Your Neighborhood Librarian Finds Her Level

It's Halloween. I'm driving around. It's overcast, it's not too cold, it's not hot. I've arrived at that - I have this weird perfect-storm confluence of coffee, cloud cover, being awake, free time, and unfamiliar surroundings, that if it combines in just the right proportions, I feel like a genius. I think other people get to this place using meth, and frankly I cannot fault them, because it's a pretty cool feeling. Where is this chilly wind coming from that's blowing air into my brain? Well it's Pulaski Highway in Baltimore, where else?

That's right boys and girls - Your Neighborhood Librarian is going to buy a case of beer

Pulaski Highway, named after Casimir Pulaski of course - I know that off the top of my head (remember I record these blog posts into my phone) - Casimir Pulaski, hero oooofff... the American Revolution I think [YES! I was right!], anyway shit is named after him ALL over the place. Everywhere I've ever lived has had a Pulaski Skyway, a Pulaski Bridge, a Pulaski Square, a Pulaski Shot Tower, Day Care Center, Pulaski Rim and Lube, etc.

SNOWPOCALYPSE 2010

I set up my tripod in the dining room and took pictures of the snow as it fell, though eventually I had to pull back - the entire frame was white! Music is "Hotel Incidental Music" by Usha Khanna.

Don't bank on it baby

Painting by Tamara Vandevender

A few people I know and used to know - once and future friends - began to reminisce about an enterprise that I used to be part of, a coffee house, and now I can't get it off my mind. I have barely thought about that place for fifteen years.

It was just a place, we had an espresso machine and cold drinks and muffins that got moldy if you didn't sell them quick enough. Tables and thrift-shop chairs and lots and lots of ashtrays. It was in an arty part of town where nobody would go unless they lived there or drank there or possibly were busting a crackhouse. The day the DEA came for the house two doors down was a good day for us. Cops drink coffee.

My ex-boyfriend Joe started it with some money he had inherited from his grandmother. I helped with the paperwork at first, and painting - lots of us helped. Our friend Chris did all the carpentry.



Our first customers were the resident artists down there. We had a guy who did decorative ironwork, we had glassblowers, a puppeteer, an arborist, mosaicists, a milliner, and the florists from two blocks away - the only people who bought the four-dollar mocha lattes. Loved those florists.



Before too long, the poets and art students and musicians found the spot. Young people. Young young young people, some of them just out of high school. I was all of 26, 27, but still - those people were young. The place turned into a clubhouse. I lived upstairs for a while, and I would come down still in pajamas to drink coffee and see who was there.


SoWeBoHemian festival, 1993

I worked behind the counter to help out. When it was busy, I poured coffee like a river, pivoting from carafe to register, my hands hitting every mark. That kind of physical proficiency is intoxicating: it feels like dancing. And I knew everyone who came in. I gossiped, I flirted: that felt like dancing too. When it was not busy, I hopped up on the counter and read, or daydreamed, or sat at a table and talked. The CD player was on top of the drinks cooler. To change the CDs we'd have to climb up on the counter. We'd put in The Pixies, Mozart, My Bloody Valentine, Meat Puppets.

Did people hook up, fall in love, break up? They did. Meaning compounds when you've had seven cups of coffee and have run out of things to say. Things ran at a pretty high pitch.

(For example, I am writing this at a coffee house, and three people, two men and a woman, are having a conversation about estimating weight. Woman: "Guess my weight. [First guy] was way off." Second guy: "Stand up. Huh. I'd say 106, soaking wet." She: "You guys are crazy! I weigh 138 pounds!" And these people are full-on adults.)

It bothers me that after I took over, the business did even worse. I was working full-time at a publishing company, 4 ten-hour days a week, with one weekday to get all the coffee house business done. Bank, icehouse, wholesale club, payroll, schedule. That was actually great. I loved having the day to myself, barrelling around town, carrying heavy stuff. I just didn't understand that we were losing money - I never saw the bank statements. I'm still embarrassed that I let Joe down.

We closed the thing down right around when I left town for New York. Late 1994 or maybe 1995. My chronologies for the early 90's are a mess: I try to date my few photographs by cross-referencing boyfriends, haircuts, tattoos, apartments. All of which there were too many of.


Polaroid Land camera photo by Katie O'Meara

Maybe that's why I get so blue when I think about those days. All that flux, all that running around, all those crushes and jealousies... it seems pretty pointless fifteen years later. Especially since the relationships I had have all but turned to ash. None of the people in the above picture speak to me, although it's mutual in the case of the tall guy. And towards the end, heroin hit our neighborhood pretty hard, and people died. Died or left town.

On the other hand, the ones who are still talking to me and are still living are some of the highest-quality people I know. Maybe the others are too, but I am not likely to learn of it.

Here are the things I learned:

1. I am a crappy manager
2. The correct amount of ground coffee to make a pot is .28 pounds
3. French presses are not worth the trouble
4. Poetry is not to be trusted
5. The eleven-ounce C-handle ceramic mug is one of the most durable items ever manufactured

photo by Joshua McKerrow

Eat it!

cake tasting, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

My parents' 50th anniversary cake is coming from Charm City Cakes - Duff, the guy with the fancy cakes with the show on the Food Network. Ace of Cakes, that's what it's called.

We met with him yesterday to confer on the design, and came away with six samples to taste, which we shared with the kids. They took their job very seriously, as you can see.

The design of the cake will be based on my parents' china pattern - Wedgwood Florentine Black.



I thought about this a long time before I came up with the china pattern. Sure, it's classy but when you look at it close? VERRRRY weird. Griffins and sea monsters with long curly tongues. I've spent many a holiday dinner trying to figure out just what the fuck is going on in the border of her plates. It's like that scene in The Birdcage when Dianne Wiest thinks the young men on the bowls are playing leapfrog.

Anyway, I think it's a good compromise between her aesthetic (pink polo shirt) and mine (pink hair).

Just because we use cheats doesn't mean we're not smart

Red and raving, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

God, it's been just as hot as the devil's heineyhole around these parts lately. And just about as stinky. When Baltimore gets hot, it gets swimmingly humid as well. Sweat does not evaporate from one's skin without the encouragement of a fan. But waving a fan back and forth is nauseatingly effortful.

Here are some of the things that happened during the heat wave.

xkcd saved my butt
My laptop quit on me. Wouldn't recognize me as a user, wouldn't even attempt to find our wi-fi. Without the laptop, I am stuck using our desktop computer in the hot hot dining room, so I freaked out. And it's Linux, which I don't know, and it didn't come with any documentation or a CD, so I ended up late one night downloading Ubuntu, burning a CD, then trying to reinstall on the laptop.

I had to type "blah blah blah --configure -a" at the command line, and the goddamn thing still wouldn't respect my authority. "You must have superuser privileges to run that command".

And that's when I remembered an xkcd cartoon that I had never understood.

So I typed "sudo blah blah blah --configure -a" and... it worked.

Mom's Casa de Stijl
I sheared the children. Did not a bad job, considering I'd never wielded clippers before. Had some tips from my friend Chris. Only a couple little bald spots, and the kids look much cooler.

I then dyed the children. Mostly it was an excuse to shove them into the shower a couple times in an afternoon. Zhou went green, and looks like a tree fairy, and Mao looks like the Human Torch.

Your 100 Degree Heat Index kung fu is no match for my Two Hours at the Multiplex Strategy!
I took my children and 3 others to see Forbidden Kingdom at the $3 theater. It's PG-13, I know, but I am ok with kung fu movies. There's violence, but it is highly stylized, artful violence, neither angry nor brutal. Plus, few if any guns. In many kung fu movies there are strong, competent women, and children, and older men.

That was fun as anything, watching that movie with 5 little kids. They were bouncing up and down in their seats cackling with delight. "Did you SEE that?" Mao kept gasping.


Then last night during dinner, a front rolled in and the temperature dropped ten degrees in as many minutes. Today the sky is high and blue, the air is clear, birds are singing, and girls play the Moldy Peaches on guitar in sun-dappled shade.

Breaking the law, breaking the law

safe at last, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

One of the all-time greatest pleasures of a warm spring night is going to the drive-in movies. Have you ever been? It is the shizz. You can bring lawn chairs, or sit in your car, or pop the hatch and recline on beanbag chairs under sleeping bags in the back. The sheer novelty of watching a movie outside is mind-blowing for kids. The snack bar is full of delicious junk that is filthy bad for you. There are always old cartoons, and asinine 1960's intermission bits, and frequently a contest of some kind. I've even surmised that you can get away with smoking grass at the drive-in.

That's what we did last night (minus the grass, what do you take us for?). Our friends Aimee and Jim brought Friend the Girl and Juicy Boy, and we took Nature Girl along with Mao and Zhou. Loaded up the minivan with the beanbags and the sleeping bags and the lawn chairs, and headed to the Bengies Drive-in for a double feature of Speed Racer (fast, colorful and unintelligible, just like the old cartoons that we love) and Indiana Jones (kind of disappointing, though it's nice to see Karen Allen hasn't aged a day).

Sweet.

Every summer, the first time we go to the drive-in, we'll read the owner's handmade signs about how EVERYONE must READ the HOUSE RULES BEFORE they EXIT their CAR, and we kind of giggle. The RULES are handed to you in a four-page brochure as you enter. We'll read a few of the RULES out loud to each other and reminisce about the times we've been threatened with expulsion in the past.

That's right. We're rule breakers.

Once, when Mao was three and woke up during the second feature needing to pee real bad? I scooped him up and raced for the restroom. WITHOUT putting his shoes back on. I was stopped, berated, threatened with expulsion, and ultimately sent back to the car to put his shoes on (by then, of course, I had to let him pee in the grass next to the car - he would never have made it back to the restroom).

Once I took some pictures of the kids playing on the playground in front of the giant outdoor screen. That's right.

Once the poor kid at the gate had to confiscate the bottle of Poland Spring I was drinking, because I wouldn't pay the $7 "outside food" fee for a 95-cent bottle of water.

And last night? Oh baby, last night we FLAUNTED those rules. Let me count the ways:

SHOES MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES BY ALL PERSONS. NO EXCEPTIONS.
Do NOT carry shoeless children.

1. I let the kids take their shoes off when they were snuggled down in the back of the minivan with me. What? They were digging into my legs!

Lift gates & doors CAN NOT BE RAISED higher than the top clearance.

2. We allowed the minivan hatch to rise above the level of the roof. In all fairness, we didn't do this until the second feature, and I made Bob walk back to the line of cars behind us and make sure that we weren't blocking anyone's view. Still.

You MAY NOT PHOTOGRAPH or VIDEOTAPE, or RECORD in ANY way on the premises. Please do not attempt to skirt this rule, the media WILL BE CONFISCATED, and you will leave without a refund. See FAQ page for all of the reasons.

This is a necessary measure for many reasons. One is my own protection from scoundrels who use them for profit. Another is simply for the courtesy of other folks around you. NO EXCEPTIONS. Do not in any way attempt.
Once more for clarity: If we see any sort of camera, video recorder, or cell phone with the capabilities of taking pictures, you and the party with you, will leave immediately without a refund. NONE of these DEVICES may be used AT this theatre FOR ANY REASON. See FAQ page for all of the reasons.

3. I brought my camera. Again! I know! I pussed out on taking pictures though, I'm real attached to my new camera and if one of those poor Essex teenagers tried to confiscate it I'd go to jail for assault and ruin everyone's evening.

Obscene language or profanity WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.

4. I cussed. I did.

NO RUNNING. Go with the kids when they leave the car!

5. We let the kids run to the playground. I believe Bob and Jim even let the kids run when they were AT the playground!

And my number-one super-flagrant VIOLATION of the multicolored hypercapitalized reiterative boldface Bengies rules:

Outside food and beverages are restricted from the premises. We will offer this option: You must purchase a permit to bring outside food &/or beverage at the box office BEFORE YOU ENTER the theatre. As per conditions of the permit, You may not share food or drink with persons who came in other vehicles. PLEASE NOTE: The cost of the OUTSIDE FOOD AND BEVERAGE PERMIT is $7.00.

6. I smuggled in a bag of sunflower seeds.

And you wonder why I keep this blog anonymous!

Kind of at a loss for words

tongue and feet, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

I almost titled this post "Let me lick your feet" but I know what kind of traffic that would get me. And then they'd be angry that I wasn't some kind of sandal fetishist.

Yesterday we made the cross-town trek to the giant Asian supermarket on the West side to stock up on rice wine vinegar, ramen in a bowl, and nori for Mao's lunch. Also picked up some staples for friends (seaweed salad for Sam, Pocky for poor root canaled dogfaceboy).

The nice manager gave me the ok to take a few pictures, which, take it from the only person I know to have ever been kicked out of Trader Joe's for suspected corporate espionage, is pretty unusual for a supermarket.

Compared to what we were used to in Chinatown in New York, this suburban market is huge and sparkling clean and has a massive variety of packaged, rehydrated, dehydrated, and house-made stuff, from every corner of Asia and parts of the Caribbean too. People of all flavors come from miles around - where else can you get durian, tindora, sour bamboo shoot slivers, duck sausage, fresh rambutan, jackfruit in a can, cooked dried whole anchovies, and a bucket of kimchi all under one roof?

Last night we sampled our purchases: bulgogi wrapped in lettuce leaves for dinner (thanks to Organizer Fairy's suggestion), acorn pudding for dessert. Acorn pudding? Sounds pretty weird - tastes weirder. I can't even find anything pertinent to link to. I have stumped the Internets.

Besides this lovely picture of the beef tongue and pig's feet, I didn't even take many pictures of the fresh meats and fishies, some of it so fresh that it... is.. still... ALIVE!

I may be a dedicated cook (then again, I may not be), but I draw the line at chopping something's head off myself.

They're kicking out in Dohini too

self portrait on Mount Royal Ave, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

My parents took the kids this weekend to their place in Virginia.

This is huge. Bob and I haven't had more than about 18 hours to ourselves in going on 7 years. When somebody asked me what we were going to do with all this time, I said, "I think we're just going to sit and cry for 48 hours. Then we'll watch TV." We've been wound pretty tightly.

Anyway, Bob took the afternoon off yesterday and we had ourselves a little Baltimore photo safari. From Mt Royal Ave to the Camden Industrial Area, from the deck of cards on Wilkens Ave to the Domino warehouse, we had a beautiful day playing with my new camera. And we didn't have to worry about the kids getting tetanus, or falling in the harbor, or any of the other terrible things that can happen when you scramble around industrial areas.

If you ever have a spare sunny afternoon in Baltimore, go to Tide Point, the fancy live/work complex the Struever Bros made out of an old Procter & Gamble site, and watch the giant claw unload raw sugar from a giant ship. It smells like pralines.

History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of man

There's not much that will make me (mentally) curse a kid. I mean, someone else's kid. My own kids I curse all the time. In my head. Mostly.

But I was almost speechless with horror and rage Friday afternoon when I stepped into the backyard and saw my vegetable garden trampled and all the stakes broken off at ground level. Multiple kids had been in the backyard that afternoon, racing and playing pirate and popping the heads off dandelions. But I knew goddamn well that neither of MY children, nor their friends, had done this. All of those children can recognize a garden and know not to step in it. My own children know that if you touch my garden stakes, you have to stand in the garden and support my plants all summer as penance.

No, I knew it was the neighbors' grandchildren, who were there for a backyard barbecue. This was tricky - I don't know those kids by name, and I don't know their parents, so I don't feel like I can yell at them. So I called Big Man and Mr. Four over, pointed at the garden, started yelling.

"WHOOO did this?" I bellowed. I felt kind of good about this, in a perverse kind of way. I knew they were going to say they didn't do it, and I knew they didn't do it, so I was anticipating Being Just and Fair.

"Well, if you two didn't do it, who did?" Pointing was the response. The grandchildren, curious as to what the fuss was about, were right there.

I turned to them. In a gentler, disbelieving tone of voice, I said, "Did you guys walk on my garden? Did you break my stakes?" They knew it was a big offense because they had heard me yell at my kids.

The thing is, they were completely baffled. One of them, coming toward me to see what I was talking about, walked straight across the vegetable garden again, mashing the carrot seedlings into the ground. "No! Stop!" my boys and I yelled all together. The kid looked at us in bewilderment.

What the hell kind of upbringing creates a kid so oblivious that he will walk right over 8" seedlings planted in a line in a vegetable garden?

Later in the evening, I was out back, chatting with one of the moms, when her children kicked over the garden border and tramped right over the peas again. "Hold up! Stop!" I'm hollering, while the mother gazes on, as clueless as her kids.

You say Milton, I say Muenster. Or possibly Munster

I know where I am going to die. The exact spot.

Every time I stand there, I feel my respiration slow. Sounds become muted. It's the strangest thing. Time loses its meaning and I literally lose the will to go on.

I get a little hypnotized. It's like a Monty Python afterlife (the only kind of afterlife I could remotely envision), or experimental theater. The indecision. The inane pleasantries. The meaningless quarter-pounds of meats and cheeses. The single deli guy glacially slicing away as two or three others bustle about, casting clandestine glances my way. I know they can hear my thoughts. Oh, I may be fussing at the kids, trying to keep them from mouthing the edge of the cheese display, from poking holes in the plastic bread bags.

But I'm thinking, "What the fuck are you doing back there? What party tray is so urgent you can't come up here and slice some turkey for me? Yeah, I'm looking at you." But if they catch my eye? I smile. I come here all the time. I can't let them hate me. Then they will give me the old baloney, the tainted ham.

And one day, the call will finally come, "What'll it be, hon?" and I will be mute. My expiration date will have been met.

************

Either that, or I'm going to die in the bathroom, after having driven a toothbrush straight through my eye and into my brain because I just can't bring myself to explain how to wash one's hands for THE EIGHTY MILLIONTH TIME. Water! Soap! Rub! More water! Oh, it's too hot? Turn on some cold! There you go! How HARD is that?!

Were you looking to buy a house? RETRACTION

How about this one? It sure is nice, believe you me. We've lived in it for just about five years, and we love it.

We were thinking, though, that we needed more space. So we got some plans drawn up to Do Work on it. The plans, they were expensive, I will not lie. But our street is such a perfect place to live that moving was out of the question. So, when our lovely neighbor across the street had to sell her lovely (bigger) house because she has moved to Boston, we bought it. Just like that. Pretty much just like that.

So now we're selling our super-nice bungalow style house. Here are some photos, captioned with detailed information.

If you are interested in moving to Northeast Baltimore, where property values are low and community involvement is high, please email me. We can talk.

NOT selling the house. Gonna live in the house. Love the house. Is it going to be too small for us in the future? Probably. Does it have one and a quarter bathrooms, which is at least three-quarters of a bathroom too few? Definitely. I am NOT looking forward to using the same shower as my two preteen boys in 5 years. But I guess we'll figure that out sometime in the next 5 years.

We could have moved to the house across the street, and it would have been great. But the evidence supporting a move got weaker and weaker, and as we showed our place to prospective buyers, the catalog of its defects got shorter and shorter.

I still feel like a doofus though. Bob and I have declared a moratorium on making decisions for a while - we are obviously not as good at it as the people who pay us for our judgement think we are.

Were you looking to buy a house?

Our house from the street, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

How about this one? It sure is nice, believe you me. We've lived in it for just about five years, and we love it.

We were thinking, though, that we needed more space. So we got some plans drawn up to Do Work on it. The plans, they were expensive, I will not lie. But our street is such a perfect place to live that moving was out of the question. So, when our lovely neighbor across the street had to sell her lovely (bigger) house because she has moved to Boston, we bought it. Just like that. Pretty much just like that.

So now we're selling our super-nice bungalow style house. Here are some photos, captioned with detailed information.

If you are interested in moving to Northeast Baltimore, where property values are low and community involvement is high, please email me. We can talk.

I want a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket

Bediboo found him a date, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Our neighborhood is becoming something of a destination for cool, off-beat, and family oriented. Juicy Boy, Mr. Four, Big Man and I took a tour today, and this is what we found. We started at the kid boutique.



Gretchen at Bediboo, 4321 Harford Road, has cool diaper bags, European toys, baby slings in beautiful prints, kid clothes that are cute but never precious, and print-trimmed chenille baby blankets that I wish came in grownup sizes.



Then we went upstairs to the rock and roll candy boutique. Candy!



Joel and Angela at Rock Candy (also at 4321 Harford Road, upstairs from Bediboo) have the Vosges, the Art Bars, plus quality bulk candy, novelty candy, and, er, a gummy steak. They're gonna get me some Dutch licorice.



Up the street a tick we visited the new yarn and spinning boutique!



Andrea at Spinster Yarn and Fibers (site coming soon), 4337 Harford Road, has more yarn books than I've ever seen, spinning supplies, and pillowy rainbows of every fiber that could be twisted into string. Also, a giant chair and sofa for curling up with your knitting. She'll also be offering classes.

Me, I'm more a lover of yarn than a knitter of yarn. I can knit a scarf, but we're pretty much scarfed up right now, and I have no ambition to expand my knitting abilities. I have plenty of friends to take up the knitting slack. But I told Andrea I'd teach an embroidery class if she ever wanted to offer one.

All of these businesses are within horking distance of the Red Canoe bookstore cafe, Zeke's Coffee Roastery, and The Chameleon Cafe. Great Soul Wellness Studio, a little north at 4711 Harford Rd, will be opening Saturday, offering movement classes (yoga, dance, drumming, kids classes), as well as therapeutic services such as massage and acupuncture. Red Canoe is soon to have a jewelry shop upstairs, handmade beautiful and quirky stuff by our own beautiful and quirky Constance.

It's looking a little Park Slopey around here, and that's not bad. God, if we could just get some decent bagels the transformation would be complete.

The sad ones run on olive oil

"So, guys, where did daddy take you for dinner after swimming?"
"It was a NEW pizza place!"
"It wasn't new - daddy said it had been there since 1996."
"1943."
"1943. And it was started by a guy who came to this country all the way from Indianapolis."
"Not Indianapolis..."
"Ohio!"
"Kentucky!"
"Starts with an 'Ih'..."
"Illinois!"
"India!"
"Israel!"
Pretty good geography for 4 and 6 year olds.
"Italy!"
"Right! And what was the guy's name?"
"Matthew! And there was a picture of him up on the wall in a gold frame."
"Did he look like a happy guy?"
"Yeah!"
"You think so? because I was going to tell mommy that he looked like one sad, bitter S.O.B."
"Yeah, I think he had a sad S.U.V."

You're the cream in my cat poo

You know that thing about the catshit coffee? Feral Indonesian cats eat coffee berries, the pits of which (coffee beans), pass through their digestive system (including the butthole, for those of you keeping track) unscathed. Then people (hopefully well-paid people) pick the beans out of the cat poop and sell them to gullible Americans for $80/pound.

Reeks of 21st century legend, right? I was so sure it was crap (sorry), but then my trusted friends Amy and Thomas, the owners of Zeke's Coffee, told us the other day that they've gotten their hands on some (eww) and are hosting a tasting. January 13, 9am, Mill Valley Garden Center. Ten bucks a ticket.

If Jaime can eat a wriggling grub the size of my thumb, you can go drink a cup of catshit coffee.

Have you seen Junior's grades?

Photo by and originally uploaded by Jules Jung.

Secret Crush Society and Even So (with Token Boy on bass) played the Rock 'n' Romp show this last Saturday at the Creative Alliance.

What? You didn't hear about it? Well then YOU must not have KIDS! Cause it's ONLY for people who show up with ankelbiters, boobmunchers, legitimate offspring or random borrowed urchins. Not too often you hear about a rock show that serves both juice boxes and microbrews. They used to have it in Tracey's back yard, but I think it's even nicer at the Patterson.

After some initial shyness, the kids danced and played. Big Man has some seriously dorky moves (by adult standards) but his cool friend Western State started copying him anyway. They looked pretty great, Big Man with his six arms flailing, Western with his hair streaming.

Our friend Girltwin, who's about a year and a half old, got right down front and did that up-and-down baby booty dance. Our friend Lisa, who's older than a year and a half, the frontwoman for Secret Crush, nearly lost her place a few times when she caught sight of Girltwin, the kid was just. so. cute! There was much spinning, some guitar-god idolatry, and everyone got a turn when it came time to pull trash from the dolphin's gullet.

Except Mr. Four: Mr. Four preferred to dance with me. As you can see above.

And that's the story of what happened to my back and why I am nearly nauseous with pain.

Kids + rock and roll = SO fun. Both bands were absolutely terrific.

Blossom of snow, may you bloom and grow

Valentine cookies from the Edelweiss, February, 2006

We were very sorry to read in this morning's paper that our local bakery, the Edelweiss, has closed. The baker, Dietrich Paul, who owned the place together with his wife, died. He had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease last year.

When we moved to Northeast Baltimore we loved the way the neighborhood felt kind of old. There were shops that sharpened scissors and repaired vacuum cleaners. "What's next?" we joked, as we traveled the main drag, "a place that fixes VCR's?". There are numerous medical pharmacies and dialysis centers, too. And a real Italian deli that makes its own mozzarella and a German deli that makes its own schnitzel. We totally monopolized the City Paper's Best of Baltimore (note the Kevin Sherry illustration - he of I'm the Biggest Thing in the Ocean) this year.

The bakery felt like it had been there forever, and looked like it could have been in a mill town in Pennsylvania - homemade curtains, Bible verses, and decorative plates on the wall. We had an enormous cookout as a housewarming party, and I called the bakery to see if we could buy hamburger and hotdog buns from them. Mr. Paul said they didn't make them as a rule, but he could bake a few dozen for me, sure, no big deal. They were great - how often do you get compliments on the buns?

It felt both thrifty and indulgent to buy bread there, and an apple fritter the size (and texture, I'm guessing) of Stephen Hawking's brain, and a few cookies. I never managed to break a twenty at that place, even when I treated the kids to lunch.

Every Thursday afternoon a posse of truly ancient German-speaking people would show up for the sauerbraten special (pretty damn good sauerbraten) and stay to sing songs that I'd always suspect could be translated to, "We are the Germans, we're so great, all the rest of you will be our slaves sooner or later," but they were so damn merry about it, pausing to gasp out laughter or take a hit off the oxygen tank.

It turns out that Dietrich and his wife were no young pups themselves. According to the Sun article, when they bought the bakery 9 years ago, Mrs. Paul was 70... and I don't think that he was any younger than she. Pretty hard-core, to start a new business at an age when everyone else is settling down to watch a couple decades of "Murder, She Wrote".

But he was something of a hard-core guy, especially considering that he smelled like vanilla extract. I was buying a pound of cookies one day. He piled a double handful onto the scale, and as he pulled his hands away, the scale read one pound exactly. I said something banal like, "Looks like you have the touch." He gave me a speculative look for a second, as if deciding whether or not he should tell me the story, then he shrugged a little and said, "When I was in the merchant marine, we were in a bad storm on the North Sea," and I mean, right there, you know, you could finish that sentence any way you wanted to - you are one balls-ass baker, in my book. Turns out his scale went overboard in the storm and he had to guesstimate everything he cooked for the next 4 months, so he's been good at eyeballing weights ever since.

And you know, I can tell a man's inseam at ten paces because I used to sell menswear... but that's just not the same.

We're going to miss getting the kids' birthday cakes from Edelweiss. I'm going to miss those insane apple fritters. It was a real treat to be greeted by Miss Nancy, Mrs. Genevieve, and the good-natured, reserved Mr. Paul, and our neighborhood is poorer without him and without his bakery.

Everything hurts

she's up!, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Seventy-five degrees and sunny?
Check.

Supersoft gigantic custom-made striped stilt pants and a silver stick with ribbons?
Check. It was one year ago, at our fair, that I met Big Man's classmate Nature Girl and her mom, who last week convinced me that I needed to learn to stiltwalk, supplied the stilts, and then made me all the accoutrements. Dude, Molly, well met.

Falling?
Check.

Not getting hurt?
Amazingly, empoweringly, check. Now that the worst has happened and I didn't break my kneecaps or my neck or my coccyx, I have a lot less fear. Although out of respect for my loved ones and my knees, I am in the market for a slightly-less-clapped-out pair of used drywall stilts.

Sack races?
Check.


Fascinating puppets?
Check. Requiem for a Landfill deserves a MacArthur grant.

Two-dollar brisket tacos with queso fresco and chipotle sauce?
Check x 4.

Running into almost everyone we know at the neighborhood fair?
Check. Our kids could run and play and there were so many parents who knew them and would look out for them that we didn't have to get all tweaky if they were out of sight for a few minutes.

AAAND...

Junker cars roaring past the cornstalks and into the derby pit (I got video)?
Check.

The smell of diesel and burning motor oil ("white-trash aromatherapy" says AH)?
Check.

Slightly toasted lesbians manhandling my children?
Check, and my kids have two new grownup (well, ostensibly they're grown-up) favorite friends. Dudes, AH and LF, well met.

Red dust and white smoke seeping up into the dark country air under the sodium lights?
Check.

Running into a dozen people we know at the Arcadia Volunteer Fire Department Demolition Derby, the worst-kept secret in Baltimore?
Check! Only the best of Baltimore boho society makes the trek, though - they run an indie credit check at the door. All my pictures here.

Fireworks arcing into the black black sky, reflected off a thousand car hoods and windshields and roofs, like a field of faceted beetle carapaces?
Sigh. Check.

Best. Day. Ever. But everything, as I say, hurts.

"I'm going to get that sock"

Big Man and I attended the Baltimore Comic Convention yesterday. It was his first comic convention: also mine. Many adults with bad posture. More people mumbling to themselves than you usually see in downtown Baltimore, and that's saying something.

I'm very glad I went with a 6-year-old, as the boy was the perfect excuse not to get too close to the tables of artists who draw pinup girls being threatened by zombies, or superheroes covered with lesions, or ... yeah you know. Ick.


What we did get close to was Bob McLeod's table: he signed a copy of Superhero ABC for us, which is a book that I pimp to ALLL the little kids, and which I've enjoyed reading aloud many times. I like using that 1950's Batman narrator voice. Nice man. Big Man was really impressed, went to bed with the book last night. I see from his website you can get t-shirts... ooh, Christmas is coming for my children!


Drawing by Scott Derby

Also we stopped a while at the table of Dave Perillo and Scott Derby, bought some little pictures and flipped through Dave's Li'l Scamp comics - very cute characters making many poo jokes, perfect for the child who has finished all the Captain Underpants books but is not quite ready for Crumb. Dave had a batch of nifty A-B-C drawings (S is for Saucer Man, X is for X-ray specs) that are looking for a publisher. That book would make it straight onto my Children's Books for Hipsters list. Both these guys draw with such clean, appealing lines, and I am absolutely sure I've seen their work before, but I can't figure out where.

The big booth with the big TV screen that showed movie trailers was tempting, but as we were walking by it was Saw IV, and there is no fucking way I'm letting my kid see even a second of that. God, ten years from now he'll probably be obsessed with those things. Among the movie swag were plastic baby rattles promoting Shoot 'Em Up. Mmmm, tasteful!

I saw a couple of titles that I'd like my library system to pick up: Annie Auerbach and Jamar Nicholas's the Grosse Adventures and Amelia Rules by Jimmy Gownley.

I was disappointed that I didn't find David Petersen, the blindingly talented creator of Mouse Guard; and I had kind of hoped for some of the old names I used to read - Evan Dorkin, Mike Allred, et al; plus I'd like to have seen some more thoughtful stuff for middle grade and young adult readers. Babymouse is all well and good, but I continue to think that creators of really high-quality picture books, like Patricia Polacco and Mo Willems and Eric Rohmann and David Weisner, could write and illustrate a juvenile graphic novel with depth and breadth and emotion.

Or? the pigeon could steal a sock. Now that would be a damn funny book.

If you said jump in the river I would

sci fi, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.