Hey Henrietta!

Do I rant? I try not to rant too much. But... I went to the mall today. Mmm-hmm. You smell what I'm sellin'.

It might not have been such a good idea to go to the mall... today. I have been battling our suckass Microsoft network server for a solid week - it is riddled with malicious, suppurating garbage processes spawned by a violent pederast of a Trojan introduced by, I suspect, some lice-ridden neighborhood wifi skeever with the handle "HAIDEEZ something something".

The novelty spelling of "Hades" just screams "thug" to me. I bet it's one of those young people at the church behind us. You can hide a lot under a choir robe. Trust me. Of course, if "HAIDEEZ whatever whatever" is you, and your computer appeared on my thinger just because you brought your laptop by one day to show me something or work at my house... well. Then I guess I would assume you were being all LOLcatty about your machine name. Uh, that's cute! Ahem.

So yeah, I've been in a somewhat combative mood. Also, I hadn't eaten. But I wanted to go to the Apple store, because I think I'm going to pitch that Microsoft piece of shit and plug in a Mac mini and a Mac router and sit back and let that proprietary software do the stuff it's supposed to do.

It's not my ideal solution. Ideally, I'd love to have an all-Linux house. I don't like the sort of... Masonic vibe of the Apple multiverse. And I've been very happy with my Ubuntu laptop. But I am forced to admit that I no longer have the mental flexibility to learn enough Linux to set all that up myself. For example, the laptop hasn't had sound for months, and I just can't figure out how to fix that. It's for the best, I tell myself. Keeps me from wasting time watching Woodentops videos on YouTube.

But back to the Apple store. Have you ever been to an Apple store? If what you need to do is to buy a lizard green iPod nano for The Best Babysitter Everr, their model of ACCOST UPON ENTRY SO THAT NOBODY WANDERS FREE works pretty well. You say, "Why yes, you can sell me a lizard green iPod nano," and that's just super. But if you just need to count the number of USB ports on the back of the Mac mini, you would like the tiny headsetted iDoorman with the skater boi haircut and the idiotic jeans to pretty much just BACK HIS SHIT UP.

And then when you DO have a question, and spot somebody in a shirt, and say, "Hey..?" you would not like that person to say, "Um? If you could just speak to Micah at the front? He's managing my floor today, and he'll set you up with someone." Because Um? I do not know about your floor. And I am not looking for a setup, I just want to know if there's a version of the one-terabyte router that doesn't crap out after 18 months.

I would like to make a comparison now. I walk up to perfect strangers and ask if I can help them probably 50 times during the course of a typical 4-hour shift at work, and I do not think I have ever once done it in such a way as to have made a person want to stab me. You never know, of course. Maybe that lady who said, "Found it myself, thanks!" was really fingering the icepick in her pocket and counting down from ten.

Have I avoided injury because I am unusually talented at public relations? Hm. According to every supervisor I have ever ever had? NO. Have I stayed safe because I do not automatically adopt a patronizing demeanor? MOTHERFUCKING BINGO.

So I learned the thing I needed to learn and then got the hell out of the Apple store before I kicked someone with my big boots. I saw The Gap and remembered that I need a long-sleeved striped t-shirt (because, er, there's one that I don't have?), and I figured it might calm me down to buy one. I swear, striped t-shirts are for me like Catcher in the Rye was for Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory. I just have to buy them.

The Gap was packed with crap. I mean I have never seen a retail establishment so overloaded with stock. The regular fixtures were stacked to the ceiling. Wheeled scaffolds holding towers of t-shirts blocked the aisles. Even the mannequins were supersaturated, wearing four and five t-shirts under two sweaters and a jacket, with two scarves. But they had no heads. Maybe their heads boiled off from wearing all that overflow stock.

So I had a little trouble finding exactly the long-sleeved striped t-shirt I wanted, and I asked a perfectly nice, non-intrusive headsetted teen for assistance. She knew exactly where it was, and showed me. When people are impressed that librarians know the Dewey Decimal System, I kind of internally snort. It's not that much to remember: resumes always come after cookbooks. But have you ever worked retail? Knowing where this v-neck brown sweater is stocked, versus that v-neck brown sweater, that doesn't have the ribbing? Those kids are not just sweater-folders.

I rummaged on the shelf for a Medium - I'll say this about mall shopping, the inflated sizing does make me feel petite - and turned back, thanking her. And found I was thanking a headless mannequin. It sat there, severed neck gleaming, elbows resting jauntily on its thighs as I looked quickly around to see if anyone had heard my little shriek.

Completely unsettled, I abandoned the shirt and decided maybe I should eat something, pronto. Headed for the food court. But between me and it were the Level 3 kiosk ambush people. "Hey! I really like your hair!" "Can I show you something?"

GOD no.

Here is where I wished I'd taken my hallucinogens before coming to the mall. I am not too good at faking freakouts, and I've really really always wanted to respond to a kiosk ambush person by screaming, "WHAT??! OH MY GOD YOUR HEAD! SNAKES! GET YOUR DINGO AWAY FROM ME YOU COCKSUCKING ZOMBIE! NO! NOOOOOOO! DON'T LET HIM TOUCH ME! SNAAAAKES!!"

I made it to the food court though. And turned around and left it immediately. The noise, the smell, the garbage food, what the FUCK? But eventually I found myself in line at a nominally deli-themed food court tenant, where an energetic lady with orange-red hair gossiped with her sisters in an elaborately unintelligible language and made me a tuna on rye garnished with a handful of potato chips so broken as to suggest a profound, possibly culturally based, misunderstanding of how potato chips are meant to work. Paid seven bucks for that sandwich, too. I reflected that for the same seven dollars I could be trading terrible jokes and wistful anecdotes with the North Indian man at the sub shop down the street, and get an amazing 12" Italian cold cut sandwich (with extra hots) to boot, but I didn't have the time. You know, I think she was speaking Romany. That would be cool - gypsies at the mall!

On my way back down and out, I came to central juncture: a staircase and an elevator linking Level Three and Level Four. I remember that elevator from my days as a stroller pilot. It's pretty small, and I always kind of resented the able-bodied non-strollered folk who used that elevator rather than taking the stairs. As I approached it today, I swerved toward the stairs, just behind a pregnant woman who did not give the elevator a second glance. And when I say pregnant, she was pregnant. PRAG. NUTT. As I descended, I caught up with her.

"Dude!" I said in a low voice. "You totally shamed all those people off the elevator!" It was true. We both glanced back at the five or six people who had abandoned their wait for the elevator in favor of the stairs after seeing Ms. LooksLikeTwins charge past them.

"Look at that - you're right!" she giggled. "But I'm just trying to get this baby to come!"

Used to be, trapped under the squirming beanbag weight of two children born twenty months apart, the mall was an attractive option every now and then. Smooth floors, no weather - the double stroller and I could windowshop and daydream our way to the kids' play area, where the boys could crawl on the play structures that today would be guaranteed to give them swine flu while I read Vanity Fair and drank a coffee. That's some potent relaxation for a stay-at-home mom with kids that young. Then we'd eat pizza in the food court.

But the state of having very small children is quite a bit like senility. You are underslept and understimulated, and probably unwashed. You spend quite a bit of time feeling pithed. Like a frog. In that state, the institutions of the mall can be soothing and safe.

But I think the rest of us should be careful to take our Xanax, as my friend Kristen recommends, first.

Fetish

I try not to fetishize books. I work in a library, right? Surrounded by books. And by the third time you've helped shift the entire nonfiction collection, books have come to look and feel a lot like bricks. Heavy. Oblong. Kind of filthy.

When I was in library school, I had already worked in several libraries. And when I heard some of my MLS classmates pipe up with, "I want to be a librarian because I love books!" I would look at my feet and make a sympathetic little face. I already knew that the books are only part of the job. Most of the job is (oh my god you sweet little bookworm you are in for an extremely unpleasant shock on your first day of work) people. Brr.




On the other hand, it's not like I became a librarian because I am indifferent to books. Books, after all, are neither demanding nor rude. They don't usually smell. If a book is not interesting, you can close it and put it down. You try that with an uninteresting person, and now it's you being rude.

So, it's a significant daily pleasure for me to scan the New Books cart that we keep in the office at work. I get to browse, flip through, and in some cases, I admit, caress the big fabulous fancy things that I could never afford to buy. Art books. Big gorgeous bird books. Images of eternity.

I've been blurbing the most interesting of these on Facebook, and recently added them all to Goodreads, under the category "your neighborhood librarian's fetish books". You can see the entire list here.




I'm not saying, "GO! Marvel at my taste!" I'm actually saying "The holidays are coming! These are good gift ideas!" I already recommended that my friend Josh buy Renaissance Secrets: Recipes and Formulas for his wife, so that she can make anti-poison potions and glass. I myself am likely to snare New York City Museum of Complaint for my husband, who misses NYC like he would miss a limb. The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death is an orgy of pleasure for aficionados of crime, mysteries, and/or dollhouses.




There's a wide range of nonfiction on this list, from classics like In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made by my late favorite professor Norm Cantor (old man, I hope your afterlife finds you on a balcony outside Tel Aviv, watching the sea and eating oranges) to seriously trashy skeeve like High Glitz: The Extravagant World of Child Pageants or The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll. I cannot look away from either of those books, even though I know they're wrong.




And in case you question my deployment of the word "fetish" (and hi, Japanese porn sites! You're already leaving unwelcome comments courtesy a previous post's use of the phrase "hairless teen," so I might as well give you more of what you're looking for!) (Thanks are due to Token Boy, for identifying the offending term. Kind of more quickly than his new bride might be comfortable with), there really is plenty of porn on this list. Travel porn. Design porn. Food porn. Porn porn (Lotsa naked models in that one. Just because they're shot all arty doesn't mean they're not sexy).

Books. Sexy. Fetishy. Kind of expensive. "Hairless teen". "Orgy of pleasure"! I should really go back to writing about the garden, shouldn't I? I am just asking for perverts and trolls. Hi, trolls! Enjoy my parentheses! Read good books!

books I crave

your neighborhood librarian's favorite books »

Oh, she can see the cars - she just can't get out of their way

Reach for the sky, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

We drove to the Eastern Shore of Maryland the other night to see Nick Lowe perform. It was a good show, Bill Kirchen opened, and both of those old men rocked, and crooned, and seemed to enjoy themselves. We did too, although it was a little weird to be the youngest people at a show. At our age.

The last time I saw Nick Lowe, I was in college in Cleveland. I borrowed a car to get there, pouring pouring pouring rain that night, but he played almost 3 hours for the 75 people who had struggled through the monsoon to get there. I say I borrowed a car. Well, I borrowed the keys. The guy who owned the car didn't know I was doing that. And actually, the girl to whom he'd lent a set of keys didn't know I was doing that either. And then I drove through a flooded intersection on the way back to the East Side and the car stalled out and wouldn't start, so I left it there and walked the rest of the way home.

So I guess technically I stole a car to get to that show. And I'm embarrassed about it.

I was thinking about that night on the way to see the show, and shaking my head trying to remember the train of thought that led to me committing basically a felony (Del Fuegos opened, did I mention? It really was one of the best shows I've ever seen.), when we passed onto Kent Island and I remembered another story.

Man, talk about BAD DECISIONS.

This is a story I call The Kent Island Massacre. It's a BAD STORY. I am using the pseudonyms from Reservoir Dogs, it's so bad. I was there. Here's what happened.

At 26 years of age, I had been promoted from tech support to Director of Marketing for that insurance company I worked for. Yeah how does that happen? The president of the company saw a flyer I'd made announcing an update to the software, and decided I was a "marketing person." Decided that, as an Anthropology major with zero marketing experience, I was cheap, and could be bullied. I hated that company. So I went from being on the IT team to the Sales team.

The IT team had been headed up by an old stoner, a tiny little Richard Thompson - loving hippie who liked to say he hadn't "sold out - I've bought in." That guy, I liked.

The Sales team was headed up by a willfully obnoxious, childishly overweight prick who seemed to think that he was entitled to... to make phone calls to employees while he was sitting on the toilet. To unbend a paperclip during a meeting and clean his ears with it. He would take your glasses off your face, saying, "You've got something on your glasses," lick the lenses, and give them back to you, and giggle. If you sat next to him on an airplane, he'd spill a drink in your lap while the seatbelt sign was lit, and laugh while he groped your ass under the pretext of helping to mop it up. During the course of his employ with that company, he was sued three times for sexual harassment.

You might think a corporate retreat with this guy was something to be avoided. YOU WOULD BE RIGHT.

One spring, the sales team, including myself, headed to a beautiful inn on Kent Island, just over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Most of us had worked for weeks on the presentations we were to give. As the resident graphics person, I had worked for weeks on EVERYONE's presentation. I hated that company.

The first night of the retreat, we all went to dinner somewhere. The boss - let's call him Mr. Brown, like Quentin Tarantino's character in Reservoir Dogs - was famous for running up giant dinner tabs. Many bottles of wine, several thousand dollars. So that happened. And then there was a bar.

At the bar, Mr. Brown started buying rounds of shots for the house. A couple hundred bucks a round - this was a semi-fancy sportsmen's bar, the kind of place with a fireplace. I remember the fireplace.

I don't drink shots, so I sat, one girl among a dozen men, drank a beer, was mortified and bored, and schemed how to get the car keys away from Brown, whom I knew would insist on driving back on the dark country roads to our inn.

Until. I don't know. I'm guessing they tried to cut him off, or he made one "redneck" comment too many, but all of a sudden, we were all leaving. There was some shoving, and one of the nicest guys in the group, we're calling him Mr. Orange, a civilized man with a nice wife and good suits, got knocked into the fireplace. Smacked his head on the marble mantel. Started to bleed.

I actually had the car keys at this moment, I'd snatched them off the bar. We were herding everyone out of the bar and packing into the car, when Brown demanded them back from me. He wouldn't get into the car without them, and kept threatening to go back into the bar, so I handed them over. There must have been at least six of us in that car, with Mr. Orange across our laps in the back, bleeding, when Mr. Brown started up the car, backed it up about six feet, then put it in drive and drove straight into the bar.

Rammed the building, yes he did. Backed up and did it again.

Now, I have done things out of spite. I once broke a bathroom fixture in a restaurant that I thought had treated my friends and I unfairly. I encouraged my friends to urinate on the lumber that was stacked in the yard of an allegedly corrupt Cleveland city councilman who was building an unsightly house right in the middle of our historic and picturesque campus. But I like to think that, had I been driving, and even had I been as drunk as Mr. Brown was on that night, I would not have attempted to punish the physical edifice of that bar for the perceived slights of its staff and/or patrons.

Moron.

The car is eventually piloted back to the inn, where there is discussion as to who will accompany the unfortunate Mr. Orange to the ER. Nobody thinks Mr. Brown should go. But he does, along with Mr. White and Mr. Blue, level-headed guys who are large enough to physically restrain him should he get stupid. -er. Again.

I stay at the inn. I want no more of this foolishness. When I wake up the next morning, to a dazzling Eastern Shore day, I quickly realize that our presentations are canceled. Cars are missing from the parking lot. Nobody is at breakfast. The only person around is Nice Guy Eddie, a Southerner who was a little older, a little more savvy, than the rest of us. He always knew when to keep his head down and when to take a pass, and he's packing to leave. He had NOT chosen to go to the bar the night before, naturally.

Nice Guy Eddie recommended a tactical retreat to Baltimore, maybe hitting the outlets on the way, and we made a pleasant day of it. I bought one of my favorite skirts of all time at the J. Crew outlet that day - a long, full, sweepy ivory-colored job that I still have in the closet.

A few weeks later, at work, I was asked into the Comptroller's office. She asked me a few VERY pointed questions about that night on Kent Island, and I BEGGED her to let me elaborate. I was absolutely sure Mr. Brown would fire me if he knew I'd told on him, but I thought if they fired him first I'd be ok.

They didn't fire him. Well, actually, they did eventually fire him. Not for that. And not for the multiple complaints and three successful lawsuits accusing him of fondling, groping, and making inappropriate comments to female employees. He was fired when the wife of one of his male employees called the company's HR guy. Told a story about Mr. Brown sort of maybe kinda making a pass at her husband. Mr. Brown was asked to pack his things, and he was escorted from the building. Within the hour.

God, I hated that company. No wonder Nice Guy Eddie kept his head down. You guys who think Mad Men is so much fun... I don't know, I don't think I would enjoy that show.

Years later, I found out the parts of the story I hadn't witnessed. Mr. White, who eventually found a successful career NOT selling insurance financing, told me that the reason so many people were missing the next morning was that, at the hospital, Mr. Brown had punched a cop.

That's right. Poor Mr. Orange is getting his wound stitched, and a cop asks our boys to move the company car parked haphazardly outside the ER entrance. Doesn't even ask about the damage - doesn't even start to accuse my boss of driving drunk - and Brown starts shouting and spitting and eventually somehow hits the cop. Short little pudgy Mr. Brown, who collected these good-looking, strapping men around him as if he were a big gay sultan.

The sultan goes to jail. Is given a sobriety test. The boys follow.

Mr. Blue spends the remainder of the night and much of the next morning driving around looking for an ATM that will spit out enough money to pay Mr. Brown's bail.

Mr. White is stuck at the police station babysitting Mr. Brown.

Mr. Orange is discharged from the hospital and walks out into that beautiful morning wondering where the fuck everyone went.

Hey, I bought a really nice skirt and had a lovely lunch with Nice Guy Eddie. Not a total loss.

Don't I know your name? - The Bob Story

Jungle gym, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

The Beautiful Miss Brown visited the library yesterday looking for a book on taxidermy. It happens. I'm not asking any questions.

Turns out, she and her boyfriend had seen a red fox dead in the road, and they scooped it up, put it in the trunk, and decided to skin it. I nodded. I used to do that.

Did I used to do that? Yes, yes I did.

There was a day, a rare, beautiful spring day in Cleveland, when I sat behind Clark Building on the CWRU campus with a hot plate and a big pot. Watching that pot. Watching the people come in and out of the student center next door. An acquaintance wandered over, curious.

"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Boiling an owl."
"No, you're not."
"Sure I am." I poked the sodden owl carcass with a stick.

I believe it was at that moment that that boy became irresistably drawn to me - decided I was the girl he wanted to spend the rest of his, er, next couple of years with. I myself was thinking more about how much bleach to add to the water. You want enough that the cartilage dissolves, but not so much as to take all the coating off the beak.

There are a few things you can do if you intend for someone to fall in love with you. The most foolproof, of course, is to BE EIGHTEEN AND BE BOILING AN OWL IN PUBLIC. Second most foolproof, of course, is to be eighteen period. The worst thing you can do is to quote Elton John lyrics. Look how it worked for Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge. He ended up having to drag Nicole Kidman around the rest of the movie.

You could sing real awful but write great songs, like Nick Cave or Lou Reed. You can show up in majorette boots. Majorette boots are the most sexually potent objects in the universe. I have boots of almost every variety, from cowboy to pirate and back again, but I have never had the nerve to get myself a pair of majorette boots.

You can insult the object of your affection in such a way that it's really a compliment. This gives him or her the opportunity to act all affronted, but be secretly pleased. This is tricky, and should only be attempted if you are eighteen, or a genius.

The rest is all variations in tone and eye contact, and that I can't help you with. Really, the majorette boots are the way to go.

None of this explains my husband Bob. I was not wearing majorette boots when we first met - or even my glasses, so I was bat-blind. He was probably wearing Chucks. He did not insult me. I did not insult him, I don't think I spoke a word. I was twenty and he was twenty-one, so we were past our irresistable years, though admittedly not by much. We were sober, it was daytime, and he was wearing a tie over a white t-shirt. But it was love at first sight for both of us.

Yes, those of you who don't believe in love at first sight (Jaime) or who have heard this story before (Jaime) can tune out now. I'll tell you the rest of the owl story later. And I don't begrudge. If you had had to hear this ridiculous story as many times as Jaime has, you would roll your eyes too. Hell, even I resist telling it too much, and I know it to be true. This story inspires works of art (Sarah). It causes people to ask if the world spontaneously bursts into song around us (Brian) (smartass).

But here, by popular demand (Sandy, Melissa), is The Bob Story: a teen novel in the making if I ever read one, spanning continents and decades and leaving a trail of betrayals and broken hearts, but with, after all, a happy ending.

How we met

I think it was 1986. It was certainly summer. We were in college - he was at Columbia and I was at Case Western Reserve. I was spending the summer working in Provincetown, Mass, washing dishes and managing a kite store; he was in Cleveland canvassing door-to-door for some environmental organization. One weekend I came back to Cleveland to visit my boyfriend.

Let's call this boyfriend Blot on My Conscience Number One. No, that's far too long. Besides, he forgives me... or at least he's willing to forget. He and his wife came to our wedding. Our kids play together as if they've known each other all their lives. Let's call him Lance.

Anyway, that weekend I got the flu. Miserable weekend. Hot and bored and feverish in the tract house Lance shared with his brother, I woke up one afternoon to voices in the living room.

I hate not being in on things. So I struggled out to the living room to sit on the floor and be with company. It was some friend of Lance's brother. Bob. They worked together or something, and the brother was thinking about transferring to Columbia.

From what I could tell with my glasses off, he was cute. He was very funny. I don't think I spoke a word - I really was ill. And I have no idea what he remembers of that afternoon. I didn't even really catch his name.

But when Lance's brother needed help moving his crap to NYC that fall, I hopped into the van so quick I'm sure I sprained something.

In New York, after unloading, we got something to eat and then ended up at a bar. I nodded along with the conversation, thinking, "Boy, wouldn't it be great if that guy from this summer showed up!"

The guy from the summer showed up, made his way to our table with that bouncy walk some athletic boys can't help having.

I thought, "There's an empty seat next to me - wouldn't it be great if he sat next to me!"

He sat next to me.

I still don't think I had much to say. This guy, now that I had my glasses on, was even better looking than I had thought, and I had thought he was pretty cute. I was breathless, especially when his left thigh got closer and closer to my right, until our legs were pressed together with actual force. After everyone was drunk, we found a minute to speak privately. I don't know what we said. I may have proposed. Anyway, it wasn't that private - I kind of got busted for it.

The Next Time We Met

Had to be the next summer. Bob came home to Cleveland for a visit, and made the rounds. Lance and I were in the same social scene, so I saw him at a party or two. Stalked him. And then one night, Bob and I were among the last ones awake at Bob's friend Bob's house. Bob's friend Bob has a daughter named Paula - it's very confusing. Lance had fallen asleep in a chair. I think he was doing his med school internships that summer and he was always falling asleep over a plate of food or while trying to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation or once, memorably, while he was on his back under his VW bus fixing something. I thought he had died.

Bob and I were on Bob's friend Bob's porch talking about poetry or something smart that I know nothing about, and I couldn't stand it one more second. Without looking at him, I reached out my hand. He would either ignore it, and I had imagined any attraction he might have felt for me, or he would take it, and I would... I don't know. Attack him. Cry. Sit there until my hand fell off.

He took my hand. We stopped talking about poetry or politics or whatever. Explanations, assurances, gazing. He kissed me. Side B of Blood on the Tracks played over and over on Bob's friend Bob's stereo. At length, we took a walk. And on the walk, none of your business. There was sawgrass. And a U2 t-shirt, hand-screened by my high school friends Chris and Xana, that I kept in my bottom desk drawer and never washed again.

We got back to Bob's friend Bob's house and took up sleeping positions - he on the couch, me on a chair. Lance woke up and realized he needed to stop home at our house before going to the hospital the next day. I told him I'd catch a ride with someone else, and as he left, I crept onto the couch with Bob.

My memory's a little hazy at this point. It might have been the next day, the same week, the same summer, or it could have been the next summer, when I found myself in Bob's mom's car getting a ride home. Bob's mom, whom I was later to know as The Estimable Frannie. Sorry for boning your littlest lamb in the back seat of the Buick, Frances. Though after some of the crap Bob's brothers and sisters put you through... no, yeah, let me just apologize. I miss you, Frannie.

A cop knocked on the steamed-up window that night, and I, all free white and twenty-one (probably) and full of bullshit entitled indignation, was like, "What?! Are we doing something illegal?" as Bob shoved my jeans at me and hissed, "Just say 'Yes, officer'!" The cop sighed. "First of all, the park's closed," he said, and I said, "Well. All right then."

That morning, Bob came up to the apartment I shared with Lance to say goodbye. He was going back to New York. Knowing now what was waiting for him at his mother's house - the dozens of brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, the lifelong better-than-brothers best friends, I am impressed and flattered that he spent so much time with me during his visit home. Although... I guess none of them were boning him in the back of Frannie's Buick, so I suppose that gave me an edge.

I found his wallet wedged in our couch a couple hours after he left. I had no phone number for him, and everything in his wallet had his New York info on it. I panicked a little, finally got ahold of him (I think by calling Lance and telling a preposterous lie about why I would need Bob's mom's phone number - Lance, brother, I do not deserve your forgiveness), and eventually settled on sending his wallet to him in New York.

So I sent it. Along with an eight-page letter handwritten on legal paper in my miniscule handwriting.

Did I do that? I may have edited it down to six pages before it hit the mails. On the list of how to not make a person fall in love with you, writing them a six-page handwritten letter after you've met three times is just below quoting Elton John lyrics.

But somehow...

We Meet Again

Later, I graduated. Lance and I broke up, over completely unrelated matters. I got a job with a software company. It failed. I moved home to Baltimore. Slept on the bunk bed that had been bought for me when I was six. Worked writing software manuals for an insurance company.

Kind of a low point.

One day, bringing in the mail at my parents' house, I noticed a newsletter from a Catholic charity in Seattle. Not the usual kind of thing you find in my parents' mail. Opening it, I found one line scrawled across the top: "How are you? How is Baltimore? Love, Bob."

Imagine walking along your street and a tiny meteorite falls to the sidewalk in front of you. Glowing and smoking and FROM SPACE.

I wrote back to the address on the newsletter, using my company's stationery. "Dear Bob - Seattle? and Catholic? and Yes."

In addition to writing manuals, I also handled tech support. I answered phones all day, walking people through the onscreen instructions, taking shit from redneck lady office managers who were fed up with this newfangled computer hoodoo. It was 1988. I sprained my hand doing that job, when I punched the handset of the phone I was speaking into. How stupid is that? Punching a phone.

So the day the phone rang at work and Bob said "Hello Paula. This is Bob." For the first time, exactly the same way he says it a dozen times a week to me. Imagine walking along your street and the CHRIST CHILD falls gently to the sidewalk in front of you. And you have your camera on you, and he asks if you would like him to grant you three wishes.

I got goosebumps so hard they hurt.

Bob was coming to the area for his cousin's wedding, and we made plans to extend his trip so that we could see the sights and be uncomfortable around each other and weld ourselves one to another for a few days. We went to Assateague, if I remember. Saw the ponies fucking in the parking lot. Not the aphrodisiac you might think, but we did not let that bother us.

And in spring he was visiting his brother Joe in Washington D.C. I left work and drove down 95 like I was a paper airplane with jet engines. There was a party, I was wearing a blue dress, must have been fifty people on Joe's deck, and all I could see was him. That night I admitted I loved him and he laughed. "You may never meet anyone who... who worships you like I do."

Blot on My Conscience Number Two, Joe, was somewhat suspicious when I started making plans to 'visit my brother' in Seattle. My brother did, in fact, live in Seattle, and I did, in fact, plan on staying with him, since Bob was living with his girlfriend, The Completely Awesome Ginger, at the time. She came to our wedding. Her children play with our children like they have known each other all their lives. It's a theme.

Bob was working at a homeless shelter. I had his home address but I hadn't written or called (no, he and Ginger had already broken up. It was someone else. Well anyway), so I staked out his place of work. Nothing like hanging out in the alley outside a homeless shelter dressed like a late-80's club kid. A very nice lady with very few teeth offered me an apple.

And here he comes, straight from his lunchtime basketball game, sweaty and still with that bounce in his step, carrying his ball. Walked right past me, his head swiveling on its stem. I have never surprised anyone that thoroughly - and let me tell you, children, I have pink hair. I can be a surprising person.

There were a few visits to Seattle. I stayed at his place when he was between girlfriends, at my brother's when he wasn't. There are one or two blots on my husband's conscience too. Eventually, he wrote that he had been accepted to a program in Africa. In Zimbabwe. He'd be gone a year at least, and had no plan further than that. He was flying out of JFK, and suggested we meet in New York. And for once in my life, I refused him.

I used to write him letters that I couldn't send. I wrote lots of letters I did send, and he wrote me, less frequently, letters full of description that I scrutinized and re-read and parsed for hidden meaning, but in some ways, in those days, he was so unreal to me that I could use the idea of him like a movie. He was so handsome, and so romantic, and so very very intermittent. You can see how that is just not to be trusted. A humid afternoon here, a Pacific cliff there, plus all that sneaking around. How could you not be in love with that? And how could you imagine that to be anything remotely resembling real? I know a teen novel when I'm in one.

When he was in Africa, I went to Africa too. Now - Africa is big. But I knew he'd be traveling in the north while I was there, and I suggested we meet in Tunis. And for once in his life, he refused me.

Bob says that if he were writing this story as a teen novel, he'd change that. He'd have met me in Tunis. But in the novel, he'd find me just at the moment I was being menaced by a gang of bus drivers who were holding my backpack hostage, and then we'd run away, and then I'd turn to him and say, "Well. You got me back for that alley in Seattle," and then whatever whatever.

But instead we did our separate trips, and learned our separate things, and came back attached to yet another couple of Blots. He disembarked in Boston, where his girlfriend had been accepted to law school. I returned to Baltimore, took a secretarial job and ran a failing business. He got a job signing people in and out of another homeless shelter.

Ergo, grad school.

We grow up

I moved to New York to go to NYU. He stayed in Boston and went to MIT. I went on MIT's website one day and looked up his email address. It was 1995. I wanted to invite him to my wedding, but the groom (who is hopefully a Blot On His Own Damn Conscience) said, "No way."

One day, I got an email. "My girlfriend broke up with me. I am pretty depressed." Oddly enough, this email came exactly one day after my husband had left, apparently for good.

"I am 'pretty depressed' myself. I think my husband left me. What are you doing this weekend?"

I was single for exactly two days. When he showed up at the Port Authority Friday afternoon, I was so nervous. We hadn't seen each other in five years. He had grey in his hair. He was warm, and beautiful.

In New York that weekend, were we a little wounded? Maybe. Maybe that's why we were so unselfconscious with each other. God, I always thought Bob was this brooding, superior guy. All that time doing social justice stuff - how could he not be angry all the time? And how could he not disdain me, with my hot pink suede ankle boots and head full of song lyrics? That weekend though, I just took him everywhere I liked, and everything I liked, he liked it too. He liked me. When I dropped him at the bus station Sunday night I asked if we were going to see each other again. "I mean, soon, not like usual. I know we always see each other again." He replied with something to the effect that I'd have to get a restraining order if I wanted it not to be so.

I got a divorce, he got a degree. He moved in, with his chair and his bottle capper and his forty-seven hats. I proposed one afternoon in a bar.

I said, "It's getting warmer. Time to wash the curtains in the living room."
He said, "Ah. Of course. Warmer weather: wash curtains."
I said, "Isn't it relaxing to know that one day you'll be married to a person who knows when it's time to wash the curtains?"
He smiled at me and said that yes, it was a weight off his mind.


You know, now that I'm thinking about it, it wasn't Lance who saw me boiling that owl. It was Lance's best friend, Mike. Mike never fell in love with me. He was already in love with someone else. What did she do? She was beautiful, and brilliant, and a free spirit. That works too.

That explains a lot.

The way I walk is just the way I walk

Sam, Molly (making her mosquito face), and Casey, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Other day, a ton of kids (a squirming, complaining, ticklish ton - they get that way when you pack them in to weigh them) were playing at our house. In, out, making forts, playing tag, wearing hats, playing LEGO. The way I like it.

I was working in the kitchen (read: screwing around on Facebook while reveling in the fact that there were six kids at my house, none of whom required direct or constant supervision - GETTING BIGGER ROCKS) when I heard Zhou, who was working with LEGO in the living room, make an exasperated sound.

I heard him get up, stomp to the sliding door in the dining room and slide the screen closed.

"THIS is why there are so many mosquitos in this house!" he groused to nobody in particular.

I related this anecdote to Bob last night as we stood in the kitchen swatting at pantry moths. I said, "He's only six, but you add a couple 'goddamns' in there and that could have been his grandfather speaking."

Bob said, "That's funny, I was thinking the exact same thing, but it wasn't your dad that came to mind first."

+++++

Our house came with a lovely wooden screen door. The old-fashioned kind, with old brass hardware. Here's a picture.



And maybe you don't think about your screen door every day, but in Baltimore, if you don't have air conditioning, your screen door is an important element in your suite of ventilation strategies. In addition, we have a very friendly street, and if the front door's open, I can be in the kitchen and have a straight sight line out to whomever's walking by. People wander in to say hi, and I can keep one eye on the kids playing out front.

Well, that door eventually fell apart. As things do. You can see where it's starting to come apart in that picture, actually. We hired our pal Rich to replace it for us, and he had a hell of a time finding a wooden one that matched the style of the house and fit the opening. Big surprise, we have a nonstandard door hole. Took him a whole day to shave the thing down to fit. The kids played with the curls of wood from his plane. And then it took me a whole day to stain it. I do not like stain. Here's the new door:



Next, the old hardware that Rich had transferred to the new door stopped working. So, next time our friend Jack was over fixing other stuff (god, it is SO GOOD that we know people that hire out their technical skills - my only motor skill is folding laundry, and Bob can usually accurately dig a hole) I asked him to look at the screen door latch.

The latch hardware was totally worn out in one direction. It's brass, it's 85 years old, a groove was worn in the... the thing. But he managed to jam the spring so that the knob would work if you turned it counterclockwise. The opposite of the intuitive way, but I really like that hardware and I didn't want to replace it with new.

Nowadays, we frequently have visitors who need a brief stymied moment before they get the screen door open. Sorry, friends. But the kids and I have gotten used to it. Neural pathways are teh awesome.

The day that Jack and I made the hot sauce (Jack has tried it and says it's great, I haven't opened a bottle yet), we noticed a rent in the screen door.

"Goddamn it!" I exclaimed.

Jack shook his head. "Gotta beat those kids good when they get home, huh?"

"I don't think so," I said. "They've seen all the trouble we've gone to over that door. They watched you fix the latch, remember? One of their beastly little friends, I guess."

When Mao and Zhou came home from school, Zhou was the first one up on the porch. "Hey!" he called out. "What happened to the door?"

"Well, you're off the hook," I thought to myself.

Mao was next up. "What? Oh, man! Who did that to the door?"

Either they were both innocent, or they are much better actors than I thought, and I am in BIG TROUBLE GOING FORWARD.

That evening, I showed it to Bob. "I am really upset about this door. After all the trouble we went to getting it fixed, now it looks terrible and it's going to let in all the bugs."

"Yeah, that's too bad," he agreed. "Mao told me about it when I got home. I asked if he thought I could blame it on Zhou and he told me 'No. She already knows he didn't do it.'"

I looked at my husband, graduate of three of the most prestigious universities in this land, and furrowed my brow. I did. I know it when I do it, and I have lines on said brow that no amount of Jurlique Calendula Cream can erase.

"You," I said.

"I hate that door!" he said. "I'm going out in the morning, and I have my gym bag, and my laptop bag, and my coffee and my keys, and then the goddamn door doesn't open! What the hell is wrong with that door?"

"You have to turn it the other way," I said. "How long have you lived here? When Jack fixed it, the hardware was too far gone to work the usual way - what the hell! I explained this when it happened!"

"Huh." He went over to the door and turned the knob experimentally, watching the latch go in and out.

"Next time I'll try turning it the other way," he said. "Before putting my foot through the door."

Sheesh. THIS is why we have so many goddamn mosquitos in this goddamn house!

STAY HUNGRY - Hot sauce

Hi and welcome to our program - STAY HUNGRY. Today we're making hot sauce. Although I've posted recipes for hot sauce before on Flickr, today's batch represented yet another variation, and I think it came out really well. Good consistency, gorgeous color, and yeah shit it's hot.

I didn't have a garden this year - not even a little bit, not at all - and so I ganged up with my friend Travelin' Jack O'Dell, monster drummer, expert handyman, improvisational gardener. Jack brought habaneros and little Thai chilis from his garden, and I had some big red jalapenos from the Asian supermarket.

That's Jack. Jack says, "WEAR GLOVES."

The first thing we did was to lay out the habs and the Jalapenos on baking sheets. I figured the Thais were too little, but in retrospect, maybe I should have roasted them too. Dialled the oven to 350° and let them roast until they started to char a little. Roasting the chilis improves the consistency A LOT and I think gives the hot sauce a richer, less acid flavor.

Meanwhile, we cut the stems off the Thai chilis, slit them down the middle, and scraped out the seed clusters. The seeds carry most of the heat, and besides they make the hot sauce hard to pour if they end up in there at the end.

Once the peppers come out of the oven, stem and seed them too. Larger peppers, like the jalapenos, can be peeled at the same time. Why? I had a reason why last time I did this, but now I can't remember why.

ARE YOU WEARING GLOVES? If you're not now, it's too late. Do not touch your eyes, your nose, your children, your hoo-ha, your Juan Pedrosa. Wash thoroughly with soap and water. Maybe rub baking soda on your hands. Rub your hands on stainless steel. Hell, bury your hands in the back yard and say "There's no place like home" over them three times. Won't make no difference. Just pretend you don't have hands for a while.

I dissolved about 4T of brown sugar and 1 1/2 T of salt in 4 cups white vinegar. I added 1/2 t of methi seeds (browned in a skillet and pulverized in the mortar and pestle), and about half an inch of fresh ginger, grated. I'll assert that sugar in some form is necessary, and a little salt, and of course the vinegar, but the rest is up to you.

The peppers went into le blender, with enough of the vinegar mixture to almost cover them. You may have to blend the peppers in more than one batch. Liquefy this until it looks like tomato juice. When the fumes from the blender brought tears to Jack's eyes, I figured we'd better try and back the heat off a little, so we put half a pineapple in, too. I have a sinus infection, so I was no judge.

Pour the puree into a stainless steel pot. Cook over a very low flame for - well, we did 4 hours today, but I've certainly gone longer. The consistency was very good so that's why we stopped. Any thicker and it might have been a problem pouring, although you can dilute with water as you're bottling if things have gotten really sticky.

We strained the cooled puree through a wire strainer, forcing the pulp through with a rubber scraper. Jack poured the sauce into the special little hot sauce bottles, using the special little hot sauce funnel (new this year and worth all 155 pennies!), and all of a sudden we had 10 bottle of glowing red-orange hearts of chili!

I scraped the seeds-and-skin pulp that was left in the strainer onto a piece of tin foil and popped it into a 200 degree oven. Once it dries, we'll peel it off the foil, break it up, and use it on pizza.

*(Linked photos are from a previous hot sauce escapade. Note the horrible old kitchen! Finished product photos are from this escapade. Note swanky new kitchen!)

Portrait of a supervillain as a young man

Something vaguely Catholic about this photo, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

"What would happen if a chunk of ice as big as the moon fell into the Sun?"

"I don't know. Maybe not much. The Sun is pretty big."

"Ok, what if a chunk of ice as big as the Sun fell into the Sun?"

"Well in that case the sun would probably collapse into a red dwarf."

"... and everyone on Earth would DIE!"

"Yes, that would happen."

"... in a matter of SECONDS!"

"Yeah, ok, listen, don't get any ideas, my friend. I'm not buying you a spaceship for xmas. We're saving to go to Peru."