10/13/10: A nondescript blue knit hat that someone has cut a hole in at the crown - for a ponytail?

33 Chilean miners, trapped in a mine since August 5, now being brought back to the surface.  I heard the story as I biked to work today.  The young reporter who described the scene this morning was hoarse and energetic.  I imagined her along with everyone else cheering as each miner came into view, witnessing rebirths throughout the night. 

I biked along in this sunny, snappy fall morning, and I thought about the final miner, the person who has to wait alone while his last co-workers goes up and the transport comes back down for him.  Now that, I thought, is a story someone should write.

Here I sit.  I have just sent Jaime up, have heard the last sounds of him and the machine that carries him.  He is looking up, up toward the light.  I am looking, too, but he will see it before I do.  I have imagined this moment, and it is both worse and better than I have imagined.  Something in my belly loosens, as if I am trying to fill the space with myself - just myself.  The darkness - and beyond it, the stone - presses back upon me.  Who will win, I wonder?  But stone moves slowly, whereas I move quickly.  I will be above this stony warren in less time than it took me to sit and eat dinner each night at home, less time than it took me to bathe my children when they were young. 
The older I have gotten, the less tolerant I have become of being underground.  I will likely never willingly enter a cave again.  To be a miner would be kind of torture, like Winston in 1984 being set upon by rats when he felt he could have endured anything but rats.  Yet somehow these men - through necessity - have found a way to be underground every day.  We endure a great many things out of necessity.  I am happy for them, for their families.  And still I wonder about that one who will be last.  Someone has to be last.

 

10/11/12: A cross-stitch pattern...

...several large templates for making your own crossword puzzles, a stuffed elephant.

The elephant is a very cartoon-like stuffed animal, with poochy jowls and tiny tusks.  Maybe a little like the elephants in Disney's The Jungle Book.

I saw that movie when it first came out.  I was eight years old (which would make the year 1969), and it was maybe the third or fourth movie I'd seen in my life.  We went because my mother had flown back to Oregon from Massachusetts to help her mother care for her stepfather, who'd just had heart by-pass surgery.  She was gone for two weeks, which felt like an eternity to all of us.  I don't think she'd been away from me for so long except when my two younger siblings had been born.  (Come to think of it, a movie was involved with one of those mother-absences, too.  We lived in Sweden when my sister, Kjerstin, was born.  It was 1966, and my dad took us kids to see The Sound of Music in Stockholm.  That was my first ever movie.)  My dad, I think, felt badly for all of us when we were bereft of my mother, and he was prone to do especially nice things when she was absent - to help us all feel better.  I hope it helped him.  It certainly was an interesting distraction for me.

And then there's elephants.  I have a Thing about them.  I can't think of an animal less suited to being made into a goofy stuffed animal.  They symbolize for me the Wild Otherness of creatures.  When I was nine, we went with our beloved friends, Tom and Kathy, and saw the Ringling Bros. and Barnum Bailey Circus in Madison Square Garden.  The drill in those days was to first go behind the big top and see all the animals that would later dazzle us with their feats and costumes.  Seeing elephants in shackles had a wrong-ness to it that leveled me. 

I want to pay more attention to those moments when they happen.  There is something good about knowing what strikes us deeply.

10/11/10: Today, I put out several things

Yesterday, our friend, Karen, asked how it was that we could keep ourselves from taking a bunch of stuff from the Bench for ourselves. First, I gestured to our overly-packed house, implying something like, "Where would we put more stuff?" I also said something about how, when I take an item for myself, I try and put something else out on the Bench. This is true, but Garth's answer was also true: "Katrina is a better person than I am." Oops! I meant his other answer: "We do take stuff off the bench." Remember that ivory-colored tablecloth from awhile back? Well, it hung around for days, and then finally I realized it would be perfect for a curtain Luken wants in his room. I'll just cut it above the rip and hang it up.

There is another answer to Karen's question, too: most of this stuff is not especially desirable - and thus, not hard to resist. In fact, I have thought a number of times that most of the things sound better when I write about them than they are in reality. This is a curious phenomenon. I generally describe what seems relevant about a Bench item, and sometimes that means not describing other qualities, like dinginess, or cracks.

I also think something happens when my attention is focused on an item. When someone takes the time to focus on something by writing about it or taking a picture of it or telling a story about it, it implies some worth. There is a dark side to this. Popular culture is all about turning our attention toward things that aren't necessarily of worth; the attention is there simply because someone wants you to buy something.

But, at its best, I think art uses this focus phenomenon in an illuminating way. It invites us into the artist's way of seeing, it says, "I find this beautiful," and asks us to find beauty in, too - though we might not have been inclined to do so previously. I like exercising my mind that way. There's something spiritual about it - like having someone speak compassionately about a person we're irritated with, and so inviting us to create a more complete, tender picture of that person.

10/10/10: Tibetan prayer flags

My Buddhist monk brother, Reverend Hugh, spent a number of years up in the forests of northern California at a place called the Hermitage.  It was affiliated with the Abbey where he became a monk. He is visiting right now from England and brought some items for the Free Bench, including the Tibetan prayer flags - which used to hang at the Hermitage.  I decided they should festoon the Free Bench itself.  I like the color they have added.  I like that they are connected to his time at the Hermitage.  I like the idea of them sending out prayers each time they are caught by the air and set to waving.  It makes me want to give more thought to the prayers so I'll know what prayers we're sending out into the world.

A couple years ago, I got some prayer flags to give to our whole family for the Winter Solstice.  They were bright, beautiful flags with images of dancing children from around the world on each panel. Someone else liked the flags, too.  On two different occasions, they came up our front steps and cut away the panels they liked the most.  Five of the eight in total.  They brought scissors with them, intending to bring the dancing children they coveted back to their space.  

I have wanted things that much in my day, have even taken some of them when I was much younger.  It is a complicated sort of wanting, and it is never really satisfied.  

Having those five panels taken was a bit demoralizing.  Not just for the obvious reasons, but also because it somehow underscored the fact that no one else in my family had been particularly captivated by the prayer flags.  Reflecting on that now, it indicates the way that I can want something, but only allow myself to see it if I believe it's "for the family."  It is still difficult for me to recognize the things that I want just for myself, and to have it be enough that I want it, even when others might not.  To get more clear on my wants would be cleaner than convincing myself that others will like this, too(even when there's been no indication they will), and then feeling disappointed when they don't especially.  And then I spare them and myself - my disappointment as well. 

10/09/10: A small, long-sleeved blue women's shirt...

...a salmon-colored women's tank top, a very large green men's golf shirt, a handful of Concord grapes.

A few days back, three smallish silver-plated dishes with lids appeared - the sort that come out for black olives and cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving tables.  Shortly thereafter, all but one disappeared, though the lid went missing for the one that remained.  Yesterday morning, there were the grapes.  My brain does not generally expect food to appear on the Bench (though it does occasionally), and so my mind kept trying to make the grapes into something else: large marbles, weird eyeball gag gifts.  Finally, I realized what they were.

Food on the Bench is a tricky thing.  Last week, a bag of bagels appeared, as did an opened and partially used gallon of water.  I like that people want to feed others.  As I've said, we have our share of neighborhood living-on-the-edge folk who likely don't get enough to eat.  It seems to me that, these days, only the most desperate would take a risk on food found on the Bench, though.  I am not conversant in that kind of hunger, where I am driven to consume something of unknown origin, perhaps wondering if it will make me sick, all the while eating it anyway.

10/07/10: More large pants keep showing up...

...in one's and two's.  Some of them are quite nice: tweedy.  My friend, Tom W., thought the initial appearance of many large pants last week suggested a death.  Which actually I had thought of, too.  But I'd spent the day before talking to a young woman whose husband had died of leukemia two weeks earlier about how she thought she should give his clothes away but couldn't quite bring herself to do it.  So I didn't write about the death explanation for the pants.  I think I was feeling tired of death.

What a privilege: to be tired of death, and so able to choose to set thought of it aside for awhile.

Tom was right.  That appearance of a pile of clothes at once could be due to a death.  So how to explain this slow trickle?  My earlier idea - weight loss - doesn't expalin the slow trickle very well either.  Clothing can be so imbued with who we are.  How would it come about that we would discard them, streadily over time?

K--- and S----- are in the living room listening to Joan Jett's version of the Doors' "Love Me Two Times."  G---- and L---- are doing the dishes together, listening to David Bowie's "Space Oddity."  L---- just asked, "Who's Judy Garland?"  I am between it all, hearing both songs, my brain tuning in to one and then the other.  This is a privilege, too.

10/06/10: A little girl's dress, black velvet top, flowered skirt...

...a white ceramic bowl with a cobalt blue stripe around the brim, something that I think is a piece of exercise equipment: a circle of black, flat metal with two cushioned parts opposite each other that are perhaps hand grips?  Now that thing I could make art out of.

One of the themes I deeply appreciated in the workshop I attended last Saturday was the idea that we each live with a foot in daily life and a foot in the life of our deep self.  That is, there are the things we need to attend to to move the life we've chosen along: getting the kids to school, paying the bills, getting the car serviced, what have you.  Then there are the things that serve our deeper life, the parts of ourselves that we feel called to express, our abiding passions.  If we accept that this is so, then we forever try to attend to both because both are happening all the time.  Sometimes we achieve a sort of balance.  More times, we favor one over the other given the demands of the moment.  

This morning, I was rather cranky.  I think it's how I feel when I am yanked out of the world of deep self (where I have been enjoying myself) and plunked firmly into mundane life.  We at the Goulash (as we refer to ourselves) household are smack in the middle of one more bedroom switcheroo.  As G---- put it, everyone moved one space counter-clockwise.  There is something about moving that is so very basic.  It involves lifting and putting down, sorting and packing, setting up and making right.

At this moment, I appreciate that my crankiness simply came from feeling the absence of the deep self in doing the basic work that was in front of me.  But I think that's a mistake in my perception.  When I talk about being plunked into the mundane, I was using the word with its negative connotation, using it in the sense of "ordinary" with ordinary not being especially attractive or vital.  But mundane also means "of the earth," and I can't imagine a more soothing balm for my deep self (while it does the deeds of daily life) than things of the earth.

10/04/10: One Dell computer monitor..

...with a note attached that says, "I may not work, but take me and make art out of me."

Hmm. I want to say - without resentment - that this is someone's trash dressed up as a silk purse.  Or maybe they were hopeful, "This is broken but surely this expensive thing that uses enormous resources could still be used for something."  That is our dilemma these days, isn't it - because we make too many disposable things that have nowhere to be disposed of?  Still, I'm pretty sure I don't want art to be what happens with things that we can't figure out what else to do with.  Badly put, but you get my meaning.  

If I take pictures of the Free Bench, does that make it art?  
Do I first have to arrange the offerings to make it art?  
Is that what I am doing here: arranging the offerings of the Free Bench?  
Is it only art if I have an MFA?  
Is art what something needs to be to be readable, to be read?

Dunno.

10/03/10: A torn ivory white tablecloth...

...a lace-edged navy blue tank top, a brown furry vest, and brown and tan diagonally striped windbreaker.

I drove up to Vashon Island, WA on Friday to attend a Saturday workshop.  I have this habit when I drive the freeway to look over whenever someone is passing me, just to acknowledge them.  Sometimes, I smile.

Not long into the drive up, I looked over at someone passing me, and he flipped me off.  I hadn't cut him off or slowed him down.  The only thing I can figure is that he didn't like some of our bumper stickers: maybe Darth W. Bush or Impeach Bush or the like.

For several miles, I wrestled with what to do with this occurrence.  When it happened, a sort of shock went through me.  I am the sort of person who first wonders what I did to draw this sort of reaction; then I find some outrage in me, though I also feel somewhat fearful of a person who would do such a thing.  None of these reactions felt right or comfortable.

About ten minutes later, I pulled into a rest area.  On my way to the restroom, I noticed two men in their early 60's who'd clearly stopped for a cigarette and to stretch their legs.  They had close-cropped hair and were dressed in clean jeans and wind breakers.  As I came back to my car, the two men approached me.  "Those are quite the stickers," the bespectacled one said.  "There's no question who you are for"  (here, I think he referred to the no less than four bumper stickers we have for Steve Novick, a good college friend of mine who ran for the Senate a couple years back).  I explained to them about Novick.  Turns out they were from Canada, were a couple, were driving back up to Canada from Palm Springs (who comes from Canada to Palm Springs in early October?!), thought Americans were a little wacky, especially about the health care situation.

All of this happened as I drove to Vashon Island and listened to Eckhart Tolle's The New Earth on CD in the car.  So here is what I think: when the guy flipped me off, he was treating me like the Other.  My discomfort came from feeling invited to polarize the two of us.  In his view, he was right and I was offensively wrong.  In such a dynamic, to make myself feel better, I had to make him outrageous and wrong for behaving the way he did and make myself wronged and, thus, right.  Yet I wanted us both to belong.  Those two men reminded me I did belong.  We see you and we're okay with what we see.  Somehow, this reminder that I was not cast out settled me enough to see that I just didn't like the dynamic the other guy set up by flipping me off.  It felt better to feel badly that he saw the world that way, but to realize it had nothing really to do with me.

The workshop was about becoming more of who we are.  I am someone who can get derailed by worrying how others see me.  When I'm on my tracks, I love people; I want us all to belong.  I want to remember that more.

10/01/10: About thirty skirt and trouser hangers...

...many assorted button-down and turtle-neck shirts, black women's pumps, two baskets, a leopard print fleece blanket with sleeves in it.

When I saw this pile of stuff, I decided to hang the shirts up on the hangers because I have this idea that that is more appealing to people.  As I sorted, our neighbor, S----, came over to sit in the sun on the bench with his morning coffee and cigarette.  He lives in the apartments and so doesn't have his own place to sun himself from.  He is a great person, a minister's kid (except he's a grownup now), and works for BARK, our fabulous grassroots organization whose mission is to save Mt. Hood.  Anyway, ----t helped me sort and hang a little, which meant that then there was actually space for him to set himself down with his stimulants.

As soon as I send this, I am traveling three and a half hours northeast to Vashon Island in Washington state to attend a workshop tomorrow.  I am not taking my laptop, so will not be Musing for a couple days.  I am taking my journals, a couple books, and some stationery.  The thought of being able to hang out in my own brain for this length of time is delicious to me.  I am renewed by it already, just out of anticipation.

9/30/10: Coma by Robin Cook...

...black women's t-shirt with a skull and a rose on it, large swatch of yellow cloth, a top that looks like it used to be a sundress only the owner didn't like the sleeves or the dress part and took her scissors to it.

Didn't Coma come out around the same time as Carrie by Steven King?  I was fourteen when Carrie came out, and my best friend at the time, Julie L., had just read it and loved it.  I generally did judge these sorts of books by their covers and would not have ever picked it up if someone I liked hadn't recommended it to me.  But recommend it she did.  Those were the days when I also felt honor bound to finish any book I started.  So there I sat, reading a book I never would have chosen right through to the end.  Carrie exceeded my expectations.  I was in a cold sweat by page five, and that never let up.  

I had been gripped by a book before. I remember reading Oliver Twist at age 11, sitting in our house in Scotland, and at the part where Bill Sykes jumps off the roof and hangs himself, I realized it had grown dark outside and in the room I was in, and that I couldn't see into the corners anymore.  It was a chilling moment.  But I happily opened books by Dickens thereafter.  

Carrie finished Steven King off for me.  Was it the relentless teen-aged tormenting?  Was it the idea that people could be so cruel that they'd save up a bunch of pig's blood to dump on some misfit's head?  Was it the savage revenge that took hold of Carrie herself?  Or was it the idea that some guy actually enjoyed filling his own brain with this stuff enough that he wanted to write a book about it?

And since I'm on a rant, what's with skulls and roses?

9/27/10: A pair of strap-on black wings...

...a large swatch of magenta cloth, an orange, blue and magenta mumu, a yellowish-beige bathrobe.        

The first time I ever heard the word mumu, it was said about something my maternal grandmother wore.  She loved mumus.  To her, they signaled that she was relaxing now.  She always worked hard, first as a child in a family of field workers, then as a domestic, eventually as a bookkeeper and office manager, and later in life as the owner of antique stores.  Most work mornings, she woke up at 5:00.  She'd put coffee on to percolate, then put her hair in rollers and sit under the drier while she had her coffee.  Sometimes, she'd have breakfast first: a slice of toast and one fried egg.  When the weekend came around, she allowed herself the luxury of first hanging out in her quilted bathrobe, and then changing into a mumu as her around-the-house garb.

That makes me think of the specialness of those kinds of delineations.  I have already said how special it was as a child to have certain foods that only came out at certain times (like during camping trips).  There were school clothes and play clothes.  Roast beef was on Sundays - well, okay, that was a bit too frequently for my taste.  Hamburger Fridays were good, though.  

Hmm.  I feel I should say something about the black strap-on wings.  After all, how often do those come along?  Still, I am stumped.  There are real feathers on it, and if someone were inclined to be a raven for Halloween, they'd have it made.

9/26/10: An all-in-one TV/VCR unit with remote

I bet it works, but we have one already - though I suspect we are the only people in the Pacific Northwest who still watch videotapes on occasion.


Yesterday (and this is why I missed yesterday's Musings), I had the privilege to attend the memorial service of one of my dad's dear cousins - though I think Howard himself would have objected to the adjective "dear."  He was born in South Dakota but lived in Sweet Home, Oregon for most of his 71 years.  He was well-loved, and an integral part of this small community.  He was a man who hugged his children before that was a trendy thing to do as a dad, and he pursued human connection throughout his life with pleasure and energy.

So, the privilege was to attend and remember him, and to tell his wife, kids, siblings and mother that he had touched my life.  It is also a privilege to have lived long enough to be able to see Sweet Home in a more balanced light.  Some of you know I spent my last two years of high school there, and it was not my kind of place.  It was - and is - narrow in many regards.  But the minister (who'd known Howard most of both of their lives) spoke early about how we come together at these times because the family "needs encouragement" from its family and friends.  He said at one point to Howard's wife, Jan, "We'll get through this," and he wept himself at a number of points during the service.  

If I had not returned for this service - if I had not lived long enough to realize that nothing human is ever simple or completely one thing - I could not have found some healing for myself with the parts of Sweet Home that were hard for me.  It is a place with limitations.  It is also a place where it's possible to know many people for nearly all of one's life, where it is possible to be woven into the lives of countless people such that, when one dies, those others gather and grieve together, and carry the memories together that remind us of the value of that particular life.

I do not pretend to understand this Death thing.  It is very large.  It makes me hug my kids just a little more.

9/24/10: Black v-necked Old Navy t-shirt...

... 3 Sierra magazines, a Sun magazine, a stretchy turquoise mini-dress, a navy blue sun dress.

I am sitting on the Free Bench.  There is a tenderness to the warmth of the day today.  Or maybe that's just me, knowing fall has begun, and so there is a grace to this weather.  Noisiness ebbs and flows - an airplane overhead that eventually goes out of earshot, a diminutive 3-year-old girl bossing her even more diminutive 2-year-old brother up and down the sidewalk, the whir of a passing cyclist.

Inside, three 6th grade girls - K--- among them - are glued to iTunes, sampling songs for each other (I've heard the opening bars of Lady Gaga's "Pokerface" about five times so far).  Tonight is their first middle school dance.  They are so excited.  I expect they'll be exhausted before the dance even starts.  They all know the words to Tina Turner's "What's Love Got to Do with It?" and were singing along with it when my neighbor K---- found me here at the Free Bench.  K---- sang along, too.

A young black-haired young woman with a Frida Kahlo bag just walked by.  "Are those your shoes?" she asked me about the gold pumps (remember those from last week? - they're still here) because I was sitting here barefoot.  I told her no, and she tried them on.  Too tight.  But the gauzy navy blue sun dress looked good to her, as did a pair of socks. 

K---- asked, "Do you visit this Free Bench often?"  

"Yes, I used to live around here."  I guess when she visits the 'hood, the Free Bench is on her circuit.

9/22/10: A rust-colored hooded sweatshirt...

...a bag of nice socks, many of which are beautiful woolen socks that clearly had an encounter with a hot drier, several rayon men's shirts, one a brilliant yellow with a red sunburst on the back, men's hemp drawstring pants.  Really, too many articles of clothing to name, all of which appeared today in neat piles and a couple sacks.  I believe our tenants - who just got married Saturday and are moving out at the end of the month - are responsible for this bounty.  Moves are often good for that: taking the opportunity to lighten the load.

Since our niece, S-----, moved in with us this summer, I pulled what I felt were my essential clothes out of the closet in the room she now occupies and have them hanging with me where I am.  I have not gone into her room to get further clothing more than twice, which suggests to me that what is left in that closet is unnecessary.  It feels simpler, though I am not unaware that I may be able to live with this smaller batch of clothing precisely because there are more outfits ready at hand should I need them.  

I am fascinated with what the internal challenges are for those of us who have so much.  I know I have pondered this here before, but when there is no one here to make us live more simply, and yet we value that, how do we learn to say no to ourselves?  

9/21/10: A navy blue towel

...an off-white blanket, gold-colored women's pumps, women's faux cowboy boots.

Here is the kind of neighborhood we live in: earlier, we learned that our neighbor, J. L., had had an accident today.  He is all right, but K---, L---- and I were feeling empathy for the randomness life's turns and thought a little warm tapioca would maybe help.  So, out came the tapioca, milk, eggs - oh, no, two eggs short.  Luken ran over to W--- and K----'s for eggs (and had the added bonus of being able to create a nutria out of the eggshell once it was cracked).  We continued on until - oh, out of sugar.  K--- ran over to L. and J. H.'s house for sugar (and had the added bonus of some mutual admiration time with Liza) and got sugar.  Jasper and Kristin were duly presented with tapioca, and K--- and L---- had the added bonus of having tapioca themselves, which they feel is "the best dessert ever."  

I know I sound like some contrived, cheery kid's book trying to communicate the joys of our interconnectedness - but this is truly how it happened, bonuses and all.

9/20/10: Three men's t-shirts ion fetching colors

...a book by Richard Feynman.

Someone has spread the cloth that is the color of the Italian flag (yes, it's still here) on the Bench.  This is brilliant.  Here, just two days ago, I mentioned the dirty bench, and now someone has spread the cloth to cover the dirt.  For some reason, I suspect my neighbor, Katie.  Perhaps it was random, the appearance of this cloth exactly where it is needed - but it makes me feel very powerful: I can notice something in these Musings and it can impel someone to act.

9/19/10: Nothing new on the Free Bench

Two paragraphs excerpted from the short story I started today:

Rounding the corner to her house was a daily disappointment.  It was set back from the road that led out of town, a cleared area after a stretch of trees on both sides and glimpses of the creek down to the left.  The siding was forest green - though any forest that shade of green would have been cause for concern.  Tru had hoped the mantle of rural poverty would lift once the previous tenants left and took their hounds and copious primary-colored plastic children's toys with them.  But their eviction hadn't had that effect.  The fleas had stayed, had proved impervious to several moppings with bleach water.  Tru had driven to the next town over to buy flea bombs, afraid of having one of the back-to-nature crowd catch her in the chemical aisle of Safeway.

********
Trudy dropped her keys into her purse.  It was made from dark brown leather with three-inch fringe at the bottom seam and most of the original turquoise and red beading.  A thunderbird, the saleswoman had said, a steal at twice the price.  The purse had the habit of disguising its contents.  Digging for her wallet or checkbook was like that game in grade school where you had to plunge your hand into a paper sack and guess what an object was by touch.  Now, she squeezed her purse under her armpit and burst from the car, slammed the door behind her, scrabbled on the gravel driveway, pounded up the saggy stairs and into the house, as if the rain were a killer, hot on her heels.

9/18/10: A bright red baseball cap that says Coca-Cola on it...

...and a child's lilac and white fleece cloche.

I was thinking that a lilac and white fleece cloche sounds more interesting than this actual hat appears at the moment.  We never did (as in, I never did) seal our cobb bench, which means it's dirty.  If you sit on it, or put clothes directly on it, you/they become dirty.  It brushes off pretty easily, but those who peruse the Free Bench might not understand that the dingy cloche could perk up easily with a brisk little whack, or a turn in a washing machine.

This makes me think of all those things that sound better than they end up being.  That happens a lot with food.  Like granny smith apples, which have never equaled the granny smiths I ate one autumn as a nine-year-old in Massachusetts; or hot dogs (when I ate them), which have never even come close to one I had on the streets of New York outside of Lincoln Center at age fourteen.  Maybe the key is expectation.  I have in mind the Platonic ideal of the apple, the hot dog, and therefore they can't measure up.  But when I'm not expecting a thing - I've never even heard of mujadarrah let alone had it, or my friend, N----, says, "Try this book, Olive Kittredge, see what you think-" there is room for an authentic experience because nothing has come before.

Which makes me think of the situation here.  It is hard to come at this writing fresh every day, to manage to frequently bring something authentic, and I imagine it shows.  

Back to the cloche.  K--- will tell you that the cloche is not my hat.  In fact, she has thrown herself into my hat search with energy and perceptiveness.  I have been on an earnest hunt for a hat that looks good on me for years.  Today, K--- found My Hat in the basement: a velvety-textured, two-and-a-half-feet-across black and apricot-colored sombrero.  So, nice to know I have something fetching to wear every Cinco de Mayo.  Though given the weight of it, the hat hair will be something fierce. 

9/15/10: Powder blue knit cap...

...a cotton bedspread in the colors of the Italian flag, assorted men's t-shirts, a pair of cut-offs.

Okay, this is my third attempt to write something.  I'm not liking what I've been writing.  The first attempt was too self-revealing (yeah, you thought it couldn't get more self-revealing than the shoe shame of yesterday?).  The second was too pedantic, me holding forth.  

I like my above description of the bedspread: accurate and evocative.  Maybe I'll leave it at that.

9/14/10: A pair of black women's boots, a pair of nondescript walking shoes

The walking shoes remind me of a time in 7th grade.  

I'd just returned from being in Scotland for a year with my family.  I'd landed back in Sharon, Massachusetts where I'd gone to elementary school and 5th grade.  I wore my Scottish gym sneakers, which were canvas and rubber, dingy and round-toed.  I'd always been tuned into my own style but was still coming up to speed on the idea that there even was such a thing as Fashion Trends.  So, there I was, walking down the hall in my too-short (thanks to a growth spurt) bell bottoms, a long-sleeved body suit, and my sneakers.  A girl walked by with a friend of hers and said, "I like your shoes."

Her tone was already expert: it sounded kind, a little sing-song-y, with only the barest hint of sarcasm.  Now, I knew from sarcasm.  In fact, I enjoyed sitting listening to my dad and his grad student, Matt, trade biting sarcasms.  They were expert.  This sort I had not yet encountered, and it was so subtle.  I looked at the girl in surprise (after all, how could she be referring to these shoes, which even I could see were nothing of any note?), and said, sincerely, "Thanks."  Only after we'd passed each other did I hear her comment to her friend, "She believed me."

I don't share this story as yet another example of teen-aged cruelty.  Rather, because I responded from a sincere place in myself, even that moment at the end where I realized she was being sarcastic didn't shame me as it would have had I known from the start that this exchange was a charade, a thinly-veiled humiliation.  I was able to hang on to what had been for me a moment of connection that I'd responded to; I felt good - not in a righteous way, but in a solid way - because I responded in a way that was open and friendly.  And that was how I wanted to be with the people I encountered.