Superstition

A prompt from elsewhere. Superstition.

The calendar says it’s November 2000. I’ve done it. I’ve turned in the final papers for my masters degree. I am also in the third month of my job. In the next week I will receive 300 boxes of art books that I am expected to turn into a library some day for the company. In the next week we will also move the entire company to a different building in a different city. In the next month I will spend weekdays at work and weekends with my siblings, caring for our dad who will die a few days before Christmas. For five, ten, fifteen and twenty years I will struggle to eventually find my place in the company, and in the work I do. I will grudgingly love it and later will enthusiastically and nerdily love it and be known for it. I will suffer less, but take on the suffering of my mom. We will all suffer together, and the work that I do will turn into a refuge, even while getting more difficult and complex. How either suffering will end is a bit of a mystery.

But it started here. At a naugahyde-covered door that serves as my desk. In a little brick former post office that serves as our house. Somewhere under all that paper is a Magic 8 Ball. I’d consult it a dozen times a day, hoping that signs would point to yes. Yes, you will some day live pretty much pain-free. Yes, you will get an A in Cataloging. Yes, If you keep going to school you will graduate and get a job that will allow you to pay your bills. Even after the heat wave that melted the Magic 8 Ball, it had *just* enough liquid inside to provide answers. The poor mishapen oracle went the way of all things when we moved to our first real home, but I just may need to buy a new one to help me navigate the current uncertain times.

Straight Outta Refinery Town

Went on a walk yesterday with the Rev, out near the old place. It was lovely. We saw ruby crowned kinglets, and cats sleeping in the sun in the grass next to the trail. We saw a mountain pooping out a cloud. 

And we had some great views of the refinery near where I used to live. Which reminded me that I wanted to share a photo of a painting done by one of my former neighbors -- a pastiche of the area surrounding the refinery and old downtown where we all lived. The view reminds me of the view from a different neighbor's rooftop apartment over the former shoe store where the artists all had their studios. You could sit on her roof and look out to the other rooftops, and see the refinery on the hill, and hear the pool balls breaking at the bar across the street. On Sunday mornings you could hear the choir singing in the church that had once been a punk nightclub, and a movie theater before that.

Another former resident of that town and I visited later in the day, unmasked. Why I didn't put my mask on immediately when she said her son was working in a restaurant, I don't know. Her phone rang, and she picked up. It was her husband. Where were their rapid tests? Son's chef has COVID. She bolted out of my house. Son tested positive, she tested negative, and I'm not leaving the house for a while.

I really have to be more careful, even though I really am.

Fred Flintstone

I guess I'd file this under "Favorite Things". 

This is the Fred Flintstone bank that I found at Thrift Town when we lived in the city. It confirmed my methodology of always looking high and low while shopping there. Fred was on a high shelf.

When we moved to the old place and seriously started saving money, I'd put all of my change in him. We were soooo poor that I'd give mrguy a hard time whenever he bought something that I thought he didn't need, like a mango. "Put the mango dollar in Fred" is still code around here for "don't spend that money you're about to spend". Those words are spoken less frequently now, but I still feel like if I need to I can go back to being that person.

Now Fred lives on the floor in the office and holds the closet doors closed so that the cats can't rampage in our belongings. He still eats my change.

Good Fred.

Dog Mayors

The other day I read an item about the passing of another honorary dog mayor. Pour one out for Lucy Lou, who was the mayor of Rabbit Hash, Kentucky.

Which reminds me that in July, for lack of anything better to do, I took my mom to a biker bar in a town about 40 minutes' drive from the mama's place. 

The town's claim to fame is that it once had an honorary dog mayor.

The bar's claim to fame is that after the mayor's passing, they taxidermed the dog and routed the beer tap through its body, which stands on the bar back. As I heard it described, the bartender lifts the dog's leg and the beer is dispensed. Whereas we were pouring one out for Lucy Lou, we were pouring one out of this dog mayor.

So I take my mom for a road trip to the town in question. It's one of those unincorporated areas that's not quite a town. Of course my heart sings for such a place, like a town near the Old Place where you drive through the yellow hills til the road dead ends in a broken up wharf. There you find a bar filled with bikers and a taxidermed polar bear. There's a certain romance in that. Or the Old Place itself, where a multitude of crazy things would take place and either make us laugh or frustrate the hell out of us.

So this bar and the town it was in were much farther than I expected, but the mama loves a drive, so it all worked out. We got there, and there were lots of bikers. A little known fact is that the mama really loves a Harley, so she definitely perked up. 

And we get to the bar and check out the tap and...WHOA NELLY! I guess you hear what you want to hear and it never occurred to me that they would be dispensing the beer out of the dog's nether regions. I thought it would be the mouth. Guess I lack the proper imagination.

 

The beer was not tasty. But they did make a good Shrimp Louis, two things that the mama really likes, and have Harleys and the mama had never been to this place before.

All in all a successful outing.

Chicken Club (tm)

Many stories from the Old Place involve Antwan. He was a 1983 Toyota Tercel -- one of those unfortunate models whose paint started sloughing off within a few years of its manufacture. By the time middlesis acquired him from a friend, he'd already gotten several coats of silver spray paint to augment his rapidly-departing factory finish.

Before he was mine, he spent a fair amount of time in the grittier parts of the City, where his original owner was a late-night copy editor at the local newspaper. Not long after she got the car she realized that people were hanging out in it while she was at work. She'd get into the car after her shift at the paper and it smelled like gum, or there would be a cassette in her tape deck that wasn't hers. Kinda spooky. This happened pretty regularly.

Anyhoo, a few years later I was lucky enough to acquire this prize automobile that did truly change my life with his steadfastness and reliability. And he needed a name. I was reminded of an old friend from the Irish bar who worked in IT at a hospital. When he got bored, he'd run database searches on different stuff. This was *around* 1985. He ran a search to see what the most popular baby names were that month at the hospital. #1 baby name (boy) was Antwan. I held onto that as a favorite name of my own and bestowed it on this new-to-me car.

As I have mentioned earlier, I wore Antwon down to the nubs. He had 183,000 miles on him at the end. But just prior to this I'd come to fully appreciate the humor in what a homely vehicle he was. I'd park around the corner if I was parking at an internship or applying for a job. And I pretended that I needed to carefully lock him, as if anyone would steal him.

I will say that this is wholly unlike the approach used by my old boyfriend's cousin who in 1987 drove a late-60's Dodge Dart with a towing sticker on the window. He kept it there so it looked like the car was going to be towed soon, and there were junk food wrappers and newspapers and a baseball glove and Neetsfoot oil, as I recall, in the back seat. This added to the air of abandonment. One day he drove us to the Met, parked in the red zone, and we looked at art for several hours, before returning home. The obnoxious stuff you do in your 20s...

Back to obnoxious stuff you do in your 30s. One day, while shopping at the 99c store, I came upon a pile of rubber chickens. The bummer was that they were stiff, not like the floppy one I had imagined I would some day own. Disappointment turned to joy as I considered all of the things I could do with multiple rubber chickens that even I, living on State Disability, could own. I bought several. Gave one to my sister, and put one in the car. Not long after, I realized the similarity in shape between my chicken and another friend's The Club anti-theft device. Hence the Chicken Club (tm) was born. Every time I parked I would dutifully whip out the Chicken Club (tm), wedge the steering wheel between the chicken's little beak and put the other part of the steering wheel between the legs. It may not have protected the car from theft, but it cracked me up every time I used it.

Here it is in action, so to speak. Today a friend sent me a portrait of me in Antwan, pulling away from a parking space in front of the Petroleum and Atomic Workers' Union Hall next door to our house, with the Chicken Club in its resting position, on top of the dashboard.

I needed to tell his story.

Signs Point To Yes, Again

Oh Man, I love this sign! Mrguy and I used to pass it all the time when we lived in the old old place, and we'd talk about how some day we wanted to own it. The sign, not the bar. Today, on my birthday (observed) with bigsis, we drove past and I was determined to at least photograph the sign. As luck would have it, the bar is now for sale, and I have written to the realtor to ask whether the owners have plans for the sign.

The reason I ask is that not too far away, many many years ago, I was getting cheap tires put on my car. While I waited, workers were disassembling an amazing sign I'd admired. I asked them if there were plans for the sign, and they told me that their boss had not told them what to do with the sign beyond taking it out of the frame. They went to a pay phone and called their boss to ask, leaving a message. Then he called me (at my apartment 30 minutes away). I returned home, got the happy message that the sign was all mine, and drove 30 minutes back up the freeway to get the very large sign (2 of them, actually) into my Barracuda. I've been a happy gal ever since.

I'm looking for a photo of the SnackBar sign, but can't find one at the moment. The sign is stored (somewhere) awaiting reinstall after the kitchen remodel is complete.

Thanks, Officer No-Tooth!

The good times continue.

The phone rings. I pick up: "I need help," says a quavery voice. Is it my sister or my mom? It's my sister, who has been taking care of Mom. There is a litany of woe over there. Everything from: my mom discombobulated all of the televisions to my sister's car is parked up the street and she has a migraine and can't move it. It's kind-of a fuckfest.

The bro and I try to figure out logistics of how we can continue the work we need to do at Mom's house and rescue our sister. It occurs to me that many of the tasks have the earmark of mrguy, including an ability to buy feminine hygiene products without embarrassment. So he was drafted and bro and I went back to work. mrguy fixed many things for the family and then came to the ancestral house.

Then I had to call in about jury duty. Drew the short straw and had to appear in the afternoon. Turns out that if you drive 80mph you can get from Mom's to the courthouse in my county in time. I got called for the first group. I was juror 9. They asked if I'd ever had a bad experience with law enforcement. I was compelled to tell them about how the sheriff pulled me over for speeding and told me that if I stood on the corner in the rain he wouldn't cite me. The judge asked me if I reported him and I told her I was too afraid. So I got dismissed. I didn't mention the capper -- that he was missing one of his front teeth. I didn't think that they'd believe me.

Mom's > Courthouse > Mom's > Big Brown Box = 140 miles. Plus it was 103 degrees at the courthouse.

omg, People!

Happy New Year. Here's Your Tape.

About 15 years ago, the City redeveloped the area around mrguy's studio and he had to move. It was bad enough trying to figure out how to relocate his business and his own belongings, but for years he'd also stored bands' master recordings and mix tapes when they'd forget to pick them up. After ten years of running the studio, there were hundreds of tapes. Argh.

I suggested that mrguy call everybody up and then have an open house -- a last blast for the studio / reunion / tape return. Instead, maddeningly, he insisted on meeting with people individually to return their tapes. Mrguy's strong sense of what is right is one of his more endearing qualities, and one place in which my easy-going Libra doesn't budge. 

His strategy of individual handoffs didn't move a lot of tapes, so they moved with us to our storage space in the old place. Occasionally he'd run into someone at a show who was part of one of the tape-leaving bands, and they would arrange to meet up and hand-off was achieved. Occasionally he'd make a project of it, look people up, and hand off more tapes. Social media (first Myspace, then Facebook), made it much easier. Sometimes he found the bands, and sometimes they found him.

When we moved to the City of Price and Purpose we were down to three 5' high bookcases full of reel-to-reel tape. Now we are down to two very large boxes.

Today began the tape return, City With A View style. Our first visitor was picking up two half inch mixes of his band from 1989. He does lighting now, but lived for a long while in LA (an alibi, it seems, for not being findable before). He laughed when he looked at the track list, which included songs titled "New One" and "Aerosmith," not very helpful when the new song was recorded 24 years ago and you don't remember it. Aerosmith was just what the song *sounded* most like, not what it actually was.

Apropos of tapes, he regaled us with a horrible story of visiting a recording studio in LA that had a back room filled with original tapes from amazing sessions: Aretha Franklin (Never Loved A Man), the first two Television albums -- all just sitting there. The originals. He opened a few of the boxes, and they were the real deal, with track sheets and all. Apparently the record companies that owned them were digitizing them, didn't care what happened to the originals after digitization, and hadn't picked them up. 

Mrguy and I felt ill hearing this. Our visitor opened up Google Maps and showed us where the studio in LA had been. I wanted to drive there immediately and rescue the tapes. Checking, later, a studio no longer exists at that site. Anyway the tape leaver is now a tape haver and our tape collection is down by two little quarter inch reels.

Customer number two today was a friend of a friend from the old days. He's still doing music, like the other guy, and has completed a feature film. How does he suddenly have a twenty-year old and a seventeen-year old? He works for the county and has a sweet house in the county seat. After a nice chat, he gave him a tour of our house.

In the past I have disagreed with mrguy's methodology for tape return, but after two visits today, now I get it. It's really lovely to get to spend some time with these people and give them back their tapes from 1989. I'm ready for the next victim, and wish that I were doing an oral history about this.

Barbra

I had a strange revelation last night while listening to Fresh Air on the way home from the factory: I no longer despise Barbra Streisand. I find myself somehow able to separate an appreciation for her tremendous instrument and a strong dislike for a lot of her material. Blew me away, gosh darn it.

In an era in which auto-tune is used routinely as a pitch adjuster *and* a sound effect on its own, it was astonishing to listen to Streisand's great pitch and control over her voice. There was a time when you had to actually be able to sing in order to have credibility as a singer. In my lifetime this has changed.

The whole Babs revelation made me think of a few stories...

When we lived in the city, our upstairs neighbors were a handful. First there was the AIDS caregiver who fell in love with a patient, took him in, and didn't give him as much supervision as he needed. The patient would get locked outside the building on the street naked and start buzzing all the buzzers. Or he'd sell all the stuff in the apartment he could get his hands on during the day while his roommate was at work. The resulting fights were amazing, always at 4 in the morning, usually with large items smashing on the floor above us. We thought things were going to get better when they broke up, but the neighbor took a roommate who listened to the cable guide channel at full-volume all day. He would occasionally switch off the tv and listen to Barbra at full blast instead. Even worse, in my estimation.

We moved to the refinery town soon after. City life was too expensive for us to save any money, so we moved to the far suburbs where, and I may have spoken of this earlier, there was a St. Vincent De Paul thrift store that occasionally served up small miracles. One such miracle was a picture disc of Barbra Streisand, from the film Yentl. I saw the potential of this object speculated fifty cents upon it. "I'm going to sell this and make some money," I told mrguy. "I don't think so," he'd say.

The over the next year or so he'd sell records the Rock-N-Swap and I would beg him to take my picture disc of Barbra Streisand in Yentl and sell it for me. His manly pride would not allow him to, so he refused. However I knew that there were rabid Barbra lovers out there and the fact that it was in its original vinyl sleeve with a gold sticker extolling the virtues of the song still on it would count for something. Eventually it did.

In the early days of ebay, I asked mrguy to list it for me, and he did. Rarely had fifty cents delivered so much pleasure than when, on the last day of the auction, there was a bidding war for the disc. It sold for fifty BUCKS to barbralover@aol.com. Total satisfaction.

Thank you barbralover! Almost 15 years later, I think of Barbra and her fans with gratitude because I could do a lot with fifty clams back then. Still can.

And now I have rid myself of another piece of dislike in my life. I can like Barbra Streisand on certain levels and appreciate her true gifts. I find myself even considering buying her latest cd so I can learn from it.

This is truly a Christmas miracle.

Along The Same Lines

Back in the old place, we had a tight-knit little community. One of our friends from the old place is Count Peckula, who lived over my sister's painting studio across the street from our little house. From the second storey of her place she had a water view and could see the tankers and ferries pass by. Occasionally, when visiting, you'd hear a "crack!" -- people shooting pool at the saloon across the street. By the way, we lived in that town for 7 1/2 years and I never set foot in that saloon.

But I digress. We traded cat-sitting duties with Count Peckula from time to time, and this is how I came to know one of my desert island discs -- Ashwan Batish's Sitar Power. I was over at her place visiting the cat babies and saw it in her cassette deck. I hit play and fell in love. Or laughed. I can't remember, and either is possible.

This record uses sitar as if Germans were playing it. Super structured, with tinny electronic instruments to back it up. I find it completely goofy and hilarious and catchy. I borrowed the cassette, and brought it home to mrguy. He told me that he knew Ashwan Batish from his college days.

Here's a sample to enjoy:

The Old Place. Whale Edition

Every Labor Day I think of the heroin story, but I've already told you that.

Instead I'll tell you this tale from the Old Place.

The Old Place was extremely hot in the summer. We lived in an old brick building next to the Petroleum and Nuclear Worker's Union Hall. On summer days the house would be cool until evening, when the bricks would expel the heat they'd been collecting all day. Some nights it would be 90 degrees at midnight, and rising. Kinda awful. However I don't think we ever paid more than $500 bucks a month for this place and I was on disability so this was the perfect spot for us during those years.

About a dozen years ago, on a hot Thursday in late August, we were watching ER. The teaser for the 11 o'clock news came on saying that a whale had washed up on the coast of our town. Our little beach was maybe 200 feet across, so we assumed that they meant the oceanside beach of the same name.

We waited for the news, and, sure enough! We recognized our little beach and the burned-out pier. Crazy! We grabbed our flashlight and walked down to the beach. There we found another couple who had obviously watched the news also. Our lights made out the shape of the whale. Not much to see, but I would come down the next day and see him in daylight.

The morning paper said that we were about to have a heat wave on the weekend. It was pretty warm by the time I left the house. I stepped out and it smelled...a little "whale-y". Poor whale. According to the Fish and Game guy I met, the whale was a juvenile female, had been deceased for quite a while and wasn't in his jurisdiction. The joy of living in an unincorporated area. "So what's going to happen with the whale?" I asked him, "I don't know," he said. Uh-oh.

I ran into a neighbor on the way back home and we talked a bit about the whale, the smell, and the upcoming heat wave.

Two days later I saw the same neighbor and commented that it was smelling a lot less whale-y. He said "You know why, right?" "Me and Bob..." (anything that started with those three words could not be good. Bob kept a pit bull chained to his porch behind our house, he didn't have a lick of sense and he owned guns) "went out in my boat, tied a rope to its tail, and towed it into the bay. Then we shot it full of holes." He seemed surprised that it didn't sink. All he knew was that he didn't want the smelly whale on our beach during a heat wave. I could tell that in some weird way he thought it was his civic responsibility to do something with the whale. He lived next door to me and also owned guns, so I wasn't going to disagree.

One week later, on Thursday, we saw the teaser for the news: "Another whale has washed up in the area." It was clearly the same whale, and I could see the bullet holes this time. It had floated into another county, on the beach fronting a fancy neighborhood, just in time for the heat wave.

I almost had an image to illustrate this post.

That first smelly day on the beach I used the last shot on my camera to take a picture of the whale. When I got my film back, the whale shot wasn't there.

So ends the story of the whale.

Refinery All Blow Up

Ahhhh.

Just like the old days.

mrguy and I were just sitting down to Hawaiian language class when I started getting multiple texts. One from my Wubbie, another from one of my teammates at work. The refinery was on fire. Was everything o.k.?

15 miles or so away, everything was grand. And now at home, things are pretty mellow, except that the cats are patrolling the house after having been subjected to the shelter-in-place sirens this evening.

Back in the day, when we lived in the old place, we were like the creamy filling in a refinery sandwich. The refinery up the street was pretty mellow. It would spew surreptitiously at night or during rainstorms. The older one to the south had less control over its waste product and was always spewing, or on the blink.

During the 7 1/2 years I lived in the old place, I was on a first name basis with the people who answered the phone at the air quality control board in the middle of the night. At first they wondered why I would call them so late, but these were the hours in which the refineries would have accidental releases. I worked late hours and so did my honey and if I didn't stay up I couldn't see him...why are you asking me this, air quality control dude?

Eventually we were all cool. The bummer was that although they had money to pay people to answer the phone in the middle of the night, they didn't seem to have money to pay inspectors to work in the middle of the night. The nice inspector would come in the morning and we'd chat about her kids. She knew that I knew what I was smelling, but unless she could smell it herself or detect it in a sample, there was no recourse.

Now we don't live near the refinery but we can see it twinkling at night from our house. Every once in a while it reaches out to remind us it's there.

Friendly little fella.

Hawaii 2011, Day 1

We finally made it to Hawaii. About time!

The flight seemed quick and was uneventful except for running into friends from ukulele class who were on their honeymoon. Awwww.

First stop, as usual, was La Mariana Sailing Club, that lovely oasis on Sand Island Access Road. It's been smartened up a bit, and was a shinier version of its usual quirky self. The joint was hopping, which we were glad to see, and there were many ladies there at lunchtime. Our waitress had an amazing Texas drawl, reminding us of our Texan friend who used to work for the Hawaiian tourist board.

We could not resist going to Jelly's in Aiea for a brief visit. I'm on a mission to find a particular 3 Scoops of Aloha tape that Akebono carried with him from Hawaii to Japan when he first signed up for sumo. Found something close. Have questions.

Then to Ward center for slippahs and books.

After a stop at the hotel we made our usual pilgrimage to the restaurant we now call Mama's. I have to say that it also was a shinier version of itself. The food was more delicate.

Sunset Serenaders were on the bandstand at the Halekulani. It's amazing how much you feel the influence of the Kahauanu Lake Trio and Hui 'Ohana in the bands in Waikiki. We felt bad for them when the request was for Pearly Shells. What would be the antidote to that? Makalapua?

And the people watching at the Halekulani was amazing last night. A woman near the edge of the stage sat with a big sullen-looking guy. She reminded us vaguely as a better-dressed version of the hooker who used to appear at the Super Safeway in the old place late at night wearing a long t-shirt and panties. The Honolulu version was a scary skinny lady propped up on high platforms, with sparkly hat, mucho braceletage. Wowsa. They had their cheese plate and beverages sent up to their room because nothing says romance like cheese, I guess.

I am now paying for that second mai tai.

Corn Festival

We went to the Corn Festival yesterday. I've wanted to do this since we lived in the Old Place.

We drove and drove and drove out to the Corn Festival. They had tons of parking. First impressions? Mrguy said "It's like the Aloha Festival, without the Aloha".

The vintage car show was very cool. We fixated on this Streamline-shaped van until we realized that it was a fantasy car. The fellow next to it seemed sad that his car was getting less attention, and rightly so. His impala had sweet flame detailing and the interior upholstery also had flame accents in *alligator*.

Festive!

We had both kinds of corn (boiled and grilled), and avoided corn in a cup, which was the third offering. The corn was yummy and we ate it in the beer tent, while sipping a "microbrew" (Sierra Nevada!!!) and listening to a band do a lot of modern country rock songs.

Altogether pleasant, but it was almost 100 degrees out there. I got whomped bad. Spent the evening recovering from the headache and heat exhaustion while watching Tokyo Drifter.

I see much potential for enhancement, here. If you're going to have a corn festival:

1) More corn signage and a mascot on site at all times. I really look forward to corn photo opportunities. Perhaps a giant corn with a cut-out to put your face in so you can see what you'd look like as an ear of corn with legs
2) Ask every vendor booth to have at least one corn item. How sweet would it have been to have a henna tattoo of an ear of corn?
3) Ask all of the food booths feature a corn specialty. I would have loved it if the bbq guys had roasted corn with sauce, and the Thai booth could have added some corn to its Pad Thai.

That said, we had a great time. I'll need to add something to my bucket list again, because now I've been to the Corn Festival.

A Murder of Crows

Over the last few hours two crows have been claiming their territory via a series of caws. Twenty minutes ago they were joined by a flock, a murder of crows, who all jabbered simultaneously and flew close to the house.

I love crows, and it wasn't always that way.

When I lived in New Hampshire for a brief time, there was a giant pine tree outside my bedroom window and another outside the bathroom window. Both were infested with crows. The din of these crow communities began early in the morning, and I worked nights. I hated crows with a passion. My heart felt light and happy when I saw one dead in the middle of our street. One for us!!

I don't know when the crow love began to overtake the hate. Maybe back at the old place, when I first heard them make the sound of castanets with their tongues. I just don't know why, but I think they're beautiful and funny.

On the way to work in the morning I pass the slimy green runoff from a neighbor's morning watering. Almost every morning, two crows march around in it like drunken sailors, weaving from side to side. It's part of the morning ritual of happiness.

Makes me wish today were a work day.

Flame Licking Hell

It's 9am on Saturday. Went to an estate sale and completely scored, for the princely sum of $2.20. However I'm mildly grumpy because it's going to be another hot one and I can't take the heat. At times like this I remind myself that this heat is nothing compared to the heat at Old Place.

In the Old Place I coined the term "flame licking hell" to describe the weather. These little piggies lived in a brick house that got hotter in the evenings, at the time of day when the little piggies who lived in houses made of sticks were cooling off. Many summer nights it was still over ninety degrees at midnight. The box fan did little to help. At least the wolves didn't eat us ;)

We lived three blocks from the bay at the time. You could look down our cross street and see the container ships passing by on their way from the Delta to the Golden Gate. And the town had a little beach, but few used it. Friends had cleaned up the beach, but crossing the tracks and passing the boat junkyard and burned-out bar on the pier dimmed the romance a bit.

Whatever. One summer it just got too darned hot. I bought a vintage 1960's Jantzen knit bathing suit for 69c at the thrift store. We walked to the beach and jumped in the water. It was delicious.

I started swimming there on hot days. I'd paddle out in the middle of the tiny cove and wave to the commuter trains when they'd pass by. The passengers would wave back and the engineer would toot the whistle.

I hear that the beach has been rediscovered, and that it's full of families on the weekends. As it should be.

Moving On, Mechanically Speaking

I broke up with my mechanic. It was a long time coming. I lost faith. I think that was him right now on the phone. He used the 800 number so I'd pick up.

Or it was Barack.

The mechanic, X of X's Motors, let me spend too much money on my old car and didn't fix the problem. Charged us to come back to discuss it. Did or did not do some of the work we paid for, depending on who you ask.

Would you go back to X?

He knew something was wrong. He called to check. He called again to tell me about his specials (chair massages for customers, and a "ladies special" to teach "ladies" how to talk to mechanics). Gosh, I'm too busy starching my husband's shirts to go to to a ladies mechanic-speaking lesson! Thanks, though.

And don't touch me. Eew.

For this one thing I miss the old place.

The mechanic we went to was a dear. I never knew his backstory, but he was a little gritty and his employees seemed like they all had criminal records. Maybe he was trying to help people go legit? They were courteous, did good work, and were a teensy bit rough around the edges. The series of ladies who answered the phones and ordered parts didn't seem to be our mechanic's girlfriends, but did seem as if they might have a night job, too...

When my car needed something, the mechanic would come to our house with the tow truck and take it to the shop for me. Awesome.

A relationship like that doesn't end when you move. We kept going to him because he was our mechanic. Then one day I went to drop off my car and his shop was boarded up. I never found out what happened.

Started going to a different beat up freaky old place with the world's dirtiest (intellectually, physically) trucker hat collection. Am I imagining that they had a singing James Brown doll, too?

Finally I decided it was o.k. not to drive 20 minutes to the trucker hat mechanic, and settled on X, with his Bluetooth earpiece and newsletters.

Good luck to you, X.

This lady's a person of the peeps.

My Disappointment in a Box

We're going to New York next weekend, because after three years of trying we finally won the ticket lottery for Saturday Night Live. On my birthday, no less.

Mrguy scored rooms at the trendy hotel where we stayed during the forklift exhibition. It was all coming together. Now, just like the last year that the Toronto Blue Jays were in contention for the pennant...a strike. That year I sat in the bleachers at the community baseball field in the Old Place and cried. This time I am just numb.

I get the strike. Doing work that's later reused in ways that make more money for other people and not you is a drag.

I know about this from personal experience. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it, but I was the happy fan who answered the phone and came down to the studio to sing on a song that millions of people have since loved. Over the years the song has been on several compilations and now is a ring tone (a huge cash cow), but non-featured performers like me don't see any additional profit from new uses of the original work. I prefer to dwell on the happy part: I had the opportunity to sing with tremendous musicians whom I admire on a song that became huge.

Had I been trying to make a living playing music, though, I think I would have been mad enough to strike.

The Old Place. Labor Day Edition

Today's the anniversary of the following story. Could have been 1997, or 1998. Doesn't matter.

As I may have explained, the Old Place was weird and magical and sometimes scary. What was a lovely funky place to live in at first became denser and more marginal over the 7 1/2-but-who's-counting years we lived there. Some of the neighbors were pretty creepy, including the one we refer to as "Hair No Grow."

The story of the moniker came from my brother, who took a position as a traveling nurse in St. Croix. He cut off his manly mane before going, hoping to fit in, and soon after he got there, a stranger on the street turned to him and said pityingly "What's the matter, man? Hair no grow?"

A few months after my bro told us this story, an intense burly guy with a shaved head moved in kitty corner to us, and Hair No Grow is born. He had a girlfriendwife and a child and a really awful band that had precisely one song that had two chords, one of which seemed to be in the same tuning as our house and would rattle the walls. I had a little song I'd sing to the tune, which went like this: "I GOT no hair, and I GOT no hair, and I GOT no hair, and I STILLGOTNO hair" (please mind the syncopation on that last part if you're playing along at home). I was mildly afraid of him but wasn't sure whether I was more afraid of the sheriff who was really far away, so we didn't call in noise complaints too often.

One Labor Day morning, mrguy and I were drinking coffee in the back yard. HNG's back window was open. It was hot already and it wasn't even noon. One of his childpeople started messing around with the drum set. Then the words "Kids! Stay AWAY from the HEROIN" rung out across the tiny yard. I looked at mrguy. Did I just hear that? Before I could ask, we heard "Stay AWAAAAY from the HEROIN!!" Holy cow. We went back inside.

Some time after that, we were having a garage sale at my sister's old studio across the street. We could see a stack of papers blowing about, tacked onto HNG's front door. He didn't seem to be home. I couldn't help myself. I ran across the street, opened up his screen door and had a look. Seems he wasn't the only ne'er do well in the household. His dolly had a warrant out for hitting a traffic pole and then splitting on foot. I don't remember what the other notices were (probably eviction).

We never saw them again.

Skunk

As I was making my way home from the factory the other night, I had an intense OLfactory experience: a skunk smell on the highway gave way to a hint of lemon oil in the finish and memories of the old place. Whoa. I think about skunk too much.

Well yes I do. Only three synapses separate the olfactory nerve from the hippocampus, which explains why smell evokes memory so quickly. But the fact that I had so much to say to myself about the qualities of the smell was a direct result of living in a refinery town for seven years.

What I was smelling was a mercaptan, a smelly sulfur compound. Mercaptans are responsible for both pleasant (grapefruit)and unpleasant (dung, skunk) smells. They are also a byproduct of the oil refining process, and the refineries would release them into the air late at night or when it rained.

I think of them as nasty and dangerous toxins. The refining industry thinks of them as less toxic compounds whose main problem is their ability to cause residents living nearby the refinery to pick up the phone and call the authorities!

And that was me. I was a waitressing night owl back then, and was on a first name basis with the nighttime operators at the air quality control board.

Things improved when one of the refineries closed. And then we moved to the new place and mercaptan isn't part of my life like it once was.

But every time I smell skunk, I parse the odor: skunk? or "skunk?"