I’m going back
to Texas tomorrow, y’all. For a week, anyways.
Big party on Dutton Drive. The last waltz. The final hurrah.
“Hey, my mom’s not at home. You wanna come over?”
For the Newbies
As I approach my third anniversary with y’all (still a little more than a month away), I thought I might offer the newer members a trip down my memory lane. Deron has many times queried Sheila for helps and hints on fashion. I’m not sure, but my comment, buried here, may have been my first appearance.
Baby
February 24, 2010. Dutton Drive. Dallas, Texas.
Sometimes you find things exactly when and where you expect to find them. When I entered my late mother’s house, I expected to find this old baby doll of hers in a drawer in a closet in what used to be my bedroom. And there it lay.
from the comments
I have a long list — I’m very much a place-oriented girl, I suppose. I still miss the original Sears Roebuck stores (particularly those of El Paso and Dallas). They had a particular light and smell that I want back. I’m about to cry thinking of old 5 & Dime stores–Winn’s in El Paso, M.E. Moses in Dallas. They sold live birds and oilcloth and hairnets and chocolate covered cherries and fake diamond rings. They always had the best linoleum floors. I miss the old Eckerd drugstore that was just around the corner from where we live now. It was dingy and cramped, and I loved it. Oh, and Kress in downtown El Paso! It had the best counter bar in the world. As a small child I got knocked down the stairs there by a woman who exited through an entrance door.
I would drive 200 miles to revisit any of the places above.
Skinny men are sometimes fat babies
The proof is in eating the pudding.
Getting Ready
Barry Hannah, Captain Maximus, “Getting Ready”:
He sold all his fishing gear at a terrible loss, and they moved to Dallas, address unknown.
Then Roger Laird made an old-fashioned two-by-four pair of stilts eight feet high. It made him stand about twelve feet in the air. He would mount the stilts and walk into the big lake around which the rich people lived. The sailing boats would come around near him, big opulent three-riggers sleeping two families belowdecks, and Roger Laird would yell:
“Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Dear Clusterflock
This may have been asked before, but: What place of business have you been most heartbroken to see close its doors for good?
Did I already post this? (another for Andrew)
For Andrew (ala Sheila)
Thinking about grief, thinking about my brother.
In the Boom Boom Room
In order to pierce the crust of Dallas, Texas subcultures, it helps to know someone who grew up here.
Returning to Dallas this time,
after these years,
I got hearing this in my head:
The towns grew up
And the people were still
Sleeping in the midday sun
Sleeping in the midday sun
(From “Buffalo Ballet”. John Cale.)
Largely why I was hated in high school
Phil once asked somthing like “is there a photo of yourself you wouldn’t show someone?” This would be it, if I were showing it. The dude on the left was my neighbor to the north of our house in the background. We shared a driveway.
Jason remembers his father flying
Like when he made a crosswind landing in a Cessna 172 ahead of an oncoming storm which we later learned had spawned some tornadoes while running a bit lower on gas than was generally acceptable by the place’s captain. He’d already attempted one landing, aborting after the wind dropped us like 10 feet in half a second while about 30 feet from the ground. The sensation of that crosswind landing — of gliding over the runway twenty feet off the ground at ~60-80 mph while pointed about 30 degrees off axis and then, just before touching down and presumably tumbling down the runway wing over wing, straightening out for a surprisingly gentle landing — was one of the freakiest things I’ve ever experienced, partly because I wasn’t scared at all…I knew he’d get us down safely.
climber’s body
Last night I moved fluidly, unencumbered, able to maneuver against the smallest holds, moving smoothly over rocks and walls, climbing stronger than I had ever been.
The death of Jermyn Street
I had just settled in my easy chair when a key turned in the lock and a nattily-dressed man in his 60s let himself in. He held a bottle of Teachers’ scotch under his arm. He walked to the sideboard, took a glass, poured a shot, and while filling it with soda from the siphon, asked me, “Fancy a spot?”
“I’m afraid I don’t drink,” I said.
“Oh, my.”
This man sat on my sofa, lit a cigarette, and said, “I’m Henry.”
“Am I…in your room?”
“Oh, no, no, old boy! I’m only the owner. I dropped in to say hello.”
This was Henry Togna Sr. He appears in a Dickens novel I haven’t yet read. I’m sure of it. He appeared in my room almost every afternoon when I stayed at the Eyrie Mansion.
—Roger Ebert, “I met a character from Dickens,” Chicago Sun-Times, February 5, 2010
(Via @davidmoldawer)
Just like Liz Parker said
My grandmother watched CSPAN like it was a marathon of General Hospital. While she thumbed through the morning’s newspaper and Senate committees hocked in the background, we kids jumped in and out of the swimming pool and then raced each other down to the beach. On the off-chance that she’d manage to grab one of us for a cuddle, Grandma would point at her 6″ television screen and say, “See that man? Look, see that wide smile? That man is a Democrat.
“Now wait. See that scowler? Can y’see how unhappy that man is? That’ll happen to you if you become a Republican.”
I never doubted her, not even for a minute. And then I came across this research, coincidentally from my grandmother’s nephew.
from the comments
So long was that shadow of one so little, stretching across the stubble of the field, snagging and tearing but going on. I would reach home late, and knew it by the light at my back that failed into my larger self. I tried to imagine I was huge, and a faint courage came then with each stitching lift of my shoes. But when I was bigger still—as large as the night—approaching a small light in a window, I stopped, and looked. Fearing to go in to my father.
something, 35
Andrew — holding two remotes — won Mr. Bachelor, Brooklyn, 2009. Mary asked, what happened? I was happy to tell her.
Smog
There are three things I am sad that I lost when my computer crashed in December 2007.
1) A piece I did for an NPR grant that had the last lucid recording of my Grandmother in it. She now has severe dementia and doesn’t remember me so well.
2) an hour-and-a-half recording I did of two friends discussing the best movies of 2007.
3) a twenty page (and counting) exposition on the band Smog, going through every album and song, writing down fierce connections and a time line.
Keeping House
Rick told how he let the housekeeper go, and it set me to thinking. At times I’ve wondered whether for for a household to run happily, it’s best if there is someone whose primary job it is to do the bulk of the shopping and the washing-up and the home repairs and the tedious aspects of the yard maintenance and so on. You know. That stuff.
I think such people used to be called servants, and it’s no longer a popular profession. Nor is housewifery. And I have my own problems both with hiring help and helping myself.
Read more
In case you missed it
After passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” — including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.
Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power.
“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.
Frank’s story about Pierce
Them’s the breaks, as my half-brother Pierce used to say a lot. He’d spit it out like you had earned that bad thing comin’ and why didn’t you just get outta the way but nobody said it out loud when he got so drunk and walked in front of an F-350 dually. Twenty four breaks as I recall although that’s skipping the bones that got all crushed up like oyster crackers.
Vintage L.L. Bean
This stuff always reminds me of my great-grandfather. I doubt Cedar Grove TN would have had snows that deep, but in my mind he was who they were designing for…
Fire
When I was a kid, I was convinced—I guess because of all the fire drills and fire safety education we had at school—that house fires were very common, so common that it was inevitable that at some point in everyone’s life, his or her house would burn down. I used to plan and replan my escape route, which things I would grab on my way to the fire escape, how I would rescue the guinea pigs, how I would climb down the ladder while holding them. Once I reached the last rung and dropped down into the downstairs neighbors’ garden, what would happen? Would I just wait there? What if my family didn’t make it out?
“When I was a Very Small Boy”
Ettore Sottsass, designer of the red Olivetti typewriter:
When I was very small, a little boy of five or six years old, I was certainly no infant prodigy, but I did do drawings with houses, with vases and flowers, with gypsy caravans, merry-to-rounds and cemeteries (perhaps because the first world war had only just ended) and then, when I was a bit older, I built beautiful, sharp-pointed sailing-boats, carved with a penknife out of the tender bark of pine-trees from Mount Bondone and together with Giorgio and Paolo Graffer we constructed cableways that were even two hundred metres long, that ran from the houses on the river Adige up to the top of Doss Trent, since we had found some balls of paper string that had been abandoned in the cellar by retreating Austrians (or maybe stolen by grandfather Graffer), and later when I was even bigger, aged eight or nine, I made barometers and wooden telescopes in my uncle Max the carpenter’s workshop to measure the passing of the stars, but naturally neither the barometer nor the telescope ever worked despite the drawings I did, of an astronomy as I imagined it and so on.