The 2010 vernal equinox is not until March 20 at midnight, but I’m quite comfortable with the Kendall Flower Shop in Cambridge, MA having declared it BEGUN!
found
– Rear windows
On this night, from our second-floor rear window and into their rear window I look and see not the lit tv screen or the polished floors or a body on a couch but female legs in red stockings and dancing shoes and his legs, in blue jeans, stepping in time with hers.
On other nights, from the same rear window I look out over neighbors’ rooftops and see tiny squares of light, in this house or that, signaling who’s awake. Sometimes I see a head bent over a desk: Is that the peaceful pose of work done in solitude or the defeated one of work done under the midnight gun? Most of the time the lit windows are empty, and I must guess at who is up in that household and why. Insomnia. Sickness. New baby. A fight. Love. Continue reading
– Postcard from Boston
– Illustrated nouns
Everywhere you look, there are nouns just waiting to have their pictures taken. Here’s a double handful of them from my parents’ house and neighborhood, where I was for the holiday. At the end, there is a noun-by-noun commentary.
Crucifix
– Vain, vain world
The VFW Parkway: that’s my strip. Home Depot. Jo-Ann Fabrics. Starbucks. The connector to 95S to get to the Cape. I drive it often, practically hypnotized by the same-old-sameness. Not mindful, not in the moment. Lost in my own reverie.
Many times I’ve passed this group of signs without really seeing them. Every time around this point, I’ve thought long and hard about vanity. (Interestingly, I haven’t dwelled on Jennifer, who is my cousin.)
Vanity, all around us. The guys at the gym who look sideways at themselves in the mirror while gently running their palms over pecs (the self feel-up?). My dentist, the competitive weightlifter in the 50-and-over division who introduced me to “cut” as an adjective. The lushly pregnant celebrities on the cover of People. The botoxed and lip-injected woman on the T with eerily old hands. Old feet, beautifully pedicured. The accumulation of friends on Facebook. Black and white photos of authors on book jackets: eyeglasses, bemused grin, hands placed just so. Shaved heads. Waxed crotches. The tanning salons clustered around Boston University. Clarice’s good bag. Modesty, an eschewing of vanity, and therefore vanity supreme. Pynchon, Dickinson. White teeth. Sunglasses. Bonfire. The memoir. The blog. Tweet. I’m guilty, too.
Vain, vain world.
My rumination was interrupted, finally, by an ah-ha! moment one day as I drove past the stacked signs, and concrete meaning derailed my train of thought: “Oh, bathroom sinks!” I laughed over the repeated misreading and my elevation of the prosaic to the profound. Ha, that, too, a kind of vanity.
– Twisted world
Usually, we keep the cars unlocked when they’re sitting in our driveway. What would anyone want to steal, but a handful of change in the cup holder, empty water bottles on the floor, or a soccer ball in the back? An opportunistic thief, it seems, might also be attracted to a red bag full of first aid supplies for Grace’s scouting troop, of which I am the volunteer first aider. Bandaids, gauze pads, Benadryl, instant cold packs, surgical scissors, a CPR face mask: stolen. Today we replenished the kit. It costs $104 for supplies that fit this description, plus $20 for a discount backpack to hold it all.
On the MBTA Green Line, a man in nice pants, black scuffed vinyl shoes, and a puffy down Patriots jacket sat across from me, with his head bent over a notebook. Left-handed, he wrote a numbered list of principles in big block letters on the lined paper. The list, which was easy to read upside-down and across the aisle, had to do with campaigning, I gathered. “1. Door-to-door. Get the message out. 2. Phone bank. Waste of time. 3. Direct mail. Expensive, uncertain.” And so on. I feared, for some inchoate reason, he was launching the beginning of a political career.
Above ground at the Park Street Station, the street was blocked off with that yellow police tape. The whole intersection, blocked. People standing around. No cars. I looked and looked at my fellow bystanders, trying to make eye contact before asking someone to explain. No eye contact. I walked over to the hotdog stand guy. “Yes, miss?” he said to me as his glance landed on mine. I asked him what had happened. He answered, “A quite older woman was hit by a truck in the intersection. She passed away.” Oh, no. Still, I found it so strange that the gentle phrase “passed away” could be used for a victim who had been rammed by a truck.
In the rundown jewelry store on the corner of Tremont and Winter Streets, I finally got the battery in my watch replaced. Only $8.49 — what was I waiting for? For at least two months, I had been covertly using the digital display on my insulin pump as a time keeper. The jeweler’s assistant told me she sees everything out her store window, everything. The old woman who was hit by the truck had her “head cracked open. Open.” The assistant, who had heat-straightened brown hair and a very kind smile, cupped her two hands around her forehead as she described what she saw. I pictured her head like an egg, the shell opening. Continue reading
– A state for writers
Lydia pulled me over to the table.
“Look at this,” she said and held up a worksheet that Grace had brought home from third grade, called “United States Regions.”
Lydia pointed to a spot on the U.S. map, on which Grace had labeled all 50 states, where she creatively spelled the name of one of them:
Pencilvanya
Kind of a mash of “pencil” and Uncle Vanya, no?
Which kinda reminds me… My friend James, who lives and works in that state, is blogging again.
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The image, “Pencil Dust,” is published by .klash on Flickr.
– Evidence
Last summer I started and made substantial progress on a draft of a memoir/essay about having a crush on one of my Wellesley College professors, *not* having an affair with him, and reading many years later of his death from prostate cancer. A first excerpt is here, and another one is here. (There’s also a reflection on writing the essay here.)
Then, I put the essay aside for the winter and did other things and wrote other pieces as well as lots of comments on student work.
Resolved to finish the draft, I picked it up again a couple of weeks ago. I hit a snag when I felt I had exhausted my memory of that time in college. Searching for something concrete, I opened up my college archives (a green cardboard box) and found three papers I wrote for that professor.
Ah, evidence. It helps. In writing about those papers and his comments, I found my way back into the essay and finished the draft. It’s funny how artifacts function, however. While they are more lasting and stable than memory, our interpretation of them is often — usually — slippery.
Excerpt #3, “Dead and Gone (draft)”:
All that I have left from Mr. K’s class (History 245) are three papers I wrote, typed, handed in, and got back with his handwritten feedback and grade. These are my only concrete artifacts of my time in that course. Who knows, though? Maybe in the College Archives, or in his own papers, there are records of that course from that semester: a syllabus, a grade book, his own notes if he kept them. (All teachers must keep some sort of notes.) But this is all I have and all I’m willing to put my hands on. Continue reading
– Overheard and overbought
I heard this today, as I stood in the check-out line at my local grocery store. It’s a revision of a well-known saying, and another customer was sharing it with another clerk.
When you complain, you complain alone.
When you laugh, everyone laughs with you.
That seems good to remember.
And what was I buying at the grocery store? I’ll tell you, and I’ll also tell you that I noticed, as my 14 or so items were picked up one by one and scanned, that none were essentials.
- 3 liters of Polar seltzer (for Grace’s 3rd grade party)
- 2 half-gallons of Minutemaid lemonade (ditto)
- 1 box of Cheez-It Party Mix (afternoon snack)
- 1 jar of roasted sunflower seeds (the protein to go with the Cheez-Its)
- 1 sandwich roll (okay, I need that for my lunch — I’m home today)
- 1 single-serving sized bag of potato chips (ditto)
- 1 hosta (to fill in a blank spot in a shady patch)
- 2 six packs of those mini soda cans: Diet Pepsi and Diet A & W (because)
- 1 bag of ice cubes (for Grace’s 3rd grade party)
Not only do we live in an age of complaint, we (still) live in an age of excess. I mean, none of those things are items I need. And yet I bought them, and will again.
– It’s not the climb; it’s the cliche.
I can’t help it — that Miley Cyrus song, “The Climb,” has been giving me goosebumps, which goes to show that the intellect has very little control over raw feeling.
I know, I know: The song is laden with cliché and bombast. It’s oversung.
However, my inner teenager has been responding in a big way: Yes <sniff>, it is the climb. That’s what… <snuffle>… matters … <sigh>.
So, what prompts this confession of uncoolness? This morning I’m digging through a box from my personal archives — it’s a big green square gift box labeled “Papers High School + College” in my printing — and I find my high school graduation speech, Leicester High School, Class of 1983. (I wasn’t valedictorian; I was either salutatorian or oratorian, which are either second or third rank.) Even with my reading glasses on, I have to squint to read it: This was the early days of photocopier technology, and the ink hasn’t held up. The full text, however, is legible enough: I see that the speech is laden with cliché and bombast. And while this first speech of mine may not be about the climb, it is about the path, which is a kind of journey. (Maybe only teenaged pop singers get to travel uphill?)
If I’ve piqued your curiosity, I’d also like to satisfy it, so I’ve transcribed the full text below. I don’t promise great or even mediocre rhetoric; it’s just a chance to read what an 18-year-old girl, only a few months away from college and some teacher’s first year composition course, thought was an example of her best writing.
Be kind! Continue reading
leaf stitch word 