…pink, and had wire rimmed glasses, and he was the smartest, funniest kid in the class. Now he’s a college professor.
Something inside me still sighs when he bobs up on Facebook.
Author: Jinx
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Today was a good day to stay inside and write. Gray and wet with no rain, but a persistent mist that left drops on the windows and turned our street into a blurred silver ribbon. I only went out to make my weekly visit to Acorn and Aaben, returning with an armload of books on San Francisco. I believe I’ve spent over $100 on books this week.
My days of buying armloads of books are behind me because I’ve reached the stage of life where buying a book means giving one up. There is simply no more space here. Some of those I brought home that day are undoubtedly lurking around here in the shadows, either on a shelf or packed in a box.
Acorn and Aaben are no more. Acorn’s space is now a boxing gym. Aaben was a carpet store and is now empty. The only bookstore left in our neighborhood is Russian Hill Books, now a legacy business.
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Everyone I know who has been says it’s wonderful.
My impressions of the country are based partly on what I read in Hemingway, partly on an old boyfriend’s story about a weird, midnight orange-fight he got into while hitch=hiking across the country in the ’70s, partly on the fantasy TV series El ministerio del tiempo, and partly on my favorite Spanish tapas place.
And there’s also Saturday Night Live‘s 70-era weekly reassurance, “Francisco Franco is still dead.”
The Generalissimo is still dead and he’s not coming back. The people seem nice. They have a good sense of humor and history. They do great things with potatoes and spicy red sauce. I want to go.
I’ll ignore the bullfights.
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One of Tim’s co-workers is leaving the company to take a new job in Switzerland and there was a send-off at Brennan’s, so after work I drove straight there. We spent a lot of time at the table talking about the alarming exodus of old employees. I heard a lot of complaints about a new manager there who apparently went to a couple of software engineers and told them to make a purposely arcane and confusing presentation for a female engineer who lacks a computer science degree and needed to be “put in her place.” I think I heard that story about six times.
Classic Silicon Valley sexism. So many of those white, male, newly-rich nerds were eager to replicate the mindset of the high school jocks who bullied them when they were teenagers. They saw themselves as part of an exclusive club. I remember how much some software engineers hated Macs because they made computers accessible to people who couldn’t write code.
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Who understands me better? Who’s more sympathetic when I’m sad? Who do I like seeing in a mirror? Who is always glad to hear my stories? Who is quick to meet my needs? Me. Me, me, me, me.
I just love me. -
…most of the time it’s as I would want it to be.
Until the wireless mouse to my Imac stopped working yesterday just after posting my last writing prompt answer, and no, it doesn’t need to be recharged, it’s dead, kaput, and I think no big deal I’ll just walk down the hill to the Apple store and get a new one and I do and walk back home up hill but the new mouse won’t connect to my Imac, and after a lot of back and forth on the phone over two hours with technical support it’s determined I need to upgrade my operating system except I can’t because you need a mouse to do that and the guy on technical support says I’m in a “tough spot” so I walk back down to the Apple store and we talk and they are very nice and embarrassed about this Catch-22 of not being able to use my mouse unless I update my OS but I can’t update my OS because I don’t have a mouse so I borrow my husband’s mouse and update my OS, and think now everything is solved, but I STILL can’t get my new wired mouse to connect and end up sending off for a wired third party mouse which doesn’t arrive until this afternoon which is why I have not posted until now.
Otherwise my retirement is going fine. -
t’s not some cherished item with memories attached. I’m not even sure exactly how long I had it or where I bought it. It’s just a rather large mug with a black and white design. A Riviera Van Beers according to the writing on the bottom. Which seems to be A Thing. I’ve been drinking coffee from it in the morning for decades.
There are older mugs in the house, including one from boarding school, but that one’s cracked and can’t be filled with anything hot and is kept on a shelf and occasionally noticed and mused over. But it’s not used. -
Pumpkins have appeared in store windows and the days have gotten so short that on Friday, when I lieft waork an hour late, it was almost dark. The fleet is in town and on the walk home that night I passed on Clay near Polk a gaggle of boys in uniform, dark green, with square caps. They looked very young to me, all downy cheeks and round chins.
The next day, while I was walking down California, I heard a sound over my head as though the sky were being slowly ripped in two, and looked up to see the blue bellyt of a jet, frighteningly close. For the next few hours the Blue Angels dove, pitched and barreled overhead, the sound of their passing more overwhelming than the sight of those tiny, sharp-looking jets flying in formation. It’s like reality is being torn open. I expected to see the sky, the clouds, and the tall buildings all around me collapse like a painted backdrop around a black gash. When I got back to the apartment I could see people standing on their roofs, some of them with binoculars. I was content to stay inside and occasionally peek out throught the blinds.
Michael spent the day watching baseball. “You bastard! You incompetent! You useless F*ck!” he’d yell at the TV before running into the kitchen to call a friend and vent.
Yes, children, in the old days of the last century, the phone was tethered to an outlet and YOU had to go to IT. Phone conversations could only take place in our kitchen.
Pam Troy 