"I know something about being a government. And you've got a good one." (George W. Bush)

This is an example of how anal I am. Or, was. No, am. (And an example of how long my family holds onto stuff, because this picture was taken in January.)

In high school I went through and hand-sewed little tags on all our bath towels and labeled them with each of our names, so that everyone in my family would have our own.


Well, because people kept stealing mine, and it was gross and annoying!

But my plan didn't work. I should have learned then that you can't organize people who don't want to be organized.

"I know how hard it is to put food on your family" (George W. Bush)

The news? Well, Penn has gotten kicked off Dancing With The Stars, and Obama is related to Brad Pitt, and the NFL is concerned about hairdos.

Oh yeah, and I think I saw some brief mention that part of some ice shelf in Antarctica broke away yesterday as a result of global warming, leaving its remaining 5,571 square miles "hanging by a thread". But I sure had to hunt to find articles about it.

And why bother? I mean hell, what's an ice shelf when the NFL players' hair is on the line?!

Miss Hickmott

While I was driving the backroads around Oneonta tonight, I passed Miss Hickmott’s house. She was my pre-k teacher, and she died just a couple of weeks ago.

As I was passing her house, I had a vivid memory of the time she took my class there. She lived near the lower reservoir dam on upper East Street, and she took us all out to look at the dam, explaining to us why it was there and how it worked. She didn’t let us get very close to it, which I thought was stupid, because it looked like just the sort of thing that would be fun to walk across. I was mad that she wouldn’t let me. I also recall that she had an apple – a large, red, plastic apple – in the room to the left at the top of the stairs, and if you put a penny in the right spot on the apple, a little motor inside would make a grinding noise (a grinding noise very like the machines at the circulation desk in the SUCO library made; the machines that would stamp the date on the return card in your book) - a nasal kind of mwaa-mwaa sound - and a little plastic worm would come out and grab the penny and pull it inside the apple. Maybe it was a sort of piggy bank; I don’t know. I just remember being fascinated by this apple, and concerned that there didn't seem to be any way to get the money back out once the worm took it.

Miss Hickmott was a wonderful teacher. I’m sure she was, though I don’t specifically remember how she taught. I just remember the atmosphere in the classroom. Very free, very informal; sort of like Malibu Crowd Days. Lots going on all over, and you could do whatever you wanted. Within reason. The only time I remember Miss Hickmott being upset with me was the time I spit in the sandbox to show my friends how the sand would ball up around the spit, like magic. She wasn’t happy with me that day.

She had funny hair; I remember it was a warm honey-brown, sort of flat on top, and then curled around her head in a pageboy style. I guess it wasn’t that odd really; just strangely flattened on top, like the grass underneath where you sat on your picnic blanket. And I remember her always in canvas tennis shoes and a cotton, button-down shirt, with a light cardigan over top. All pastels. I may be wrong about the shoes. In fact, I may be wrong about everything. Maybe she dressed up and wore heels. But I don’t think so.

I guess the other time she was angry with me was the day Jason Brown and I decided to run away. We hid in some bushes not too far from the playground. We didn’t really go very far. It was thrilling to know that nobody could find us; we listened to them calling, and kept very quiet. I’m not sure Miss Hickmott enjoyed the experience as much as Jason and I did.

One day she combined the morning class and the afternoon class, so I got to see my friend Carrie Stevens (who, appropriately, was the one who sent me the notice about her death). Carrie was in the other group, and so I was excited to finally share a class with her! We watched a filmstrip about dinosaurs, and had some sort of celebration; we all brought food and cake. Maybe it was Miss Hickmott's birthday; I don’t know.

Best of all, I loved driving around in the little pedal car they had there. Sometimes she let me take it up and down the hallway outside the room. See? I’ve always loved driving. The only frustrating thing I remember was that the outdoor sandbox (not the one I spit in; that was indoors) didn’t go very far down. You’d get a good depth going with your hoe, and then you’d hit the bottom and that was it. Irritating. And I got blisters from the wooden handle on that hoe. I’m surprised they let 4-year-olds use hoes. Maybe they didn’t. But that’s how I remember it.

I-earn-y

It occurred to me this afternoon that much of my workday is spent assisting people or tracking down people who would not need to be tracked down or assisted had they spent any time reading information already sent to them, or taken care of their obligations in a timely manner.

So I guess if people were less lazy and oblivious, I’d be out of a job.
Which then leads me to wonder how much of our economy is dependent on general human inefficiency.
Which is a disturbing thing to wonder, so I’ll stop wondering about it and go back to tracking down this bunch of students – I’ve been waiting 8 months for their paperwork. The longer they wait, the more letters I get to write; more time is spent, more paper is used, and the USPS gets more business, our departmental budget soaks up the postage, the college charges the students higher rates to cover the need, their parents work longer hours to break even, and so the world turns.

Go Laziness! Work your magic! Get our country back on its feet!

recording

When I was younger, I would tape-record sounds. It was an attempt to counteract loss. Knowing that my parakeet, Cottentail, would not live forever, I recorded the sound of her chirping. Knowing we might someday sell our house, I recorded the creaks of our basement stairs as I went down them, and the growl of our old furnace igniting. The particular slapping sound made by the wooden venetian blinds on our front door; the flub-flub of our swinging kitchen door as it came to rest against its frame. I didn't want to forget.

I was going through some of these old tapes last night, and found one on which I had recorded some stuff from when we lived in Spain in 1985-86.

It was interesting. I had captured the sound of the town's one lone church bell tolling solemnly. I'd gone into a bar and recorded the carnival-like song playing on a slot machine that we'd heard every day while walking past or stopping for a soda. But later I had done something that I didn't often do - I left the tape recorder running on the dining room table in our rented house, and recorded the last 15 minutes that we lived there.

It was weird; almost disturbing to listen to. It's the usual last-minute hustle and bustle of a family scrambling to get ready for a long journey - mom asking whose was the bag of nuts on the table, me stressing over how to pack a sweater in an already-overpacked suitcase, our landlady stopping by and my parents arranging with her in broken Spanish to leave the house keys at the neighbor's. At the end of that 15 minutes, we would be on our way to England, taking a bus through France to Calais, the ferry to Dover. Later that day, my mother's purse would be robbed by two guys on a motorbike, as we stood on a streetcorner in Malaga, waiting for the bus. We would lose our passports and have a difficult time entering France.

But that was all to come. As the tape recorder ran on that day, none of that had happened yet. The walls of the house still echoed with our voices and footsteps; the taxi hadn't yet arrived to finally carry us away from that period in our lives.

Try as I may (and believe me, I've tried), I find myself completely unable to comprehend the passing of time, and our inability to re-construct or re-connect to what once was. And I know now that the tape recording doesn't help; in fact, I think that it makes it all harder to understand.

little grey cells

It has occurred to me to wonder how much smarter I'd be if my brain didn't (by default, it seems) decide to fill itself with useless song lyrics and retain them for decades, even when not regularly accessed. It's a waste of space. Holmes and Poirot would be disgusted.

nuts&bolts

Sunday.

I was having a lovely day; it was sunny, warm enough to start the snow melting. I was driving around in my old car, listening to Cat Stevens, and running errands. A perfectly perfect afternoon.

But what made it extra perfect (if such a thing is possible) was the kind of errands I was running.

I had to get a spring to repair my electric shaver (yes, it broke again), and a washer and nut for the faucet in the bathroom sink. So I went to Home Depot.

I don't often go to Home Depot anymore. When I lived in California, I went to Home Depot (or, preferably, Orchard Hardware) at least 2-3 times a week. Well, I had to! There were things that needed doing! There were tools and stuff that needed to be bought to do them!

But that was when I lived in a house, with a garage and a yard. Now I live in an apartment, and keep my tools in the pantry, next to the sugar. Well, I only have one closet, and that's full of my camping equipment. What would you do? It's a sad state of affairs.

So I hadn't been to Home Depot in a long time. And after meandering around for awhile, picking up some drywall anchors and a clamp and some fuses for my car, I fell to admiring the copper pipes in the plumbing section and the little cotter pins in the grey pull-out drawer in aisle 10... yes, with all the imagining of the cool projects that could be accomplished with all the things they were selling, it took me quite awhile to finally get around to looking for what I'd actually gone there to get.

And on the way home it came to me that someday I will have to face the blasphemous fact that I have much more fun in hardware stores than I ever do in bookstores or libraries.

May God have mercy on my soul.

U2

On the way back from taking Joel to the Albany airport the other morning, I was listening to U2's Running to Stand Still.

It's on the Joshua Tree album, which is one of my favoritest albums ever; both because it's great (particularly side 1), and because it reminds me of the summer of 1987.

-Mom and I took the train cross-country to LA that summer. To Malibu, really. I had just gotten my first (and last) Walkman cassette player, and I had one tape. That tape. Joshua Tree. Which our family friends, the Kerns, had copied onto tape for me from the LP I'd just gotten for my birthday. (They copied it because my family didn't have enough newfangled stereo equipment to effect such a transfer.)

That album is perfect for a cross-country train ride, because you can hear that train-y track-y clackity-clackity rhythm through pretty much every song. Yeah, every song. It's a train album. It's a western album. It's a sage brush dry dirt baking sun cactus open sky California album.

I packed minimally for that trip. I had some black Hanes t-shirts and some Fruit of the Loom men's boxer shorts. And one black button-down cotton skirt. My mom and I had purchased that skirt specially the previous winter, so I would have something formal to wear while I was serving rice pilaf to members of my church during some sit-down pledge-drive dinner we set up on folding tables in the sanctuary. By the summer, I had washed it enough times that it was starting to lose its crisp black, and was looking a bit grey around the edges. My plan was to wear the skirt during the day, as we sat and traveled in the train, and then at night (as we continued to sit and travel in the train) I would unbutton it (revealing my perfectly legitimate public-wear boxer shorts) and straighten the skirt out full-length to use as a throw-blanket to cover me as I slept. I thought this was a very clever plan. It meant that I didn't have to lug around an extra blanket, and that I could feel like I was changing into nighttime sleepwear without really having to change into nighttime sleepwear.

I was 16. It was one of the best summers ever.