i can’t think of anything better to find in your purse (within reason) than a finished roll of film you never got developed.
Monthly Archive for December, 2002
things i did the day after christmas in peoria, illinois, while my parents and grandmother spent an hour and a half in an antiques mall:
- crunched my feet in the snow on the sidewalk. - took a picture of a snow-covered hooters restaurant. - crunched in more snow, realized snow melts into dirty water, rolled up pant cuffs. - crossed the railroad tracks. wondered what would happen if a train came by and hit me, launching me into a snowdrift, not to be discovered until the snow melted. - walked up and down the missouri river, taking pictures of the bridge and riverboat casino. - sat on a riverside park bench and tried to call you from my cell phone. got no signal. - checked out a restaurant called katie hooper’s crow’s nest pizza. thought about katie hooper as a middle-aged woman, sugary-sweet friendly to her customers but a total bitch to her employees, who hate her guts. - with a gloved finger, etched the word snow in the snow on a snowy bench. took a picture. - ignoring a sign that said, “marina closed for winter,” slid down the ramp to the marina. nearly slipped in snow and fell into the frozen river. took off one glove to gather and throw a snowball. decided snowballs aren’t fun when you’re throwing them at nothing. - walked, accidentally, through a snow-covered flowerbed. - sat at a bus stop. - watched an old man. - saw a mushroom cap squished into the concrete in a parking lot. decided it probably went overboard from some delivery to one of those chain restaurants near the casino. - thought about what would happen if i slipped in this snow and fell down. would i scrape my face? break my neck? if the former, would i walk back to the antique mall, my gloves soaked with blood, frightening passersby? if the latter, who would come find me? - called you from an outdoor payphone from underneath the entrance to what appeared to be a train station. told you that peoria was the best time i’d had my entire vacation. that this was my own personal christmas, not yesterday in someone’s strange freezing house with relatives i barely know. - wondered if the top of the st. louis arch gets covered in snow, or if it’s too high up. - walked along the river, back the way i came, seeing my footprints from earlier, backwards in the snow. in my grandmother’s neighborhood, the snow drifts are yellow with deer piss.
sort of interesting the way that, with extended family, you can float in and out of the room without anyone noticing you at all.
before i thought about the other thing, i was going to write about fiction and nonfiction. i was going to write about how are they opposites? if i write something here and label it fiction, is everyone going to think that i took some piece of nonfiction, some truth from my life and wrote it backwards to be false? are they going to believe that, because of something i wrote and said was made-up, that i do NOT, that i am NOT?
also i was wondering do you think that someone who cleans airport restrooms for a living feels strange when she has to use the toilet she just cleaned herself? i thought about this sunday night in the ladies’ at lambert – st. louis international, when under the stall divider i saw the sensible shoes and polyester cuffs of the woman who’d just been pushing the janitorial cart outside by the sink. and then i was thinking about how i’d love to write a story about an airport custodian. it’d be set inside a stall in the ladies’ room, and would involve an airport custodian having to use the toilet she just cleaned herself. that’s as far as i got, of course, as i have no real grasp of how to write fiction, or even how to think about it as anything other than the opposite of not fiction. or the not oppsite of not not not not fiction. but all that’s gone away now that i’m in rural ohio with some extended and unfamiliar family. now i’m just thinking about how maybe there are two kinds of caring. maybe there’s active caring and passive caring, and if there is, i’d rather be alone than a victim of the latter.
i’ll never forget that day in the old house (even now we refer to the house we lived in until i was ten as the old house, and the house we lived in after that as the new house, even though the new house is fifteen years old), when i stood outside and watched a small pickup truck go backwards all the way down our street, from one stopsign to the other. before that, i’d not thought it possible to go in reverse for so very long.
i had to buy it for you, you just looked so pretty playing that child-size accordion at the flea market.
