June Squibb, cont’d (SPOILER ALERT) J(une) or J(esus), take your pick. WWJD? He ran the money changers off, she hacked into the bank account. Same difference.
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I love June Squibb to death—her Thelma in the movie Thelma —for a multitude of reasons. I won’t go into them here. All I’ll say is (SPOILER ALERT): June swatting a cockroach with a magazine wasn’t mean—the bug’s end was instantaneous. The only mean thing June did in the movie was cut off the man’s oxygen. That small glimpse of mean was oh, so satisfying. P.S. I wish June could’ve been around last night in Atlanta.
I watched a worm the other day. Or maybe it wasn’t a worm—do worms have antennae? Skinnier than a soup noodle, it sinuated up the bathroom wall and onto the window trim, then switched course and melted into the crevice behind the wood. Somewhere it still lives. It wasn’t a stinkbug. I didn’t say how our stinkbugs meet their end. We drop them into a mug of dish-detergent tinged water. It’s too slippery in there for them to scramble out. Occasionally, though, when the mug water gets overly crammed with bodies because someone’s neglected to dump them, instead of sinking and drowning a bug might clamber across the backs of the others, scale the wall, and make tracks for somewhere safer so it can again haunt us, oh dread. The technical explanation: besides the slipperiness, the dish soap interferes with the molecular behavior of the water, allowing it to enter the bugs’ pores and crash their respiratory system s . It’s not a fix I’m proud about. Those sticky strips people hang f...
The p icking and strumming, there at the start, was the plan. A few opening chords. No body reckoned on a squeal splitting the air. But doesn’t the baby’s joyous shriek—in that gloomy, bare church—make the perfect lead-in? It was Janelle’s baby, I think. Janelle is the soprano way over on the tail end. Bedtime loomed and the mother would be going home to—with—her family, rendering a wee person’s bliss complete. P.S. We were there, yes . We were sitting on one of the cold hard church benches. Sometimes, seeking the sublime, you just have to brave the elements.
Framed-art tour, exhibit 6 More slashing and pasting—ruination. The wolves kept popping up in our magazines, courtesy of GlaxoSmithKline’s ad campaign. How in the world were ravenous beasts in wool sweaters supposed to mollify the anti-vaxxers? (Matthew 7:15) Bald Babe here, Sunglasses Girl, and Little Drooler, safe in the clutches of the devourers, are the same three who appear in The Tale of the Wrinkled Egg.
Framed-art tour, exhibit 5 Allow me to point out the problems. 1. The photo isn’t the right size for my spotty junk mat—I had to work in a piece of a duplicate print. That’s why you see two bookshelves with identical books, and on the wall to the rear of the sofa, a picture that looks to have replicated itself. 2. The newborn is Cato—at the time, our youngest grandchild. The youngest, Ayaka, wasn’t born yet. After she came along I had to cut her out of a photo of Noemi holding her on the porch and paste it in. That’s Noemi’s arm around Ayaka, spilling into the mat, not Nicholas’s. 3. Although Jonathan is holding the newborn, not Havilah who’s squished close to Jonathan, she got her chance when I glued her and Cato over at the end, next to the lamp. Havilah is also behind herself, clipped from an entirely different photo. 4. Caroline is the one with red-painted nails, Amelia on her lap. The Amelia trying to climb over the back of the sofa, though, got her chubby feet chopped ...
Framed-art tour, exhibit 4 I don’t quite know what it means. Fly? See us fly? Our young children? In the doorway, rubbing sleep from their eyes, their pajamas drooping around their butts, worried that if we don’t flap around fixing their lunches they’ll go hungry at school? Our children turning 40, 50? So we’re supposed to get out of the way? Flutter off to the blue yonder, leaving more room for them? Go before we’re so old they get stuck with wiping up our drool and changing our Depends and can’t dash around frenetically living their own lives? (Dependses, I think, technically.) Alta had folded this in half and tucked it inside an envelope, thus the crack running across the beak-y nose of the bird person in jailbird pants. That crease—the wornness? All the more reason for matting the picture and putting it behind glass. “Just recycling old cards,” Alta explained in her note on the back. “Stay well & sane,” she wrote, too. It’s what anybody’s best-in-the-world friends hope fo...
All this talk about flaws—egregious or slight—and then, wouldn’t you know, along comes a piece in the May 27 issue of Time (see below) that hits the spot. Our Tommy person says that for all his awe around showboat dogs, he prefers the hardier mongrels. Disease wise, they’re less at risk due to inbreeding. Their dogginess is on full display. I’ll say. I was a little grudging about getting Buster. Jennifer kept saying I needed a dog. No. I didn’t want one, either. Nor did Paulson. What didn’t our daughter understand? She found a puppy on Facebook, anyway. She and Rebecca drove us to to see him, like we needed a taxi for the elderly, or something. Ug. As far as I was concerned, his head was too small for his body. After a night of his barking I was ready to send him back. Paulson said no. Four years on, who’s the luckier—us, or our boy who sprawls on the porch every night surveying his kingdom—is hard to tell. And as for funky (how Tommy puts it), my word. Look at the soggy black-...
I don’t have a photo, but here’s why that gouge gave me fits. Turning onto our road one morning—this was a few years ago—I encountered a ridge of gravel and debris running right down the middle, scraped there by a repair crew’s monster grader. I edged to the side of the road so the gravel wouldn’t punch hoes in the car’s underbelly and kept going. But 50 yards up from the culvert pipe for the creek , g oing around the bend, I failed to notice how close I was getting to the ditch. Suddenly the car was sliding toward oblivion. It didn’t land upside down in the creek—a tree was in the way. So I didn’t go to heaven (if I had anything like that in mind, which I didn’t). The car at a steep slant, its left rear wheel lifted off the ground, I got the motor turned off. I fumbled and fumbled for the phone. I called my husband. He couldn’t hear me, but he said he was coming. I had an awful time trying to climb out. The car door was too heavy. Finally, kicking off my silly shoes allowed me to b...
See the creek along our back road. See the pebbly embankment. See where heavy rains took out a chunk this spring. After the downpours, after the damage, I stewed. My husband painted a stick bright like danger and pushed it down through the sludge. Also he sent an email to the highway department. Oddly enough, they came by some time later and put in their own stick, banana colored, a more bureaucratic affair. I say oddly because the highway people don’t always pay attention like this. And sometimes the thing I obsess over actually matters. To be cont’d.