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August 20, 2003
What I Did on My Summer Vacation
This past weekend, Jacob and I went to a cave.
It had amazing stalagmites. Also stalagtites. Caleb the tour guide gave us a handy pneumonic device to remember which is which, but you probably already know it.
Though we were repeatedly instructed not to touch any of these living wonders,
the stinky man in front of us with a bunch of babies did anyway.
Near the end we came to an entire room full of fried eggs.
But none of the formations could, ahem, top this favorite:
The best part was when we got to go outside and play with Grendel the dinosaur and his orange family.
I had a good time on our field trip to Natural Bridge Caverns, and I learned a lot. Mostly that I don’t like Icees anymore. And that caves are not always refreshing and cool. I also don’t like screaming children or adults who don’t think they have to listen or follow instructions. But truly, the most important thing I realized was that no matter what I do on a Sunday with Jacob, it’s almost always brilliant.
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August 19, 2003
from “Pippi Goes On Board” by Astrid Lindgren
… the children came to a perfume shop. In the show window was a large jar of freckle salve, and beside the jar was a sign which read: DO YOU SUFFER FROM FRECKLES?
“What does the sign say?” asked Pippi. She couldn’t read very well because she didn’t want to go to school as other children did.
“It says, ‘Do you suffer from freckles?’” said Annika.
“Does it indeed?” said Pippi thoughtfully. “Well, a civil question deserves a civil answer. Let’s go in.”
She opened the door and entered the shop, closely followed by Tommy and Annika. An elderly lady stood back of the counter. Pippi went right up to her. “No!” she said decidedly.
“What is it you want?” asked the lady.
“No,” said Pippi once more.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” said the lady.
“No, I don’t suffer from freckles,” said Pippi.
Then the lady understood, but she took one look at Pippi and burst out, “But my dear child, your whole face is covered with freckles!”
“I know it,” said Pippi, “but I don’t suffer from them. I love them. Good morning.”
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August 14, 2003
Let Me Set the Battlements on Fire
There is absolutely no explicable reason that I should wake up with the Pet Shop Boys’ version of “You Were Always on My Mind” swirling through my head of its own damn volition this morning, but I did. I tried to make my sleepy brain combat it while I was showering and the best the feeble thing could do was flash back to the other night when we were at the new wave HEB on Burnet and heard Sting’s “Fortress Around Your Heart.”
I’m going to assume these to be bad omens, same as black cats in your path, breaking mirrors and such. I am fearful of this day.
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August 10, 2003
That Summer Feeling
Here’s what makes me happy: getting some tacos, barbacoa and migas, from Loca Maria at Taco Express on a Saturday. Getting back in the car and hearing “She’s About A Mover” on the oldies station and dancing and singing along as I drive along the green belt. Going to a barbecue and drinking cold, cold beer from a koozie, and eating a million kinds of foods that everyone brought. Watermelons, cold-ish and sweet. Fresh fruit altogether. Firecrackers. Bare feet in dead brown grass and smooth, dusty dirt at dusk. Or cool concrete. Or hard wood floors. Or hot asphalt, smelling of tar, bubbly and hot. The smell of the jasmine and lavender growing in pots on my front porch. The smell of the basil growing in the front yard. Seeing the surprise of different colors of hibiscus blooming in my yard every morning. Iced tea with mint. Trains. Rock and roll shows and dancing and sweating until I think I might collapse with the combination of happiness, heat and exhaustion. The top down at night or in the morning. Aguas frescas. Cold beer with lime. Swimming. Old-time honky-tonk or Tejano music wafting from windows across yards and streets. Any music wafting across yards and streets. Sitting on the porch. Carnivals. Moving slow. The brilliance of a cool breeze. Sweet, fresh, juicy fruits. Salsa that I made this morning, and nothing but more fresh veggies from the garden in the fridge. Tadpoles. Swingsets. Postcards from everyone visiting everywhere. Accordions. Puppies named Audrey that don’t like to swim. Red toenails. Cool, crisp cotton sheets. Naps with Jacob in the afternoon. Doing the crossword or reading comic books while drinking an icy coffee or Topo Chico on the porch in the afternoon. Lightning bugs. Orange butterflies dancing with one another all over the lawn this afternoon. Limes. Full moons. The promise of a beach house. Baking until I’m warm and crispy in the sunny, welcoming afternoon. Sun, sun, sun. And friends and easiness. Summertime.
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August 06, 2003
I’m Gonna Pack My Trunk and Make My Getaway
A couple of weeks ago, at closing time at Beerland, I stumbled into a conversation between Jacob and Shawn wherein they were discussing St. Louis and how segregated it is. Shawn was saying that he lived there when he was a kid, and thought of it as a terribly racist place. That was interesting and a little surprising to me. Having been born into a Southern family and growing up in the South and then moving to Missouri, I’ve always heard people deride the South as a segregated and racist place. I’ve never really heard anyone have the same ideas about Missouri, except for my roommate in college who was from Chicago and whose friends ridiculed her constantly for going to school in the backwoods of Missouri, because they had it confused with Mississippi. People in Chicago don’t really know much about anything outside of Chicago, because there’s nothing to know for miles and miles and miles, so they just bury their heads in Lake Michigan and comfort themselves in their icy isolation.
This seems like a big bite to tackle, and I already know it’s way more than I can chew today, but I’m going to jump in all the same.
Yes, the South (and whether or not that includes Missouri will depend on your geography and upbringing, I guess. To my thinking, the South includes all the Southeast U.S., all the mid-Atlantic states and extending west to include just the furthest east reaches of Texas. I really don’t consider Texas or Oklahoma part of the South, but it’s really all negotiable. I had a professor who taught a class in the History of the New South and she maintained that all it took to be a Southerner was to consider yourself one.) is racist. And segregated. Racism, and not just against black folks, but against every hue in the spectrum, is so deeply enmeshed in the making of this country that it’s not even a question.
Here’s the thing, though: all cities are segregated. And when it happens now, I think that it sometimes is a matter of racism, but not always necessarily so. Every city I’ve ever been to is divided into neighborhoods, and these boundaries are most often drawn across cultural and class lines. The only St. Louis I can speak of is the one I lived in, and I left in 1994. It is very divided, and it is very white in many ways. It’s in the Midwest and the Midwest is full of a whole, whole lot of white people. (I mean, have you ever been to Iowa?)(Don’t go.) The divisions I noticed mostly were ones of class. West is rich, South is redneck, East is poor and everywhere else is everyone else. For the most part, people are going to assume South Grand to be Southeast Asian, the Hill to be Italian, Soulard to be GermanFrenchSpanishPolishWhoCanSayWhiteMidwesternPeople, Cherokee to be Latino, East St. Louis to be African-American. When I go back to visit I’m always excited to visit new neighborhoods that weren’t there before, like the huge, new Bosnian neighborhood near Bevo Mill. But really, I don’t see these neighborhoods as being segregated. They occur where they do for a reason. The build up because it’s much easier to make a home and a community where people are going to understand you and what you do and why you do it. It’s going to be easier in every way to rent from a Vietnamese-speaking landlord if that is the only language you know. You’re going to want to live in a Muslim neighborhood (especially in these fucked up days in the U.S.) if you are Muslim so you won’t have to be constanly defending yourself and explaining yourself. Also, oftentimes (as is the case in St. Louis) people tend to settle near immigration centers where they will have an easier time with transportation, employment and just plain communication. These things are so obvious to me. Perhaps it can be called segregation. I guess it is, but I don’t see it on the same level as I do Jim Crow laws. I see individual communities that make the whitewashed Midwest a little more bearable to be in. All cities are comprised of neighborhoods, and all neighborhoods have their own distinctions.
I imagine this isn’t what Shawn was talking about. I personally think Austin is just as segregated, if not more. Everyone can make any assumption they want to about you as soon as they know whether you live east, west, central or south (I don’t really know anyone who lives north.) And of course, that’s wrong, but it’s what happens everywhere. And if you really could use a good example of racism, just come to work with me today and meet the stupidass motherfuckers that I spend forty hours a week with.