no such thing.
* * *
Had he been at Panera that evening, 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume would’ve patted a hysterical me on the shoulder and asked me to consider the lily.
Hume made many significant contributions to the world of philosophy, but the one that concerns us here is his controversial ‘bundle theory.” Bundle theory is the ontological assertion that there really is no such thing as a lily. What there is is your sense of smell, your perception of flowers, your memory of previous “lilies,” atoms of water and carbon, your understanding of height and weight and how such things are measured, and so on. In other words, a lily is no more than a collection of its properties; without all of these pieces sliding into place, a lily might as well be a hippopotamus, or a war missile, or Greenland, or nothing at all.
There in the cafe (better: there in a square space delineated by slabs of brick and mortar wherein one conceives of ‘soup’ and ‘sandwich’) my purse had been deleted. None of its physical properties were available to me any longer; I had only a memory of them — a pretty flimsy “property,” if you ask me. And though I believed I was adequately describing the purse over the phone to the police, there was so much adrenaline pumping through me at that moment, even the picture in my head was shorting out. Perhaps to the thieves “my” purse still physically existed (was it “theirs” now?) but to me, my beloved handbag was suddenly nothing more than a concept — an expensive black Italian leather one that held the contents of my organized life. What was a handbag? What was any object that could be so empirically with me one moment and gone the next? Do handbags exist, Mr. Hume? Mine certainly didn’t, not anymore. The bundle had left the building and was probably halfway across Chicago at that point.
It wasn’t until I applied Hume’s theory to my situation that I began to feel even slightly better. If the purse was a concept now, it was a concept an hour before the crime as well; I just felt more comfortable with it back then. There was another purse I had yet to encounter that would be attractive to me as a replacement. The pocketbook, the keys, the day runner, the phone — these were all just bundles of properties, I told myself, not items of true substance that existed on their own, certainly not items that I could feel real affection for. (Full disclosure: the Chanel lipstick was tough — I loved my “La Somptueuse” very, very much and of course that particular shade has been discontinued; in the end I had to admit that lipstick is only pigment, water, and sexual possibility; nothing more and not anything less. It’s hard to be actively devastated when you decide to bag emotion and consider objecthood instead. An hour later I stopped crying and straightened up.
My purse never existed. My purse never existed. My beautiful, beautiful purse.
Though I was somewhat less distraught after considering all this — calling my mom helped, too — my inquiry into the nature of material things wasn’t quite finished and now threatened to disturb me more profoundly than the theft itself. In terms of causing long-lasting trauma to a person, I do consider the battle of petty crime vs. metaphysical crisis an even match. As I walked up Michigan Avenue the next morning carrying exactly two personal effects (1), I felt positively weightless. Weightlessness is a feeling with a good reputation, but actually it’s awful. This is because it defies one of the the most fundamental properties of all material objects: gravity. Even if they are all just a big bundle of this and that perception, even if we’re making all this up, blink by blink, material objects (e.g., apples, purses, small dogs), are spooky if they suddenly start floating in the air.
Everything on my body seemed subject to fling off at any moment. I fully expected to be robbed again, was anticipating it, bracing myself for another thief who might divest me of my coat, even the shoes on my feet. My glasses weren’t a given: they might pop off my face and go flying into the sky. What, exactly, was keeping them from doing just that? Wasn’t everything else gone? Hadn’t my fellow man betrayed me once? My previous relation to objects and other humans (more objects!) was now absurd. We believe we own things, that we “have” them, that they exist because we see them; after the purse snatching, these ideas flagged and dropped. Not a very good place from which to go to the D.O.T. for a new driver’s license, but I went anyway, brow furrowed. (2)
* * *
I have replaced my pen.
The shop guys gave me a YPT (“You Poor Thing”) discount and two free ink refills, which was awfully sweet of them. The argument that there is no such thing as a thing, a concept I might not’ve considered at such length had I not been unceremoniously divested of many precious things, did help me cope. But bundle theory, like arguments for or against deism, does kind of end up in a similar, dare I say impotent spot: either there is a god or there isn’t; either there are substantive things or there aren’t; we still have to pay the electric bill. We still have to pee. We still have to make sure we’ve received and read through a particularly strong graduate school applicant’s materials thoroughly.
Are you sure you have everything?
——————————
(1) Passport, mint.
(2) A final dispatch from ground zero: As I passed WGN, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that the radio would report the story.z “Popular Chicago resident Mary Fons was robbed yesterday. Police say her Marni handbag, itself valued at over $1500, was stolen at a cafe at Congress and State around 4pm. Cafe staff assisted Fons in placing calls to cancel credit cards, including Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and Citibank. A report was filed with Chicago police. “They made me call 311 because this is a non-emergency,” Fons said, “But as a woman’s brain is located in her handbag, I may require an ambulance.”
Get a coffee at the Pret a Manger on Saturday morning. Drink half of it, then resolve to drink less coffee, more water. Make this resolve every single day for seven years and keep doing it until notified otherwise.
Pay your money. Sign the insurance release for the Segway tour. Marvel at how you always first write, “Sequay.” Wonder genuinely if you have mild dyslexia, because it’s always been like this with the “q’s” and the “g’s” and the “b’s” and the “p’s,” a little dimple in your composition, strawberry jam in the gear shift. See pods of marathon runners and whirr past them, carefully but not without the sniff of a cool kid.
Think about Nike (human engineering) vs. Nike (Greek god.) Decide it’s an even match.
See the city from A Beautiful Spot and marvel with your best friend how lucky you are to be alive and breathing. Get hungry “after all this Thoreau-ing.” Go to the new pizza bar; fuel up.
Kiss.
Smile.
Snap picture.
Have six great ideas before you even leave the pier.
Finding a home for your hair is no small task in the big city. Salons grow like weeds in every neighborhood from Cicero to the lake and stylists pour like water out of so many beauty school faucets. (Note to self: check and see if “beauty school” is derogatory.)
But two years ago, I found my spot. It is Charles Ifergan on Oak St. and it is a magical place. If you don’t live in Chicago, you likely won’t know that Oak St. is one of our poshest roads. There’s a Lanvin store there, if that tells you anything, and if you need to be told something else, there’s a Harry Winston, too. (Note to self: check and see if anyone’s ever coined the euphemism, “a Harry Winston.”)
But my salon, while not a bargain, isn’t outrageously expensive simply because it’s near a shop that (successfully) sells purses for $35,000. In New York or L.A., this proximity would automatically mean that your hair — just a trim! — would be upwards of $400 bones. But this is Chicago. You can’t charge $400 for a haircut. You can try, but most people will laugh at you and then you will go out of business. We eat bratwurst here. So Charles Ifergan is competitive but not gouge-y, so I can give them a sane amount of money and feel very, very fancy without going bankrupt, which is where I would go if I gave my money to nearly any other place of business on Oak.
The elevator up to the fourth floor is entered into from the actual street, first of all, and that’s just rad. The first time I had an appointment, I got in and the doors shut and I was whisked up in that elevator; okay, it actually heaved me up — not a new elevator. It’s okay, because when the doors opened to the salon, it was love at first sight/smell.
The noise of dozens of hairdryers, at least a dozen stylists, and the chatter of every client in the place nodding heads full of highlight foil created a marvelous clatter and whir. Someone was calling to someone else and a handsome woman was tapping a foot with a high heel at the reception desk. The smell was intoxicating: chemicals, botanicals, mists of Avalon and sprays like waves on a beach. The layout of the salon is circular, which makes it feel like more of a beehive than it already is.
George does my color. I think he’s Greek? He has a lovely accent. I found him — and the salon — because a “Best of Chicago” report in Elle magazine called him out by name. I said, “Well, I like the best, so… To George!” And the mention was well-bestowed: my haircolor has never been more lovely and George, I think, truly sees me as one of his clients now. You do have to prove yourself, you know. It’s still the big city.
Phoenix cuts my hair and does my blowouts. He is an adorable creature. He’s hella smart, too, and friendly, and we cackle and commiserate while he works his own magic.
This is not a post that I was paid to write. It’s just that I’m composing this at Charles Ifergan at this very moment, getting my roots done and then seeing Phoenix for a cut and style. I have a good weekend planned and one must always be prepared.
Hats off, Mr. Ifergan…because you’re worth it! And I will accept a coupon, but no biggie.
Like a little black alligator chomping my happiness.
The riot of pink in the picture above is a dress, and that’s my leg, and that big black annoyance hanging from the bottom is the new anti-theft system recently deployed at Bloomingdale’s in Chicago and, I assume, everywhere else. Sorry the picture is reversed — I was trying to get a shot that didn’t get too friendly and was up close enough to allow you to examine the device. I partially succeeded. Sorry, Mom.
Department stores have long used electronic sensors on their garments as well they should. Thieving from a store is not cool and those honks and buzzers that sound at the door when someone tries to take a non-paid-for item of clothing past them have surely deterred countless people from trying to do so. But there’s a new game in town because there’s a different kind of theft the Bloomie’s folks are after: buying something, wearing it, then returning it.
In the ephemeral world of fashion, I can see how this would appeal: wear an item once, take it back, get another, etc., like you’ve got your own little revolving closet. I’ve never considered it because a) it didn’t occur to me, b) too much trouble anyway, and c) ew. But it apparently happens all the time, so the Bloomingdale’s corporation has invented an anti-returning system and though I am hardly a thief, I believe it is the death of shopping. At least at Bloomingdale’s. At least for me.
Here’s how it works: There’s a big black tag on the item you purchase (see photo.) It stays on the item after you pay for it. They don’t take it off at the store like the other sensors — yes, the other sensors are still on the garment, too. When you get home, if you intend to keep the item, you take off the big black tag. You break it off, actually, because you have to twist and pull the top of the bottle cap thingy and it shatters in your hand. Once the plastic is broken you cannot return the item. I’m not sure if you get store credit, but I’m pretty sure you..don’t? I don’t know because I decided to keep my pink dress, but then, I had decided to keep it before. In the store. When I bought it.
Oh, Bloomingdale’s. You so strangely killed my shopping joy. You know how when you lose your favorite bra (don’t ask me how this can happen and I won’t have to tell you) and you have to replace it? In no way is it fun. It was so fun when you found your favorite bra! You bought it! It was like your best friend and you were so happy because you chose it, or it chose you! Then it goes missing and you have to trudge back to the store and find it, or search online and find it, and when you hit “buy” or when you plunk down your money, it’s depressing. The thrill of buying something new is gone.
That’s how I felt with that damned tag. I got home. I was so excited about my dress. Then I saw that tag and instantly, I had second thoughts. Did I really want it? I bought it, but did I really want to buy it? This was for keeps. This was like getting pinned by a boyfriend. The gods were pressing me: Mary, you loved this enough to buy it but do you really really really love it enough to keep it? FOREVER??
No! I… I don’t know! It’s a dress! There are lots of dresses! Maybe I should return it! But I was going to wear it! But it’s forever! But! Bloomingdale’s, I hate you! I like this dress but now I hate it!
In my frenzy, I grabbed the tag and twisted and smash! the tag shattered and the dress was really really mine, as opposed to almost being mine before. Total and complete fail, Bloomingdale’s. I fear that all the shops will go this route soon and when you are faced with this, friends, you will understand.
I wore the dress that night but you know what? It drapes strangely on the hanger and it’s never the dress calling to me when I open the door to my closet. Most dresses say things like, “Mary… Pick me… I’m fun…” This one says something more like, “Mary… We’re married and we’re going to visit my mother for the weekend…”
