My great, great grand aunt, Anna McCurdy, was from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, just like the rest of the McCurdys and the Scotts–I am a McCurdy Scott. In June, 1875, Anna McCurdy married George Upton, who was from Gloucester, Massachusetts. Anna moved to Gloucester with George, and in so doing left behind her widowed father and five younger siblings.

My grandparents, Janet and Andrew, have been reading the letters that were sent between Gloucester and Gettysburg that year. This is Anna’s Christmas letter to her father, dated December 17th, 1875. As it happens, December 17th, 2008, was just about when I started thinking of Christmas presents this year. Another interesting similarity between Anna and me is that we generally begin each paragraph with “I”. Apples, trees. Self-centered Christmas apples, self-centered Christmas trees.

I aim to preserve original punctuation.

My dear Pa,

I am sending you a Christmas box [ed: my grandmother guesses this was by dray or train to Boston, then on a steamer to Philadelphia or Baltimore, and then another day train to Gettysburg] hoping that it may give you all as much pleasure to receive it as it has given me to prepare it.

I only wish that it was twenty tims as valuable as it is, but we have done our best this year. The shirts (red flannel anti Rheumatism) for yourself I know will be useful and the red silk hankerchief, sham, finger sponges from the sea &c may be acceptable also. Charley [ed: Anna's litte brother] will need the Enxesis and white silk hankerchief when he is going to a party or a concert; the delicate fragrance of Enxesis is very delightful I think–the bottle of bath powder he may like too but I can’t vouch for its worth as I can for the shaving soap–it is through George’s, not my own experience however–I am sending Mollie [Anna's eldest little sister] my damask silk knowing that she can make a beautiful dress of it sometime and have given hats to her and Puss [Anna's youngest sister] because they are the two who never had satisfactory ones, to my knowledge.

The young ladies in Boston seem to be wearing white or very light hats this winter and I met two very stylish girls from Phila. when we were at Cousin John’s on Thansgiving and both of theirs were much whiter than the one I have had made for Mollie. The white plume on it was never worn an hour but the wing was in my wedding hat–I suppose I ought to have kept all these little knick-knacks to remember the event but as I have George himself it doesn’t matter so much.

I would rather that you tell that girls not to open the box I am sending to Julia Jacobs [a childhood friend]–it contains pressed ferns, two little finger sponges like yours and some sea mosses very much like those George gave me when I was at home–these articles are easily soiled and broken and the girls can see them at Jules’s sometime.

The vase is for Sarah McPherson [another friend] and the stockings for the old family piece [ed: oh man, I am embarrassed, but let's be fair: "old family piece" is a...servant]. Lillie’s [another sister] box contains collar and cuffs white tie trimmed with lace and a pair of kid gloves which I bought in Boston and wore only once–they will come good next summer–Ginnie’s [sister] slate colored kid gloves and scarlet necktie I thought would suit her taste and I did not forget to send the inevitable bottle of perfumery for each of them.

The bundles of miscellaneous articles, calico dresses, chemise, dancers skirts, apron, hood &c which I sent to Lillie and Ginnie I thought would be useful although they are not very handsome. And now comes Puss. I want her to write and tell me how she likes her hat, cosy and blue waist.

The toaster you will find very convenient to broil a little steak as well as for bread. You just take off one of the griddles and hold it over the top of the stove. I put in some nutmegs & tea to fill up the little spaces thinking they could be more useful than wads of paper… The pressed ferns and sea fan (Fan Gorgan) are for Mollie. I suppose you have rec’d [sic] the half barrel of mackerel which George sent you.

The barrel of mackerel (salted? Oh let’s hope salted) did indeed make it to Pennsylvania, although it took three weeks. In a letter to the Gettysburg side of the family, George advocated said mackerel and wrote,

Anna and I do have very cosy breakfasts off of it occasionally–I mean cosy always and mack’l occasionally.

[Ed: all images are from the archive of the Denver Public Library, available in the "History of the American West" collection of the Library of Congress's American Memory database.]

Wilco_No More Poetry

Wilco_Forget The Flowers

A STEP AWAY FROM THEM
by Frank O’Hara

It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.

On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.

Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of
Federico Fellini, è bell’ attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.

There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they’ll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.

A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

[Ed: the above poem was first published in Frank O'Hara's "Lunch Poems," which, squirt that I am, I gave to my father as a birthday gift the year I turned 14 and he turned 50.  That is a little like what will happen when our children give us a copy of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and say, "You really gotta check this out.  God, MOM."

I wanted Lunch Posts to be a series, but I'm not sure if it will work.  For one, I don't eat lunch very frequently--some of these are dinner posts, I'll admit.  And it's simply not appropriate to take pictures during some of my more significant luncheons.  Last week when Andrew took me to Taco Bell and I didn't know what to order and he told me he was trying hard not to think of John Kerry, for example: in an instance like that, one doesn't want to ruin the mood.]

Buy more Lunch Poems here.

TV On The Radio_Family Tree

My Liberty scarf was dragging in the gravel and my yoga clothes had spilled out of my backpack.

I pulled out the credit card sized map Tulane had given my class at orientation.  I’d never looked at it before: I’d evacuated from New Orleans almost as soon as I’d gotten there, and for most of my time in the South maps of Mississippi have been more valuable than anything else.  As it happened, the Tulane map looked like this:

Fuck Tulane, I said.

I was trying to find the Orleans Parish Public Defenders Office so I could start volunteering to conduct First Appearance interviews.  In Orleans Parish, most offenders meet their lawyers in the same courtroom where they’re arraigned.  This means that there’s no chance to discuss mitigating circumstances—the children, jobs, educations and women most people accused of crimes will lose in the initial weeks they spend in jail awaiting trial.  If the accused can make bail, there’s a chance of salvaging some of that.

Of course, it’s hard to make bail when your lawyer doesn’t know how to argue for you, so First Appearance interviewers try to fill in the gap—a gap, I must mention, that is particularly wide in New Orleans’s under-funded, overburdened criminal justice system.

So that was me, scarved (scarfed?  no, not that) and lipsticked, riding through Mid-City.  Caroline and I had walked four miles through Mid-City the previous Saturday, but on that afternoon we were oblivious, directionless and armed with the Brooklyn transplant’s foolish courage.  Mid-City looked different when I was alone, stuck on one side of the I-10, in a rush to get to the other.

I’m home, with guns.

The directions I’d googled told me to stay on Broad Street, but from my vantage point in the parking lot of Orleans International Fish, Broad Street turned into a highway-speed on-ramp when it went over the 10, and all of my new law school analysis firmly informed me that getting on such a ramp would be, at the very least, a failure to exercise “ordinary care,” and probably also be reckless.  No recovery for the reckless, guys, that’s what I like to say.

I took off my scarf and my sunglasses and rode circles around in the bleakness: shells of buildings, sprawling light industry complexes and dim white noise radiating from the highway below.  Mid-City is the kind of neighborhood where you don’t want to listen to your iPod, because someone might ask you for it, and you don’t want to smoke a cigarette because someone might ask you for that, too.

TV On The Radio_Ambulance

I-10 reached out to the horizon in both directions, gashing the city like highways always do.  Last week, Andrew and I were downtown, wandering around after the Farmer’s Market.   I wanted to see the river, which was still roiled and murky after Ike; in the effort to do so, we found ourselves inside the Riverwalk, an eerily anemic mall, filled with aimless and armed National Guard troops and separated from the water by towering panes of glass.

There was, inexplicably, a bust of Eisenhower near the food court, and Andrew said something probably smarter than what I will attribute to him, which is, Old Ike and the military industrial complex.  I then said something probably dumber than what I will attribute to myself, Oh, Ike, if only we knew then what we knew now, and we moved on.

I’ve come to appreciate that milk faced Fudd-ish president because of his prescience, but as I circled around the west side of I-10 I remembered that interstate highways are a really good reason to hate him.  Whether the highway skirts a city or bisects it, it still cinctures street life: the Big Dig?  Sure.  Let’s do that, guys, right after we give every person arrested in Orleans Parish a right to legal representation.

Unbeknownst to me, two employees of International Fish had come out to the parking lot for a cigarette break.

Ma’am? one of them called.  Ah, ma’am, are you trying to get over the highway?

I rode over, wariness and pride suspended indefinitely.  Well, yeah.  I just—that seems like kind of a scary road to bike on, you know?

They looked over at it and nodded, yeah, it seemed kind of scary.

You know, uh, ma’am, there’s a pedestrian path? the second International Fisher said.  It’s over on the other side.

Oh, I said.  So that was that: the kindness of strangers and the inadvertent grace of pedestrian paths.  I got to the Public Defenders in a matter of minutes and walked into the lobby.  A man was standing at a desk labeled “Security,” and I said, I’m going to Suite 700?

He looked at me and slowly began unwrapping a Snickers bar.

Oh.  You’re not the security?

I’m not the security, he said, but if I were, I’d tell you to try the 7th floor.

Thanks, I said, I really appreciate that.

TV On The Radio_I Was A Lover

When I got to the office, I sat down in the waiting room with a man applying for services.  He smelled like Cherry Life Savers.  I start interviewing next week.

Two things became clear after I spent a day with my grandmother last week: I have beautiful teeth, and I am her favorite niece.

Todd Rundgren_Couldn’t I Just Tell You

My grandmother, Ardel, lives in Ocean City, at the Memory Unit of the Shores at Wesley Manor, and she grew up during the Depression, in a poor family that did not have enough money for regular dentist trips. Teeth are important, the specifics of familial relations have become less so.

The Flanders Hotel, Ocean City, NJ (1992)

I walked into the Shores and the woman at the front desk beamed at me: proudly, I’d imagine. I signed in. The lady kept beaming and gave me an extensive set of directions based on hallway color that I promptly forgot. As far as I was concerned, the color of each hallway was “pastel”.

I made my way, appropriately enough, by memory, to the Memory Unit, which seems to have a remarkably rudimentary security system, until it occurs to you that the people it is supposed to be securing have remarkably rudimentary cognitive abilities. I opened one glass-paned door and let it close slowly behind me. I was in a small foyer that is supposed to trap—securely—patients who have figured out one of the doors but forgotten that they wanted to figure out the next.

The first door closed, and I pressed the code for the second. One-two-three-four. That is the code to all the doors in the memory unit. The nurses tell their patients this, the patients appreciate the nurses’ confidence, and then the patients promptly forget the entire exchange. Goodwill prevails.

Ocean Boulevard, Deal, NJ (1985)

Once the second door had wheezed open, I was standing in the middle of recreation hour: a bony, middle-aged man was pounding away at Rogers and Hammerstein on a cheap upright and twelve eighty-somethings were staring at him, mouths agape. I made my way to my grandmother, tentative and mindful of the tantrums my preschool students threw when their parents came in the middle of story time.

“Grandmom?” I whispered, hunching over because maybe that would insult the pianist and the wheelchair-bound less, “Hi, Grandmom! It’s Emma!”

Her eyes, bluer than ever, blinked.

“Hi?” I offered again, kneeling down next to her.

“Oh, Emma!” I wasn’t sure if she’d processed my face or what I’d said my name was, but I took it.

“My favorite niece!” she hissed. “Granddaughter!” I hissed back. We squeezed hands.

“I’m here to visit you!” I whispered. I looked at her lap and grimaced inadvertently. On a flowered napkin, she was holding something like a Rice Krispie treat on steroids, all kinds of gunky cereal gummed together with chocolate candy and then frosted.

My grandmother saw me looking and leaned over to me, “What am I eating?”

“Grandmom,” I said, “I have no idea.”

A nurse had been hovering over us for a few seconds, so I turned and shook her hand. “I’m Emma,” I said. “Ardel’s granddaughter,” I said, loud enough so that Ardel herself could hear it.

“Of course,” said the nurse, a wide hipped young blond woman who looked like everyone in Ocean City, which is to say, a former lifeguard. The nurse glanced over her shoulder at the piano. I asked her where we should go; I didn’t want to interrupt enrichment time. She nodded, “you can go to her room.”

I looked at my grandmother, who was gazing at the nurse and I with utter unconcern. I decided to ask, “Where is her room, again?” not sure where the line was between being polite and getting lost in another pastel hallway.

“She knows,” said the nurse, and I was surprised.

Point Pleasant Boardwalk, NJ (1988)

My grandmother and I made our way slowly to the elevator, both half remembering from our most recent trips, each of which felt like it had been months earlier.

“Emma!” she exclaimed. “I can’t believe you’re here!”

“Well,” I shrugged, “I am!”

“Did I know you were coming?”

I hadn’t expected that. “Well, no,” I said. “It’s a surprise, I guess. So, surprise!” That line made her laugh a few times throughout the day. When I next go to see her, I think I will call ahead, because there’s no reason not to make her happy on a Monday and then surprise her eight times during the same Tuesday afternoon.

We got to her room, a stoveless studio with a railing in the bathroom, and her coffee table was covered with papers. Tiny scraps of note paper, opened and unopened greeting cards, half-finished word games, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Atlantic City Press. I was ready to tell her I didn’t mind the mess, but she never apologized for it. When I wondered what she’d been reading she said she didn’t know, so I read her a headline.

“Bernanke, Frank Form Improbable Alliance Over Subprime Crisis. Uh, well. I don’t even really know.” I faltered but I was heartened to see my grandmother looking at me with mild curiosity. I scanned the article, “Oh, Barney Frank?” Barney Frank is the first openly gay member of the House. On her most lucid day my grandmother would have needed me to explain “gay”. “Well, Barney Frank, huh. It’s basically about the Fed. Ben Bernanke is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. And subprime, it’s houses, houses that were sold—”

My grandmother beamed at me, “you have such beautiful teeth!”

“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. “I came to visit today, Grandmom, well, because I love you—”

“I love you!” she said, almost desperately.

“I love you, too, so I came to tell you that, but also because I’m going to law school.”

“You are?” She was wide-eyed, and more aggressively complementary than I remembered. “See, you’re so smart. You can do anything.”

“Well, I guess, then, let’s hope I can do law school?”

“You have such beautiful teeth.”

“Thank you, Grandmom.”

I told her more about law school, about living in Brooklyn—“you like that?” she kept asking. “You like being in the city?”

“I do,” I told her. “I am sad to be leaving.”

“Where are you going?” she’d ask. My favorite line from the Sarah Kane play, Crave, is “Begin again.”

“Where are you going?” My grandmother asked. Law school. Begin again.

I started to think that I liked this, the constant chance for self-editing, the circular conversation. I started to have fun revising my answers in order to fit in everything that was true. Sometimes I was sad to leave New York, the city where everything happens; sometimes, I told her, my world in Brooklyn was insufferably self-important. Sometimes I mainly biked around the city, sometimes I used the subway every day. I had a boyfriend; I had a lot of very close friends. I was a writer; I was working on research for someone else’s book. I would come see her again soon, I had no idea if I would see her again at all. The last part is the only truth I could not fit in.

Neil Young_Truth Be Known

Finally I looked out the window. “You know, Grandmom, I was hoping we could go to the boardwalk this afternoon, but when I called and told someone here that I wanted to take you, he said the weather was ‘iffy.’ Isn’t that funny? Like I might show up and there might be no weather at all? Or something?”

She beamed at me, eyes blue and clear.

I continued. “And the weather doesn’t look so great. Which is I guess what he was saying. Heh. But, oh, would you like to go out, anyway? We don’t have to go to the boardwalk, but do you want to go for a drive? Do you want to go for a drive and have ice cream?”

My grandmother chuckled in a disconcertingly knowing way. “You know I love ice cream.”

I had not known that, but I loved that she knew it. “I love ice cream, too!” I said. It came as a relief. I have never felt like I had much in common with my grandmother, who spent her time gambling in Atlantic City and play pinochle after dinner. She left high school before she’d graduated, and I have never seen her reading a book. (Newspapers, of course, yes.)

“Should I wear a sweater?” she asked, anxiously. Since my grandmother developed Alzheimer’s disease several years ago her main preoccupation is her personal body temperature. Hot and cold are immediate sensations, and “too hot” and “too cold” are reassuringly basic emotions. The temperature was in the mid-eighties, but my grandmother is a frail woman in her mid-eighties, too, and I told her she should probably bring a sweater.

At the ice cream store, my grandmother looked around vacantly. “The flavors are there,” I pointed, and she laughed in her “you know I love ice cream” way. I asked the young, equally vacant looking server the name of a certain brown flavor, veined with cookies and fudge. “It’s coffee moose peanut caramel blah blah blah,” I heard her respond, and then I heard my grandmother say, “Ooh, that sounds good.”

I turned to her. “Does it? What do you usually get? Do you usually get, like, vanilla?” I recognized the absurdity of my question, and I said, “Okay, then. One of those. Cup.” I ordered vanilla for myself. Things seemed calmer that way.

Tent City, Ocean Grove, NJ (1991)

We ate at a bench outside and, during one of my particularly messy slurps, my grandmother said, “You have beautiful teeth.” Afterwards we went on a drive, south through the narrow, salt-crusted towns of Strathmere and Avalon, and I played the new Bonnie Prince Billy. Bonnie Prince Billy writes haunted, raw, oversexualized folk. It is the most poignant and most instructive love making music I can imagine. My favorite Bonnie Billy song is called “The Mountain Low” and includes the lyric, “If I could fuck a mountain, Lord, I would fuck a mountain.” My grandmother said she liked it.

It was getting late, and the Memory Unit begins serving supper at four-thirty, so I turned the car around in Avalon. My grandmother started asking me where we were, and I continued telling her.

“Do I live here?”

“Well, you live north of here. In Ocean City. This is Avalon.”

“I live in Ocean City? Does my husband live with me?”

Her husband, formerly known as my grandfather. “He doesn’t live with you anymore, Grandmom. He died.”

She was already nodding. “He died. And what—” I knew what was coming. I answered this question no less than forty times on the day of my grandfather’s funeral, “and what did he die of?”

“I don’t know, Grandmom. Nobody knows. It was just his time.”

She nodded and stared at her hands folded in her lap. “He wasn’t sick, was he?”

“No, he wasn’t sick.” I preempted her next question, “you would have known if he were sick.”

The Walkmen_Passing Through [Daytrotter Session]

All of the visitor parking spots were full, and it took us forever in the hot afternoon sun to walk back into The Shores. My grandmother had both knees replaced about ten years ago, but forgot to do the necessary rehabilitation exercises. The long walk hurt her more than I’d realized it would, and as we got back into the elevator she looked at me and said, “Is it supposed to hurt this much?”

I could feel my face crumble and I looked at the wall so she would not see my tears. One of the hardest things about treating senile or otherwise cognitively impaired patients is understanding what “this much” means. It’s possible—and her doctor believes—that my grandmother’s knees have been hurting “this much” for a decade. I swallowed and turned back to her, “I don’t know how much they’re supposed to hurt. Let’s tell the nurses about it.”

When the head nurse, JoAnn, asked about our day, I told her. After I was done, my grandmother clutched my arm and announced, “This is my favorite niece!”

“Thank you,” I said.

When we went into her room I made clear that I would need to leave shortly. I didn’t want that to be a surprise, too. My grandmother alternated between wondering why I’d ever bothered to come see her at all and making sure I’d promise to come again. She started crying and I put my arm around her. “I need to blow my nose before I kiss you goodbye,” she said.

I sat on her bed and watched her make her way, carefully, into the bathroom. She shuffled to the tissue box. I was exhausted. She shuffled to the sink to wash her hands. I leaned against the wall. She sniffed again, and shuffled to the tissue box. Then she shuffled back to the sink wash her hands. Tissue box. Sink. Tissue box. Sink. Tissue box. Sink. Tissue box. Sink. Tissue box.

Begin again.

I watched and waited, breathing deeply. After a “sink,” I said, “Grandmom? I have to go now.” I wondered how frequently a nurse had come to call her for dinner and found her doing laps in the bathroom: tissue box, sink.

At the door, we hugged for a very long time. She said, “My hands are clean. You know I wouldn’t touch you if my hands weren’t clean.”

And I said, “Grandmom, I know you wouldn’t.”

Steel Pier, Atlantic City, NJ (1982)

[All pictures in the post are from the Library of Congress collection, "Built in America, 1933-present," a project of the Historic American Buildings Survey.]

The Smiths_Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others

Today was my first day of law school orientation. Because of my last name, I was scheduled to pick up my orientation packet between 8:30 and 9:30. Last night, my roommates got home from a pre-orientation bowling party and told me, “Since we can get our packets between 8:30 and 9:30, we’re thinking we’ll get there right at 9:30.” “Oh,” I said, “okay.” My parents were picking me up right at 8:30. So I guessed I’d see my roommates there.

For the entire three days I’ve spent in New Orleans, I’ve had no qualms about spending most of my time with my parents. I’ve been thanking goodness that I’m not the same girl who showed up at South Orange Middle School on September 2nd, 1994, or the same girl who showed up at camp during summers in the nineties, or really the same girl as any other time.

There’s something about moving to New Orleans that has liberated me from most of my social anxieties about not being well liked, about not being cool enough or ever being right about anything about which cool people had an opinion. During the recent years I spent in New York, I wound up understanding most of those things, or, at least, my aesthetics and politics and sensibilities meshed well enough with those of people I liked, and all was harmony. Most of the time.

Because I believed so thoroughly in that New York which I inhabited, because I felt like it was the norm, rather than the exception, to step into a place and feel like it made sense, I have been largely ambivalent about pleasing New Orleans. I don’t think this is a sustainable existence, and I don’t think it is nice, but as I sit here with an earplug in my right ear, ignoring the dips and squeals coming from the dining room where my roommates, Rachel and Kit, and Kit’s mother, Bettina, are eating falafel and talking about rainstorms in kindergarten, I feel more peaceful than anxious. I am petrified of Bettina, and I really want Kit and Rachel to like me, but it’s okay. I’ll have time to spend with them, and Bettina will go back to Cajun country and to watching my father on the television, and I won’t have worry.

We met Bettina yesterday, when my parents and I were looking at a map in the living room. First Kit’s father banged in, carrying something heavy and yelling to Kit, I’ll get this stuff out of the car, but then I’ve got to get back. Bettina came sauntering in moments later, her shocking orange hair up tight and to the side, wearing flared jeans, platform sandals, and a long lace tunic with bell sleeves. She was carrying a gigantic fast-food Styrofoam soda cup, and I mentioned this to my mother later, when my mother called her slick.

What did you think of Bettina? I’d asked.

I think she’s very slick, said my mother. I had never heard my mother use the word “slick” before.

I didn’t think that giant soda was very slick, I offered, and grinned at my father in the rearview mirror.

Well, said my mother, I just think she’s very Southern. Like, beautiful smiles, but then, if you cross her— and then that was it. I thought that was a kind of antiquated way of judging your modern Southern lady, but then my mother told me Bettina was very racist. That made me sad. I hadn’t thought Kit was. I asked my parents what they and Bettina had been talking about while the girls were cleaning and straightening and sorting out the mail.

Did she recognize Daddy? Bettina had seemed to take strongly to my father, although most women do, star struck or no. My mother said no, Bettina hadn’t said anything, but that, she might have, and just been slick enough not to.

I love when my mother is catty, but this time, I wished everyone could just be friends. I didn’t want any Cajun lady in flip-flops to perturb my mother.

It turned out Bettina had recognized my father, but she didn’t say anything until they left tonight. She recognized him from Guiding Light, a soap opera he was on in the mid-eighties. He played a child molester. I am a standoffish Yankee, in here typing madly while there’s dining going on, and my father is Bradley Raines, child molester. I think that, even though I am not the same sweaty, skinny kneed, anxiety-ridden girl who I was, I should go sit with Bettina and my roommates. Oh! And now they’re talking about the Superdome. This is something I will want to hear.

—–

It was, or wasn’t. When I sat down at the dinner table, Abita in hand, Bettina was talking about the evacuations after Katrina, and the subsequent rising crime rates in Houston, Baton Rouge and Layfayette, where she lives. She had brought this up the day before with my father, too. This is a common trait of people who are trying to historicize a recent wound; the telling and retelling of stories so that they become sociological myth.

To illustrate her point, Beyrl said, And after they closed our stadium, kicked New Orleans refugees out of Cajun Stadium, in Lafayette, after they closed our stadium, the twenty four hour Wal Mart was closed! All the stores that used to be twenty-four hour just started closing, at, like, ten!

Rachel said something about displaced people coming from neighborhoods where homes had been in the family for generations, where people hadn’t been accustomed to providing for their families very much in the first place. The day before, my father had talked about reconstruction companies only hiring undocumented immigrants, about the fact that unemployment rates among native New Orleanians had skyrocketed after the storm, even though there were many jobs to be had.

Bettina shook her head regretfully and said, It was like they opened the zoo.

I drank more beer. I was not going to change Kit’s mother’s mind in one conversation, and if I’d wanted to, I didn’t know where to start. Bettina continued ranting about the refugees, talked about the atrocious things that happened inside the Superdome—did not mention the atrocities that happened outside it—and then came back to Cajun Stadium, home of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Ragin’ Cajuns.

And the price they quoted after those people left, Bettina started, even though I hadn’t realized we were talking about budgetary concerns, was not even to repair the stadium. It was to sanitize it.

So the lesson of my first day of law school is that my mother was right, about that one thing.

Annie Blacker house, Greene & Greene Architectural Records and Papers Collection

If I weren’t convinced that everything I know is already known well by anyone I’d ever want to impress, I’d use Hemingway’s six word novel as a pick-up line. (I’m embarrassed now to even write it, so certain I am that you all have committed it to memory and started either rolling your eyes or nodding maternally). Deep breath, Emmita! Our romance isn’t dead yet:

For sale, baby shoes, never worn.

Entry hall stairway of the David B. Gamble House

Now that I’ve done some brief internet research, I’m starting to doubt Hemingway ever wrote those words at all, or that they haven’t been irreparably bastardized (one example here–infuriating!) by generations of creative writing teachers who thought “artist” was spelled with one rim of their Clark Kent glasses and “quirky” with the other.

Gamble house from the northwest

I ran into my very own creative writing teacher this evening, in the first meeting of my second-to-last Columbia class ever. Her name is Phyllis (as though there were ever any doubt), and if that author photo bears any resemblance to the once-original, she used to be really, really hot. She’s aged, and, I’d guess, gotten more acerbic. At the very least, she seems to have wantonly embraced the professor as muse complex, common to literary men and women who find themselves at the heads of seminar tables before they’ve stopped being able to fill out an oxford. It didn’t take much actual intimacy before I realized I didn’t really need to bed any of those people again.

Rosewood chair, designed by Charles Greene

And yet: I want to write really well for her. I kept being blinded by the glare from the overhead light reflecting on her glasses and so I never knew if she was looking at me intensely or vacantly, and I was never sure for how long I should maintain my end of the eye contact, so my face in seminar was a flickering affair full of eyelash.

These were my six-word memoirs, in this order:

What do you really think, Mom?

I haven’t learned to mop, yet.

Still frequently falling up the stairs.

Mariah Carey_Fantasy

She gave each class member individual prompts for next class, which I cannot attend because I will be at Clio’s Sail-a-bration in my boss’s stead. Max is graciously serving as my date for the Parents’ Association fund raiser. When my boss told us to wear “jeans, something casual,” I told Max that, in British English, “jeans” means “seersucker.” His response:

I will be wearing my finest pair of Dungareed short pants! T’would a sandalled shoe be appropriate?

Commenced, of course, a rapid-fire email discourse on the virtues (him) versus the criminality (me) of cargo shorts. It did not culminate until the email copied below, which I wrote in character, did not even send and which languishes as a draft because it is just way too completely ridiculous:

“I hate to do this, because you have a lot of cargo in your trunk, but I just think I have too much cargo from my childhood.”

Anyway, Phyllis assigned me the prompt: “I knew I was in trouble when…”

Seriously. That’s my assignment. It think it means that I am inane and boring. Phyllis had heard me speak an hour earlier as we went around the table introducing ourselves. I’d finished my brief monologue, conveniently forgetting the suggestion that we note what we’d “bring to a desert island,” and she waited a moment and said “Well. You certainly have a checkered past.”

Mariah Carey_Always Be My Baby

Do I? I am going to finish my “in trouble” prompt with an explanation of a certain halting, alternately uneasy and impassioned and frequently drug-fueled affair; this may be the point at which I actually know I’m in trouble, of course, but I actually think she’ll like it.

Charles J. Willet house

[Buy Phyllis here and here, and buy Mariah everywhere, including here.]

[All images are from the Greene & Greene Architectural Records and Papers Collection, housed in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia. Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene were born in Ohio in 1868 and 1870, respectively. They studied architecture at MIT and moved West, where their work emblematized the Arts & Crafts movement. My parents live in an Arts & Crafts home in New Jersey and I think it's beautiful; all of the above examples were built in Southern California. One of them, Maddy, is in Ojai!]

Numero 6_Da Piccolissimi Pezzi (with Bonnie “Prince” Billy)

Ruthie hadn’t been to Abe and Jos’s before so she had to make a Mii. I remember it being extremely short even though Ruthie isn’t, particularly; the next day she sent me this email:

i was thinking this morning about how funny it was that the mii i created in wii had enormous glasses. you know, just like the real mii.

The Real MII! Amazing.

I’ve been cooking a lot recently, also doing some graduating; I hope these things are more the real mii than some of my other recent activities, which in retrospect mainly involved staying up past dawn and rambling about my parents. That’s what blogs are for, not tail ends of parties.

Numero 6_Quel Giorno Cosa Avevo?

I made cheese:

and a rhubarb compote. Chris and I have fantasies of chronicling other culinary efforts on thesethingstakethyme.com, or at least I have those fantasies and he has the rights to that domain name. I am reviewing my recent photographs in an effort to write something interesting and I’ve discovered certain patterns, like how much I love wearing glasses and how much I love other people who wear them, too.

Download your own Numero 6 here, and then help my neck find a way to get nuzzled by that lead guitarist’s moustache. The band’s website is in Italian, I’ve been squinting at it for a few minutes trying to figure out where you can buy the EP, but it seems essentially hopeless. Berlusconi hates the free market.