Monday, October 27, 2008
Saturday, October 25, 2008
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu: The episode of the hot dog
Stomping through tall, weedy grass, my mother in the lead and I, about four or five years old, on the way to the college theater, to see that new “Ewok movie.” Those were our days of graduate student housing, walls of painted concrete block and linoleum floors that were cold to the touch. Just the three of us. My father still with shaggy hair and mustache, he used to take me to the Weinerschnitzel, a shingled, red A-frame, where "drive-thru" really meant it and I delighted in watching cars pass through the building. But we never drove, we just walked there and sat outside, at plastic tables, under plastic parasols, striped in the colors of mustard and ketchup.Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Ten Months of Missing You
... if you have to miss something you love, (or at the very least, once thought you might love,) for more than a week it begins to smart like spliced Hell. After a month it's more like an amputation.
Ten Months of Missing You, is a crumbling attempt to capture some of the smaller things we might otherwise forget to remember- you know the smaller things like overdrawn American sitcoms and ticket stubs from the Trimet six weeks out of date and already disentegrating in your coat pocket. Like Raymond Carver or scrabble tiles or just the right song in the wrong place. Not to mention that thing he always said everytime you left the room or that thing you always said when he returned, missing toothbrushes and those sneakers hanging from the telephone wire. Of course you know these smaller things.
Perhaps we'll paint them or write them in long lines of slanted prose. Perhaps they'll make no sense to anyone outside our own shoes and this will make us happier than a full scale revival. Perhaps they'll form an anchor to this clear and present place or sharp little arrows shooting manfully forwards or looping into yesterday's fog.
Perhaps we simply need reminding of how very lucky we have been. If you have to miss something you love for ten months or more it's well worth saying so.
Ten Months of Missing You, is a crumbling attempt to capture some of the smaller things we might otherwise forget to remember- you know the smaller things like overdrawn American sitcoms and ticket stubs from the Trimet six weeks out of date and already disentegrating in your coat pocket. Like Raymond Carver or scrabble tiles or just the right song in the wrong place. Not to mention that thing he always said everytime you left the room or that thing you always said when he returned, missing toothbrushes and those sneakers hanging from the telephone wire. Of course you know these smaller things.
Perhaps we'll paint them or write them in long lines of slanted prose. Perhaps they'll make no sense to anyone outside our own shoes and this will make us happier than a full scale revival. Perhaps they'll form an anchor to this clear and present place or sharp little arrows shooting manfully forwards or looping into yesterday's fog.
Perhaps we simply need reminding of how very lucky we have been. If you have to miss something you love for ten months or more it's well worth saying so.
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