Indecisive Peach

I have an early memory of being with my grandparents as they were picking up their potato crop. I must have been about three or four as my grandma held out wriggling snails in her brown, dirt-caked hand that she found as she went along. I remember how the dirt smelled as they turned it over in searching, how the potatoes clunked one-by-one into the buckets, and how it felt to sit on the collected mound.

The translation of my Mom’s last name is people of the cliffs. My grandfather’s mother’s name is people of the fields. An earthy tincture should run in my blood. I should have meandered into this world with both thumbs being bright green. As I’ve looked over the immaculate rows of carefully tended vegetables in my grandparent’s garden, with strawberries that do not taste like water and cucumbers that compliment butter, I feel that I should be able to cull plant growth much like Batman’s Poison Ivy. Hell, Uma should have NOTHING on me.

It seems, however, that I’ve taken the Kill Bill role and have killed many, many plants in my time. I kill flowers, spider plants, herbs. I’m pretty indiscriminate in my murdering. I kill cacti and that’s nearly damn impossible. The last was a perfectly stable cactus I got from my Mom which I believe I over-watered in my excitement and it fell inside itself with rot. [Sorry, Mom. *cough*]

And so the current apartment farming experiment I’ve conducted has been a success of sprawling and epic proportions. Check it out, my first crop:

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After five years of archival experience, I was in a room with the development officer and the man from the company who was persona non grata. Only last week did it slip in the last meeting before the department head left for vacation that I’d be handling a meeting for someone who was restricted access to a collection we had.

I sat in the cramped room full of cast-off teal chairs with a holdover from the seventies who really was a researcher that want to know how to be an archivist.

What gets my goat, and my goat is more spry lately, is that I don’t get paid, nor recognized for the profession’s work I do, yet here I am, refocusing this man’s excitement about sub-woofers into archival procedure. FOCUS PEOPLE.

Priorities in a project. Audience being addressed. Why am I telling a 50 year old man, a many decaded engineer, how to manage a project at the very basic level? This is not rocket science people. It is figuring out an audience for PAPER. Google can educate you in this.

He swung the door open like a gentleman, leaving room for me to slide in front of his body into the restaurant. As I walked in, all action stopped for a split second. The two older weathered men looked up quizzically and the large family at one end stopped in mid-chatter. The man behind the bar was wiping down a glass with a rag and he tilted his head.

I felt like the cowboy walking into the Mexican bar. It was actually a seafood restaurant.

GS told me it was pretty much a replica of the same restaurant of the city across the border. As only Spanish floated into my ears, he ordered accordingly.  I didn’t even need to cross to get the authentic experience – terribly convenient. I opened the menu and burst out in laughter.

The description for a salad: “a kind of fresh”. An appetizer was advertised as “tastely hot”. I appreciate that type of honesty.

The texts between J and I went something like this:

J: Hey guess what’s sitting at the muffler shop on our street?
Me, spinning in my chair at work: Oh, a DeLorean?
J: Oh damn, I didn’t think you had seen it yet.
Me: HOLY SHIT THERE IS A DELOREAN?!
J: You just guessed that? You didn’t see it?!
Me: NO! JEBUS! A DELOREAN!

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Leu chansonetta e’vil by Guirault de Bornelh (1138-1215)
[Ed. note: Emphasis mine.]

A little song, swift and free, is what I should like to compose,
which I’d then send to Dalfi in the Auvergne;
and if, as it goes on its way, it should find my Lord of Eblo,
it may help him understand that saying something obscure
is not all that hard, but with clarity is.

Because I know how to distinguish the basest man from the best,
I do not suffer reproof, nor am I weakened with worry.
But there’s one thing that gets me for I can’t send it away;
it cuts me to the quick when a man neither shines in discourse
for some little while, nor understands when to leave off.

Nor will I humble myself to my Lady so dear;
she’s someone I cannot describe but to say that I’m killed by her love.
Ah, more sorrows assail me;
I do not know how I can quiet them so that now I’m unable to rest;
And now my art is close to being destroyed.

Thankfully, there were Coronas.

I might have failed giving GS an authentic American fourth of July, because who has trout and wild rice for dinner on 4th of July?

At least, it’s a healthy fail.

I had noticed it a few weeks back, grumbled, and continued on with my day. It was the chipper and hyperactive student was stopped in her tracks as she blew through the break room. I leaned against the counter, watching her as she observed the magnets on the fridge and asked, “Who stole the Southwest?”

Earlier in the year I had inherited the bag full of magnets my Mom had collected around the country. Each state had their state saying or state flower. Texas and Delaware were mysteriously the same size. New Mexico was very similarly sized to Rhode Island. To my knowledge, this is not true, but a sliver of a magnet probably wasn’t the best at bolstering state pride up in the East Coast.

As my home fridge is covered with postcards that I goad my friends into sending me, I decided to take the bag o’ magnetic state pride to work.

“California, New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona… are gone?” She peered up and down and to the sides of the fridge much like I had.

“So is Nevada,” I said, munching my crackers.

“Who steals states?” she proclaimed.

“This is why we can’t have nice things,” I mumbled.

“Perhaps they ceded back to Mexico,” she said contemplatively and I laughed. Later, as we were working on a project together she leaned over and mischievously said, “I should put a sign up on the fridge.” She told me what she would write and I howled in laughter. “Please, please do. I totally condone it.”

Happy Fourth of July!

I had been getting the running heckles from my lack of writing. I guess fading into oneself is a tad harder when people watch where you tend to mentally yodel to yourself.

The questions were always a mix of the following:
Working for The Man has gotten you down hasn’t it?
Something horrible and tragic must have happened?
You’re spending your time consumed in the throes of a new passion?

There are some variables to create a finite answer to these.

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Friday’s Feast is still a link on my sidebar, but it’s been defunct for a long while now. I had this prompt kept for a rainy day. And…it is humid here today.

Using 20 or less words, describe your first driving experience.

I was fifteen and had my shiny new driving permit. On a late spring Saturday morning, I watched my Dad pull out my car out of the garage – a large, brown Cutlass Caprice Classic with a luggage rack that I later termed my ghetto spoiler. I hopped excitedly from one foot to the other, my Mom standing next to me. Leaving the car running, my Dad got out and gave me the trademark Serious Dad Face.

I got behind the driver’s wheel, my Dad in the passenger bench seat, my Mom sitting behind me in the backseat. I tapped the wheel at ten and two and I was lectured quickly about the power of the vehicle I was given the ability to control. I eyed the radio. “Don’t even think about it,” he growled.

I shifted the brake, pulling the handle behind the wheel forward and slipping it from Park to Drive. I pulled slowly, ever…so…slowly…out of the driveway. Turning to look behind me, I then looked up and down our achingly boring street. We inched out.

“CAAAAAAAAAR!” my Mom howled into my ear. I slammed onto the brake, slapped against my seat belt, watched my Dad brace himself against the dash and spin around eying my Mom who had flown forward and was clutching the brown couch of the seat with death white hands. “Where!” I yelped, spinning in my seat. My Dad gave my Mom a dirty look as if he already knew what was coming.

She leaned back, readjusted herself, and proclaimed, “Well, there could have been one.”

Out the hazy dream my consciousness was beginning to leak out of this morning, I heard the familiar sound of my alarm – a single gentle beep. Automatically, I ricocheted my arm diagonally upward pounding my Kleenex box with rigour. I had inadvertently placed my alarm clock on the wrong side of the nightstand.

I am a creature of habit. I sometimes wish I were someone who created traditions that held a weaving of intimate meaning, something akin to lighting incense before morning mediation and yoga. I, however, only usually just stumble blearily toward my TV and pop the necessary buttons.

Did you notice that I walk to my TV to turn it on? The TV in my bedroom is a relic from my childhood; it’s the very first TV I got when I was 12 or 13. Now still in my bedroom, it is the very first thing I do in the morning. I have a quiet, yet sincere belief that bits of the world might have fallen off the map while I was drooling on my pillow. These things I must know, you know, for travel purposes.

NBC is my favorite. The local news has a genuinely mellow, yet upbeat female anchor saying names of streets and intersections in the larger town they broadcast out of about an hour away. Traffic jams, bridge waits, all things I have absolutely no need for – entirely soothing as I readjust to the land of the living. About a year ago, they introduced a young, black weatherman that you just knew was not from around here. Chester Lampkin. They don’t make names like that around these parts.

But he certainly had chutzpa for the lingo when he started the job. He had taken upon himself to enunciate the Spanish in our town names to a cloying degree with an unsure clamor of Aaaaahs and a throaty El. I would mimic them back to him and chuckle. I off-handly told a co-worker about my sincere affection for Chester and his slow spiral of toward Gringoization of town names. “I love him too,” she declared, “Chester – what a name!”

The tell-tale grandeur of seven o’clock would then ring out with the arrival of the Today show. Matt Lauer’s fluctuation between mid-life crisis to utter contempt was my version of morning coffee. His clear demonstration of contempt for Roker or his unhidden apathy for celebrities he interviewed (only to be playfully aroused by a feral Tom Cruise), this was the snark of the world that I loved and found strange, strange comfort in.

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