Daily writing prompt
Describe a decision you made in the past that helped you learn or grow.
about whether everybody likes me or not.
Author: Jinx
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I was a child when the first moon landing took place. We all gathered in front of the TV to watch it live. My parents were of that optimistic generation who imagined that by the 21st century, tourists would be visiting the moon, staying in hotels there, etc.
After explaining the terrible risks the astronauts were taking, and why they had to wear those heavy suits, what could happen to them if those helmets they wore so much as cracked, my parents told me confidently, “…and someday, you will visit the moon yourself!”
Which absolutely horrified me.
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After all the beautiful days, the Feast of the Resurrection turned out gray and cold and uninspiring. At about three-thirty I made some brownies, and a little after four we started out to see the couple I’ll call the Wee Folk.
They live in a house in a quiet neighborhood in Menlo Park. Both are computer people. He is red haired, red bearded, rather short man who reminds me of a hip leprechaun. She is slender, with long brown hair, slanted brown eyes, and a long face with high cheekbones. She looks like an elf from one of those Celtic fantasy books, is an ex-nerd and SF fan who got tired of working in the “pink collar ghetto” and acquired enough computer skills to make a respectable salary. She is also an excellent artist. Some friends of ours asked her to do a mural for them in the house they bought, and she did a beautiful job, creating a small jungle in one of their work rooms. They have three cats, two of them long-haired. Fur kept drifting in tufts around us.
The meal was delicious, lamb that he had prepared, peas and carrots from their own garden. Somehow, near the end of the evening, we got onto the subject of Pee Wee Herman, and we ended up piling big cushions on the floor and watching a video of Pee Wee Herman’s April 2 Saturday morning show. Weird. I liked it. After that came two Bakshi Mighty Mouse cartoons I liked even more.
I must remember to set the clock an hour ahead. I should have done it last night, but I forgot to.
Actually having movies and shows on videotape that you could watch any time you wanted was still very much a novelty, and it it was common to invite dinner guests to watch them with you after the meal. I remember hosts playing everything from the film IMPROMPTU to probably pirated episodes of Jonathan Frid’s DARK SHADOWS. Older TV shows weren’t easy to find before YouTube and the internet as-we-know-it, and that could be the only chance you had to see them again.
Bakshi’s new version of MIGHTY MOUSE, brand new in 1988, is now a collector’s item. I hope the Wee Folk kept their copies.
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a single drop in the ocean.
When I was in high school I learned that two younger cousins of mine angrily confronted someone because they thought that person had been unkind to me. I was in high school and they were in middle school, a time of life when kids rarely stand up for someone with any trace of nerdiness (I had more than a trace of it.) I’ve never forgotten that.
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Yesterday afternoon, on the rooftop, I had a bout of what I call time-sickness. This building is not a high rise, but it’s on the crest of the hill. Streets I used to walk every day are visible from here as gullies and canyons in the distance. They tugged at me.
I wanted the impossible. I wanted more than just to be on those streets again, walking in the sunlight, passing familiar places — the old Uomo store where Dad bought Mom a leather jacket back in the ’90s, just because she saw it in the window and liked it — the noodle shop that disappointed me with its gristly chunks of chicken — the high end European candy shop with its window full of foil-wrapped, molded chocolates in the shapes of Santas at Christmastime, rabbits at Easter, pumpkins at Halloween — The glassy Apple store that always reminded me of an ant-farm with its three stories and stairways and all those moving human figures visible from across the street — the bar/art gallery next to the entrance of the library, the DADA with its delicious Sazeracs, its constantly shifting paintings, its massive permanent sculpture of a pair of opalescent wings made from computer motherboards.
I wanted to walk past these places with a freedom and assumption of safety that I don’t think I will ever feel again.
The last time I walked through downtown was when I went home at about sunset on the Friday we learned the library would close. I’d assumed that Laura and I would be back in the office on Monday as part of a skeleton crew doing some last-minute housekeeping before the building truly closed. By Sunday evening, though, it was plain we weren’t going downtown any time soon. I didn’t get to say goodbye to the city I knew. When I finally get to walk past those places again, I wonder which old friends will be unlit and empty.
Maybe that’s why last night I rediscovered another old friend, a book I’d read in my twenties. Over the summer I spent overseas as a college student, I binged on Mary Renault’s work, starting with The Persian Boy, and then tearing through her whole ancient world series. It seemed her paperbacks were the main English language fiction on sale in Europe back then, especially in Italy and Greece.
The Mask of Apollo was my favorite, an historical novel set in ancient Greece disguised as a chatty, bitchy, name-dropping memoir by a famous actor, the fictional Nikoratos. Reading its first pages again on Amazon made me want it again. Unlike many books I revisit from my youth, this one had aged well, drew me in. I think it will do me good to spend more time with Niko, his wit, his insights, the perfectly captured, badly disguised vanity of a successful actor who, even as he describes historic events and great men, can’t resist sliding in a few humble mentions of the applause he enjoyed, the compliments he received. If anyone can reconcile me to the reality of growing older and seeing the world I knew fall away forever, it’s him.
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…tucked into a rather grimy side-street. (Its sign was included in an expensive, nationally broadcast car ad back in the oughts, meant to conjure up neo-noir vibes. I think it involved a car chase.) It’s been around for decades, the late owner a Chinese-American local culinary patriarch whose descendants still staff and run the restaurant. Three dining rooms, energetic wait staff, delicously fiery food.
Since it’s close to an Imax theater, it used to be where local critics had dinner before attending advance screenings. I can remember eating there with Michael and spotting several in the dining room at other tables.
It’s not far from the Mechanics, so before COVID I either ate there or picked up lunch takeout at least once a week. I was on a first-name basis with them, and occasionally they added hot-and-sour-soup as lagniappe to my order. They still call me by my first name. Yesterday, when I had lunch there with a friend, the smiling waitress commented, “You still like this, eh?” as she served me my hot and sour chicken.
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Back in the ’90s this was a question that used to crop up at job interviews. I hated it. Like “what is your greatest weakness”, it was less an honest question than a hoop held up to test my willingness to hop through it. The honest answer would be, “working at another company after you boost your stock prices by laying off half the customer service/admin employees” but I was supposed to sit up a little straighter in my seat and say something like “striving hard in my chosen life’s work of telecom/real estate ad management/heavy equipment sales contract processing.”
Now that I am retired and in my sixties, the answer is “looking around for a home without so many stairs.”
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I’m back at H&C. Started last Wednesday and found Lara just about to pop, so swollen in her strained t-shirt I could see her inside-out belly-button pushing against the fabric.
Poor Dierdre is gone, replaced by Kay, a blond, stocky fellow in his twenties whose half-grown beard and barely concealed chest-hair remind me of a coconut. Apparently he had, until recently, a full beard and dreadlocks going halfway down his back. Al that remains of that is the impression of hairiness and a fondness for jewelry, especially a silver-colored bracelet on one wrist. I like him. He’s smart and literate. The prospect of sharing an office with a man seems to have unhinged Yolanda, who flirts so outrageously with him I’m reminded of a cat I once had who would pick fights with other cats by yowling and twisting its body until it was practically standing on its head.
That may be part of why there’s a rising tension between the comroom and the office manager, Portia, who sweeps past it occasionally with her lips compressed, her eyes on the open door with the look of someone on the watch for misbehavior. It’s possible Lara and Yolanda have a little too much in common, both being young and fond of men, fashion magazines, and gossip.
Lara’s last day before she left for maternity leave had a last-day-of-school feel to it. She left cheering and practically skipping out the door.
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My Ipad, which is my book/camera/notepad/mailbox.
My biggin, which is not only beautiful, but makes good coffee. I’ve written about it here.
My cougar rock. It’s a piece of quartz I found while taking a walk on a mountain in North Carolina. I put it in my pocket because I had seen a video clip of a man being chased by a cougar and wanted to be prepared. Completely irrational, of coure. In the Western Carolina mountains I’d more likely encounter a bear than a cougar, and I don’t think bouncing a small rock off its nose would do any good if one were chasing me. Not much chance of meeting cougars or bears in the hills of San Francisco, though there are coyotes, and I do know someone who got bitten by a seal at Maritime Park. I just like the way the stone, which is just big enough for me to curl my fist around it, gets warm in my hand.
My suede ivy cap, which used to be my father’s. Now that I am a Woman Who Wears Hats, I use it on overcast days. It’s too big for me. I have to pin my hair up when I wear it, or it will constantly slide down over my eyes. I suppose I’m attached to it because I remember Dad wearing it. Sometimes, if I catch some murky passing glimpse of myself in a store window, I can see him.
Any one of my tarot decks, which I can use to tell myself stories.
Pam Troy 