Can I tell you - while I was walking back from picking up lunch, this Asian fob guy started talking to me? He just started walking next to me and said, "You are so beautiful can I meet you?" He kept saying things like, "My heart jumped when I saw you and how beautiful you are" and "Your grace and elegance make my heart explode." I kept asking him if it was a joke and how much money his friends were paying him to talk to me, and he kept insisting that it wasn't. He kept laughing a little, which made me think it was a joke, but he also seemed very shy so I didn't press. I told him I had a boyfriend. Then he kept walking with me, literally repeating every minute that I was beautiful and saying poetic things about his heart that nobody really says out loud, or ever (very quickly, like muttering them almost), and I asked him what he did for a living and what he was doing around the area, etc. he seemed to answer me quite earnestly. I told him thank you and that it was nice that he came to talk to me, to encourage him. At the end he said, "It makes me so happy to be talking to such a beautiful girl like you." Then I said bye. I still couldn't tell if it was a joke, but either way, it was really amazing having someone (even if that someone was an unattractive fob that may have been playing a joke on you) recite lines about how your beauty makes their heart jump.
The end.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
explode
I would love to post your stories about conversations with strangers. C sent me this fantastic story today:
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
klaus
My travel reroute took me from O'Hare to LaGuardia to Soho, for the fourth sleepover with C in five weeks, to the Chinatown bus to Boston. It was my first time walking through Manhattan at 6:45 a.m. on a Saturday. The 33 year-olds in bubble-hemmed dresses turning their ankles on pitted sidewalks, the erratic taxis, the "Unforgettable Fire"-era U2 tunes from a windowless bistro, all the filth from hours before had been cleared away and only I and the pigeons had the city between Sullivan at Houston and Bowery at Canal. I found a bakery, bought some pineapple buns, and boarded the 7:30 bus to South Station.
I wanted to sleep. Don El Don came through me again, so that my night was spent reading the nonsense sentences that passed in front of my closed eyes - I'll explain my amphetaminic textual vision some other time. Its only relevance here is that it caused me to get no sleep the night before.
I asked the man sitting in the row behind me whether he minded if I reclined my seat. He said, in a northern European accent, No, no, of course, go ahead! I said, Thank you. And then I added, You must not be from New York if you're so polite. Dutch? He laughed and said he was Danish but had lived in New York for seventeen years. I offered him a bun, and we chatted as he tore it to pieces with his fingers and ate it one bite-sized piece at a time.
His name was Klaus, he was in his mid-30s, and he had moved to New York from Denmark - a little tiny town in the north of Denmark where nothing happened. He had worked as an au pair in New York in 1992, and the family he had worked for was wealthy, and they took him along for their summer holidays up and down the west coast. He was young then, and he returned to Denmark to finish his business studies. The education system in Denmark was such that university tuition was not only free but also students got stipends simply for attending, so Klaus did not understand why Danes would stay in crappy jobs when they could educate themselves into better careers and be paid during the process. After graduation, he and his wife schemed ways to move to America, and when two management positions opened for the North American office of European Sperm Bank (that is the name), they took the jobs and moved across the Atlantic. His wife still held the job, which she executed for Seattle from a home office in Park Slope, while Klaus had gone onto a middle management position at an advertising agency.
He had liked working for the sperm bank. You think that the clients are primarily lesbians, but that is not necessarily so, he said. The women who came into the clinic were often emotionally delicate, because only non-traditional situations would lead people to the door. Klaus found it fulfilling to guide people through the process, to help them, to give them what they wanted so badly. He said people sent postcards and photographs of their children, which were kept all around the office.
He was on his way to Boston to pick up a car he had bought, sight unseen, from the Internet. You can save thousands this way, he said. He was buying a Volvo station wagon, for his kids and his bikes. He loved biking. I communicated that I loved biking also, but that my love was born from my commute, not from what I called "bike vanity." He looked puzzled, and I realized that I had made no sense and was being negative to boot. I said, I just mean that I prefer biking for leisure or travel rather than for fitness. He liked biking for fitness, and described to me the pleasure of riding twelve loops of Prospect Park, or about forty miles, two nights before. There were many other riders for pacing or catching, and people and scenery and topography to watch. The convenience of having a forty-mile ride two blocks from the apartment, available any time of day, couldn't be beat. He liked mountain biking also, but needed a car to get out of the city for that, hence the Volvo station wagon.
I sat across two bus seats with my back against the window and talked to him in the row behind me. It was a shame that there isn't a more extensive network of rail so that you could take your bike upstate without having to drive it there, I said. We talked about urban planning and bicycle advocacy, with him generally maintaining a note of optimism about the movement toward bike- and pedestrian-oriented planning and me lamenting the violent zealotry of car drivers and gleefully spelling the doom of the American suburb. Congestion pricing was something we could all agree on.
My eyes could not stay open, so I said, Good night, Klaus, I need to rest now. For the next four hours, through the McDonald's rest stop, I leaned my head against the window, closed my eyes and watched words scroll in front of me, and failed completely in sleep. I opened my eyes next at South Station, to see Klaus extending his hand toward me. We shook hands, and he went off to find his Volvo.
I wanted to sleep. Don El Don came through me again, so that my night was spent reading the nonsense sentences that passed in front of my closed eyes - I'll explain my amphetaminic textual vision some other time. Its only relevance here is that it caused me to get no sleep the night before.
I asked the man sitting in the row behind me whether he minded if I reclined my seat. He said, in a northern European accent, No, no, of course, go ahead! I said, Thank you. And then I added, You must not be from New York if you're so polite. Dutch? He laughed and said he was Danish but had lived in New York for seventeen years. I offered him a bun, and we chatted as he tore it to pieces with his fingers and ate it one bite-sized piece at a time.
His name was Klaus, he was in his mid-30s, and he had moved to New York from Denmark - a little tiny town in the north of Denmark where nothing happened. He had worked as an au pair in New York in 1992, and the family he had worked for was wealthy, and they took him along for their summer holidays up and down the west coast. He was young then, and he returned to Denmark to finish his business studies. The education system in Denmark was such that university tuition was not only free but also students got stipends simply for attending, so Klaus did not understand why Danes would stay in crappy jobs when they could educate themselves into better careers and be paid during the process. After graduation, he and his wife schemed ways to move to America, and when two management positions opened for the North American office of European Sperm Bank (that is the name), they took the jobs and moved across the Atlantic. His wife still held the job, which she executed for Seattle from a home office in Park Slope, while Klaus had gone onto a middle management position at an advertising agency.
He had liked working for the sperm bank. You think that the clients are primarily lesbians, but that is not necessarily so, he said. The women who came into the clinic were often emotionally delicate, because only non-traditional situations would lead people to the door. Klaus found it fulfilling to guide people through the process, to help them, to give them what they wanted so badly. He said people sent postcards and photographs of their children, which were kept all around the office.
He was on his way to Boston to pick up a car he had bought, sight unseen, from the Internet. You can save thousands this way, he said. He was buying a Volvo station wagon, for his kids and his bikes. He loved biking. I communicated that I loved biking also, but that my love was born from my commute, not from what I called "bike vanity." He looked puzzled, and I realized that I had made no sense and was being negative to boot. I said, I just mean that I prefer biking for leisure or travel rather than for fitness. He liked biking for fitness, and described to me the pleasure of riding twelve loops of Prospect Park, or about forty miles, two nights before. There were many other riders for pacing or catching, and people and scenery and topography to watch. The convenience of having a forty-mile ride two blocks from the apartment, available any time of day, couldn't be beat. He liked mountain biking also, but needed a car to get out of the city for that, hence the Volvo station wagon.
I sat across two bus seats with my back against the window and talked to him in the row behind me. It was a shame that there isn't a more extensive network of rail so that you could take your bike upstate without having to drive it there, I said. We talked about urban planning and bicycle advocacy, with him generally maintaining a note of optimism about the movement toward bike- and pedestrian-oriented planning and me lamenting the violent zealotry of car drivers and gleefully spelling the doom of the American suburb. Congestion pricing was something we could all agree on.
My eyes could not stay open, so I said, Good night, Klaus, I need to rest now. For the next four hours, through the McDonald's rest stop, I leaned my head against the window, closed my eyes and watched words scroll in front of me, and failed completely in sleep. I opened my eyes next at South Station, to see Klaus extending his hand toward me. We shook hands, and he went off to find his Volvo.
blake
White male, 26-28 years old, 5'11", attorney, Boston University, plaintiff-side class action litigation, in Aquadots case before my judge, going to Boston for bachelor party, had been looking forward to it for months, got bumped off the same flight as me. I made conversation by asking whether he had any more information than me; he didn't. We walked together from Gate B5 to B21 for ten minutes, dodging rolling bags, slicing through queues, waiting when one was behind the other. High spirits, fast walking. I called DR on my cell phone for advice about what to do and Blake half-listened to my end of the conversation, chuckling politely when I made jokes about the weather. Queued together for twenty minutes, commiserating with fellow travelers. A man who had just made it to the front of the queue walked back looking grim. I asked, What are they saying? The man - 6'3" Eastern European in sharp business dress - said, with a gulping accent, "Bullshit." Everybody laughed, everybody suffered the same. No point in getting angry at the weather. Blake and I advanced to the counter and monopolized the smiling attendant for fifteen minutes asking about different permutations of travel options: standby on Flights X and Y; guaranteed seats on Flights A and B but not until Saturday night; refunds; reroutes. I felt lawyerly communion with the lawyer at my side.
The options were not good. Take a risk on waiting for a standby seat for the last flight to Boston before Sunday, with a more than 50% chance of not getting a seat at all, or attempt to fly standby on a flight to New York, which would leave me 210 miles from my destination at 12:30 a.m. Blake desperately wanted to go to Boston for the bachelor party; one could sense it from the way he talked about his job. I said, Come on, just fly to New York. He said, But I don't know anybody there. I said, You don't know anybody there? No. And then, for a brief moment, it seemed the crazy was going to ratchet up to a new level, and I thought about proposing that we share a hotel room that night. We had engaged with each other for half an hour and it got me to almost right amount of friendly, or flirtatious, or slutty. But I guess no, not yet, not enough. I wavered for a few moments, and then decided to run through that lovely colorful neon sound installation to Gate C8 to stand by for the next flight to LaGuardia. Blake was researching Chinatown bus options with his thumbs all over the screen of his smartphone. I shook his hand, said goodbye, and ran away.
The options were not good. Take a risk on waiting for a standby seat for the last flight to Boston before Sunday, with a more than 50% chance of not getting a seat at all, or attempt to fly standby on a flight to New York, which would leave me 210 miles from my destination at 12:30 a.m. Blake desperately wanted to go to Boston for the bachelor party; one could sense it from the way he talked about his job. I said, Come on, just fly to New York. He said, But I don't know anybody there. I said, You don't know anybody there? No. And then, for a brief moment, it seemed the crazy was going to ratchet up to a new level, and I thought about proposing that we share a hotel room that night. We had engaged with each other for half an hour and it got me to almost right amount of friendly, or flirtatious, or slutty. But I guess no, not yet, not enough. I wavered for a few moments, and then decided to run through that lovely colorful neon sound installation to Gate C8 to stand by for the next flight to LaGuardia. Blake was researching Chinatown bus options with his thumbs all over the screen of his smartphone. I shook his hand, said goodbye, and ran away.
Monday, June 22, 2009
terry
There was a light sprinkling of rain and a few bolts of lightning in Chicago on Friday, so all outgoing flights from O'Hare were canceled. Terminals B and C were overflowing with travelers, who waited petulantly in hundred-person lines for hours for refunds or reroutes, sat on the tile near electrical outlets with their laptops burning their crotches, and lay supine on the heating vents with Cubs caps pulled over their eyes. I was trying to get to Boston. My flight was first delayed 45 minutes, then two hours, then three, and we shuttled from one gate to another awaiting, what we discovered later, a fictional flight that was never to take off.
At B5, I dozed and snapped photographs of fellow travelers. It was a rare chance to document so many expressions of unhappiness under one roof. I was at peace because I had a soft serve. I was sitting right next to the people standing in line for the United attendant, so I watched them and listened to their conversations. One man had the face of a 38 year-old but wore screened t-shirts, thick leather bracelets, and dark jeans adorned with decorative flat chains in the style of somebody fifteen years younger, in a nightclub, in Hackensack; he touched himself on the biceps and abdomen and adjusted the cuff of his jeans several times, but the intended audience for his presentation was unclear. One man had a small cell phone device in his ear and looked right at me and shouted directions, which I assumed were not for me. I heard a boy named Terry tell a man named Mario about the missionary work he was planning to do.
Half an hour later, Terry sat down next to me. I asked him whether he was going to Boston like me, but he said he was going to New York. We didn't say anything else for a few minutes, but I looked over and smiled a few times, and eventually I said, I couldn't help but overhear that you were going to do missionary work in New York. What exactly are you doing? and from there, our conversation took off.
Terry was 20 years old and headed for a six-week mission in Brooklyn. He was on summer break from his studies in marketing at a small state college in Michigan. He would be leading a group of fifty teenagers from as far away as Canada in restoration projects on a church on Flatbush Avenue whose motto was "Doing Good in the Hood Since 1654." He wasn't going with his church members; his only partner would be a girl about his age whom he had only met once before, at the previous week's mission orientation. He and his crew would be living in the dormitory connected to the church. He hadn't been to New York, but he was excited to go, and he asked me where he should go and what he should do. I said that he might like the city upon first impression but feelings of love would develop after he exhausted his tourist sites and turned to the people around him. He asked where the restaurant from Seinfeld was, and I gave him precise directions and added my own trivia to his understanding of the storefront, but he didn't appear to care too much about Suzanne Vega. Terry had the letters "WWJD" repeated in scrolling text on a tight blue bracelet around his wrist. He wore a baseball cap and glasses, and was exceedingly polite, without being formal, in the way he addressed me.
He was from Niles, Michigan, a town of 15,000 just north of the Indiana border. He said he was from the "cornfields," and that his college was in a town that was even more full of cornfields. He'd spent the entire day, starting from 8 a.m. shuttling by car and regional jet between his hometown and Grand Rapids and O'Hare, and here he was at 6 p.m. a bit tired from travel but happy to have already met so many interesting people. I liked his attitude, and told him this. I said I liked meeting people, but you don't know whether they want to be meeting you. We agreed it was nice when two people who didn't know each other both wanted to talk. One can get a sense of another's values in the way they talk about even value-neutral subjects, like whether to be irritated by a long day of rain delays, or in the simple fact that they will talk openly with a stranger. Maybe it is foolish or dangerous of me to go on believing in strangers like this, but I trusted Terry immediately.
I suppose Terry was something of a cliche, because he was kind, polite, genuine small-town boy who expressed unpretentious, open-mouthed awe when I told him about the institutions I'd been affiliated with ("Is Harvard really as hard as everyone says it is?") and who spoke of his (paltry) summer salary like it was an unfathomable sum of money. It only made me like him more. He wanted to know more about what I liked about New York. The liveliness, I said. Go to the Mermaid Parade. (He was fascinated.) Go to Central Park on a Saturday. Go to the gay pride parade.
At this, he hesitated. Well, you know, I don't know if I would personally feel comfortable about that because of my religion, he said. I had with purpose instructed him to go to Pride; I am making the slow transition from sustaining conversations with strangers by pretending to be more politically moderate than I am to actually speaking my mind, but doing so without breathing stranger-repellent radical fire; so I felt too a gentle missionary zeal in speaking to my missionary about matters of the spirit.
Terry was hesitant but not insulting, and not even conservative. He spoke about his personal discomfort - "I" statements - not about other people's sins. He was a good boy, a curious boy, a cornfield boy compelled by New York, so even though his brain had been taught to close, his heart was wide open. I am gay, I said, and some parts of the parade make even me feel uncomfortable (I said this with the Log Cabin Republicans in mind), but it's good to go and see that people are people no matter how different their identities might seem from yours. Or something equally platitudinous, and probably less grammatical, came out of my mouth; I was trying so hard. Terry responded immediately by talking about how one of his friends had come out to him but prefaced his remarks by saying that Terry was the last person he had come out to. This remark saddened Terry, because he felt that some "out there" Christians had made it seem like the whole religion was about hating other people. Terry sounded hurt when he said that Christianity was about love. God is love. He said he protested against the conservative protesters at his school, because he didn't like how they made others feel.
We drifted from this topic into the next: cops and lawyers. Everybody considered the cops in his small town corrupt. Terry had been pulled over and given a ticket for having expired car insurance because he had shown the cop two copies of his insurance papers, one of which was older than the more recent set. The cop was corrupt, the magistrate presiding over the case was corrupt, and in the end he felt that he had been roughed up by a bunch of jackasses. There was no justice. Contempt for corrupt authority, God as love, curiosity - my dear, dear boy.
Over the intercom, the kiosk attendant announced, triumphantly, that Seating Area 1 was permitted to board. I shook hands with Terry and left, because it was time for me to fly to Boston. Terry wrote down my email address and we shall see if I ever have occasion to see my dear missionary again. I left it up to him.
Seconds after the attendant made the boarding announcement, she got back on the intercom and said, pausing heavily, "Well...sorry folks, but...it looks like your flight has been canceled." This was uproarious for the crowd, who raged, and also uproarious for me, because I found the comedy utterly delightful. O'Hare and its gentle Christians could not control the 12th largest downpour in Chicago history, and there was nothing to do but laugh and laugh! The delays and detours resulting from this uproarious announcement also gave me the opportunity to have half hour conversations with two additional strangers, Blake and Klaus, which I will document here tomorrow.
At B5, I dozed and snapped photographs of fellow travelers. It was a rare chance to document so many expressions of unhappiness under one roof. I was at peace because I had a soft serve. I was sitting right next to the people standing in line for the United attendant, so I watched them and listened to their conversations. One man had the face of a 38 year-old but wore screened t-shirts, thick leather bracelets, and dark jeans adorned with decorative flat chains in the style of somebody fifteen years younger, in a nightclub, in Hackensack; he touched himself on the biceps and abdomen and adjusted the cuff of his jeans several times, but the intended audience for his presentation was unclear. One man had a small cell phone device in his ear and looked right at me and shouted directions, which I assumed were not for me. I heard a boy named Terry tell a man named Mario about the missionary work he was planning to do.
Half an hour later, Terry sat down next to me. I asked him whether he was going to Boston like me, but he said he was going to New York. We didn't say anything else for a few minutes, but I looked over and smiled a few times, and eventually I said, I couldn't help but overhear that you were going to do missionary work in New York. What exactly are you doing? and from there, our conversation took off.
Terry was 20 years old and headed for a six-week mission in Brooklyn. He was on summer break from his studies in marketing at a small state college in Michigan. He would be leading a group of fifty teenagers from as far away as Canada in restoration projects on a church on Flatbush Avenue whose motto was "Doing Good in the Hood Since 1654." He wasn't going with his church members; his only partner would be a girl about his age whom he had only met once before, at the previous week's mission orientation. He and his crew would be living in the dormitory connected to the church. He hadn't been to New York, but he was excited to go, and he asked me where he should go and what he should do. I said that he might like the city upon first impression but feelings of love would develop after he exhausted his tourist sites and turned to the people around him. He asked where the restaurant from Seinfeld was, and I gave him precise directions and added my own trivia to his understanding of the storefront, but he didn't appear to care too much about Suzanne Vega. Terry had the letters "WWJD" repeated in scrolling text on a tight blue bracelet around his wrist. He wore a baseball cap and glasses, and was exceedingly polite, without being formal, in the way he addressed me.
He was from Niles, Michigan, a town of 15,000 just north of the Indiana border. He said he was from the "cornfields," and that his college was in a town that was even more full of cornfields. He'd spent the entire day, starting from 8 a.m. shuttling by car and regional jet between his hometown and Grand Rapids and O'Hare, and here he was at 6 p.m. a bit tired from travel but happy to have already met so many interesting people. I liked his attitude, and told him this. I said I liked meeting people, but you don't know whether they want to be meeting you. We agreed it was nice when two people who didn't know each other both wanted to talk. One can get a sense of another's values in the way they talk about even value-neutral subjects, like whether to be irritated by a long day of rain delays, or in the simple fact that they will talk openly with a stranger. Maybe it is foolish or dangerous of me to go on believing in strangers like this, but I trusted Terry immediately.
I suppose Terry was something of a cliche, because he was kind, polite, genuine small-town boy who expressed unpretentious, open-mouthed awe when I told him about the institutions I'd been affiliated with ("Is Harvard really as hard as everyone says it is?") and who spoke of his (paltry) summer salary like it was an unfathomable sum of money. It only made me like him more. He wanted to know more about what I liked about New York. The liveliness, I said. Go to the Mermaid Parade. (He was fascinated.) Go to Central Park on a Saturday. Go to the gay pride parade.
At this, he hesitated. Well, you know, I don't know if I would personally feel comfortable about that because of my religion, he said. I had with purpose instructed him to go to Pride; I am making the slow transition from sustaining conversations with strangers by pretending to be more politically moderate than I am to actually speaking my mind, but doing so without breathing stranger-repellent radical fire; so I felt too a gentle missionary zeal in speaking to my missionary about matters of the spirit.
Terry was hesitant but not insulting, and not even conservative. He spoke about his personal discomfort - "I" statements - not about other people's sins. He was a good boy, a curious boy, a cornfield boy compelled by New York, so even though his brain had been taught to close, his heart was wide open. I am gay, I said, and some parts of the parade make even me feel uncomfortable (I said this with the Log Cabin Republicans in mind), but it's good to go and see that people are people no matter how different their identities might seem from yours. Or something equally platitudinous, and probably less grammatical, came out of my mouth; I was trying so hard. Terry responded immediately by talking about how one of his friends had come out to him but prefaced his remarks by saying that Terry was the last person he had come out to. This remark saddened Terry, because he felt that some "out there" Christians had made it seem like the whole religion was about hating other people. Terry sounded hurt when he said that Christianity was about love. God is love. He said he protested against the conservative protesters at his school, because he didn't like how they made others feel.
We drifted from this topic into the next: cops and lawyers. Everybody considered the cops in his small town corrupt. Terry had been pulled over and given a ticket for having expired car insurance because he had shown the cop two copies of his insurance papers, one of which was older than the more recent set. The cop was corrupt, the magistrate presiding over the case was corrupt, and in the end he felt that he had been roughed up by a bunch of jackasses. There was no justice. Contempt for corrupt authority, God as love, curiosity - my dear, dear boy.
Over the intercom, the kiosk attendant announced, triumphantly, that Seating Area 1 was permitted to board. I shook hands with Terry and left, because it was time for me to fly to Boston. Terry wrote down my email address and we shall see if I ever have occasion to see my dear missionary again. I left it up to him.
Seconds after the attendant made the boarding announcement, she got back on the intercom and said, pausing heavily, "Well...sorry folks, but...it looks like your flight has been canceled." This was uproarious for the crowd, who raged, and also uproarious for me, because I found the comedy utterly delightful. O'Hare and its gentle Christians could not control the 12th largest downpour in Chicago history, and there was nothing to do but laugh and laugh! The delays and detours resulting from this uproarious announcement also gave me the opportunity to have half hour conversations with two additional strangers, Blake and Klaus, which I will document here tomorrow.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
shears
While we were sitting in a sunny park on a perfectly warm day, R explained to me and C how he had chosen the maroon-brown snowboarding pack that he had been toting around for three years. There were certain features and decorative touches that he liked. For example, he used the cell phone pouch on the left shoulder strap for its intended purpose, something I have never seen done.
He also noted that one of the zippers had broken off. Left behind was only an aggravating metal nub which R had to wrap his pincers around to unzip the main compartment of the pack.
I just so happened to have a piece of nylon climbing cord around my wrist that would fit perfectly around the metal nub, giving R a convenient zipper pull. B had had this cord tied around her steering wheel in 2007, and when I asked her then what it was, she said, It is a nylon cord, and gave it to me.
For two years I have been wearing it around my wrist, without ever having occasion to take it off. Why would I? It was simple and unobtrusive and it reminded me of the awesomeness of B. But all good bracelets must come to an end, and here was a chance for the cord to start a new life. However, after two years of wear, some gummy residue had developed around the knots. This residue made it impossible for me to untie the cord. The loop was too small to slip over my hand.
I struggled with it for ten minutes, to no avail. Nearby was a couple enjoying the weather with their infant. I showed them the cord, told them it had been attached to me for two years, then asked if they had scissors or nail clippers. They said, Sorry, no.
Twenty minutes later, a lady with a pair of gardening shears strapped to her waist walked by. I dashed after her, wrist-first, and begged to use her shears. She said, Sure, but I won't cut it for you. Perhaps fearing a lawsuit. I said no problem and cut it myself. I returned triumphantly to R and C on the bench and tied the cord around the zipper nub.
The couple with the infant shouted over to me, "Congratulations on your new life!"
He also noted that one of the zippers had broken off. Left behind was only an aggravating metal nub which R had to wrap his pincers around to unzip the main compartment of the pack.
I just so happened to have a piece of nylon climbing cord around my wrist that would fit perfectly around the metal nub, giving R a convenient zipper pull. B had had this cord tied around her steering wheel in 2007, and when I asked her then what it was, she said, It is a nylon cord, and gave it to me.
For two years I have been wearing it around my wrist, without ever having occasion to take it off. Why would I? It was simple and unobtrusive and it reminded me of the awesomeness of B. But all good bracelets must come to an end, and here was a chance for the cord to start a new life. However, after two years of wear, some gummy residue had developed around the knots. This residue made it impossible for me to untie the cord. The loop was too small to slip over my hand.
I struggled with it for ten minutes, to no avail. Nearby was a couple enjoying the weather with their infant. I showed them the cord, told them it had been attached to me for two years, then asked if they had scissors or nail clippers. They said, Sorry, no.
Twenty minutes later, a lady with a pair of gardening shears strapped to her waist walked by. I dashed after her, wrist-first, and begged to use her shears. She said, Sure, but I won't cut it for you. Perhaps fearing a lawsuit. I said no problem and cut it myself. I returned triumphantly to R and C on the bench and tied the cord around the zipper nub.
The couple with the infant shouted over to me, "Congratulations on your new life!"
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
ramblers
Olympia got free tickets to a show at the Old Town School of Folk Music last Friday night, so I canceled my plans for the evening to join her. We've been playing some bluegrass/country/folk music together, and I was eager to have the chance to watch some live music of that genre with her. We have similarly analytical and curious approaches to music and performance; we both want to improve ourselves by imitating the successes of others.
Seats were assigned at this venue, an auditorium that was a mix of lecture hall seating (church pews on terraced levels on a ground floor and a mezzanine) and cabaret lounge-style tables and chairs ringing the back rows. Olympia and I were seated at a table at which a man and woman were already sitting.
Since it is awkward to share a table but not conversation with strangers, I introduced myself to both of them, and there were then introductions around the table. The woman's name registered as "Pamela," but I instantly forgot the man's name. They were kind-faced older white people, heavy-bottomed with age but not unhealthy, and unassumingly dressed. The man's silver hair was short in the front but a pulled into ponytail with rubber band in the back. He had an earring shaped like a feather in one ear. They spoke to each other quietly and occasionally. They seemed moderate in every way, and very predictable for a sit down $25-per-head concert at a revered folk music institution. I say this without intending to be snide; folk is folk.
Before the concert started, the four of us chatted briefly. They wanted to know, do we like Cajun and western swing music? Even though I had gone through a zydeco craze in 1995, I threw up my hands and said, I don't know, we got the concert tickets free. Pamela said that western swing was like swing music, except with a country influence.
The lights came down and the musicians began playing. They were introduced by an older staff member as "young faces in Cajun music," but they still looked quite old to me. The youngest member seemed to be in his early thirties, the oldest in his fifties. Their arrangement was two fiddles, a hollow body electric guitar, upright bass, spare drumset; one fiddler and the bassist and guitars also doubled as singers. Their music was mostly uptempo, danceable harmonious country with jazzy walking basslines. There had been a Cajun dancing lesson immediately before the show, and just before the stage was a cleared out area for dancing, so quickly the floor filled with folks trotting around in pairs.
At the intermission, the woman sitting at the table went to fetch a drink. The man spoke to me and Olympia. I take it you guys are musicians? he said. I said, How did you know? I guess Olympia had been talking throughout the first set about the arrangements and the idiosyncratic characteristics of the genre. The man said that he was an art teacher at a local college, and that he sometimes used music to connect his students to the art. He was interested in knowing what Olympia thought of the fiddlers, and Olympia described the process of translating her classical skills on the instrument to the loose improvisation required for folk music. She talked about learning licks from a book.
The man said, There was this classically trained violinist who took his instrument down to Texas. You know, down there they say, it's not a violin, what you have there is called a fiddle!
The woman came back and we all talked about how it would be fun to dance. The man and Olympia were reluctant; the woman and I were eager. After the music started up again, couples again took to the floor to spin, twirl, and step on themselves. I looked at Olympia and suggested we dance. She demurred. The woman looked at the man and suggested they dance. He demurred. The woman and I looked at each other, and I said, Wanna dance? She said, Sure! and we took to the floor.
I cannot dance, let alone Cajun dance. I am not gifted with grace or natural athleticism. What God has given me is a below-average sense of shame. So the woman and I had a great time flouncing about on the dance floor, mimicking the moves of the more skillful dancers, spinning each other. I took the man's position and gripped her waist with my right hand and her hard, dry palm with my left.
We were both somewhat embarrassed (but not enough to stop dancing), and we chatted nervously as we moved about. At this point, there were only a few people on the dance floor and two hundred people outside the fishbowl staring at us. Because the dancers up until that point had been exclusively white male-female couples, I feared gay panic and tried to project with my body language and laughter that Pamela and I were not a May-December heteroracial homosexual pair, but just new friends out for a trot. Pamela corrected me when I addressed her: "I'm Paulina!"
We danced like this for two songs. I tried not to allow her body too close to mine, because I am friendly with strangers but I don't like to allow too much sensation to pass between me and them. Only aural, maybe some visual. Still I could feel her hard hands and smell the bouquet of her mingled, muted floral scents, and it made me the slightest uncomfortable. After two songs, we returned to our tables to fetch our intended dancing partners.
Olympia and I danced for about thirty to forty-five minutes up near the stage, trying to see the action closer. Between our clumsy dance steps, Olympia would periodically announce things like "They are using pedals on the fiddles" and "We need a spare drumset. I should buy a snare drum." It was even more nerve-wracking to be part of a May-May homoracial homosexual pair in a sea of uncomplected couples with mismatching genitalia - but only my own self-consciousness, not anyone else's judgment, made me feel this way. Anyway, by this point there were little girls dancing around in rings and middle-aged women slow dancing and other outlier groupings to make one feel less alien.
When the encore was completed, Olympia and I found Paulina and her man, and we all said, Goodbye, what wonderful table-sharing friends you were! Then Olympia and I found our bikes and rode a bumpy and dark three miles back to Cleaver Street. Last night we composed a mariachi song, but I would not be surprised if we move soon to western swing.
Seats were assigned at this venue, an auditorium that was a mix of lecture hall seating (church pews on terraced levels on a ground floor and a mezzanine) and cabaret lounge-style tables and chairs ringing the back rows. Olympia and I were seated at a table at which a man and woman were already sitting.
Since it is awkward to share a table but not conversation with strangers, I introduced myself to both of them, and there were then introductions around the table. The woman's name registered as "Pamela," but I instantly forgot the man's name. They were kind-faced older white people, heavy-bottomed with age but not unhealthy, and unassumingly dressed. The man's silver hair was short in the front but a pulled into ponytail with rubber band in the back. He had an earring shaped like a feather in one ear. They spoke to each other quietly and occasionally. They seemed moderate in every way, and very predictable for a sit down $25-per-head concert at a revered folk music institution. I say this without intending to be snide; folk is folk.
Before the concert started, the four of us chatted briefly. They wanted to know, do we like Cajun and western swing music? Even though I had gone through a zydeco craze in 1995, I threw up my hands and said, I don't know, we got the concert tickets free. Pamela said that western swing was like swing music, except with a country influence.
The lights came down and the musicians began playing. They were introduced by an older staff member as "young faces in Cajun music," but they still looked quite old to me. The youngest member seemed to be in his early thirties, the oldest in his fifties. Their arrangement was two fiddles, a hollow body electric guitar, upright bass, spare drumset; one fiddler and the bassist and guitars also doubled as singers. Their music was mostly uptempo, danceable harmonious country with jazzy walking basslines. There had been a Cajun dancing lesson immediately before the show, and just before the stage was a cleared out area for dancing, so quickly the floor filled with folks trotting around in pairs.
At the intermission, the woman sitting at the table went to fetch a drink. The man spoke to me and Olympia. I take it you guys are musicians? he said. I said, How did you know? I guess Olympia had been talking throughout the first set about the arrangements and the idiosyncratic characteristics of the genre. The man said that he was an art teacher at a local college, and that he sometimes used music to connect his students to the art. He was interested in knowing what Olympia thought of the fiddlers, and Olympia described the process of translating her classical skills on the instrument to the loose improvisation required for folk music. She talked about learning licks from a book.
The man said, There was this classically trained violinist who took his instrument down to Texas. You know, down there they say, it's not a violin, what you have there is called a fiddle!
The woman came back and we all talked about how it would be fun to dance. The man and Olympia were reluctant; the woman and I were eager. After the music started up again, couples again took to the floor to spin, twirl, and step on themselves. I looked at Olympia and suggested we dance. She demurred. The woman looked at the man and suggested they dance. He demurred. The woman and I looked at each other, and I said, Wanna dance? She said, Sure! and we took to the floor.
I cannot dance, let alone Cajun dance. I am not gifted with grace or natural athleticism. What God has given me is a below-average sense of shame. So the woman and I had a great time flouncing about on the dance floor, mimicking the moves of the more skillful dancers, spinning each other. I took the man's position and gripped her waist with my right hand and her hard, dry palm with my left.
We were both somewhat embarrassed (but not enough to stop dancing), and we chatted nervously as we moved about. At this point, there were only a few people on the dance floor and two hundred people outside the fishbowl staring at us. Because the dancers up until that point had been exclusively white male-female couples, I feared gay panic and tried to project with my body language and laughter that Pamela and I were not a May-December heteroracial homosexual pair, but just new friends out for a trot. Pamela corrected me when I addressed her: "I'm Paulina!"
We danced like this for two songs. I tried not to allow her body too close to mine, because I am friendly with strangers but I don't like to allow too much sensation to pass between me and them. Only aural, maybe some visual. Still I could feel her hard hands and smell the bouquet of her mingled, muted floral scents, and it made me the slightest uncomfortable. After two songs, we returned to our tables to fetch our intended dancing partners.
Olympia and I danced for about thirty to forty-five minutes up near the stage, trying to see the action closer. Between our clumsy dance steps, Olympia would periodically announce things like "They are using pedals on the fiddles" and "We need a spare drumset. I should buy a snare drum." It was even more nerve-wracking to be part of a May-May homoracial homosexual pair in a sea of uncomplected couples with mismatching genitalia - but only my own self-consciousness, not anyone else's judgment, made me feel this way. Anyway, by this point there were little girls dancing around in rings and middle-aged women slow dancing and other outlier groupings to make one feel less alien.
When the encore was completed, Olympia and I found Paulina and her man, and we all said, Goodbye, what wonderful table-sharing friends you were! Then Olympia and I found our bikes and rode a bumpy and dark three miles back to Cleaver Street. Last night we composed a mariachi song, but I would not be surprised if we move soon to western swing.
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