What is a goon, anyway?
Younger Girleen, settling the question once and for all:
I think a goon is a kind of frog.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
A Conversation, Overheard
Elder Girleen, thoughtfully, having just finished singing "Little Bunny Foo-Foo":
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Working Jigsaws
A week ago I set on the left-hand corner of my desk a saucer — in the optimistic speckled pattern of Franciscan’s Starburst — filled with chips and slips and shards of china mottled still with red clay dirt, to remind me. Of what? Of something that china elicited from me; something that the sight of it laid out in my palm left on the tip of my tongue to want to say.
I am on the cusp of forty-four, my body has without me really noticing how or when become the sort of soft motherly body I despised my own mother for when I was fifteen, and lithe and taut and tan (it being 1979 after all), and she was the age I am now. Why not do sit-ups, I wondered, with the completely unconscious cruelty of youth. Why not buy some decent clothes? Why not take care of herself?
And now I know exactly why one wouldn’t. Because other people are being taken care off first, and once that’s been accomplished you might have other things on your mind besides your clothes. Because it’s more pleasant to purchase things for your lithe, taut beautiful offspring — how on earth did such heartbreaking loveliness emerge from the welter of your DNA? —than take inventory of your own battle-scarred body in some three-way mirror at Target, where the clothes are cheap but neither fit nor flatter in the less palatable part of the maxim you get what you pay for.
I am by no means the fashion-plate I once could have been, but in service of the merest ghost-wisp of memory that such a thing was once was possible, I walk. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a child in a stroller, sometimes with another mother. In summer I walk at six in the morning and in winter I walk at four in the afternoon when the temperature is highest and as I do I wonder how I ever forced myself to do so at the peak of the opposite season.
I used to walk wherever the mood took me, but now I have a particular route. I’ve measured it on Google Ped, I know it is a little over three miles. It takes me past dogs gotten loose and dragging chains I take back to their owners and seafoam spangles of safety-glass from the latest smash-and-grab of cars left recklessly with cell phones or their chargers in plain view. This time of year, it takes me past the holiday inflatables in every other yard, deflated: snow globes and santas on motorcycles and nativity scenes all melted into puddles on the brown-grassed yards like the remnants of The Wizard of Oz’s wicked witch.
This neighborhood, it gentrifies in fits and starts, and five long years ago, developers started buying up the kudzu-draped vacant lots between the 1920s bungalows and post-war Levittown-like starter homes (the last two seasons of overreaching prosperity this neighborhood knew) and constructing over-muscled craftsman homes, bulked up into two stories and three-car garages and all the other things we now believe we need that the bungalows they’re theoretically based upon never possessed. And some of them — I love an old house with cracked plaster as much as the next person, mind you — are lovely, what with porches you could raise a family on and solid doors with leaded fanlights.
Apparently, I’m not the only one who likes them; rumor has it that these houses are the ones the kick-in-the-door bandits make a beeline for because they’re not stupid either and new house equals ipod and flat-screen, and even with an alarm if you know what you’re doing you can be back out the bashed-in front door in 45 seconds flat.
But all that is neither here nor there.
There is a particular spec home on my route that paints the story you can follow in the newspapers these days but made more manageable, like a miniature painted onto ivory with a sable brush.
Before there was a house there, there was a vacant lot full of tossed tires. Located around the corner from the elementary school built in 2000 on — people say — a landfill.
I walked through summer and winter, through one child’s graduation out of the stroller (a season in which I gained some weight) and through the disappearance from my life of one simpatico walking partner and indow the welcome appearance of another, and during all that the house was not there and then suddenly … it was.
Crew after crew of Spanish-speaking labors swarmed over scaffolding and the red clay earth was broken open to pour the foundation. The view from the back yard was of a warehouse-turned-daycare-turned-abandoned-building and Section Eight housing but so what: the workers lugged in granite countertops and painted the exterior a particularly fetching shade of Bunglehouse Blue (you would know it when you saw it, it being as pervasive in exteriors these days as Martha Stewart Jade-ite green is for the inside walls of houses).
And then work stopped. Completely. The landscaping had not been started, or the sod that covers a multitude of sins unrolled; the house rose like the prow of a wrecked ship from sculptured piles of red dirt and a smattering of weeds that rattled against the bricks as the months went by.
Eventually, somebody figured out how to jimmy open the bottom story’s windows. One evening I saw a boy around eleven or twelve clamber out the upstairs window and scamper along the roof line (a call to 911 and a visit with the beat-cop ensued).
The windows were starred with broken glass, the weeds grew taller, and one morning when I pushed the stroller past, my eyes caught on a bit of china glinting in the dirt meant to some day become front yard. It was that same Martha Stewart Green, that arsenic-like color that a previous generation frantically painted over whenever they encountered it on a wall, that we now, as a generation, adore.
And there were more, and more, and more, once my eye adjusted to seeing them. A bit bearing still the tag-end of the manufacturer: …ango China….castle, PA. Another sporting a maker’s mark of crown. Crackled glaze and slabs of marble. An art nouveau pattern curving around the lip of a bit of bowl like an elegant glimpse of the neck of a woman in a black velvet evening gown. Heavy diner china with three lines of color banding the rim, suitable for Edward Hopper paintings. The cobalt blue milk of magnesia bottles.
I had found either treasure or the dump!
Lucky for me the neighborhood I live in gentrifies only in fits and starts and the sight of a woman poking around the front yard (and then side yard, and then back yard) of a half-constructed house apparently gives no one any pause.
I can be as crazy as I choose and in a neighborhood where the guy who has no teeth (who greets every single homeowner into the area for the past ten years with an unintelligible, slightly threatening request for ten bucks) spends hours strolling through the neighborhood using a beat-up walker without anyone noticing it as something out of the ordinary — nobody will chastise me for trespassing.
What on god's green earth will I do with all these bits of broken china?
But I love them all for what they might be pieces of: our past. The chinoiserie’d goldfish swimming across its broken universe of plate. The floral, fireworks-like explosion of painted blossom. Right now, I have in front of me a slice of plate that has, ensnared upon it it a tiny-bas-relief image of a swan. Black pin-point of eye, brown beak, tucked wings and all emerging from reeds painted the blackish green of Charleston-style shutters.
I am on the cusp of forty-four, my body has without me really noticing how or when become the sort of soft motherly body I despised my own mother for when I was fifteen, and lithe and taut and tan (it being 1979 after all), and she was the age I am now. Why not do sit-ups, I wondered, with the completely unconscious cruelty of youth. Why not buy some decent clothes? Why not take care of herself?
And now I know exactly why one wouldn’t. Because other people are being taken care off first, and once that’s been accomplished you might have other things on your mind besides your clothes. Because it’s more pleasant to purchase things for your lithe, taut beautiful offspring — how on earth did such heartbreaking loveliness emerge from the welter of your DNA? —than take inventory of your own battle-scarred body in some three-way mirror at Target, where the clothes are cheap but neither fit nor flatter in the less palatable part of the maxim you get what you pay for.
I am by no means the fashion-plate I once could have been, but in service of the merest ghost-wisp of memory that such a thing was once was possible, I walk. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a child in a stroller, sometimes with another mother. In summer I walk at six in the morning and in winter I walk at four in the afternoon when the temperature is highest and as I do I wonder how I ever forced myself to do so at the peak of the opposite season.
I used to walk wherever the mood took me, but now I have a particular route. I’ve measured it on Google Ped, I know it is a little over three miles. It takes me past dogs gotten loose and dragging chains I take back to their owners and seafoam spangles of safety-glass from the latest smash-and-grab of cars left recklessly with cell phones or their chargers in plain view. This time of year, it takes me past the holiday inflatables in every other yard, deflated: snow globes and santas on motorcycles and nativity scenes all melted into puddles on the brown-grassed yards like the remnants of The Wizard of Oz’s wicked witch.
This neighborhood, it gentrifies in fits and starts, and five long years ago, developers started buying up the kudzu-draped vacant lots between the 1920s bungalows and post-war Levittown-like starter homes (the last two seasons of overreaching prosperity this neighborhood knew) and constructing over-muscled craftsman homes, bulked up into two stories and three-car garages and all the other things we now believe we need that the bungalows they’re theoretically based upon never possessed. And some of them — I love an old house with cracked plaster as much as the next person, mind you — are lovely, what with porches you could raise a family on and solid doors with leaded fanlights.
Apparently, I’m not the only one who likes them; rumor has it that these houses are the ones the kick-in-the-door bandits make a beeline for because they’re not stupid either and new house equals ipod and flat-screen, and even with an alarm if you know what you’re doing you can be back out the bashed-in front door in 45 seconds flat.
But all that is neither here nor there.
There is a particular spec home on my route that paints the story you can follow in the newspapers these days but made more manageable, like a miniature painted onto ivory with a sable brush.
Before there was a house there, there was a vacant lot full of tossed tires. Located around the corner from the elementary school built in 2000 on — people say — a landfill.
I walked through summer and winter, through one child’s graduation out of the stroller (a season in which I gained some weight) and through the disappearance from my life of one simpatico walking partner and indow the welcome appearance of another, and during all that the house was not there and then suddenly … it was.
Crew after crew of Spanish-speaking labors swarmed over scaffolding and the red clay earth was broken open to pour the foundation. The view from the back yard was of a warehouse-turned-daycare-turned-abandoned-building and Section Eight housing but so what: the workers lugged in granite countertops and painted the exterior a particularly fetching shade of Bunglehouse Blue (you would know it when you saw it, it being as pervasive in exteriors these days as Martha Stewart Jade-ite green is for the inside walls of houses).
And then work stopped. Completely. The landscaping had not been started, or the sod that covers a multitude of sins unrolled; the house rose like the prow of a wrecked ship from sculptured piles of red dirt and a smattering of weeds that rattled against the bricks as the months went by.
Eventually, somebody figured out how to jimmy open the bottom story’s windows. One evening I saw a boy around eleven or twelve clamber out the upstairs window and scamper along the roof line (a call to 911 and a visit with the beat-cop ensued).
The windows were starred with broken glass, the weeds grew taller, and one morning when I pushed the stroller past, my eyes caught on a bit of china glinting in the dirt meant to some day become front yard. It was that same Martha Stewart Green, that arsenic-like color that a previous generation frantically painted over whenever they encountered it on a wall, that we now, as a generation, adore.
And there were more, and more, and more, once my eye adjusted to seeing them. A bit bearing still the tag-end of the manufacturer: …ango China….castle, PA. Another sporting a maker’s mark of crown. Crackled glaze and slabs of marble. An art nouveau pattern curving around the lip of a bit of bowl like an elegant glimpse of the neck of a woman in a black velvet evening gown. Heavy diner china with three lines of color banding the rim, suitable for Edward Hopper paintings. The cobalt blue milk of magnesia bottles.
I had found either treasure or the dump!
Lucky for me the neighborhood I live in gentrifies only in fits and starts and the sight of a woman poking around the front yard (and then side yard, and then back yard) of a half-constructed house apparently gives no one any pause.
I can be as crazy as I choose and in a neighborhood where the guy who has no teeth (who greets every single homeowner into the area for the past ten years with an unintelligible, slightly threatening request for ten bucks) spends hours strolling through the neighborhood using a beat-up walker without anyone noticing it as something out of the ordinary — nobody will chastise me for trespassing.
What on god's green earth will I do with all these bits of broken china?
But I love them all for what they might be pieces of: our past. The chinoiserie’d goldfish swimming across its broken universe of plate. The floral, fireworks-like explosion of painted blossom. Right now, I have in front of me a slice of plate that has, ensnared upon it it a tiny-bas-relief image of a swan. Black pin-point of eye, brown beak, tucked wings and all emerging from reeds painted the blackish green of Charleston-style shutters.
The plate itself, if whole, would be quite ugly.
But how miraculous the piece is! As is the thought that out of anything I might have stumbled upon — this being garbage after all — I stumbled upon this!
But how miraculous the piece is! As is the thought that out of anything I might have stumbled upon — this being garbage after all — I stumbled upon this!
The swan is no bigger than my thumbnail, it glides serenely into the future, it endures.
All I Want For Christmas...
... is to be Judith Warner.
If you don't have children, you probably don't bother to read her column. If you do, chances are high you already read her column this morning.
But... here's today's.
OK, maybe she isn't completely in touch with the cultural zeitgeist (tho I think she is) but she's definitely got her finger on my maternal pulse these day.
Peace out and Happy Days.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Word of the Day
Abnegation.
A word I’ve never had the slightest opportunity to use. Denial, the dictionary has to say about it, particularly self-denial.
I have so little self-denial! a person might say coyly when presented with — particularly this time of year — a plate of goodies, just before they reconsider — oh, well, on second thought! — and reach a hand toward a particularly tempting bite.
Other than that usage — so blithe, so redolent of pop psychology — I can’t imagine a single way self-denial might be inserted into conversation: it’s a concept that’s been stripped of meaning, an act long ago fallen out of fashion.
I’m certainly not bemoaning that fact. To practice self-denial — what would be the point? What would it be for, other than …. I dunno. To prove a point? For one’s own good? You give up smoking, you turn down a rich piece of cake, you practice self-denial. Maybe you exchange all the old-style lightbulbs in your house and turn down the heat.
Our culture keeps the concept of self-denial firmly on a transactional level. You give something up — you get something in return. You cut the sugar from your diet, you are gifted with… (I suppose)… better health. You simplify your life, you're blessed with... tranquility and peace.
So abnegation means self-denial, and there’s little point (who cares?) discussing it.
But then there’s the verb form of the word …
Four days ago, after I gave up on driving so aimlessly and at the same time so purposefully through the neighborhood with my freight of sleepless child and all my complicated baggage — of what I needed, of what she needed, of what should happen, of what was most important — the word self-abnegation all of a sudden seemed scrawled across my afternoon in bold, black, foot-high, maybe even flaming, letters.
To abnegate: To deny, renounce; to surrender, to relinquish.
So Latinate, so medieval! And the interesting thing about the definition is the way it changes our focus from the transactional nature of self-denial (at least as we see it these days, hair shirts having gone, also, out of fashion) to something much more difficult, and powerful: the struggle. If denying, renouncing, surrendering or relinquishing isn't the hardest frigging work you’ve ever engaged in then I sure don’t want your job, whatever it might be.
In parenthood, one’s will continuously butts up against something so much larger and stronger than it is — a life force? A universe? — and there is something downright… religious about the — I don’t know what else to call it — self-abnegation that almost always is the lesson learned. There is nothing concretely transactional about the self-abnegation of parenthood: I mean, I can sacrifice my desires for my child's well-being until I'm blue in the face, but it's not ever ever ever going to get me back into a size 6 pair of jeans.
This sort of sacrifice is dangerous stuff. This is poking at the dark heart of motherhood — here there be dragons! — with a particularly strong stick. This is mixing the theological (or the spiritual) with the everyday, and to do so is anathema (interestingly enough, another religious word) to the people and the culture we are these days.
Is the self-abnegation that is part and parcel of parenthood good or bad? I’m not saying ( I don’t know; I made a C in Existential Philosophy at UGA in 1983). It just is, as loathe as we are to acknowledge it.
A couple of other religiously-connotated words:
Fanaticism.
Fervor.
Oh, they’re not words connected to us, (even should we have a religious affiliation, these things being also these days somewhat out of vogue) but belong to other people’s lives, across oceans and far away.
But throw those sorts of words into the parenthood mix and what do you get?
A culture where parent participation is sometimes elevated to a byzantine art? Where guilt can be paramount? One where places exist where parents must undergo interviews to get their kids in preschool?
A word I’ve never had the slightest opportunity to use. Denial, the dictionary has to say about it, particularly self-denial.
I have so little self-denial! a person might say coyly when presented with — particularly this time of year — a plate of goodies, just before they reconsider — oh, well, on second thought! — and reach a hand toward a particularly tempting bite.
Other than that usage — so blithe, so redolent of pop psychology — I can’t imagine a single way self-denial might be inserted into conversation: it’s a concept that’s been stripped of meaning, an act long ago fallen out of fashion.
I’m certainly not bemoaning that fact. To practice self-denial — what would be the point? What would it be for, other than …. I dunno. To prove a point? For one’s own good? You give up smoking, you turn down a rich piece of cake, you practice self-denial. Maybe you exchange all the old-style lightbulbs in your house and turn down the heat.
Our culture keeps the concept of self-denial firmly on a transactional level. You give something up — you get something in return. You cut the sugar from your diet, you are gifted with… (I suppose)… better health. You simplify your life, you're blessed with... tranquility and peace.
So abnegation means self-denial, and there’s little point (who cares?) discussing it.
But then there’s the verb form of the word …
Four days ago, after I gave up on driving so aimlessly and at the same time so purposefully through the neighborhood with my freight of sleepless child and all my complicated baggage — of what I needed, of what she needed, of what should happen, of what was most important — the word self-abnegation all of a sudden seemed scrawled across my afternoon in bold, black, foot-high, maybe even flaming, letters.
To abnegate: To deny, renounce; to surrender, to relinquish.
So Latinate, so medieval! And the interesting thing about the definition is the way it changes our focus from the transactional nature of self-denial (at least as we see it these days, hair shirts having gone, also, out of fashion) to something much more difficult, and powerful: the struggle. If denying, renouncing, surrendering or relinquishing isn't the hardest frigging work you’ve ever engaged in then I sure don’t want your job, whatever it might be.
In parenthood, one’s will continuously butts up against something so much larger and stronger than it is — a life force? A universe? — and there is something downright… religious about the — I don’t know what else to call it — self-abnegation that almost always is the lesson learned. There is nothing concretely transactional about the self-abnegation of parenthood: I mean, I can sacrifice my desires for my child's well-being until I'm blue in the face, but it's not ever ever ever going to get me back into a size 6 pair of jeans.
This sort of sacrifice is dangerous stuff. This is poking at the dark heart of motherhood — here there be dragons! — with a particularly strong stick. This is mixing the theological (or the spiritual) with the everyday, and to do so is anathema (interestingly enough, another religious word) to the people and the culture we are these days.
Is the self-abnegation that is part and parcel of parenthood good or bad? I’m not saying ( I don’t know; I made a C in Existential Philosophy at UGA in 1983). It just is, as loathe as we are to acknowledge it.
A couple of other religiously-connotated words:
Fanaticism.
Fervor.
Oh, they’re not words connected to us, (even should we have a religious affiliation, these things being also these days somewhat out of vogue) but belong to other people’s lives, across oceans and far away.
But throw those sorts of words into the parenthood mix and what do you get?
A culture where parent participation is sometimes elevated to a byzantine art? Where guilt can be paramount? One where places exist where parents must undergo interviews to get their kids in preschool?
Wow, that world's not oceans away from us ... it's right down the street, at least from the house I most often find myself living in!
Any state of being that requires extremes from an individual ... may also pull forth extremes of behavior from within them as well. In short, if you expect a person to put hours and hours and hours of time every week into their childs' ... school... sport... whatever... maybe you're going to have to not just tolerate but embrace some fervor and fanaticism as well.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Be on the Look Out
Could say: needs must when the devil drives. Could say: desperate times call for desperate measures. If I were a certain ethnicity and drove a certain sort of car, a BOLO* would surely have been issued for me by now, given the slow circuitous route I just took through the neighborhood and the way I made blocks, then doubled back and drove them again and then turned down the streets paralleling them for more than half an hour.
But I look neither young, nor hungry. I am a forty-three-year-old mom, Merrill-shod foot pressed against the brake (not the accelerator, the point being to drive slow), clad in low-rise jeans and a black fleece hoodie. My vehicle's a VW Passat with an Obama sticker pasted to its back bumper; the back seat of my station wagon is full of car seats; the luggage compartment's full of strollers and shreds of children's artwork and wadded canvas grocery totes.
12:30 p.m.
I am backing the car slowly out of the driveway because we are losing Younger Girleen's nap and I have just realized that after today, it will be at least a month before I have a moment or two sans offspring** and the list of things that must be done — by me — that sits at my right hand is pages long right now, and without the nap, there will be no time for anything.
Fact: when the nap is on the way out, the car can sometimes lull the reluctant to sleep. And this is my dirty little secret: sometimes when the going gets tough, I throw the three-year-old into the car.
12:45 p.m.
Younger Girleen is strapped and cinched into her car seat, she is barefoot, she is deeply suspicious about my motivations. Are we picking up her sister? she asks. Are we going to Target? Are we going home? Are we going HOME? ARE WE GOING HOME?
When did I become this walking cliche? When did I become a person who drives a black station wagon and even worse, if it's not tax-free weekend or Black Friday considers a trip to Target a recreational jaunt? Once I dated boys in bands and streaked my hair and did all sorts of wild things.
But it happens to the best of us, real life.
12:50 p.m.
The trees outside the windshield are elegant and austere. It is 67 degrees. Younger Girleen stares out the window.
12:52 p.m.
Her eyelids droop; I eagerly turn homeward.
12:53 p.m.
One more long block, one more street, surely that will do the trick!
When Elder Girleen gets home, a voice from the back seat pipes up, we will play Mac the Superhero.
Whatever that might be!
But if a slow drive can't lull the napless into sleeping it can lull the mother into peace.
Does any of the stuff on that to-do list really matter? The insurance forms to fill out, the phone calls to return, the packages to seal and label? The writing that I once considered my best, my real, work? The laundry to be shuffled from washer to dryer from dryer to pile on bed, from pile on bed to chest of drawers? The cereal to be swept from the floor, the dishes to be rinsed? The too-small red patent leather shoes become talisman to a three-year-old that must be hidden away while her eyes are closed so she won't hobble through the rest of life, a maiden with bound feet?
1: 07 p.m.
At a certain point, the knowledge that one looks absurd trumps desperation. I pull back into the driveway; Younger Girleen is still awake. I have made my peace with things.
1:23 p.m.
Younger Girleen clambers up onto the sofa. I'm going to sit here just a second, she says.
And then, God bless us everyone, she's just like that asleep.
*BOLO: Email Neighborhood Watch Group-ese for Be On The Look Out; smash and grabs are up and when you throw that into the mix, nobody's behavior looks particularly pretty.
**Thursday's the last day of school, but an orthodontist appointment in the far-north 'burbs and attendance at various school winter holiday functions precludes much being crossed off the to-do list tomorrow or the next day)
Monday, December 15, 2008
The Pause that Refreshes
Given the status quo — news feeds full of Ponzi schemes, bilked billions, punted auto industry bailouts, and thrown shoes; a midwinter sky the color of waxed paper, a personal, parental to-do list that's grown insupportably long (don't tell me you don't have one!) — I figure there's no better way to start a Monday than with some escapism and a damn good story.
There's one right here.
Yeah, I know I've sung the praises of Five Chapters before, but geez louise I'm impressed by their fiction — and this week's serialization looks like an especially good one.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Why I like Junk Stores
The Girleens are making Christmas presents this year, or rather, they're telling me yay! that sounds like SO MUCH fun, and hanging out for the few minutes it takes to get whatever project we're working on set up, and then wandering off to do something they find more engaging.
There's probably somebody out there on the interwebs who'd be happy to point out that I might be doing lasting damage to my daughters' psyches by finishing up their projects without requiring huge amounts of engagement from them, but hey — we're operating under a bit of a time crunch here. Besides, I'm the same person who three days before Halloween was up to her elbows in pumpkin innards while the kids were busy doing cartwheels in the yard so what can you expect?
All the weighty psychological damage I might be doing my kids aside, it's their Christmas "projects" that led me to the fabric store this morning.
Ah, the fabric store! We're not even talking the arts-n-crafts, hot-glue gun, plastic-flowers store, which is the third circle of hell, despite any middle-class aspirations it might have. This is the fabric store, located in a shopping center that, though it may've once rode the crest of late-sixties prosperity now has an "arcade level" where homeless people sleep.
The fabric store is flanked by Diaper Depot on one side and Family Dollar on the other. The anchoring SUPER GIANT FOOD across the parking lot is vacant, though its motto (The name says it all!) is still scrawled across the windows. The windows of Diaper Depot are filled with sealed cardboard boxes which I guess contain diapers; the store itself is also closed.
And if you need a pick-me-up after shopping? Starbucks wouldn't touch this shopping center with a ten foot pole. Are you up for lunch instead at Piccadilly Cafeteria?
The Fabric Store doesn't give a shit about branding or marketing or shopping as an "experience." It's a throwback to those days we hardly even remember anymore, when people shopped solely because they needed a particular necessity, not because the act of shopping massaged the seratonin levels in their brains.
It's week two of Laid-off Life, and The Husband is diligently, and valiantly, sticking to a schedule of job-hunting, but this morning, I convinced him to take a few hours off to accompany me somewhere that Suburban Center (the shopping center's actual name) was on the way to, and if you want to make a recently-downsized male's head explode, take him to a Hancock Fabrics with linoleum flaking from the floors and waterstained ceiling tiles.
The fact that we ran into someone we knew there, and the three minutes I spent talking to her (learning that another dad in our social circle has been laid off, and yet another made it through a "first-round" Thanksgiving week but 70 of his co-workers did not) did absolutely nothing to mitigate how deeply distasteful The Husband found the whole experience.
To cheer him up after we got our cotton batting, I suggested we stick our heads into the Estate-selling enterprise a few storefronts past the Fabric Store.
Where we found this...
You can't tell by looking, but it's a Pictorial Map of the Literary Development of the United
States, circa 1967, complete with the actual streets in New York City where writers lived and wrote mapped on it.
And you know what? Roughly half the authors on this — well, they didn't vanish without a trace, but let's put it this way: read any Ruth Cross lately?
You might think this is depressing, but I actually found it uplifting to contemplate. Kinda like staring out at the ocean or something.
Time goes by, the moon waxes and wanes. What matters now just might not matter a whole lot fifty years hence.
Besides, check out that sixties sol-yellow and toothpaste greenish-blue.
The future's so bright you gotta wear shades.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
News From the Front
At five-thirty this morning, the Husband fumbled for the silent alarm clock beside our bed and whispered urgently to me: We've overslept!
The reality being that we hadn't, at all, that the alarm he was certain he'd heard was imaginary, but we're all a little on edge right now, and it stands to reason that he might feel anxious that he'd slept through the starting bell of yet another round.
Fact Number 1. The Husband walked into work a week ago to discover his job no longer existed. Handed over his corporate cell phone; was handed the proverbial cardboard box to put his personal effects in, and that was that. A small drama being played out all over the country this month; a chorus swelling in the background of the day-to-day that sings out this: laid off.
Fact Number 2. He is not the first parent from Elder Girleen's class of fifteen kids to fall under the wheels of the corporate bus.
What do I know of recessions? The first one that occurred in my lifetime meant nothing to me but lines at the gas pumps I walked past on my way to school and the president's cardigan-clad plea that we turn down our thermostats a few degrees.
And the second? Well, when you're hardly wet behind the ears and make minimum wage and survive off coffee and cigarettes and filched sugar packets from Wendy's, where the salad bar means all you can eat, how does a recession touch you? It was nothing but a word, and besides, I was too busy applying to grad school to notice much, although now that I think about it, my longing to escape the real world for the ivory tower might have been considered pretty telling.
But this time, I'm a card-carrying grown-up and find it hard to consider recession just a word (which was how I got through last go-round, when I was just a few semesters past having failed economics and my only dependent was a siamese cat — hey! light another cigarette! strike up the band!).
Last Wednesday, it was still just a word. One we were worried about, yes, but in a fairly hypothetical sense. Today it's tangible and real-to-the-touch. Who knows what's going on with the guy who lays on the horn in traffic for what seems like no reason? Who knows what's behind the fact that some mom drags her kids into school late? It's hard times out there. We've got to be gentle with each other.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
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