Saturday, June 28, 2003
Drowsy Flying Thinkthings, Lost Cheshire Cats
It is a strange place through which I pass each night on the way from Drowsy to Dreaming. Sometimes I linger to take in the sights and sounds. Warm, fuzzy static is my bed of kelp, a cloud of white-noise like sauna steam in which I float. Conscious thoughts trail off, meeting with those that bubble up from below. They bump, and where they combine the sun glints off bright chrome, blurring them into something new.
This dialogue intrigues me, the meaningless disconnected meanderings that begin in two places and connect together inanely different, I am baking a pie tomorrow the color of grass moves into rusty blackiron railing full-bloom. Lost happy orphaned Thinkthings emanating from subconscious within, reverberating, echoing. A man in a deep canyon whispers: Do you know me? I listen from a ledge above. I know him, he is me, I am happy to be rejoined with my missing self.
But occasionally a voice enters the scene unfamiliar and strange from outside my moist sleepy world, mixing with my own disjointed thoughts like two radio stations playing on the same channel; two word-flocks passing through each other, combining in mid-flight, then roosting on a wire.
Someone says: "Romij tomo amtu nit!"
From whence comes this loud interjection, and in what ancient tongue is it spoken? It wakes me, makes me grab pen and scrap of paper and write it down to read the next day. And, Yes, it is exactly, purposefully as I heard it: "Romij tomo amtu nit!" Those are the words, to the letter, as surely as tomato is spelled tomato no matter how it is pronounced.
But Google has no answer for my query, "Romij tomo amtu nit!" ...nor can any search engine tell me what demon I may conjure should I dare speak these words aloud.
Even more disturbing is the odd phrase in English that I hear but do not comprehend:
"Gravity does not affect us so much when we grow older," she says in a voice no more my own than Shirley Temple's singing could come from my throat. "Gravity just doesn't matter. Sometimes we think, 'I wish I were dead,' but even then we know somehow that we're better off living."
If these are your thoughts, strayed from your head like lost kittens, won't you please come and collect them? I like them, and they are safe and welcome here... but they unnerve me slightly, like Cheshire cats. And I have questions, so many questions, for their owner.
~
Note from the author: No, I'm not schizophrenic. Really! Yes, I know I joined three independant clauses with two commas. Twice. Now go pick on someone else.
6/28/2003 02:39:00 PM
Thursday, June 19, 2003
Possibly the world's smallest stamp collection:
Interviewer: "Everybody would like to be Cary Grant."
Grant: "So would I."
~
The portraits of Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston and Archibald Leach above are copyright the US Postal Service, of course.
6/19/2003 11:33:00 AM
Wednesday, June 04, 2003
A Story to Fill the Time
A Canadian friend of mine just told me I remind her of her cousins in Belfast, and that made me happy. I've lost weight lately. Stress, mostly. So, my chronic chubby cheeks have finally thinned out to expose something I haven't seen for a while: a prominent, almost cocky Bruce Campbell jaw. I got my hair cut, brushed it back and had a look at my hairline. It has receded exactly one half-inch over the last 15 years. How do I know this? Because one damned single hair, stubbornly rooted at the exact edge of the original hairline I was born with, refuses to leave.
It is not about to be evicted. The land belongs to it and it is no man's tenant.
The distance of bare forehead between this lone hair and its cousins to the North is exactly one half-inch. That's how much hair I've lost in front. Not bad. And none lost in back, thank you. So, with my hair pushed back and my temples exposed and my thinner face making my nose look even longer and more pointy, I look "Irish" again (whatever that may be).
Just today, before my friend told me that, I was thinking of the "lads" on a Gaelic football team of Belfast immigrants in an amateur league here in the States. They all have a bit of the same look about them: tall, lean and hungry but wiry, with craggy cheekbones and high foreheads revealed beneath artfully-receding hairlines. Black Irish, mostly. Dark hair and widow’s peaks. You know the type? Obviously good-natured on the one hand, but with a slightly dangerous I've-Been-There-And-Back edge on the other. Sort of like Pierce Brosnan with shorter hair, if Brosnan could somehow look as if he really means business.
I saw the lads play a match a few years ago. The match was a tragic upset in their favor. Unlike Mr Brosnan, these fellows do look like they mean business. Sure, they’re affable and quick to joke. You wouldn’t mind having a pint with any of them. But you’d think twice about saying anything remotely derogatory about the mother of any of the lads, especially after a few of those pints.
You see, they all have traces of Belfast left on their faces. Something of the stress of the place still lingers in the lines between their brows, the lines that furrow with old memories and troubles and ghosts even when they laugh and smile. It’s a look that reminds you the lads didn’t grow up in one of the few rich, safe suburbs of Belfast.
The local team of Irish-Americans should have taken note of that look when they played against the team of Belfast-ers. You don’t want to catch the ball with one of these fellows coming up fast behind you any more than you’d want to insult the fellow’s mother. And that’s exactly what happened. The catching of the ball, that is, not the insulting of the Ma.
A slightly chubby youth with blond hair and baby-fat cheeks was playing on the local Irish-American team that day. The ball was kicked far downfield to him and he made a perfect, proud leap straight up high in the air, catching the ball and clutching it to his chest in perfect form, elbows jutting out to fend off anyone too close to him as he came down. What he didn’t see was a Belfast lad streaking toward his back like an interceptor bearing down at mach-1.
People in the UK and Australia have a certain descriptive phrase, arse-over-tits. I had never realized how perfect and how literal this phrase can be. Now, after witnessing the collision of the blond-haired-boy and the Belfast Interceptor, I’m convinced the term was coined on a football field.
He never knew what hit him. Literally. We can be sure of this, because he also didn’t know where he was or what he was doing there as they picked him up off the grass. Even more frightening was that the blond boy was happy, or perhaps just delirious, smiling and insisting he was perfectly fine as he inquired as to why he was in the middle of a field with people staring at him.
The Belfast Interceptor had caught him square in the back at something shy of mach-1 (but not shy by much). One minute the blond boy’s feet had been on the ground, and the next his head was exactly where his feet had been and the soles of his shoes were pointing straight upward to high heaven. He had spun 180 degrees like a GI Joe doll tossed by an angry child. His body continued onward with the same velocity, causing several onlookers in the bleachers to swear they felt vibrations beneath their feet upon his impact with the earth.
The comments of the fans of both teams followed a predictable, two-part pattern.
First:
“Lord, didja see that? The poor lad.”
“Ask him his name and what state he’s in! Surely the poor lad has a concussion!”
“Is the poor lad okay?”
“Ah, the poor wee lad. Arse-over-tits he went...”
And then:
“But it was a fair hit!”
“Aye, a fair hit. A good one too!”
“Fair hit! Nice one!”
Most people watched the spectacle from the bleachers, talking amongst themselves while the boy staggered away in a zigzag pattern grinning like a fool with a bag full of gumdrops, with one man supporting him on each arm. Some of the onlookers took advantage of the convenient interruption to refresh their drinks and haul a few extra pints back for later.
Then the lads resumed the field, and the game went on…
Now, the strange thing is, at a later point in the match the roles were reversed. It was a Belfast lad leapt high and snagged the pass, landed, and paused for a split-second to wonder which way to run. In that millisecond a boy from the Irish-American team took revenge for his teammate, but with unpredictable results.
The boy hit the Belfast-er hard on the back with running force. But the Belfast lad went nowhere. He was a brick wall, a stone statue, like a Tai Chi master standing relaxed while his students grunt and groan trying to push him off-balance.
The boy who by all rights should have made a marvelous tackle bounced off the Belfast-er like a superball, regained his feet and stared wide-eyed after his target who was by now well down the field toward the goal.
You might say this can be easily explained away because the Belfast-er’s feet were already planted firm, or his center of gravity was low, or his body was prepared. Still, by all the laws of physics, he should have toppled like a bowling pin. Everyone in the bleachers stared and puzzled and said there was a reasonable explanation, but secretly they knew. They knew it was the Belfast-er's willpower, his stubborn resolve, his refusal to be relocated against his will that made him an immovable object.
It was his land, and he would not be evicted.
This explains why I am happy to be told I look like a Belfast lad. And as odd as that errant, stray, stubborn hair looks on my forehead, I keep it there as a reminder.
~
Big thanks to t r a c y !
6/04/2003 01:04:00 PM
