Some Strangeness in the Proportion
In search of the strange and beautiful...
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Goodbye, Hacienda, you weird old restaurant
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Unexpected, in Safeway parking lot
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Obsession
We had just arrived at my grandparents’ big house in Pueblo, Colorado. It was a hot July day that made the tall elms outside the open front door buzz with the electric sounds of insects. The grown ups were busy talking in the living room, their ice clinking in glasses. My older brother jumped up and down because he wanted someone to go outside with him.
I slipped away. Nobody noticed.
At four, I felt very small in that house. I ran up the grand living room staircase that curved into a long green hallway, up two more staircases and through a door that I knew led to the attic playroom with its grooved dark-wood floor. The room’s warm air had the familiar smell of wool and mothballs. I opened the white toy chest against the wall and there they were, the three of them, tangled together with doll clothes and doll shoes and stray toys. I carefully took them out, one by one. I hadn’t seen them for a whole year. I touched their chipped lids that clicked open and shut on blue doll eyes; I put my pinky in their pudgy porcelain hands. I kissed their tiny rose-puckered lips.
These dolls weren’t like the squishy, baby-clothes-wearing rubbery ones I had at home that came in pink, plastic cellophane boxes. These were grown-up girls dressed like no one I had ever seen, with important lives and big thoughts. In the worn paint and porcelain of their limbs, in their clothes’ age-stained fabrics and velvet cow-licked from years of touch, in the mechanical iris stripes of their eyes, these three dolls were real, and alive. When I hugged them, the wrinkled organdy that pressed against my neck felt like breath.
I rearranged their velvet hats, combed my fingers through their tangles of mohair floss and studied their gold-slippered feet. I laid all their outfits on the floor: mended petticoats over yellowed puffs of tulle, sealskin capes with real fur collars, gingham dresses, seersucker high-waisted sun shorts with blue anchor buttons, lace aprons, plaid picnic dresses, wool riding suits. My favorite took the center spot: a tiny blue taffeta gown, as delicate as a pressed flower.
Three flights below I heard a screen door slam and my mother’s voice in a strange, high pitch. I heard footsteps across floors, which matched the beat of the faint tick-tock of the attic’s old clock. I heard my name again and again, muffled by the dust that floated down from above.
“Do you love me?” I asked the silent orbit of dolls around me.
They smiled with outstretched arms and answered yes from quiet lips.
From an unintentionally creepy 1960s children's book called "Amy's Doll"
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Saint
It is small and water-stained, this paper portrait of “San Charbel” inside of a plastic sleeve. The saint is wearing a black robe with a hood, his arms outstretched. His white beard is almost glowing. Behind him are a cedar tree and a white building at the base of hills that are grey and green against ice-winter mountains, which in turn blend into the faded yellow-blue glow of a sunset, or maybe a sunrise. A light blue circle around his head suggests a subtle halo. Above his left shoulder is a faint apparition of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, above his right, a wine goblet. In front of him, on clay-like orange rock, is an open book with Arabic writing and next to it a hoe or shovel. I don’t know much about him, except that he was Lebanese and his presence in Mexico is due to its large Lebanese immigrant population. He’s the saint of miracle cures—both physical and psychological—which I imagine is why he’s so popular. He’s the saint equivalent to blue-light late-night infomercial promises of less pain. He is hope found again, a garden cultivated from rock.
I’m not Catholic, or even religious. Raised loosely Episcopalian by closet-agnostic parents, I will, if asked, mumble something about secular humanism or in rare moods admit to some sort of vaguely pagan spirituality. This card is covered in symbols I don’t really understand and have never cared to learn about. The earnest prayer on the reverse side full of promises and exclamation marks and supplications pulls no heartstrings in me, nor makes me want to attend mass.
And yet I hold on to this little card, and have transferred it time and again from purse to bag to purse, for 14 years.
Shortly after we started dating, on an oppressively hot April day in 1997, H. took me to the cathedral in the Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City where the shrine to Saint Charbel is located. I stopped outside the heavy wooden doors, where an old woman was selling rosaries and milagros and little cards of the saint. I wanted milagros because I had an idea to make jewelry out of them and on a whim purchased the little San Charbel card as well.
I wandered inside and found H. near the rows of candles and an explosion of colored ribbons on the wall. He was writing something on a ribbon—a thank-you note, he explained—and then pinned it into the others. Always the sarcastic atheist, he shrugged quickly, embarrassed, but explained how one of his aunts had convinced him to visit the church several months before, at a low point. He told me how he had come here and knelt down and awkwardly asked for help, feeling silly, but doing it to please his favorite aunt.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Anna Karlsson
I imagined how I must have looked to her at that moment—my eyes squeezed shut, tight line of mouth, grimly frozen in my seat—so I croaked out a chuckle. I couldn’t let on that I was busy digesting the idea of our violent deaths, entertaining Dread and Terror like honored guests, imagining my poor parents at my funeral, when she could still manage dark humor to comfort a friend.
The bus started in reverse and for a light-as-air second I thought we were going to turn around, but then we lurched forward with a burst and crack, crunch we were speeding across that old wooden bridge.
I imagined the river below, wild and deep, overpowering the rain-loosened banks.
We made it across and the bus sped along again on solid ground. Some smart aleck up front shouted “Otra vez!” (“Let’s do it again!”). I opened my eyes to Anna’s straight teeth, wide lips, and, of course, laughter.
Just posting a little thing I wrote in my memoir class. I used to scoff at memoir writing but a writer/teacher I admire, Leslie Kirk Campbell, made a very good point: where else do you get your material? Even if you radically change it, morph it, shape it, take one word, one line of it and make it into poetry, novels or short fiction--where else are you getting that raw, visceral, I was *there* emotion and description?
I also miss Anna, who I've hopelessly lost touch with. If you try to do a Facebook search on her name, you'll just get page after page of gorgeous Swedes.