deeples

May 15, 2006

Pin people

Filed under: Television — denise @ 6:55 pm

Pin People

This is one of those strange memories where certain parts of it are very clear and others are….errrrr?……….how could that be?

In the 5th grade, in Tucson, AZ – my friend Keith Singer and I worked on a special project that was enthusiastically approved by our teacher, Mr. Crowley.  Mr. Crowley had a very 70’s beard and 70’s feathered hair and I alternately loved and hated him.

For example, I loved him the month of October when he read “Charlotte’s Web” aloud to the class every day after lunch.  I couldn’t wait every day to hear what would happen next to Wilbur and Fern and Charlotte … he had this beautiful deep bass voice…

I hated him in December when, as a Christmas present to our parents, (even though our class was at least 50 percent Jewish) he brought in his fancy camera and took our pictures and taught us to develop the pictures ourselves and write a little poem directly on the picture. Except, when my picture was developed – my bangs were sticking STRAIGHT UP IN THE AIR and everyone laughed and I cried the whole rest of the day and fought myself internally over ripping the picture to shreds…. and having nothing to give my mom……or just sucking it up. I never forgave him for taking my picture without telling me that I looked like a moron. “Why would you take my picture like that?!”, I asked him over and over… it’s only now as a grown woman that I understand how a man wouldn’t necessarily think anything of a girl’s bangs sticking straight up.

I loved him again in February when he held up my pink, red and white tissue paper decorated shoebox and declared it the “Winner!” of the Valentine Mailbox Decorating Contest and presented me with a small box of conversation hearts.

I hated him again in the spring. After warning me at least 100 times that  I needed to clean up my desk, which actually was so messy that I couldn’t get it closed. You know, those angled flip-top kind… papers hung out the sides of mine and I had so many books inside that it was raised in such an uneven way that my things were constantly sliding and falling off my desk… and he just snapped.  Walked over to my desk in the middle of math, ordered me up and out of my desk, picked my desk up… walked to the front of the classroom and TIPPED MY ENTIRE DESK UPSIDE DOWN IN FRONT OF EVERYONE. Then ordered me down on my knees to clean the whole thing up in front of all my classmates…oh god.. the horror… don’t cry.. don’t cry… don’t cry…. I tried to flip him off when his back was turned but I don’t think anyone saw it, which basically nullifies its effects, anyway…

The hatred was pure at that point.  I used to daydream that he would be bitten by snakes.

Suddenly…. end of year…. and Keith Singer and I are working on our “project” – which was to create an entire house… furniture… food… clothing…lives… for a set stickpins.  We used mostly cardboard, wire and construction paper… and we’d sit out in the hall for hours working on it. I don’t remember coming up with the idea… or proposing it to Mr. Crowley. I don’t remember what we were supposed to learn from it or if it was graded… but I remember hours of hallway sitting, laughing and talking with Keith while we folded little paper beds, with little paper sheets and made paper tables with paper placemats and paper chicken with paper cake…. folded wire into little hairbrushes and forks…

Keith was great fun – he didn’t like playing with the boys and didn’t “like LIKE” girls – (I’m not sayin’, I’m just saying…. I mean, the kid could have been a late bloomer – I was 12 when I last saw him.)

I can’t remember what happened to The Pin House… I can’t believe we’d put in all that work and just leave it there… maybe Keith’s mom has it?

These half-memories drive me nuts.

Like so many of my childhood memories, I can often remember what I did and who I did it with — but not for the life of me why I thought it was a good idea, in the first place…

May 9, 2006

The Library experience – then and now

Filed under: Uncategorized — denise @ 6:55 pm

The library experience then… and now

I got my first library card when I was 4 years old.  I remember it pretty clearly for something that happened 31 years ago.  I started to read at a very early age and my grandparents and mother strongly encouraged and nurtured this ability.  My grandfather had me practice writing my name and address for weeks… I copied the letters and numbers every day, honestly not understanding much more than D-E-N-I-S-E…

We went after dinner and I brought my “worksheet” with me that had my name and address on it so I could copy the letters and numbers on my card – my grandfather was insistant that I fill it out myself.  The rule, in 1975, was that you could take out 1 book at a time until your permanent card came in the mail. Just one book…. how could I decide… I had hundreds of books at home already…but these books.. well, let’s face it – they were SHINY.  They had that thick piece of shiny plastic over the cover.. and those cards that had all the numbers stamped on them in the inside cover and they smelled…. bookish.  I was then, and remain now, facinated by books about holidays.  Christmas books. Halloween books. Thanksgiving books. Easter books.  The book I finally chose was “The Country Bunny and the Little Golden Shoes”.

…I book that I love to this day… an amazingly feminist story of a young girl bunny who proves everyone wrong by becoming a full fledged Easter Bunny  – all while being the single mother of dozens of young children – even more amazing, the book was written in 1939.

A few years after my grandfather died I found some of his writings – he was an amazing writer, inventor, computer programmer, gardener and he held a doctorate in engineering – and found that he’d written a short story documenting that first day at the library with me – how proud he was…. how I begged him to put on the light in car on the drive home so I could read my new book….

***

Yesterday’s trip to the library was certainly less awe-inspiring.  First of all, I wasn’t completely sure that I didn’t owe the Ramsey County Library System a trememendous amount of money. I was a little panicky about filling out the slip for a library card and having the clerk tell me that I owed several hundred dollars for books I checked out 9 years ago – I mean, it was entirely possible. I know for a FACT that I have library books in my house right now that are, well, stolen…. if by “stolen” you mean “borrowed and never given back”…  I would have felt better if my ID had my married name on it -but I’m actually still running around on my old hole-punched ID and a tattered yellow temporary piece of paper due to laziness and a new license that came in the mail in February with the WRONG last name on it….

Anyway, the building is dark red brick and very cool looking.  There is an inexplicable bright red and blue NEON sign in the front that says “OPEN” which is strange and out of place, but oddly acceptable on Como Ave… the library smells like… public library.  A mixture of dust, ink and chicken nuggets…  I ask the woman at the desk with the long white hair pulled back in a ponytail where I can get a library card – except, I’m sort of nervous about the whole possible book stealing thing so I kind of stammer something like, “Hi, I want to sign up somewhere to get a card so I can check out books”, with this big dumb shit-eating grin on my face and she says with NO PATIENCE whatsoever, “Thru the arch to your right.” – which, incidentally, was about 6 steps down the desk from her… there, a young guy with glasses and long black hair asks if he can help me  – and there are signs everywhere on the desk.

“BOOKS WILL NOT BE CHECKED OUT WITHOUT YOUR CARD”

“MUST HAVE PROPER ID TO APPLY FOR A CARD”

“FINES MUST BE PAID PRIOR TO CHECKING OUT BOOKS”

…. and I get all nervous again… and I do the stammery weird talking thing to the kid and he wants to see my ID and current address and I fumble the hole-punched ID and the yellow paper out of my wallet and then for some reason, I start flashing my check book around – like, just to show that I’m totally prepared to pay my outrageous fine, should it be discovered…. and he enters everything in and starts peeling off stickers and then just hands it to me -and I’m yelling, “SHAZAM!” in my head — and then, in that second that we are both touching the card.. he hasn’t quite released it, yet… he goes, “Um, what was your maiden name again?”

CRAAAAAAAAAAAAP!

I tell him… start fishing for my checkbook again… and he goes, “Ok.”

And thats it. I look at him. He looks at me. I wait. He waits.

I say, tentatively, “So, I can only take out.. what?…. 2 books today?”

“That is a true. Once you get your card in the mail you can take out as many as you like.”

Except, I’m thrown by him saying “That is true.” instead of “Correct.” or “Yes.”, so, I say it again…

“But TODAY, I can just take out 2 books?”

“That is true.”, says the guy.

I squint my eyes at him and grab all my stuff and practically run away from the counter – and I’m not having any fun at all being back in the library – because this whole experience has been TENSE AS HELL… I walk over the “New Fiction” section and quickly grab 2 books that I’ve read good reviews about and I’m back at his desk to check them out in less than 2 minutes.

He looks at me. I look at him. Now, he’s squinting at me.

Crap. I made my choices too quickly… now he thinks there is some funny-business going on with me and I suddenly am overwhelmed with the desire to start waiving my checkbook around again….

He says nothing… checks the books out… and I grab them and boogie out of that library like I’m on fire.

The lilacs are in full bloom in Minnesota and the air was perfumed with their scent .. and this was mixed with that pre-rain smell… and as I walked to my car with my two shiny plastic wrapped books, I still managed to smile.

May 8, 2006

Book Jonesing

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — denise @ 6:55 pm

Book Jonesing

I officially ran out of things to read last night…. it was 3am… and it was nothing less than TRAGIC.  I did the frantic thing where you go through stacks of books hoping that you’ll find something you haven’t read yet… something you bought and never got to…. ugh.

Since I have the world’s worse case of Evening Sickness that leaves me feeling like a disabled person with vertigo who just ate scrambled eggs on a small ship in the middle of a terrible storm that is tossing the ship relentlessly on 50 foot waves, I have altered my sleep schedule so as to fall asleep almost the minute I get home and wake up around 2-3am, thus enabling myself to sleep through the worst of the nausea.  This of course means that I spent virutally no time with my son or husband and haven’t joined them for dinner in weeks….  it also means that at 3am, I need something to READ, dammit.

God, I even did that thing where you find a book that you don’t quite remember reading… in this case, “Trace” by Patricia Cornwell. It’s a hardback version, which is a clear signal that it was probably purchased for me at Christmas, as I rarely invest in hardbacks.  A quick scan of the back of the cover… and still…. it’s possible I hadn’t read it…. a quick flip through the pages – I’ll admit it, now – I’m a TERRIBLE page folder.  Yes, I know you shouldn’t do it.  People have bought me inumerable bookmarks… I just like to dog-ear a book – it’s been read that way, man. The spine should be cracked, the pages folded and somewhere…somewhere.. in the book should be a splotch of peanut butter or salad dressing… something that tells you that this book was SO FUCKING FANTASTIC that I couldn’t put it down, even to eat a meal….

No dog-earing on the Cornwell book – HOT DIGGITY, I thought.

I hopped back into bed… with the window open and an awesome early morning May breeze blowing through the room… my snoring husband safely curled up in his blanket… an icecold Gingerale and a hunk of cheddar cheese and I was sooooo ready….

and DAMNED if by the 3 page I didn’t know, without a doubt, that I’d not only read this stupid book before… but didn’t even really enjoy it.

I was too bummed to make the trek out to the living room to start scanning the bookcase – I KNOW I’ve read all those books… so it would have been a matter of settling for the book I’d read the longest ago…

I’m now up to like 3 books a week.  It’s time to do it.  I’ve got to just bite the bullet and do it.

I’m going to to the library.

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