A friend of mine has a son with elfin ears.
Not long ago, the boy’s dad wrote to Barak Obama to mention this fact. And President Obama wrote back.
Category Archives: Portraits of People and Places
Warts and All
As I sat waiting for a prescription at the pharmacy reading a book on my iPod Touch, an elderly guy approached. “You’ll get warts on your thumbs from that thing,” he informed me, farting luxuriously as he walked past. When I didn’t automatically agree with him he drove the point home. “You’ll see. When it happens you’ll have to admit I told you so.”
“Ok,” I told him cheerfully, and went back to reading my book.
But he missed the rugs, both of them
I was curled up in my favorite seat at the coffee shop reading a book when a mom ducked into the restroom half carrying, have pushing her young son ahead of her. My first thought was that he was having a potty emergency. He’d probably been engrossed in something and then suddenly realized that he had to go — that he’d had to go for a while now. I remember those moments from when my siblings were young, those sudden looks of surprised urgency, those mad dashes for the bathroom, those occasional times when no mad dash could be fast enough.
Then a minute or two later the dad and two older brothers also drifted into the restroom, the boys’ eyes wide and worried looking. And from inside the crowded little room the youngest had started to cry.
Evidently shooed out of the restroom, the two brothers were clearly at a loss about what to do with themselves while their parents were in there with their baby brother. Picking me at random, the oldest boy, maybe 7 or 8, came to tell me, “My brother just suddenly threw up. Next door. Did you know they’re having a sale next door? Well they are. 40% off. They’re going out of business.”
He went back to check on his brother, only to be shooed out of the restroom once more. He wandered down the wall toward the front door, his middle brother trailing after him. Wandered back. Came over to me again. “We didn’t know he was sick when we left this morning. And then he just threw up next door. But luckily he missed the rugs. There were two of them, right next to each other, but he threw up right in the middle of them. We didn’t know he was sick until then.”
His middle brother hung back a bit, sucking his middle fingers and looking at me silently, glancing over his shoulder at the restroom door every once in a while. From inside we could all hear the baby brother crying. Finally the two boys wandered over to a table and sat down by themselves, talking quietly to each other, waiting.
As the family left, crying youngest boy in his dad’s arms, the oldest boy told the couple sitting nearest the front door, “He’s crying because he threw up. We didn’t know he was sick.”
Painting and Drawing
Remember those bags filled with snacks and coloring books and quiet toys that your mom would pack if you had to go sit and amuse yourself in the presence of grown-ups for any length of time? I have exactly that kind of bag for myself now. It’s rough-woven of coarse hemp yarn, handmade by someone in town, and full of all that I could need to amuse myself quietly for hours. It has a paperback, a zine, a sketch pad, a watercolor sketch book, plain envelopes (in case I want to mail a sketched card to someone), watercolor postcards, colored pencils, paints, pencils, charcoal, eraser, pencil sharpener, straight edge, smudger, and paper towels (for cleaning up the watercolor travel case). Given food, a laptop, and a wifi signal, I could amuse myself for days.
This week I did a watercolor postcard from a photograph I’d taken last Sunday in town.
Then I started a watercolor postcard of a lily.
I was challenged by a friend to draw something in 5 minutes.
And, since I’d really love to learn to draw people, I drew as quickly as I could this morning at a meeting. People are pesky, though. They’re hard, and they move. I’m very very bad at drawing people, but at least three of these four are recognizable (barely) as the people they are. The purse didn’t move, which was such a relief.
I thought I’d lost the capacity to concentrate on something for long periods of time, losing track of time. I used to get that feeling while reading, or weaving, or doing any number of things, but I hadn’t felt that same sense of being totally engrossed in a long long time. I feel like I’m welcoming back an old friend.
Open Daily 11am to 9pm
Next time you pull up to a bookstore that sells “books and resources” to the politically radical, and find that it’s located next to “Sweeney Todd’s Salon,” be prepared for oddness. The sign saying “Open Daily: 11am to 9pm” will probably be more of an educated guess than a statement of fact, the implied message being “Well, you know, if we’re not busy doing something else — and we’ve got a lot going on.” And they do. They’re sorting and packing books for prisoners, running discussion groups about the G20, stopping the war in Iraq… The 200 or so square feet of book shelves are kind of an after-thought.
I didn’t know this, though. So I was a little confused to pull up at 11:30 and find the place dark. There were people inside, and the door was unlocked, but the people seemed pretty surprised when I actually entered.
“Are you open?” seemed like it should have been akin to a rhetorical question, but apparently not.
“No, not yet.”
“Do you know when you will be?”
“Usually we’re open by about now, but we’ll open when they get here. They’re volunteers, you know.”
I wondered who “they” were. The girl seemed to think I’d know. And since she was busy sorting and packing books, I thought I’d just return to my car and ponder the question from there, stopping first to retrieve my book from the trunk. I no longer trusted Them to appear soon, and yet I didn’t really feel like driving the hour back to my house now that I’d made it all the way here just to see what kinds of zines they’d carry.
A heavily tattooed couple clumped by in heavy black boots, their hair styles leaving it to the eye of the beholder to decide between “bed head” and “I spent hours moussing it to look just like this.” I wondered, as I often do, how piercings like the one woman had feel in -20 weather.
A preppy looking couple walked their black lab while sipping coffee. The lab peed on the bookstore’s sidewalk sign.
A middle-aged woman in grey sweats and lime green crocks shuffled along next to her miniscule grown daughter. And then several minutes later walked back and entered the darkened bookstore. Were these They? I closed my book and glanced at the clock: 12:10. Ten minutes after the store event I’d seen listed on the website was scheduled to begin.
But no. The lights didn’t turn on, so I returned to my book.
Not long afterwards, though, They arrived in the form of a diminuative college-aged guy carrying a satchel that was easily twice the size of his torso. The lights went on. A sandwich board went out on the sidewalk declaring “OPEN: 11am – 9pm.” And I went in to browse zines while They talked on the phone about an upcoming meeting to discuss “the war, abortion, and health care.”