hodges and podges

It was kind of a funny weekend.

I. Boy or Book?

Friday I got a text message from a guy I dated briefly last summer -- one of the local rookie cops. Nice guy, but a bit odd in that his behavior has always been erratic. Wouldn't call for weeks, but always looked like running into me made his day. Bizarre.

I'd written him off a long time ago as a result, but last week he stopped by the office and we chatted a little, so his text inviting me to dinner at a local restaurant with him and his housemates didn't surprise me much. I went, mostly out of curiosity.

The hanging out only lasted an hour, and the entire conversation centered around his housemates' wedding two weeks ago, and all the cute girls that attended. I was internally amused -- here he goes again -- and a little bored, and when I realized I was wearing the smug, condescending, tolerant expression I get when I'm amused and a little bored and trying not to show it, I got up and excused myself for a few minutes.

When I returned, they were paying their bills and getting ready to leave. No extensions of this strange hang-out invitation were given, so I bid them a cheerful goodbye and tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my evening -- it was only eight o'clock.

Thankfully Borders has a location just down the road from the restaurant, and the naughty book addict in my brain whispered, "Go! Go! Maybe something's on sale." (Evil naughty book addict.)

As I walked through the gleaming glass doors, a book with the painted torso of a skeleton smoking a cigarette caught my attention: David Sedaris' latest collection of essays, When You are Engulfed in Flames. Oo.

I opened the cover and before I'd finished the second page I was laughing aloud. In order not to frighten or bewilder other customers entering or exiting the premesis, I removed myself to the fiction section, next to his other works, and folded myself up on a tiny stool to keep reading. Sadly, I didn't yet own any of his other books, so, tired of fiction and yearning for humor, I yielded to the demon book addict and bought that book and three of his others (one of them was on sale. I didn't lose entirely).

That night I celebrated the true purpose of a single's bedroom and propped myself up on pillows and read. And laughed and laughed and laughed. I had to put the book down a few times and struggle for breath. Since my bedroom window is one of the few in my house with screens, and is therefore one of the few consistently open, I'm sure anyone taking a nice late-night walk quickened his pace, hearing the cacklings of a madwoman from somewhere inside.

II. Looking from the Crossroad

Saturday I continued my voracious consumption of Sedaris' essays, mostly while lying on my stomach baking in the backyard under a murderous June sun. The glare of the light off the white pages gave me a headache, but I resisted for a valiant while.

When I finally gave up (after all, it's hard to read while lying on one's back, and I want an even tan), I started thinking. Mostly about my writing. My thoughts wandered back to my thesis on Till We Have Faces my senior year in college. I remembered all the research I did on C.S. Lewis, particularly his early years writing, when he produced some of the most horrible poetry I have ever read. He kept on trying, though -- sonnets, epics (especially epics) -- until his friends and critics finally convinced him to give it up. Even when he turned to fiction and essays, and garnered huge success, even then, years after he stopped writing poetry, he still thought of himself as a poet and not a writer of fiction.

Conversely, I've always thought of myself as a fiction writer. My head teems with stories, good ones, innovative ones, stories that might win me some small acclaim in not-so-great genres like fantasy literature, some that might win me some small acclaim in slightly better genres. The problem is that I hate writing them. I enjoy writing the interesting parts, of course, but I don't like to bother myself with the rest -- to me it's just filler. When all of it ought to be part of one whole.

Even poetry has taken a backseat as the years after college, when my writing classes demanded production, slide away. What has emerged instead has taken its shape as you read it here: the blog.

I have just over three and a half years' worth of raw material on my blog for what I think I might like to do -- the personal narrative essay. Why not? I enjoy reading narrative essays, and I certainly enjoy writing them, or at least writing their bastard second cousins, the blog posts. One of the reasons I decided to take crap minimum wage jobs right out of college and then go wherever the wind took me was in order to have a more interesting life from which to draw for my writing. Back then I had gritty fictional realism in mind, but the principle holds true when applied to gritty personal narratives.

I have so many real life stories. And if I were given a dollar for every time I've heard, "Omigosh, Sarah, your life is like a drama/soap opera/novel/reenactment of Bridget Jones," I could comfortably pad my IRA.

So again, why not? This is the form in which I have trained myself, without knowing, these past four years. (I had another blog on another site before I fell in love with Blogger.) It's a form I have found I enjoy. And it gives me this blissful sense of directed purpose.

Bliss with a sharp edge. The bliss a piece of iron might feel, as it begins to understand the shape into which it's being hammered between naps in the coals. Ah. That's it. I know what I'm for. But it's still hot and there are still hammer blows and the blacksmith still isn't letting up. A fierce bliss, maybe. A harsh joy. A hint of shaping to undergo and work to do.

This spring and summer I've reached a lot of crossroads. After endless miles toiling along one undeviating way, being brought to a point of choosing has been an enormous relief. Being shaken awake to see the choice has been an enormous relief. Perhaps like the piece of iron saying, That spot, right there, it's not quite even, can we work on that? just as the hammer blow falls right on it. Ouch. Ahhhhh.

I have made momentous decisions -- in regard to my faith, in regard to my choice of career and location, in regard to my attitude toward my life and my singleness, and now in regard to my writing. My counselor told me a couple of months ago that, although my verbiage was overwhelmed and anxious, what he heard me saying was that my life was just beginning. I suddenly realized he was right -- my life is new, it's my own, I can shake free from the older influences that did me no good and choose how and where and under what conditions I want to live. It's still in the beginning stages, of course. But one of the greatest excitements of a journey is the starting out. Later on it'll get exhausting and frustrating, but now is the newness of discovery, the hardening to a purpose, the pointing the nose into the wind and tightening the shoulder straps and starting off.

III. The Winds of Change

The Little Hell Hole, also known as my house, has been trying to kill me. The air circulation makes the inside of a Ziploc bag sound positively refreshing, and the damp that traps itself inside appears to have been pumped in from the Amazon. The Little Hell Hole is moldering.

It's not the house's fault. But it's a sad house. Sitting inside it for any length of time would depress Shirley Temple. If it were a lot bigger and more open, it would hold that nice spooky atmosphere of a house with too many stories and no tongue to tell them with; instead it feels like it should have fallen down years ago, it isn't cute anymore (and probably hasn't been since the advent of indoor plumbing, when the home-made nature of the place took on a gruesomely callous flair), it's too clumsy to feel haunted, and the only thing holding it up has been, ironically, neglect.

So I'm looking for alternative places to live. I miss space. I miss the ability to rearrange the furniture if I want, I miss the ability to buy new pieces of antique furniture in order to rearrange if I want, I miss sitting at the dining room table, for God's sake. I miss light pouring in through the windows instead of hiding sourly outside, I miss the fresh smell of well-ventilated rooms, I miss books in my living room. I miss enough room for company.

I will probably begin looking seriously toward the end of the summer, closer to when my year's lease is due to run out, and when my landlord might feel more inclined to let me out of it early. Summer brings out the house's only two amenities: a large backyard and a wide gracious front porch, both of which I can enjoy without needing to sit inside the house.

In the meantime I have to make the place liveable for sleeping, and liveable for Simon, who has cast a thick coat of shed hair on all the floors (or would, if I didn't vacuum). I had called the landlord earlier in the week to beg for screens, and he said he'd rig some for me, but as of the weekend, no word, no screens. And I was DYING.

Saturday I spent a delightful evening with Meg, Phillip and Josie, and noticed how well-ventilated and cool their house was. I was thinking wistfully of whole-house fans, when my eye landed on an unobtrusive object in one of the upstairs windows:

A window fan.

I could have banged my head against the wall. Here is the perfect, sensible solution: draws in air and requires no screens. The very sense of it made it elusive, I think. So, with an end to the suffocation in sight, yesterday I drove through a storm that amounted to a pygmy hurricane to purchase a pair. Then I took them home and began the unexpectedly painful process of wrestling open the selected windows.

The one in the bathroom was the worst. Years of staying shut, with no fan whatsoever siphoning off the moisture in the room, had rotted the window frame completely. And by "rotted" I mean I was wiping black wet powdered wood off my palms after touching it. I managed to shove it up about eight inches when it stuck and wouldn't budge, and in trying to wiggle it from underneath, I felt the bottom of the frame give under the slight pressure and the glass cracked. I stopped in time to prevent a break, and then I stood there looking in helpless rage at the disgusting wood until my next-door neighbor, an elderly garrulous gentleman named Gordon, came to my aid -- having heard my shouted grunts of effort in getting the window as far as I did.

Between his tapping the window gradually up with a hammer, and my bracing the crumbling frame, we managed just to get it open enough to wedge the fan under. He helped me with the second bedroom window as well, muttering deprecations against my landlord for being cheap. But finally the fans were installed and turned on, and voila! blissful, beautiful, blessed breeze.

I'm hoping the one in the bathroom will keep all my towels from rotting. And now I can stand to live in my house. For as long as it takes to find a new, better-kept place.

IV. In a Brand-New Pair of Shoes

The Spine of Satan has muttered its way down to The Spine of One of Satan's Lesser Minions: no longer constantly putting me on the rack, so to speak, but easily tired and requiring vigilant caution. One of these vigilances, while simple, puts me at a slight disadvantage in regard to my usual style of dress: No More Heels.

This distresses me, as the number of flats I own you could probably pack in your wallet. Smaller people have criticized me for my love-affair with three-inch heels when I already stand at 5' 9-and-3/4" in my bare feet; but I love height. (I don't love heights. Walking over one of those city grates and staring at a street visible forty feet below me gives me the heebie jeebies. But I do love my height.) I love being tall. I enjoy all of its benefits -- a more slender-looking figure, the ability to see above everyone else's head in a crowd, rarely experiencing vision obstruction at the movie theater, helping others in the grocery store getting items off the top shelves, looking fabulous in a floor-length dress -- which, in my opinion, far outweigh its disadvantages -- buying pants, namely, and towering threateningly over men (although, depending on the situation, this can be a huge benefit. People don't try to push me around. All I have to do is loom a little).

So I cherish my heels. The Spine of One of Satan's Lesser Minions necessitates, however, flats. I've been wearing my only pair of black leather flip-flops, but that cramps my wardrobe a little; black isn't my first choice for summer.

While out on my window fans mission, therefore, I bought a pair of brown sandals. They're comfortable, cute, and match the half of my wardrobe that the black shoes don't. Considering my growing hatred of laundromats, this expansion of available attire works very well, allowing me to throw some variety into the mix, and avoid laundry for a little longer, even if I can't avoid it three inches taller than Nature intended.

V. My Old Man Fan Club

It just keeps growing, and keeps growing less flattering.

What possesses a man old enough to be my father's much older brother to ask a young woman out for a drink? I understand the inclination, but following through on it belies a loose grip on reality...and appropriate conduct.

I'm not in the mood right now anyway. My plate is heaped with work and with getting a life. Figuring out polite-yet-firm ways to shoo away these fifty- and sixty-year-olds hasn't been top of my priority list, and there's no way to tell them politely, "Shed thirty or forty years and I'll consider it." I'm as old as some of their children, for God's sake. And even if I had gold-digger tendencies, which, so far, I don't, these poor guys don't have any assets to appeal even to that trait.

They're not bad guys. They're just...way too old. Don't they know that? What girl has dreamed from her childhood of taking her three- and five-year-olds to visit Daddy in the nursing home, and paying their college tuitions from his estate? "Hi, honey, I'm here to wipe the drool off your chin and give you a new bedpan for our fifth anniversary. The kids helped decorate it so it matches your gown. Isn't it cute?"

It's the tenacity that stuns me. Give a twenty-something guy a slight snub (intentionally or not), and you'll never see him again. Brain an old guy with an iron skillet while saying "No thank you" in an assertive voice and he might get the idea that you're not interested.

Boss-Man says egos decrease in fragility as they age. Maybe I don't need an iron skillet, but a cannon.

VI. Around the Cobbler's Bench

D. works at the local post office. She has, for as long as anyone at my office has known her, been "a tough nut to crack."

I liked her from the get-go. Maybe she reminded me of the breed of people who populate my natal region: downward-turning lines slashed into the corners of her mouth, curt voice, aloof demeanor. Unfriendly, especially for the sunny vivacious Midwest (who are these people?). Or perhaps she presented a challenge, a bastion of guardedness upon which to work my own sunny vivacity until her dourness wore down like a stone under moss. Or maybe I've been old since I was born and the people I like best either share my mentality or are twenty years my senior (D. falls under the latter category).

Whatever the reason, we now get along splendidly. She reminds me, comfortingly, of my origins, of where I come from, of the people who are becoming increasingly unfamiliar (when I visit Pennsylvania I'm more and more surprised at how -- unpleasant -- people are to strangers) and yet whom I understand completely. She also possesses a wry sense of humor I enjoy. We swap tips and tricks for quitting smoking, complain about rude customers, jaw about the government, exchange town gossip. She tells me about her husband and asks after my dating life.

When I went to send out the mail on Friday, she asked if I were seeing anyone. I told her, with a snort, "No," and she made a face about the men in town, and then took on a thoughtful expression.

"I know a guy," she said. "He's the son of our best family friends. Nice guy. Really nice guy. At least you could meet him and go out to dinner."

"Sure," I said, remembering the New Deal, and, having learned a lot with CB, ready to apply the lessons. Besides, going home every night to a cat gets old, however beloved said kitty.

"I'll talk to him," she said.

Today while running office errands I bumped into a girl I barely know. She's about my age, and we chatted for a minute.

"I hear a friend of mine is going to ask you out," she said, with that sly "woo-woo-you're-going-to-be-talking-to-a-BOY" grin that girls never outgrow.

I had forgotten about D.'s offer.

"Oh?" I said.

"Yeah, I've known him forever and he told me a family friend of his was setting you up on a blind date."

I remembered then. Her grin got a little more dimpled. "He's really nice," she said. "He wanted to know if you were. I told him he couldn't weasel information out of me." Then she wished me luck and repeated that he's really nice.

"Nice" can mean so many things -- anything you want it to mean, really. When girls say it of guys it speaks to his character or temperament more than anything else, and is usually a good sign -- he may be a bit of a diamond in the rough, but worth a little scraping and polishing. Either that or he's just fantastically great.

The whole thing is funny. Blind dates are usually hilarious in that they're never not a total crap shoot. Small towns are funny in that a butterfly flaps its wings in Widow Allen's garden and the next day it's front page news. (Much fun can be had with this, when it isn't supremely irritating.) And I'm back to the Square One of Not Caring One Way or the Other, which ought to make any results whatsoever entertaining enough to add value to the experience.

Am I the monkey, or the weasel? Or am I the bench? I feel like the bench. And where on earth is the cobbler?