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She Called It The Piazza

December 10, 2008 2 Comments

She called it the piazza. I’d been to the library and it isn’t a piazza at all, but she says it just the same.

I don’t say that and it’s not like I know what to call it anyway. I wouldn’t say it to her if I did because she is so fierce. They’ve pulled babies out of her and bits off her while the calendars repeated themselves, and when they bury her there will be an echo inside. But everyone loves her and fears her.

She never went leathery, she got adamantine. Basilisk to a stranger and a pitted madonna with the toe worn smooth where votaries come to her own. She’d press a quarter in my hand like a card trick when we left.

The piazza leaned drunkenly off the building and she’d send me to get the food that cooled out there. Thirty rickety feet and more over the jetsam of a thousand lives gone bad surrounded by chainlink and crime.

It was always hot and close and she had only two colors — grey and the pink of her cheek. There was always things I didn’t understand boiling. Everything on the plate was grey and pink, too.

The rooms were in a parade. The triptych of the parlor windows showed the sack of a forgotten Rome. No running in the hall! Her daughter lived down stairs so there was no one to bother but … the very idea. But how could a child linger in that tunnel of a hall. The bedrooms branched off, dim caves that smelled of perfume bought in stores forty years closed by men thirty years dead. The indistinct whorls on the wallpaper reached out to touch your hand like a leper. You had to get past it to the kitchen table.

She’d spoon the sugar and dump the milk in the tea until the saucer was a puddle and you wondered how many times the bag could take it. But there was cinnamon and laughter now and then and sunlight that turned the battered battleship linoleum into a limpid pool. The cork shone through the scrim of the coating, a million footfalls revealing it over time.

And Catherine? The Cork showed through there, too.

Never Pick Fights With People That Buy Pixels By The Kilojoule

December 9, 2008 3 Comments

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me! Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out of my Ford and run off into the hills, or wherever. Sometimes when I see videos on my Intertube machine, I wonder: “Did little demons get inside and draw them on the cave walls?”

My older cavecub’s junior high school has an Audio/Visual club. They limit the amount of cubs they allow in it. My cavecub got passed over.

Caveman Woodbanger is supposed to be sanguine or mystified or peeved or whatnot. But Caveman Woodbutcher knows all about the ability of your average school teacher to see the potential in a cavecub. Caveman thinks we expect too much of teachers in many ways; there are a lot of cubs and they’re not mind readers. I cast my mind back to when the dinosaurs and I roamed the Earth and my own high school wouldn’t allow me to take shop class no matter how much me and my troglodyte parents tried to convince them to let me. What a waste of everyone’s time it would have been to let me at any tools. They knew I’d never stick with it. I must go back to the runes. It’s not that caveman and cavecub care all that much. Everyone gets to do what they want as soon as you grow up and leave the Secondary Cave. It’s the intergenerational monotony of the thing that strikes caveman funny.

Likewise, what a waste of time it would be to let my cavecub into the A/V club. I’m sure it’s loaded with cubs churning out videos like these, using nothing but the obsolete video editing software that came with Windows; Vixy; cave cartoons found on YouTube; cavetoys found in littler cavecub’s room; an eight-year-old digital still camera; and help, encouragement, and bad jokes from their old cavedad:

I see the teacher who runs the A/V club has the kids entering things on Smith Magazine’s Six Word Memoirs. Oops. Not exactly:

For the last four days, I have done nothing but email teens who are finalists for our upcoming teens-only six-word memoir book. It’s hundreds and hundreds of stories, plus some pictures, some advice, some tough questions, and some secret-sharing of my own. Today, I got a reply informing me that a memoir Larry and I had selected wasn’t written by a teen at all, but by their teacher, testing the waters.

I just fell off the mastodon wagon, but I don’t think you call that “testing the waters” in publishing. At least not in depositions, anyway.

That’s OK. My cavecub’s picture has been on Six Word Memoirs for almost a year already. But I wrote the blurb and took the picture; he and I are too far to the left on the evolution chart to … ahem… test any waters.

So Unfrozen Caveman Woodbutcher is here to praise my local schoolteacher. Put him up on the Mount Rushmore of edumacation with Horace Mann and Christy McCauliffe and Aristotle. Even an unfrozen caveman can see that his assistance in helping us avoid exposing our cavecub to strange old men that masquerade as teenagers on the Intertunnel has really been first-rate.

Delmer’s A Haunt, Still

December 8, 2008 3 Comments


That’s my friend Delmer Wilson.

Those aren’t the swallowtail boxes we talked about before. They’re a sort of basket, made like the oval boxes, but with a loop handle added. The Shakers called that item a “carrier.” Spare of prose, too. It is what it is.

There was Shaker village in Canterbury, New Hampshire. Delmer Wilson lived in Sabbathday, Maine, which isn’t too far from there, but I don’t know if he ever went there. A carrier made in the Canterbury, New Hampshire Shaker village sold for $117,000.00 this year. Delmer is standing in front of a pile of over a thousand of them, identified as a season’s work for him.

I wonder; could I make 117 million dollars worth of furniture this year? Doubtful. Delmer sure looks relaxed doing it. Me, I’m frantic and the kids still need new shoes.

I’m friendly with the nice people over at Marion Antiques here in the town I live in. They don’t mind I wander around a lot and only buy trifles. And they don’t mind that I make antiques fresh daily, because they understand we’re in different but related businesses. Many antique dealers treat me like a leper.

I bought a Shaker box from Marion Antiques recently. The Shakers used to make perfectly round containers, too. they called them “measures.” The modern equivalent would be the folded, waxed cardboard bin you put chinese food in, I guess. This one was painted blue originally, I can still see it stuck in the check grains of the wood. The most valuable stuff still has the original paint on it. The Shaker carrier that sold for all that cake is painted a screaming yellow color, and the paint is still intact. People think of Shaker stuff as kind of drab, but it isn’t. They painted stuff really vibrant colors, and they didn’t use tiger maple by accident.

The Sistine Chapel ceiling seemed kind of drab ’til they cleaned it. Many had become accustomed to thinking of it as drab and wanted it put back the way it was. When reality intrudes on prejudice, reality is often asked to go back to the back of the bus. It won’t stay there forever, but foolish people try.

The measure I bought at Marion Antiques wasn’t expensive. but I flipped it over, and scratched rudely in the bottom, it said: WILSON 1848.

It’s not him; the date’s wrong, and Delmer wouldn’t have taken so little care in doing anything, even scratching his name on something. Someone that used it for a lunch pail wanted to make it identifiable, or some such; or maybe some former owner is fooling around and it’s not that old.

I don’t care. When a ghost shows up, you don’t ignore him because you don’t like the clothes he’s wearing.

Month: December 2008

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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