Monthly Archives: July 2010

High High High High There

Posted by Tata on

Cat blankets, drying in the hot summer sun.

The rumors you’ve heard are true: it was over 100 degrees here today. I walked home from the grocery store and felt a little guilty about feeling fine, knowing that just about everyone else was miserable. Oh, who are we kidding? Since I feel great, everyone else should just be happy for me! Have a glass of cold water and think about my needs!

Tomatoes And Black-Capped Chickadees

Posted by Tata on

Dear Future Generations:

It’s just a matter of minutes before we’ve never met and as far as you’re concerned I’m a dusty relic in some old green pictures. It is impossible for you to know me as anything but a two-dimensional object. A very wise person once told me that all of history before one’s birth might as well have never happened for most people, and even people who care can’t really imagine it. He went on to say it was all some sepia-toned movie, then a person’s born and things that can really be considered start happening. Turns out he also smoked a brand of cigarettes I never saw anywhere else and may have leafletted Havana eight months after I was born, but that doesn’t help you any, does it, pumpkins? Of course not. So let’s talk about this.

This apron cannot protect you from ridicule, cooking spatter.

When my friends’ grandmas kicked the buckets, my friends turned up at my place with puzzled expressions and suitcases of clothing my friends could barely contemplate. We were younger, vintage was my thing, I was much smaller than most adult mammals and the grandmas’ clothing was too small for their beef-fed progeny. Somehow, grandmas could never let go of silk stockings or wild bras or lacy things – and the idea of Abuela as a hot tamale – ¡Ay, caramba! For many of my friends, that was too much.

Recently, I made a perfectly innocent request of my friends. You remember my friends: they’re the mostly puzzled people. I asked them to clean out their stashes of knitting yarn, toss the scraps my way and I’d knit blankets for stray cats. Yes, it’s hard to believe we still have problems like knitting, scrap yarn and stray cats, but stay with me here. One of my friends has been cleaning out a house belonging to the elderly mom of a friend of hers, and apparently that mom is full of surprises. My friend has delivered two large garbage bags – yes, we still have garbage, it’s so EMBARRASSING TO BE ANCIENT HISTORY – and the second one contained the style-bucking apron above and this eye-opener to boot:

Drusy points out a major flaw in this apron's design: no human could wear it with a straight face. Nor should he.

See, until fairly recently, I was – and I can say this without fear of contradiction – smokin’ hot, at least in geologic time, but though I was born when my father’s mother was 44 I did not know until after she died that she had been an unmitigated beauty. I found some photographs, one of her posed casually in a kitchen, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. And you, who see me as an old person or a name on a family tree or a speck of dust you breathe now and then, you should know that this apron is a horrible affront to good taste that might be very funny on a skinny teenage boy, and doing things because they’re funny is the only way to go. But if you find something frightful like this in my possession posthumously, you must consider another possibility: that these dreadful items are being passed from silly person to silly person to mortify grandchildren. Perhaps this is not about us old folks being secretly super-sexay. Perhaps we sing along and sing along, and when the music stops, we wish we could watch one more mesmerizing, hilarious dance.

No really. I was hot,

Princess Ta

Be Running Up That Road

Posted by Tata on

Firefighters have alternative ideas about structural porosity.

Pete called me at work this afternoon from a roadside to say our next door neighbor’s house was on fire. He didn’t seem all that upset, but I threw a hissyfit at my desk. Siobhan tried to be comforting about the whole thing but I said a lot of things that sounded like, “Grrrrrr bzttttt keck keck guappppp.” When Pete called me back from our backyard, the driveway was taped off, firefighters from three towns were smashing attic windows to let out smoke and I could tell Pete wasn’t telling me the whole story. I got on my bicycle and rode home, searching the sky for signs of smoke. At home, our cats were also freaking out.

A police officer allowed as how another fire in town was probably not an accident.

For hours, emergency vehicles blocked off our street and about two dozen firefighters moved around like warmly dressed chess pieces. By the time I got home, the fire was out and the investigation was beginning. The neighbors leaned on a car across the street, looking shell shocked. Pete and I invited them in to sit down, but the police took turns asking them questions. Later, one of the officers told Pete there’d been three fires in three days and one of them differed from the others. When we walked to the main street later, we saw this and thought it looked very suspicious.

By the time we sat down for a dinner of CSA vegetables and pasta we might've called it breakfast.

We joined a farm share program, which led to me writing a check that made me hyperventilate. We live modestly, so a whole season’s vegetables all at once really add up. Thus, when Pete puts a plate like this one filled with carrots, cabbage, onions, green beans and herbed compound butter in front of me it is as if we are rewarding ourselves for making an unnerving leap of faith.

Our street smells like smoke tonight. Our cats are finally calm.