Sunday, March 23, 2008
The Straight Line - plus bonus photo-delite goodies
It’s been a while since I’ve updated, but not for lack of material - the new notebook is working out well and there’s some good stuff in the pipeline. However, I had to put my time into other pursuits for a while, of which, a touch more later. Here, though, in honor of Easter, is a story about Purim, which I failed to mention when it was actually happening. God Bless Shiva.
She spoke up from behind me; that’s what first attracted my attention. “It’s not up to me, it’s up to him, he’s the one in front...” I’d left the ‘pod at home in anticipation of one of these moments, in which I’d be tangentially, passively addressed, and my part of the social contract would be to respond to the oblique jibe with polite alacrity. I’d gotten all the way through my shopping on that overcrowded sunday afternoon without noteworthy incident, though, so I’d started thinking I was home free. But then I heard her disclaiming responsibility in deference to me, literally behind my back - and I knew all the rest had been a set-up. Game on.
I peered behind me. A slim, somewhat bent woman stood with her sparse cart, large dark glasses accentuating high slim cheekbones, a somewhat underslung jaw, and a narrow chin, all somehow drawing toward and accentuating a very direct gaze. Behind her, a somewhat older-looking woman, heavier, more formally dressed, looked a bit embarrassed at the end of the express line as she held up a single box of something or other for my assessment and possible mercy. I had a full 12 items and the hissing woman immediately behind me had about the same. I nodded the woman with her one box forward with a “come on up” and she scooted ahead of me to the front of the line. I gazed down at my sugar and flour and apricots and eggs and wondered how long things were going to take.
The woman I’d let ahead of me began by fumbling in her purse for a saver’s card, so she wouldn’t have to key in her telephone number. Then she fumbled for her cash, paying slowly and deliberately. She had change - dollars and cents. She had a coupon - wrong product? Really? Let’s check it again. What’s this, a raffle? She buys three postage-stamp-sized tickets, and stands at the register painstakingly filling them all out.
“It’s always the way.” The voice was a sharp whisper, conspiratorial at my shoulder. I turned to see her staring fixedly at the next lane over as she kvetched: “You let them through with one and it takes all day. You’re just trying to be nice, I know it. You could set your clock by it. Or, well, you know.” The lack of a sustainable metaphor was no impediment. “Of course, it’s even worse when it’s people from other cultures.” She pronounced it “othah culchas.” Her gaze swung to me like the boom of a crane, sticking at last right into my eyes. Her shoulders were rolled forward in her light cardigan; did her t-shirt say something about a library? I didn’t want to look. We were having a moment.
“Like, once, here, in that line there, there was a young lady” - the first syllable drawn out, the second snipped unceremoniously short - “a young lady from anothah culcha, and the fellow in front of me said to her, go on, you go ahead, and boom! she comes back with a whole cart!” Her brows and shoulders raised up as she gestured with upraised palms. “One thing, or a couple of things, you can say, okay. But she’s doing her whole shopping!”
It was a pro forma conversational handoff, a common courtesy in nascent relationship such as this. “That guy must have been mad,” I ritually intoned.
She had returned to scanning the rest of the crowd by now, having established sufficient conversational intimacy with me. Her forehead furrowed; she stood with neck craned forward as if to form a straight line from her nostril down to her inward parts. “No, no, he was from anothah culcha too, he thought she was adorable, so cute, he was fine with it. But I had to stand there too and wait for them both, and it was a long time and I didn’t care how adorable she was. Ugh.”
“It’s the way things are,” I solemnly, lamely responded.
“Well, once, when I first moved here, I was in a long line, and this guy walked in, I mean, he was doing fine, he was doing well, he wasn’t any kind of, you now, poor person, and he wanted to get these flowers, they were $10, I remember that, and he came up and handed me a $20 and he told me, ‘keep the change,’ and oh boy were those people behind me sore but I was happy to keep the change, the flowers were only $10 and he game me $20 so my change was $10, that’s as much as the whole flowers were in the first place.”
“Quite a profit!”
“No, it was just, I could keep the change.”
“I see.” We debated the basis upon which others might be antagonized by such behavior. The conversation sputtered. She suddenly took a stock-taking step back, eyes fixed on my chest, peering with contemplatively hooded eyes at the legend on my shirt. “Penn. Oh. Okay. I know… um, yes, it’s um, I know… Chris Tucker! He went there.”
“Oh, okay.” It didn’t seem to call for more of a response. Not needing one from me, she went on: “Oh and there was, oh, I’m sure… there was somebody else… at Penn… and of course my son was once in a Ph.D program at the University of Pittsburgh.”
“Ah.” There was something behind what she’d said, something unspoken and possibly terrible, and I didn’t want to know what it was. I turned my eyes, face, shoulders and undivided attention forward. I wanted nothing more to do with that conversation. In a startling karmic coincidence, the woman I’d let ahead of me was just stuffing the last of her raffle tickets into the plastic insert of her gargantuan wallet, and I casually engaged the checkout clerk in small talk much as a drowning rat would casually take to a liferaft full of corndogs. As I arranged my groceries on the belt we talked a little about nice weather and St Patrick’s Day.
I had essentially concluded my transaction already, having tried to remedy the slowness of the woman ahead of me through the application of extraordinary efficiency. By now the clerk was just bagging and I was just waiting for her to finish. “And get ready for purim, too.” I told her with a grin. “Jewish St Pat’s day.”
The woman behind me snapped to attention as if awoken from zombieism. “Yes, purim is coming! It’s purim!” She said it to me as if she were informing me of something, her voice full of pedantic sincerity.
“Yes, that’s why I’m getting all these hamentashen supplies. To make cookies for purim.” I picked up my sack; verily, it bulged. I swung it down and turned toward the door. “But wait, cried the woman, imploring from her station by the register with her paltry groceries: “How did you know?”
I just turned and left, laughing. How did I know it was purim? Such a question!
Okay, so, for your update: Saturday we went to San Rafael to play some mini-golf with some friends. It was a compact but very entertaining course, to wit:
Afterwards I hit a couple of buckets of slow-pitch hardballs in the batting cages, which is marvelously cathartic. Whacking stuff! Yay! Of course today my hands feel like I got a nerve conductivity test or something, but the pleasure lingers.
Today we got up early to enjoy an easter feast - INCLUDING BUTTERLAMB! -
This is how the Poles celebrate easter - with a lamb cast in butter. Eat Not of Its Peppery Eyes! Leaf-ears may contain detectable amounts of whey! Manufactured in a facility which handles butter and butter-related products! I ate well anyway, and I don’t care who knows it. Additionally:
somebody found a 24” chocolate bunny, and somebody needed to do immediate exploratory auditory-oral surgery. Tympanum’s loose, rabbit - sorry, guess I et it! I always said, any holiday that features rodents made of candy has at least one redeeming quality. And if bunnies aren’t rodents, there goes easter, so let’s not examine this one too closely.
The next thing was, we drove out to Pt Reyes and took a cool little beach-bluff stroll past a lagoon to the ocean. It was pretty darned idyllic, and I have licked my share of idols so my word is good. Along the way, we noticed this nice view:
Here’s a close-up of the little community that’s sprung up at the end of the hand-rail on the bridge:
And here, god forbid I don’t advertise my shame, is what it looks like when I miss one of the driftwood boards overlaying the mudpuddles:
finally, just to bring some random weirdness to your monday, here’s a garbage pail I recently bought for our laundry room (the chinese characters at the bottom spell out, I am told, “garbage can"):
Yes, it’s cute - but our panel of experts asked, is it cute enough? Or can it be made even cuter - or, as experts say, further encutened?
Answer: further encutenment is achievable.
Mail your unused peeps and cadbury overstock to the Chucklehut. I’ll be happy to send you back some butterlamb. While supplies last. Which at this rate might not be too long.