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slate and stove

// July 1st, 2009 // 4 Comments » // Writing

Today’s blockbuster prompt is from Davmoo: “Please write 100 words on …your favorite childhood memory.”

The wood stove in our living room was surrounded by pieces of slate. Old radiators kept the corners of the other rooms warm, but the wood stove, the old general, boomed forth waves of heat well into winter nights. Cats curled up to it as close as they dared. My parents each tended the fire in such an unassuming way while working on their other projects, another grownup ability that I found quietly glamorous. During nights spent around the stove, I would write and draw on the slate pieces with chalk while the three of us listened to albums of classical music. To this day, whenever I hear Satie’s Gymnopédies, I feel safe.

[Want to help me bust through my writer's block this month? Read about this exercise!]

vintage

// April 14th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Life

I spotted a vintage Pelikan 100 in the wild — the reference desk, really — on Monday. It was burgundy with a bright gold “beak” clip and its owner let me write with it. It was filled with Private Reserve Chocolat, an excellent choice for this smooth writer. I let the patron write with my Lamy 2000, which is the new hotness of my collection and the Pelikan’s opposite in form and character; while the Pelikan reminded me of an antique Bentley, my Lamy is more of an Audi TT.

It was a random treat in the middle of a dull day.

Now I am flipping through Fountain Pens Past and Present and it smells just like my high school yearbooks used to smell. That combined with the smell of freshly-baking bread is making me homesick for Chicago, but only the Chicago of my teenaged self, all Wax Trax and Café Voltaire and living for that first burst of Friday afternoon air, half-past three and everything is possible as long as someone borrows a car.

photos I did not take

// September 15th, 2008 // Comments Off // Libraria, Life

Last night the moon slipped slate-blue behind silver clouds, and although I could see it from the overstuffed leather recliner I did not fumble for a camera. I watched it, and it looked full, though my astigmatism makes me a poor judge of such things.

Past midnight, sometime over the weekend, we were sitting with snacks, twin bowls of cereal, savoring the wee hours with no early alarm the next morning. Just outside our bedroom, my cat walked past his cat very, very slowly, and then carefully put her paw out to touch the very tip of his cat’s tail. We lost it; my mouth happened to be full of cereal.  I wanted to take a photo of the moment I started thinking of my cat and his cat as our cats, but instead I cleaned the cereal off my face.

Someone in the library today learned how to scan a photograph and email it to himself so he could upload it to the Web.  As he thanked me for the third time, I wished for a meta-photo moment, something I could carry with me to remind me that although the objects of learning may be different, intellectual curiosity still exists. Where it exists, hope creeps in around the edges.

nostalgic

// August 6th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Life

It is gray inside the building today, which reminds me of December, which in turn reminds me of last December and my last job. Our big project was just about to launch. The launch had been pushed back, and the new launch date conflicted with my holiday vacation.  The team changed the launch date again so I could be present.

I felt very lucky to be so cherished.  I also felt overwhelmed and disenchanted and other things.

To think that I have not once visited a website I used to visit hundreds of times a week.

In the moment, we tend to think that our little importances, good or bad, will extend forward indefinitely. But the moment after this one, and this one, and this one, always proves that wrong.

I miss certain aspects of every remembered moment of my life, be it perspective, innocence, determination, or merely the me-ness in that moment that no longer exists, no longer can exist, the air in a bubble popped.