Trust in me when I say

I have been visiting lately with a friend who is in hospice, dying of cancer. And before you for one second think that I am a good person for doing this, let me say that I am doing it entirely for selfish reasons.

My friend is the mom of a large family, six kids, a couple of whom I went to high school with, that she raised largely on her own. That family meant a lot to me growing up - one boy was my best friend, another was one of my first crushes. The oldest girl took me to New York City for the first time. They lived four doors up from us. And the household was full of the usual Eight Is Enough contumaciousness - somebody was always getting married, or living in sin, or getting in trouble, or, whatever, chasing a pet around or something. None of that shit ever happened at my house. At my house, nobody ever even burned the toast.

So their house was, in a way, real life to me. And their mom was always - always - busy.

Now that her children, my contemporaries, are grown, successful, gone away, there has been space there. She joined the garden club and the sewing group, both of which my mom is a member of, so I've gotten occasional news. But still there was rarely time when I was in the neighborhood and not busy with some scheduled thing.

And then she got cancer. Years ago now. It's completely unfair, as cancer always is, but, I don't know, more so in her case. Because she was a nurse, because she cared for other people all her life, because she entered the Peace Corps as a grandmother, because her greatest vice was peanut butter and pickle relish sandwiches. It's just unfair, ok?

She has dealt with her illness in the same way that she dealt with all the everyday catastrophes attendant with having six children - philosophically, with perspective and candor and unusual calm. This summer, she entered a hospice program that allowed her to live at home, get her meds, have a wheelchair. She managed pretty well, but this autumn she began to fail. That's when I started coming around once a week.

During my visits, we just hung out. I had her to myself - left my boys with my parents for the afternoon and evening, which has been wonderful in and of itself. I told her funny stories about the kids and about the library. I knitted a scarf for my mom. She got me up to date on her kids, all of whom I had lost touch with. That perspective of hers was awe-inspiring. When I fretted about a kid, or about anything else, she was sympathetic and always had interesting suggestions, but mostly reminded me that worrying wasn't going to help. I found we thought the same way about a lot of things - we gave people the benefit of the doubt right up until the same point. And then - forget it!

More than once, when we talked about her kids, I expressed my admiration at the way they leapt to each other's aid without hesitation, ditched their jobs and lives to jet home when she needed them. "Six!" I would say, "Six kids, and they all grew up generous and good, and also funny and smart! And good-looking!" She laughed and admitted she had no idea what she'd done right.

I have such anxiety about my kids. They were born perfect, and they are smart and polite and beautiful now. I have been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since the Apgar score came back. Probably ever since I got pregnant. I told her that one time and she shook her head. She said she couldn't help feeling that all their good luck had finally turned - we had just learned that her youngest daughter's husband had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer himself. I said, "You know that's a fallacy - there's no sum total of misery in our lives and we'll get it sooner or later - right?"

She said she knew that. But it's hard not to believe it sometimes.

I love you, Bobbi. I hope I am half the mother you have been.

Oh, she can see the cars - she just can't get out of their way

Reach for the sky, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

We drove to the Eastern Shore of Maryland the other night to see Nick Lowe perform. It was a good show, Bill Kirchen opened, and both of those old men rocked, and crooned, and seemed to enjoy themselves. We did too, although it was a little weird to be the youngest people at a show. At our age.

The last time I saw Nick Lowe, I was in college in Cleveland. I borrowed a car to get there, pouring pouring pouring rain that night, but he played almost 3 hours for the 75 people who had struggled through the monsoon to get there. I say I borrowed a car. Well, I borrowed the keys. The guy who owned the car didn't know I was doing that. And actually, the girl to whom he'd lent a set of keys didn't know I was doing that either. And then I drove through a flooded intersection on the way back to the East Side and the car stalled out and wouldn't start, so I left it there and walked the rest of the way home.

So I guess technically I stole a car to get to that show. And I'm embarrassed about it.

I was thinking about that night on the way to see the show, and shaking my head trying to remember the train of thought that led to me committing basically a felony (Del Fuegos opened, did I mention? It really was one of the best shows I've ever seen.), when we passed onto Kent Island and I remembered another story.

Man, talk about BAD DECISIONS.

This is a story I call The Kent Island Massacre. It's a BAD STORY. I am using the pseudonyms from Reservoir Dogs, it's so bad. I was there. Here's what happened.

At 26 years of age, I had been promoted from tech support to Director of Marketing for that insurance company I worked for. Yeah how does that happen? The president of the company saw a flyer I'd made announcing an update to the software, and decided I was a "marketing person." Decided that, as an Anthropology major with zero marketing experience, I was cheap, and could be bullied. I hated that company. So I went from being on the IT team to the Sales team.

The IT team had been headed up by an old stoner, a tiny little Richard Thompson - loving hippie who liked to say he hadn't "sold out - I've bought in." That guy, I liked.

The Sales team was headed up by a willfully obnoxious, childishly overweight prick who seemed to think that he was entitled to... to make phone calls to employees while he was sitting on the toilet. To unbend a paperclip during a meeting and clean his ears with it. He would take your glasses off your face, saying, "You've got something on your glasses," lick the lenses, and give them back to you, and giggle. If you sat next to him on an airplane, he'd spill a drink in your lap while the seatbelt sign was lit, and laugh while he groped your ass under the pretext of helping to mop it up. During the course of his employ with that company, he was sued three times for sexual harassment.

You might think a corporate retreat with this guy was something to be avoided. YOU WOULD BE RIGHT.

One spring, the sales team, including myself, headed to a beautiful inn on Kent Island, just over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Most of us had worked for weeks on the presentations we were to give. As the resident graphics person, I had worked for weeks on EVERYONE's presentation. I hated that company.

The first night of the retreat, we all went to dinner somewhere. The boss - let's call him Mr. Brown, like Quentin Tarantino's character in Reservoir Dogs - was famous for running up giant dinner tabs. Many bottles of wine, several thousand dollars. So that happened. And then there was a bar.

At the bar, Mr. Brown started buying rounds of shots for the house. A couple hundred bucks a round - this was a semi-fancy sportsmen's bar, the kind of place with a fireplace. I remember the fireplace.

I don't drink shots, so I sat, one girl among a dozen men, drank a beer, was mortified and bored, and schemed how to get the car keys away from Brown, whom I knew would insist on driving back on the dark country roads to our inn.

Until. I don't know. I'm guessing they tried to cut him off, or he made one "redneck" comment too many, but all of a sudden, we were all leaving. There was some shoving, and one of the nicest guys in the group, we're calling him Mr. Orange, a civilized man with a nice wife and good suits, got knocked into the fireplace. Smacked his head on the marble mantel. Started to bleed.

I actually had the car keys at this moment, I'd snatched them off the bar. We were herding everyone out of the bar and packing into the car, when Brown demanded them back from me. He wouldn't get into the car without them, and kept threatening to go back into the bar, so I handed them over. There must have been at least six of us in that car, with Mr. Orange across our laps in the back, bleeding, when Mr. Brown started up the car, backed it up about six feet, then put it in drive and drove straight into the bar.

Rammed the building, yes he did. Backed up and did it again.

Now, I have done things out of spite. I once broke a bathroom fixture in a restaurant that I thought had treated my friends and I unfairly. I encouraged my friends to urinate on the lumber that was stacked in the yard of an allegedly corrupt Cleveland city councilman who was building an unsightly house right in the middle of our historic and picturesque campus. But I like to think that, had I been driving, and even had I been as drunk as Mr. Brown was on that night, I would not have attempted to punish the physical edifice of that bar for the perceived slights of its staff and/or patrons.

Moron.

The car is eventually piloted back to the inn, where there is discussion as to who will accompany the unfortunate Mr. Orange to the ER. Nobody thinks Mr. Brown should go. But he does, along with Mr. White and Mr. Blue, level-headed guys who are large enough to physically restrain him should he get stupid. -er. Again.

I stay at the inn. I want no more of this foolishness. When I wake up the next morning, to a dazzling Eastern Shore day, I quickly realize that our presentations are canceled. Cars are missing from the parking lot. Nobody is at breakfast. The only person around is Nice Guy Eddie, a Southerner who was a little older, a little more savvy, than the rest of us. He always knew when to keep his head down and when to take a pass, and he's packing to leave. He had NOT chosen to go to the bar the night before, naturally.

Nice Guy Eddie recommended a tactical retreat to Baltimore, maybe hitting the outlets on the way, and we made a pleasant day of it. I bought one of my favorite skirts of all time at the J. Crew outlet that day - a long, full, sweepy ivory-colored job that I still have in the closet.

A few weeks later, at work, I was asked into the Comptroller's office. She asked me a few VERY pointed questions about that night on Kent Island, and I BEGGED her to let me elaborate. I was absolutely sure Mr. Brown would fire me if he knew I'd told on him, but I thought if they fired him first I'd be ok.

They didn't fire him. Well, actually, they did eventually fire him. Not for that. And not for the multiple complaints and three successful lawsuits accusing him of fondling, groping, and making inappropriate comments to female employees. He was fired when the wife of one of his male employees called the company's HR guy. Told a story about Mr. Brown sort of maybe kinda making a pass at her husband. Mr. Brown was asked to pack his things, and he was escorted from the building. Within the hour.

God, I hated that company. No wonder Nice Guy Eddie kept his head down. You guys who think Mad Men is so much fun... I don't know, I don't think I would enjoy that show.

Years later, I found out the parts of the story I hadn't witnessed. Mr. White, who eventually found a successful career NOT selling insurance financing, told me that the reason so many people were missing the next morning was that, at the hospital, Mr. Brown had punched a cop.

That's right. Poor Mr. Orange is getting his wound stitched, and a cop asks our boys to move the company car parked haphazardly outside the ER entrance. Doesn't even ask about the damage - doesn't even start to accuse my boss of driving drunk - and Brown starts shouting and spitting and eventually somehow hits the cop. Short little pudgy Mr. Brown, who collected these good-looking, strapping men around him as if he were a big gay sultan.

The sultan goes to jail. Is given a sobriety test. The boys follow.

Mr. Blue spends the remainder of the night and much of the next morning driving around looking for an ATM that will spit out enough money to pay Mr. Brown's bail.

Mr. White is stuck at the police station babysitting Mr. Brown.

Mr. Orange is discharged from the hospital and walks out into that beautiful morning wondering where the fuck everyone went.

Hey, I bought a really nice skirt and had a lovely lunch with Nice Guy Eddie. Not a total loss.

Don't I know your name? - The Bob Story

Jungle gym, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

The Beautiful Miss Brown visited the library yesterday looking for a book on taxidermy. It happens. I'm not asking any questions.

Turns out, she and her boyfriend had seen a red fox dead in the road, and they scooped it up, put it in the trunk, and decided to skin it. I nodded. I used to do that.

Did I used to do that? Yes, yes I did.

There was a day, a rare, beautiful spring day in Cleveland, when I sat behind Clark Building on the CWRU campus with a hot plate and a big pot. Watching that pot. Watching the people come in and out of the student center next door. An acquaintance wandered over, curious.

"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Boiling an owl."
"No, you're not."
"Sure I am." I poked the sodden owl carcass with a stick.

I believe it was at that moment that that boy became irresistably drawn to me - decided I was the girl he wanted to spend the rest of his, er, next couple of years with. I myself was thinking more about how much bleach to add to the water. You want enough that the cartilage dissolves, but not so much as to take all the coating off the beak.

There are a few things you can do if you intend for someone to fall in love with you. The most foolproof, of course, is to BE EIGHTEEN AND BE BOILING AN OWL IN PUBLIC. Second most foolproof, of course, is to be eighteen period. The worst thing you can do is to quote Elton John lyrics. Look how it worked for Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge. He ended up having to drag Nicole Kidman around the rest of the movie.

You could sing real awful but write great songs, like Nick Cave or Lou Reed. You can show up in majorette boots. Majorette boots are the most sexually potent objects in the universe. I have boots of almost every variety, from cowboy to pirate and back again, but I have never had the nerve to get myself a pair of majorette boots.

You can insult the object of your affection in such a way that it's really a compliment. This gives him or her the opportunity to act all affronted, but be secretly pleased. This is tricky, and should only be attempted if you are eighteen, or a genius.

The rest is all variations in tone and eye contact, and that I can't help you with. Really, the majorette boots are the way to go.

None of this explains my husband Bob. I was not wearing majorette boots when we first met - or even my glasses, so I was bat-blind. He was probably wearing Chucks. He did not insult me. I did not insult him, I don't think I spoke a word. I was twenty and he was twenty-one, so we were past our irresistable years, though admittedly not by much. We were sober, it was daytime, and he was wearing a tie over a white t-shirt. But it was love at first sight for both of us.

Yes, those of you who don't believe in love at first sight (Jaime) or who have heard this story before (Jaime) can tune out now. I'll tell you the rest of the owl story later. And I don't begrudge. If you had had to hear this ridiculous story as many times as Jaime has, you would roll your eyes too. Hell, even I resist telling it too much, and I know it to be true. This story inspires works of art (Sarah). It causes people to ask if the world spontaneously bursts into song around us (Brian) (smartass).

But here, by popular demand (Sandy, Melissa), is The Bob Story: a teen novel in the making if I ever read one, spanning continents and decades and leaving a trail of betrayals and broken hearts, but with, after all, a happy ending.

How we met

I think it was 1986. It was certainly summer. We were in college - he was at Columbia and I was at Case Western Reserve. I was spending the summer working in Provincetown, Mass, washing dishes and managing a kite store; he was in Cleveland canvassing door-to-door for some environmental organization. One weekend I came back to Cleveland to visit my boyfriend.

Let's call this boyfriend Blot on My Conscience Number One. No, that's far too long. Besides, we're cool now. He and his wife came to our wedding. Our kids play together as if they've known each other all their lives. Let's call him Pants.

Anyway, that weekend I got the flu. Miserable weekend. Hot and bored and feverish in the tract house Pants shared with his brother (whom we'll call Peel), I woke up one afternoon to voices in the living room.

I hate not being in on things. So I struggled out to the living room to sit on the floor and be with company. It was some friend of Peel. Bob. Peel was thinking about transferring to Columbia, and Bob was there to give him advice and drink cheap beer and make a lot of wisecracks.

From what I could tell with my glasses off, he was cute. He was very funny. I don't think I said a thing - I really was ill. And I have no idea what he remembers of that afternoon. I didn't even really catch his name.

But when Pants's brother Peel needed help moving his crap to NYC that fall, I hopped into the van so quick I'm sure I sprained something.

In New York, after unloading, we got something to eat and then ended up at a bar. I nodded along with the conversation, thinking, "Boy, wouldn't it be great if that guy from this summer showed up!"

The guy from the summer showed up, made his way to our table with that bouncy walk some athletic boys can't help having.

I thought, "There's an empty seat next to me - wouldn't it be great if he sat next to me!"

He sat next to me.

I still don't think I had much to say. This guy, now that I had my glasses on, was even better looking than I had thought, and I had thought he was pretty cute. I was breathless, especially when his left thigh got closer and closer to my right, until our legs were pressed together with actual force. After everyone was drunk, we found a minute to speak privately. I don't know what we said. I may have proposed. Anyway, it wasn't that private - I kind of got busted for it. God knows Peel hated me from that moment forward. Guy works for the SEC now and I swear if I ever get investigated, I'll know it'll be because of that night at the Lion's Head.

The Next Time We Met

Had to be the next summer. Bob came home to Cleveland for a visit, and made the rounds. Pants and I were in the same social scene, so I saw him at a party or two. Stalked him. And then one night, Bob and I were among the last ones awake at Bob's friend Bob's house. Bob's friend Bob has a daughter named Paula - it's very confusing. Pants had fallen asleep in a chair. I think he was doing his med school internships that summer and he was always falling asleep over a plate of food or while trying to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation or once, memorably, while he was on his back under his VW bus fixing something. I thought he had died.

Bob and I were on Bob's friend Bob's porch talking about poetry or something smart that I know nothing about, and I couldn't stand it one more second. Without looking at him, I reached out my hand. He would either ignore it, and I had imagined any attraction he might have felt for me, or he would take it, and I would... I don't know. Attack him. Cry. Sit there until my hand fell off.

He took my hand. We stopped talking about poetry or politics or whatever. Explanations, assurances, gazing. He kissed me. Side B of Blood on the Tracks played over and over on Bob's friend Bob's stereo. At length, we took a walk. And on the walk, none of your business. Let's just say I never washed that U2 t-shirt again.

We got back to Bob's friend Bob's house and took up sleeping positions - he on the couch, me on a chair. Pants woke up and realized he needed to stop home at our house before going to the hospital the next day. I told him I'd catch a ride with someone else, and as he left, I crept onto the couch with Bob.

My memory's a little hazy at this point. It might have been the next day, the same week, the same summer, or it could have been the next summer, when I found myself in Bob's mom's car getting a ride home. Bob's mom, whom I was later to know as The Estimable Frannie. Sorry for boning your littlest lamb in the back seat of the Buick, Frances. Though after some of the drama Bob's brothers and sisters brought... no, yeah, let me just apologize. I miss you, Frannie.

A cop knocked on the steamed-up window that night, and I, all free white and twenty-one (probably) and full of bullshit entitled indignation, was like, "What?! Are we doing something illegal?" as Bob shoved my jeans at me and hissed, "Just say 'Yes, officer'!" The cop sighed. "First of all, the park's closed," he said, and I said, "Well. All right then."

That morning, Bob came up to the apartment I shared with Pants to say goodbye. He was going back to New York. Knowing now what was waiting for him at his mother's house - the dozens of brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, the lifelong better-than-brothers best friends, I am impressed and flattered that he spent so much time with me during his visit home. Although... I guess none of them were boning him in the back of Frannie's Buick, so I suppose that gave me an edge.

I found his wallet wedged in our couch a couple hours after he left. I had no phone number for him, and everything in his wallet had his New York info on it. I panicked a little, finally got ahold of him (I think by calling Pants and telling a preposterous lie about why I would need Bob's mom's phone number - Pants, brother, I do not deserve your forgiveness), and eventually settled on sending his wallet to him in New York.

So I sent it. Along with an eight-page letter handwritten on legal paper in my miniscule handwriting.

Did I do that? I may have edited it down to six pages before it hit the mails. On the list of how to not make a person fall in love with you, writing them a six-page handwritten letter after you've met three times is just below quoting Elton John lyrics.

But somehow...

We Meet Again

Later, I graduated. Pants and I broke up, over completely unrelated matters. I got a job with a software company. It failed. I moved home to Baltimore. Slept on the bunk bed that had been bought for me when I was six. Worked writing software manuals for an insurance company.

Kind of a low point.

One day, bringing in the mail at my parents' house, I noticed a newsletter from a Catholic charity in Seattle. Not the usual kind of thing you find in my parents' mail. Opening it, I found one line scrawled across the top: "How are you? How is Baltimore? Love, Bob."

Imagine walking along your street and a tiny meteorite falls to the sidewalk in front of you. Glowing and smoking and FROM SPACE.

I wrote back to the address on the newsletter, using my company's stationery. "Dear Bob - Seattle? and Catholic? and Yes."

In addition to writing manuals, I also handled tech support. I answered phones all day, walking people through the onscreen instructions, taking shit from redneck lady office managers who were fed up with this newfangled computer hoodoo. It was 1988. I sprained my hand doing that job, when I punched the handset of the phone I was speaking into. How stupid is that? Punching a phone.

So the day the phone rang at work and Bob said "Hello Paula. This is Bob." For the first time, exactly the same way he says it a dozen times a week to me. Imagine walking along your street and the CHRIST CHILD falls gently to the sidewalk in front of you. And you have your camera on you, and he asks if you would like him to grant you three wishes.

I got goosebumps so hard they hurt.

Bob was coming to the area for his cousin's wedding, and we made plans to extend his trip so that we could see the sights and be uncomfortable around each other and weld ourselves one to another for a few days. We went to Assateague, if I remember. Saw the ponies fucking in the parking lot. Not the aphrodisiac you might think, but we did not let that bother us.

And in spring he was visiting his brother in Washington D.C. I left work and drove down 95 like I was a paper airplane with jet engines. There was a party, I was wearing a blue dress, must have been fifty people on Joe's deck, and all I could see was him. That night I admitted I loved him and he laughed. "You may never meet anyone who... who worships you like I do."

Blot on My Conscience Number Two, Poe, was somewhat suspicious when I started making plans to 'visit my brother' in Seattle. My brother did, in fact, live in Seattle, and I did, in fact, plan on staying with him, since Bob was living with his girlfriend, The Completely Awesome Girlfriend, at the time. She came to our wedding. Her children play with our children like they have known each other all their lives. It's a theme.

Bob was working at a homeless shelter. I had his home address but I hadn't written or called (no, he and Completely Awesome had already broken up. It was a different girlfriend. Well anyway), so I staked out his place of work. Nothing like hanging out in the alley outside a homeless shelter dressed like a late-80's club kid. A very nice lady with very few teeth offered me an apple.

And here he comes, straight from his lunchtime basketball game, sweaty and still with that bounce in his step, carrying his ball. Walked right past me, his head swiveling on its stem. I have never surprised anyone that thoroughly - and let me tell you, children, I have pink hair. I can be a surprising person.

There were a few visits to Seattle. I stayed at his place when he was between girlfriends, at my brother's when he wasn't. There are one or two blots on my husband's conscience too. On one trip, I went out to dinner with my brother's girlfriend and we discovered roasted garlic for the first time. Ate an entire head of garlic, like four inches in diameter. The next day, Bob was due to meet me at my brother's place on his lunch break, but my body was busy converting all that garlic to THE most toxic gas. I raced around the apartment opening windows and finding fans, waving my arms around, desperately trying to chivvy those clouds of fart into the at-large atmosphere of Queen Anne's Hill.

Eventually, he wrote that he had been accepted to a program in Africa. In Zimbabwe. He'd be gone a year at least, and had no plan further than that. He was flying out of JFK, and suggested we meet in New York. And for once in my life, I refused him.

I used to write him letters that I couldn't send. I wrote lots of letters I did send, and he wrote me, less frequently, letters full of description that I scrutinized and re-read and parsed for hidden meaning, but in some ways, in those days, he was so unreal to me that I could use the idea of him like a movie. He was so handsome, and so romantic, and so very very intermittent. You can see how that is just not to be trusted. A humid afternoon here, a Pacific cliff there, plus all that sneaking around. How could you not be in love with that? And how could you imagine that to be anything remotely resembling real? I know a teen novel when I'm in one.

When he was in Africa, I went to Africa too. Now - Africa is big. But I knew he'd be traveling in the north while I was there, and I suggested we meet in Tunis. And for once in his life, he refused me.

Bob says that if he were writing this story as a teen novel, he'd change that. He'd have met me in Tunis. But in the novel, he'd find me just at the moment I was being menaced by a gang of bus drivers who were holding my backpack hostage, and then we'd run away, and then I'd turn to him and say, "Well. You got me back for that alley in Seattle," and then whatever whatever.

But instead we did our separate trips, and learned our separate things, and came back attached to yet another couple of Blots. He disembarked in Boston, where his girlfriend had been accepted to law school. I returned to Baltimore, took a secretarial job and ran a failing business. He got a job signing people in and out of another homeless shelter.

Ergo, grad school.

We grow up

I moved to New York to go to NYU. He stayed in Boston and went to MIT. I went on MIT's website one day and looked up his email address. It was 1995. I wanted to invite him to my wedding, but the groom (who is hopefully a Blot On His Own Damn Conscience) said, "No way."

One day, I got an email. "My girlfriend broke up with me. I am pretty depressed." Oddly enough, this email came exactly one day after my husband had left, apparently for good.

"I am 'pretty depressed' myself. I think my husband left me. What are you doing this weekend?"

I was single for exactly two days. When he showed up at the Port Authority Friday afternoon, I was so nervous. We hadn't seen each other in five years. He had grey in his hair. He was warm, and beautiful.

In New York that weekend, were we a little wounded? Maybe. Maybe that's why we were so un-selfconscious with each other. God, I always thought Bob was this brooding, serious guy. All that time doing social justice stuff - how could he not be angry all the time? And how could he not disdain me, with my hot pink suede ankle boots and head full of song lyrics? That weekend though, I just took him everywhere I liked, and everything I liked, he liked it too. We talked more. He turned out to be kind of a goof, which was a big relief. 

When I dropped him at the bus station Sunday night I asked if we were going to see each other again. "I mean, soon, not like usual. I know we always see each other again." He replied with something to the effect that I'd have to get a restraining order if I wanted it not to be so.

I got a divorce, he got a degree. He moved in, with his chair and his bottle capper and his forty-seven hats. I proposed one afternoon in a bar.

I said, "It's getting warmer. Time to wash the curtains in the living room."
He said, "Ah. Of course. Warmer weather: wash curtains."
I said, "Isn't it relaxing to know that one day you'll be married to a person who knows when it's time to wash the curtains?"
He smiled at me and said that yes, it was a weight off his mind.


You know, now that I'm thinking about it, it wasn't Pants who saw me boiling that owl. It was Pants's best friend, Mike, so he heard about it secondhand, which is probably even better. The reality of reducing an animal to bones is seldom as romantic as the concept. Probably why Mike never fell in love with me, plus he was already in love with someone else. What did she do? She was beautiful, and brilliant, and a free spirit. That works too.

That explains a lot.

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

Found a bug

Zhou found a bug, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

I wrote some porn one time, when I was in high school. Why? Oh, that's kind of a dumb story. Wait, but... I have a blog. What the hell else is this thing for?

Goes like this: one of my best friends in high school was a boy named [Jim]. One morning, as we walked to school, Jim confessed to me that he thought he might be gay. So I bought him four pornographic novels.

Wait, you did what? No, shut up, let me tell it. I bought these novels, or, got someone older to - keep in mind we lived in the suburbs and this was 1982 - because... I thought Jimmy needed more information on the subject, and I wanted to help. It took a fair bit of conniving on my part.

And, well, of course, Jimmy didn't need more information: I didn't realize, then, that when a boy says "I think I might be gay," that doesn't mean he has had a disturbing dream about Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. No, "I think I might be gay," usually means "I have recently had some of that-there homosexual sex, and I really really liked it."

Well, what did I know? My understanding of homosexuality was limited to Victor/Victoria, and while Jim could do an excellent Julie Andrews imitation, I was rational enough not to equate that... with... wait. I may have been wrong about that. Too. What is more, the only porn I'd ever seen was the occasional Playboy in my dad's briefcase when he came home from a business trip.

But most importantly, I was utterly, utterly without experience myself. A purer eleventh-grade virgin there never has been. I'd never even been on a date, and while I was concerned about what that said about me, Social Pariah-wise, I wasn't otherwise all that interested.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I believe I mail-ordered these books (which would explain why my parents got the International Male catalog for so many years). And when they came, I read them, and I was appalled. Outraged; betrayed. THE WRITING WAS JUST SO AWFUL!

Yep, THAT's what bothered me about my first exposure to material that was intentionally sexual in nature. The fact that there was no editorial hand in evidence.

And of course Jimmy thought they were boring, and I didn't understand anything, so I was like, "I KNOW! They're terrible!" So, as night follows day - and this is a common, common phenomenon in my life, and an impulse almost never to be trusted - my next sentence was, "Hell, I could write better than this!"

So for a day or two in College Algebra (sorry, Mr. uhh... the guy who said he didn't believe in South Dakota, oh by the way I am here to tell you South Dakota exists, and it's fuckin COLD) I did nothing but write porn. In pencil, on lined spiral-bound notebook paper. I may even have it somewhere still. There was a stable boy, and a "Washington Monument of passion," and testicles the size (and texture! where on god's earth did I get that?) of overripe plums.

My art teacher, who was patiently waiting for me to graduate so that I would leave town and not get him fired for giving me rides home from school on his motorcycle, got ahold of this thing at one point. Not my fault, believe me - that thing got Xeroxed and sent all over the county. I saw a copy in the boys' locker room of Hereford High School, which is practically Pennsylvania. I was kind of famous for a while there.

Anyway, surveying my parodic penile prose, his comment was, "You know those things don't... get that big..." and when I assured him the whole thing was a joke, he said, "Good. Yeah. Because otherwise... you're going to be pretty disappointed."

Last week I read the last entry in the ten-part graphic novel series Y: The Last Man. It's nominated for a Cybils Award as a Teen Graphic Novel. And it's a good series: funny, well-drawn, with an interesting premise: all the males on Earth have been wiped out (I think there was a virus, I can't recall exactly), except for our hero, Yorick, and his pet monkey. Anyway, the ten books cover five years in which Yorick rambles all over the planet, running from, er, Israelis (among others) and looking for his girlfriend, Beth.

In this last book, Yorick and Beth are finally reunited. Naturally, they immediately get a room and have a whole batch of rowdy sex, which is implied by the disheveled nature of the apartment when we see them next: having sex standing up in the middle of the room. Yorick is entirely supporting Beth - no table, no wall.

They finish their shenanigans, and he puts her down. They stand together talking. She moves a few feet away, and they talk some more. Then they argue. Then he gets his clothes on and storms out. ALL STANDING UP.

I am not being entirely flip when I say that this sequence kind of messed up my ability to read the book. It's not like Yorick is some bodybuilder: he's an emo-looking, slight guy. His knees, his calves... look, nobody has sex standing up and doesn't sit down right afterwards.

Luckily, I cannot draw to save my life, so I'm not going to all of a sudden throw up my hands and go, "THAT'S IT. I can write a better graphic novel than this." Because... seriously, no. Brian K. Vaughn is a terrific graphic novelist.

It's just, if it's being marketed to teens... I don't want them to end up disappointed.

What's your name, little girl?

I have been giving people nicknames for as long as I can remember - at least since the day I realized that my given name is un-nickname-able. Oh to have been Elizabeth or Margaret - to invent a new nickname every time I changed my wardrobe! But I have one name and I always will, despite real efforts by charitable friends to come up with something interesting.

But that doesn't mean my friends are stuck with their names, and I habitually lengthen, shorten, translate, or completely ignore their first gift from their parents. For example, I am the only person (besides some homeless people in Seattle) who has ever called my husband 'Bobby' instead of Bob. Charlotte, Peter, Jerry and various Rachels have been called Carlotta, Pedro, Gerhard, Raquel. I staked my claim on a friend in college by shortening his already one-syllable name to, basically, just a vowel sound and a fricative.

And my kids - don't get me started on my kids. They've learned to respond to just about anything that comes out of my mouth in a certain tone of voice. Especially since I mix them up pretty frequently. What? They're 20 months apart - pretty much if I need the attention of one of them, I probably need the other one too, or at least he can tell his brother, "O HAI WHATSHERNAME SEZ DON'T DO THAT."

But there's worse. I have kind of a very bad genius for mean nicknames. I'm ashamed. But a little proud. And ashamed. In my defense, I never fire the first shot. It's always someone who has been either mean to me first or is a jerk in general.

My dear friend Bill once had boyfriend who was not nice - to him, to me, to anyone. That guy liked his cat and the Pope, and the rest of us be damned. Which, I suppose, he had a line on, because he was in fact a Catholic priest. On their first sleepover date he took Bill back to the rectory. So come on, he was basically begging to be named... Father Fellatio.

When I was a camp counselor in Maine, one of the girls in my cabin gave me fits. She teased one of the other girls whenever my back was turned, and would openly break the rules, and defy me when I called her on it. She had a habit of sneaking out after lights-out, forcing me to creep around in the dark, skunk-infested Maine wilderness (Stephen King country, full of psychotic rednecks and sentient, evil-minded... whatevers) with only a flashlight and a headfull of expletives for protection. I always found her with one of the boys from Cabin Josh (9 boys were in that cabin, 7 of them named Josh), and as I marched her back to Cabin 10, I would mentally compose the letter to her parents apologizing for sending her back to Fort Lee pregnant. I can't remember her real name. Lisa. But to me she will always be... Titsy.

Linda the Schizoid Drunk. Meatlips. The Scary White. Mistletits. Larry "I Speak French" Jenkins and Heather "Not Her Real Name" Hartman. (Not their real names). Barfy.

Oh god, I am going to get in so much trouble one of these days. No, but I'm not - I'm off it. Nowadays I have a blog, and I can satisfy my eponymical cravings with the nicknames I make up in captions or blog posts to protect the privacy of the people I like and love. They ain't ever mean. And when that fails, I can make up names for the 'regulars' at work, although truth be told, most of them name themselves by virtue of their... habits. Ick.

Little old lady got mutilated late last night
Werewolves of London again

Two days til Halloween! Hey, if you have a particularly nice costume - nice enough that it ought to have a name? you call on me.

For your eyes only

I can laugh about it now. But at the time I wanted to die of embarrassment. Everyone to whom I have told the story wants to die of embarrassment for me. Including my therapist, and if you knew her... yeah.

The whole reason I'm thinking of it is because I was on Facebook this morning, and updating my Google calendar at the same time, and I noticed that it was Wednesday, September 24th - my friend Jaime's birthday. So I went to her Facebook page and wished her happy birthday. I checked twice before doing this. I have a history of getting Jaime's birthday wrong. For years I was convinced it was October 24th.

Needless to say, today is not September 24th. Today is September 3rd. I should know this, because yesterday, September 2nd, was my 8th wedding anniversary, and the day before that was September 1, my older son's 7th birthday.

So Jaime asks me, basically, "WTF? FREAK." and I'm all, "Do not F with me you meanie, I checked twice!" and then I'm like, "Whoa, it's not Sept 24," and she was like "WTF? I ASK AGAIN," and I decided that I should get offline before I really make an ass of myself. I mean, to someone who doesn't already know I'm an ass.

See, for the past two days I've been sick. The gut rot that the boys and Bob got last Sunday, the night before school started? GOD. It ripped through second grade like an electric shock. THIRTEEN out of the twenty-four individuals who spend time in that room were out at least one day vomiting, peeing out their butt, being in hell. They had to call the health department.

And I got it yesterday. I was so miserable that I couldn't even vomit; too exhausted to even read a magazine - and I had Fashion Rocks! Can you think of a less demanding piece of print? So uncomfortable that I couldn't even sleep. My guts were sore. My body was sore. Today I was still so weak that taking a shower was an extremely risky proposition.

So I really had no business being online this morning. Last time I was online when I was sick, I received an email from a prominent person in my (largely former) profession. I felt the need to comment on this email, and went to forward it to, in point of fact, Jaime. Among other things, I complained that the prominent person in question habitually fails to place any value on any person not possessed of a penis.

I had a fever of 103. I was, in fact, Hot Blooded. And then I made a mistake. I hit Reply instead of Forward.

Shit hitting a fan. Have you thought about that metaphor, ever? Shit being slung all around the room, far and wide? The sheer amount of time and effort it would take to clean all that up? Well, it's a good metaphor.

Like I said, I can laugh about it now. Heh. Heh, heh.

Teach him he's alive before he wishes he was dead

An open letter to Andrew McCarthy:

Dear Andrew McCarthy,

I am a woman of a certain age.
No, I don't mind you asking: forty-two. That makes me the answer, ha ha.
It's from a book. Never mind.
Well, that's very nice of you, but you are mistaken. You're just confused because I don't act my age.

Andrew McCarthy, if I may make an observation? Age? is funny. It doesn't mean as much as it used to. Age no longer serves as a cultural definition. Remember when it used to? Used to be that if you knew the Speed Racer theme song, that meant that you had been in elementary school sometime between 1972 and 1981. But then MTV started showing Speed Racer, and then somebody else picked it up, and now I can get that song as a ringtone on my new phone. Because of the way stuff is archived and documented on the Internet, the merest cultural moment is always poised to make a comeback. Strawberry Shortcake. Mr. T. Transformers. Pegged jeans.

So it's actually increasingly rare that a generation, or a cohort, or a graduating class, has a movement, an icon, a trend, or even a fad that they can call their own. And this is where you come in, Andrew McCarthy. Stick with me here.

People spend a lifetime developing and modifying their mental Cute Boy Ken doll. (Unless, like, they don't, and therefore routinely fall spasmodically in love with men just like the boy who lived across the street with the long eyelashes and... god, fill in the blank yourself. I'm coming up dry. The kid who lived across the street from me growing up was obsessed with his toy lawn mower and would try to run over your feet with it if he saw you barefoot. Not a romantic figure, at least to me.) (NB: I am told that he grew up to be perfectly normal.)

Most people my age probably started with Erik Estrada as their base model, added Leif Garrett's hair and Matt Dillon's jeans, and then continued to tweak their Cute Boy ideal from there. Some went the Chachi route, and their Cute Boy is short and smartmouthed. Others discovered androgyny when they saw Robert Downey Jr. wearing eyeliner and breaking your heart in Less Than Zero. Many add a brood-and-explode component, à la Judd Nelson (ick) in Breakfast Club. Everybody adds his or her own bits and pieces: Val Kilmer's oversized Ray-Bans in Real Genius; Eric Stoltz's blue eyes from Some Kind of Wonderful. The girl who used to live in this house liked Christian Slater: when we moved in, I found pencilled graffiti in the closet of the boys' room noting that she saw Pump Up the Volume in May of 1991.

These are the movies that every suburban girl my age saw, and which by and large haven't been co-opted by subsequent cohorts. You know where I'm going with this.

Because even though most of us were rooting for Duckie, in the same situation we all would have gone for Blane, too. After all, Duckie was clearly gay, even though the movie wasn't written that way. They chickened out on that, didn't they? Ok, a few girls would have held out for Spader. But for me, that stickie-out chin? Nah.

No, it was the Andrew McCarthy take on brood-and-explode: the paper-thin, fooling-nobody offhand veneer that gave way to horrified alarm and then escalated to frantic, wild-eyed panicked outrage that became a characteristic of many of our mental Cute Boys. That shit still plays - just look at the career of David Schwimmer (Or, yeah, don't - sorry). Also, my Cute Boy has a cotton sportcoat with skinny lapels hanging in his closet, just for emergencies. I bet you were wondering where that thing got to.

Years have passed, of course, since you lusted after the likes of Jami Gertz and Molly Ringwald, and my tastes have coarsened too. I go for the more obvious now - the Clive Owen, the Daniel Craig. And of course the most requested ALA READ poster boy of all time. (Although we just saw The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and I may be back on James McAvoy, who is not obvious at all. He played Tumnus the Faun all sidelong glances and conspiratorial nods: he appeared to be harboring seriously inappropriate thoughts about little Lucy Pevensey.)

So - just the other day, I heard something that sent my skull flying back to 1985. I'm kind of a voice person, I notice voices. I can pick out Mark Hamill or Brooke Shields before the words "Listening Library presents" are out of the CD player. I am insufferable during TV commercials. "Christine Lahti!" I will crow. "Listen, that's Duchovny!" Shatner, Sheen, Sutherland (père et fils), Linda Hunt, Peter Coyote, Thomas Haden Church - their secret commercial shilling is an open book to me.

(I believe this voice thing of mine dates back to 1987, when there were two televisions in my apartment, one stacked on top of the other. Both had been trash-picked: one had sound only, and the other had something resembling a picture. It was greenish and bled offscreen at the top, and only came in when Star Trek: The Next Generation was on. Everybody looked like Beldar on that TV, especially Picard. I think it was pointy-headed old Patrick Stewart, who, despite being bald and sort of beady-eyed, was absolutely devastating whenever he rumbled "Make it so," that made me start listening as well as looking. You know who's sexy? These guys are sexy: Campbell Scott, Stephen Fry, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Eddie Izzard. I will listen to whatever they are saying.)

But I had forgotten, until we slotted The Nixie's Song into the CD player a couple weeks ago, that Andrew McCarthy has this funny, breaky, bone-dry voice. I guess when I was a kid it was eclipsed by the sportcoat. But the moment I heard it, I thought to myself, "Oh yeah... Andrew McCarthy. Holy crap." Well done. Tired-sounding yet excited, this voice makes Holly Black's snotty characters funny and sympathetic. Creaky and quiet, yet charged with tension, this is the voice of hopeless causes, betrayed friendships, and unrequited longing for Ally Sheedy - and that shit never gets old either.

Andrew McCarthy, live in peace. Stay clear of Brooke Shields. That girl pissed off the Scientologists, she's got a target on her back.

Sincerely,

-- Your Neighborhood Librarian

You can beat my brains, beat my brains, beat my brains but don't kiss me again

A famous author and public radio commentator, let's call him Faniel Blinkwater, is a troll. Now, before you go getting all "Hey, just 'cause a guy is fat and bald and adenoidal and possibly lives under a bridge, you can't just go calling him a troll," hear me out.

This guy was so offended by a single sentence in my 2-paragraph review of a picture book that he authored in 1972, that he came on Pink Me and left this comment:

A comment from the author: Marginally sorry if the book is superfluous. I don't write books because of some perceived need other than my own. I needed it, I wrote it--around 1972. This present incarnation, with D.B. Johnson's wonderful drawings is its third. If it pleases, amuses, or becomes a personal point of reference for certain readers, naturally I am happy. But I can't claim I wrote it in order for it to be part of someone's educational armamentarium. See, it's a work of art--in addition to being about a work of art. If you think books are tools.....well, you need to read this book.

Troll, no?

This was a while ago. I didn't respond because, you know, first of all, who cares? I vet books for parents on Pink Me. It's not like it's international diplomacy or something. And secondly, I am not dumb enough to respond to that kind of baiting.

You might not think of bar fights as educational opportunities, but I have taken away one important observation from my (admittedly limited) experience of them.

(Limited to:

1. threatening to relieve my ex-husband of his (basically useless) manhood if he ever set foot in "my" bar again and
2. policing my old friend Carol, who liked to pick them with total strangers (something that I never understood AT ALL, especially given the fact that Carol was TINY, and if anyone had ever taken her up on it she would have had her flat Long Island ass handed to her trussed up like a pale, raw turkey.) (Seriously, she was so small that in order to keep the peace I would frequently end up lifting her bodily and carrying her out of the bar. Her methods of antagonism were so precise and persistent that, in spite of her size and gender, she would actually manage to push people (almost always men) to the brink of violence. My intervention was not so much on her behalf: in my opinion, if she had finally taken a pasting for her efforts it might have served her right, but I couldn't allow some hapless man to give her a shove, and then bear the social, legal, and possibly emotional consequences of her insane need to be an unbearable cunt (that's what we used to call trolls).) The day she finally picked a fight with me, I came awfully damn close to punching her in the face. I was in the process of turning all my rings inward toward my palms so that I wouldn't cut her when I hit her, when someone noticed what I was doing and hustled me out of the bar.))

My bar fight observation is this: when someone wants to start one, that person gets up in someone else's face and starts a sentence with "See..."

1. ("See, YOU left ME. YOU slept with Christine D____k in OUR BED. YOU made ME figure out how to get a divorce. AND when you finally came to pick up the rest of your CRAP, you trashed my apartment! So YOU can FIND ANOTHER PLACE TO DRINK or the next time I see you in here you will leave WITHOUT your shriveled DICK."*
2. "See, you men just have no concept of the female orgasm. You take and you take, and then you want us to shake our ass for you. You like this? Uh-huh, that's what you like... am I shaking it hard enough for you? Oh, you want me to stop? Should I go make dinner for you now?")**

Here's hoping we all - including Mister Flinkwater - get over our anger issues, get remarried, quit drinkin', and don't get slapped. Because, while I actually don't think that books are tools, I sure know at least one author who is one.

* At least in my head that's what I said.
** Ver. Fucking. Batim.

All my tubes and wires and careful notes

Couple of weeks ago, we visited Bob's brother Joe and his wife Jeannie at their place in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Joe and Jeannie make their living telling children stories with puppets (really! although it's a running joke that Joe is secretly a C.I.A. agent, as nobody can seriously support themselves as a puppeteer). Their house, consequently, is full of cool stuff. Musical instruments and picture books, juggling equipment, wigs, giant yoga balls, and puppets.

The kids were horsing around on the floor one afternoon, and one of them knocked over a heavy little cube wrapped in electrical tape. Instantly, about twelve strings of Christmas lights came on all over the room. A mercury switch! Magic! They played with that thing for an hour.

It reminded Bob and Joe of a weekend, decades ago, when Joe lent his Washington, D.C. apartment to their sister Anne and her husband. Joe wasn't at home when they arrived - late at night and after a long drive. Fumbling around in the dark, one of them kicked the mercury switch. Instantly, a million colored lights illuminated Joe's apartment, which was - as now - filled with many interesting objects, including a headless mannequin, around whom the lights were wrapped in an intimate way. The stereo came on, heartily pumping out "Jingle Bells" at full volume. Something mounted on a turntable started rotating. So Anne and Mike suddenly found themselves in a loud, luridly-lit Christmas funhouse in the middle of the night, with no idea how they had turned everything on, and no idea how to turn it all off.

This story reminded me of a weekend, easily ten years ago, when Bob and I stayed at my parents' house when they were out of town. I know that house pretty well - I grew up in it - so I know the little quirks. I know how to work the security system and which lights are on timers. My dad enjoys fiddling around with technology. I showed Bob the lightswitch in the downstairs bathroom that operates on a motion sensor.

The first morning we were there, my dad's alarm clock went off - loudly - at 6am. When Bob ventured into my parents' bedroom to see about turning it off, he couldn't find the lightswitch. Sliding his hands around the wall in an increasing panic, all he found was a blank switchplate. "Aha!" he thought. "Motion sensor!" So he stood in the middle of the room waving his arms in wide swings, as if he were trying to flag down a truck on a dark country highway.

After a minute of this, he thought, "Wait, he's not going to put a motion sensor in the bedroom - the light would go on every time you rolled over in bed." Then he thought of Dad's security system and froze. It was JUST possible that my slightly paranoid father might have installed motion-sensitive video cameras around the house in case of a break-in.

In which case he would arrive home to footage of his not-yet son-in-law standing in the middle of his own bedroom, nude, waving his arms like a pornographic snow angel.

Blowing through the jasmine of my mind

basement - before, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

This is our basement. I'm not proud, believe me. Especially since I'm pretty much the one that has to empty it. We're getting some work done, and it all has to go.

I spent some time on it yesterday. It was nuts - I found stuff from every stage of our lives and from everywhere we'd traveled. I found a brass ashtray in the shape of a shoe that we bought in India. I found my fake Kate Spade handbag. I found issues of the school newspaper from junior high. There were boxes that were packed in Brooklyn in 2002 and never unpacked. And since I'm now gonna die from all the mold spores I inhaled, I leave these notes to testify to what I found.



My dad painted this during one of his art phases. He's not a bad painter, but he's not that interested in it for some reason. He wasn't very happy with the job he did on this portrait of my aunt's Siamese, so he painted in the blue lines.



I have September Vogue for every year back to the mid-1980's. This is 1991. Any time I hear someone protest that the fashion industry is not irrelevant and self-perpetuating, I think of all the times the magazines have tried to talk us into wearing plaid. (Jaime can wear tartan, but the rest of us should just leave it alone.) Meryl Streep's speech about Anne Hathaway's blue sweater in The Devil Wears Prada? Left me totally unconvinced.



Which is not to say I am not riveted by fashion magazines. Here we see a spread from that issue - the infamous ballgown-and-biker-jacket feature. This picture, shot by Peter Lindbergh back when people like Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen, and Claudia Schiffer still modeled for a living, lodged in my mind as the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Minus the leather caps.



Can't clean out a basement without finding a pair of skates.



Bob brought about 12 items with him when he moved in with me in 1997, and this Yamaha motorcycle headlight was one of them. He's never owned a motorcycle - I think he found this on the street and brought it home. Twenty years ago.



This was for a friend's xmas card. She was a photographer with long blonde hair and she wanted a photo that looked like she was making out with Santa. Proof that at some point in my life I have owned something made of lace. I remember I went from this photo shoot directly to my friend Heidi's baby shower. (Hi, Nutmeg!)



I used to work in medical publishing. I retain quite a bit about cardiology - it's actually pretty straightforward, for medicine.



I used to be a Classics major. I had 6 semesters of classical Greek in college. Four days a week, 8am, up a long and very narrow staircase, taught by a man who was at least 300 years old, in a class with at most 3 other students. I retain almost zero classical Greek.



I used to be a graphic designer. Everything I designed was the color of candy.



Look hard enough anywhere in my house and you will always find a nose flute. You know what sounds good on the nose flute? "The Great White North." Koo loo-koo-koo koo loo-koo-choo!



A bunch of little hat model ladies made of a button, scraps of felt, and a few sketched lines. I'm guessing Grandma. They totally make me think of the department store modeling scene in How to Marry a Millionaire.



Doesn't this one look like Marilyn Monroe?



A box of tiny china kitties playing instruments, all in various stages of broken.



An eyeball candle.



A bottle of Lady Stetson.



LIFE: The Year in Pictures, 1983. "Flyin' high and feelin' free, we're the class of '83!" Reagan. Quadafy. Ewoks. Mariel Hemingway. Has survived many such memorabilia purges, but not this one.



A leather shoulder bag I bought in Greece in 1994, killed by mold.



The alarm clock from my red-white-and-blue bedroom in my parents' house. That room was decorated in 1972 with striped vinyl wallpaper and white shag wall-to-wall, and stayed that way until the early '90's when they turned it into my dad's office.



A planter in the shape of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I do not get why Christianity allows its icons to be used in this way. I'm grateful, don't get me wrong, but if it were my religion, I think I'd have a little more respect.



And the only reason we kept her is because her middle fingers had broken off like that.

Attention all planets of the Solar Federation

Isn't it lucky that Rush never made some kind of horrendous narrative video of side one of their album 2112? Think of it.

Oh my god it could have been great, though - Geddy Lee playing all the parts, just with his hair done differently: naive longhair Geddy discovering a guitar in a cave; uptight ponytailed reduplicated Geddy as the priests smacking down the youngster; Neil Peart smirking in the background. Misty shots of Alex Lifeson with his satin-pants camel toe whaling on that guitar could be little Geddy's dream of a more culturally democratic world.

This is where fanfic comes from, doesn't it? I guess minus the choking with laughter part.

No, really, we're lucky. These guys are musical geniuses, but their visual sense is atrocious. Look at the album covers. And the concerts - I never saw more smoke and purple lights until the Jesus and Mary Chain toured the U.S. And even Jesus and Mary Chain didn't wear satin pants.

My brother and I and a few of his friends were giant Rush fans in high school (and beyond). I saved my ice cream scooping money to buy the albums and concert tickets. My brother would put A Farewell to Kings (speaking of wince-worthy visuals, and smoke, and you know, damn it, I'd like to wear a satin kimono to work sometimes too) on the tape deck in his room, hit the repeat button, and fall asleep that way, pissing my father off gigantically. He did that with ELP too though... "Hoedown" is really nothing that young unconscious minds should be exposed to.

Yes, we loved our pretentious '70's arena rock. We were never quite as inspired as this guy though.

We're on the road to paradise - here we go, here we go

My driver's license is suspended in North Carolina.

When the young woman at the DMV who was trying to renew my license for me this morning looked up from her computer and asked, frowning, "Have you ever lived in North Carolina?" I knew exactly what was up.

In the late 1980's, I worked in the insurance industry - I worked for a company that serviced the customers of the state insurance funds, to be exact. If you get too many tickets or accidents and the regular insurance companies don't want you, if you want auto insurance, you have to get it through the state. This is true in most states. Those rates are HIGH, and, at least back then, the state funds did not offer a payment plan. So there is this secondary constellation of little finance companies that offer financing to the desperate youngsters and hard luck cases who need to drive so badly that they will pay thousands and thousands of dollars a year to remain insured. Needless to say, the interest rates were incredible. We couldn't do business in Michigan because they had strict(ish) usury laws. Usury! How often do you get to use that word?

It wasn't a shady company, exactly, but the people who made their way through it were not, as a rule, career insurance people. We had the ex-soccer player who is now the manager of a professional team in New Jersey. We had the guy with the Super Bowl ring who held all his "meetings" at sports bars. We had programmers whose IBM System 36 expertise was not in great demand elsewhere.

And we had my boss, a terrible human being who had moved from company to company, always in an executive position, dogged by harassment charges but possessing the kind of brash, incorrect sense of humor that made him a hit with the other upper-management guys, who all seemed to yearn for the days when they could make a pass at a secretary with impunity.

That guy once put his hands on my ass to steady me as I stood on a chair, then leered over his shoulder at the head of HR (HR!), "Ten more seconds of this and I'm probably liable for $10,000!"

I am very proud of myself that I replied, "Tick-tock, motherfucker."

Although they laughed - and he didn't move his hands. They thought I was cute, their little punk-rock mascot. I only wish I'd ever been asked to testify against him.

Anyway, he wasn't a terribly good strategist either. At one point, he lowered our rates and attracted so much business that all of a sudden the company had no more money to loan. He announced to the entire sales and marketing team that we were to do no work for a month. "Go play golf!" he decreed. And the rest of 'em all went to play golf. Yuck.

This was summertime, and I lived in an un-air-conditioned apartment in southwest Baltimore. Staying home wasn't too appealing, and I had no money to go anywhere. I did have a car, however, and a gas card, so one afternoon I got in the car and drove to Delaware. I slept in my car at the National Park beach. When I woke up, I drove to a diner and had a grilled-cheese sandwich. Then I drove south to the National Park on Assateague Island. When I got hungry, I found another diner and had another grilled-cheese sandwich. I drove south. I slept in the car. I danced on the beach. I ate grilled-cheese sandwiches, sometimes with a fried egg. I got as far south as Ocracoke Island.

I spent a night at a hotel in Nags Head, mostly to take a shower. I remember that shower. Five days of sunscreen, sweat, salt water, and mosquito repellent washed off me and out of my hair - I remember wondering where their graywater went, and feeling sorry for whatever was downstream.

At one point I left the Outer Banks and drove through Dare County. The sun went down while I was driving one of those two-lane state roads that arrowed straight through a swamp. It was DARK. I was nervous. Locals kept whipping along that road, pulling up right behind me, and then passing me with a roar in their pickup trucks.

Now, I know that some people are scared of cities. Perhaps rightly so. I've been mugged and broken into, and had cars stolen in cities, granted. But I'll wager that just about anyone who is not from the South can get really creeped out down there. We hear Creedence in our heads, and think of poor Ned Beatty, and we suspect that behind the wheel of every pickup truck rides a crosseyed inbred redneck who will drag us from the car, hold us captive in a tarpaper shack, and invite his legions of cousins to perpetrate unspeakable things upon us.

So, eventually, when the third or fourth pair of headlights came up fast and rode my bumper, I sped up... and of course, that was the cop.

He pulled me over, I gave him my license and registration, and he told me to close my window back up because of the mosquitos. Oh, the mosquitos on that trip are a whole 'nother story.

When I got back home, I sent Dare County a check to pay the ticket. Months later, I got a notice from them that they had suspended my license, along with my returned check. I called. Money order only, or I could pay in person. I got a money order and paid it. What a pain.

So today, when I called the North Carolina DMV to find out why they are still reprimanding me almost 20 years later, I find I have to pay a "license restoration fee" of fifty dollars. Can I pay over the phone with a credit card? No. "Do you know anyone in-state who can come in and pay it for you?" You've got to be kidding. Bob says I should have said, "Just you, ma'am - you're my only friend in North Carolina."

It was a great trip though.