Nana's toilet paper.

My Nana and I are pen-pals. Rather than call each other, we exchange letters every few weeks. Last month I mailed her a rock from the Florida Panhandle and she responded with this letter written on one continuous sheet of two-play toilet paper:

Hello Heidi & Joe -

Finally getting around to answering your letter and acknowledging the lovely gift. I would say it's a shell from St. George Island. How wonderful that you could vacation. Thank you both for thinking of me and remembering my collection. (Oh yes I've added it to my special box you gave me of rocks.)

I had a hard time finding the right kind of toilet tissue. You see it has to be of premium quality in order to be able to write.

Warning! If for some reason (you never know) you decide to use this in an emergency be very careful to use it ink side down, or you may have a blue streaked butt. (Just joking.)

Well, your vacation is over and you're back to work. You know all good things come to an end sooner or later.

Went to Troy Gier's grad party Saturday night. (That's Aunt El's grandson.) Had a good time. Then Sunday Papa and I went to his aunt's 90th birthday party - that too was nice even if I didn't know too many of the relatives on Papa's side of the family.

The next month we'll be going to Lisa and Shawn's baby shower. Its at a restaurant in Dunkirk. Ought to be nice. I got him a baby stroller which can be made into an infant as well toddler car seat. It is quite deluxe! Of course Shawn picked it out so I know he'll like it.

I've been trying to catch up on my garden work. Lots of trimming to do but the rain has been annoying. I no sooner start and down it comes! Oh well one day I'll get it done.

Day 2. Trying to get this letter finished so I can get it out in tomorrow's mail. Just finished doing some trimming in the yard again. It seems like a never-ending job and I'm getting too old and tired. Trying to talk Papa into hiring a landscaper to do the work but he wont hear of it. You know Papa. If he doesn't do the work himself it won't meet his approval. I gave up mowing two years ago now I might retire from trimming too.

I've just about run out of happenings so I'll say bye for now. Enjoy the rest of the summer. Write when you can.

Love to you both.

Nana

PS. Written on quality TP.

Attachments.

I have a tendency to write in either clipped sentences that make my Aunt Debbie laugh, or long tangled ones that stretch and pull like heavy muscles after a long bike ride.

Sometimes I can't write at all. Sometimes I can't stop. It's what some therapists call an addiction and other therapists call an outlet. To me they're one in the same - addictions and outlets - marked by bouts of happiness and bouts of sadness. Marked by what we mull over on long drives home as the evening sun blinds us, making us squint, making us look in the rearview mirror to check our makeup or to check our teeth, where upon doing so we discover that years of squinting has etched lines on our face, which is why I suppose the passage of time is often illustrated by lines.

I know she was just a fish, so I'll just make this clear: it's not about the fish. It's about what we get attached to. And how we get attached. Attached to people, to TV shows, to bands, to cars, to brand names, to favorite pubs and football teams. And it's not just humans either. My dog is so attached to me that when I don't come home after work Joe tells me he sits with his nose to the front door and waits.

Some people cynically spin the word attachment and call it baggage. If you've met someone who brags that they have no baggage, don't buy it. No baggage means no attachments and the minute you hear that B.S., be wary. A person with no baggage is either deeply repressed, deeply afraid or deeply alone.

In 2002, when my favorite show Ally McBeal went off the air I remember retreating to my bedroom and crying softly into my pillow. On the surface it was a pitiful act. I remember my father snorting under his breath as I whimpered during the final David E. Kelley credit.

"Christ kiddo. It's just a skinny broad on TV."

And I remember my friends stopping by the house to cheer me up - half joking, half not - because they understood that even if I was a fool to mourn the skinny broad I had, from age 15 to 20, identified more with that neurotic, hallucinating, love struck lawyer than any other female character then or since.

Joe says Ally McBeal was my Mary Tyler Moore.

Attachments vary of course in seriousness. I was also, for about ten years, attached to a Paula Abdul concert tee shirt my mother found at a Goodwill store in Hamburg, N.Y. Even though I had never seen Paula in concert - and I promise you I begged - I became unreasonably attached to this tee shirt.

I'd wear the shirt to school, to bed, to the airfield where my father flew his model airplane, to my Oma & Opa's house for dinner. I wore it so much I convinced myself (and others) that I had actually gone to the concert. I held onto it for years. And when I finally threw it out sometime in 2005, a pang of wistfulness stabbed at my memory and I'm sure in my montage of memories I thought: what a great concert.

My office fish Martha died last week. She was 11 months old. Her bowl was cloudy and she was acting listless the day before, which gave me pause because Martha was usually a plucky fish. Just last week I gushed to my coworker Kyle, "Man, she's a cute fish, isn't she?" To which one of our editors replied, "Can fish be cute?"

It was in the way she swam - dive bombing the bottom of her bowl and then rushing to the surface to eat pellets and blow bubbles, staring at me with one distrustful eye and out the office window with one trustful eye - that reminded me of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffanys. She was a pale fish. Colorless really, which is why I chose her. All the other Betas in the pet store were red, purple, orange and blue. Ostentatious fish with gaudy dramatic fins.

Martha was understated. Sleek, simple, yet an extrovert.

I realize now that I probably overfed her. According to every Beta web site I tracked down, cloudy bowls are an indication of overfeeding. (Kyle you're off the hook. Perhaps by keeping her lean while I was on vacation you extended her life span by two weeks.)

So the next morning I spread myself out on the balcony with my computer, a cup of coffee and Patty Griffin on repeat. Noticing that a U-Haul was running at the apartment next door I did what I do best, and spied at the two women below as they stood hugging, saying goodbye and promising to keep in touch. I recognized the mover as a woman I named Plant Lady after the litter of busted ceramic pots and Little Shop of Horrors ferns she keeps by her door.

If there's one thing I've learned from living at five different addresses in four years it's that apartments are ghostly things. Unlike houses, apartments take shape after a person moves in. A shithole can look like a two-page spread in Better Homes & Gardens if someone with a decent sense of feng shui and fine art occupies it, and though I rarely get attached to my neighbors, I do in a sense get attached to their presence ... and their stuff. 

Once when I lived with my friend Zac in a second-story apartment in downtown Sarasota, I got attached to the habits of the couple two doors down. I grew accustomed to the sound of their baby crying, their deafening television set and their evening cigarettes, even though we didn't talk, save for the occasional "hello," "goodnight," and "how's the baby?"

 

Zac and I nicknamed them Man, Woman and Baby. And just knowing they were there was a comfort. Occasionally Man would mention his being a pastry chef on Longboat Key and according to Zac, he would sometimes bring leftover tarts to our door, the likes of which I never saw much less ate. 

One weekend Man, Woman and Baby moved away. I never said goodbye. Never even saw the U-Haul. And still I missed them. Especially their pastries.

I read a NY Times essay this week in which an Iraq war vet - now safely stationed in Brooklyn and "non-deployable" after getting shot in Baghdad - mourns the loss of his overseas daydreams, most of which centered around Natalie Portman:

"... She and I would have dinner in a darkened restaurant, somewhere hip and stratospherically expensive, thick with the smell of polished wood. The swirling flashbulb-pop taste of something unpronounceable on my tongue; looking up, smiling and feeling the shivering joy of having her laugh at a witticism of mine."

Attachments. All of it. Material. Ephemeral. The things we sometimes take for granted. The things we don't. I'm sitting here watching Plant Lady pull away thinking straight lines are pinched by the passage of time and even though we never met, I'm going to miss her man-eating ferns. 

--

PS. Photo by Cate Cuerden. For her Flickr photostream click here.

Should I stay. Or should I go.

I'm considering starting a series of 9 a.m. Sarasota clamshell fountain pictures.

I took this one today on my walk from the Whole Foods parking garage to my office on State Street.

I've got no story to go with this woman, her suitcase and hat. 

I imagine that since there's a bus depot up the block she most likely got off the bus and is waiting for someone to pick her up. Or, she just got dropped off and is waiting to catch the bus.

Which is better folks: To be going somewhere? Or to have arrived? 

(A good question for my American expat friend Ricci.)

Lighting up on Lemon Avenue.

I've been distracted. Birthday parties. Rays games. Ghost hunting in Sarasota. Bike riding with Joe. Interviewing Sarasota County Commissioners. Watching Batman. You know. The basic distractions.

This guy's name is Ian. Or at least Ian is one of his names. He also goes by Adrian and Avery. According to Ian, who likes to set up shop in the courtyard by the clamshell fountain in downtown Sarasota, his parents were a "headstrong lot," too stubborn and too squabbling to decide who to name their son after. Since they both had unisex names - Adrian and Avery - they decided to call him both.  

 

"Now listen," says Ian. "I think both names are beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. But my parents had it coming. What did they expect giving their son two names like Adrian and Avery? I go by Ian now, which I consider a nobler name. It's a noble name, isn't it? Ian."

"Yes," I said. "It's a nobler name."

I asked Ian if I could take his picture. He was nervously rolling cigarettes like some people twirl straw wrappers. (If you look closely, you'll see that all those blue papers beside him contain tobacco. Grainy, dirty bits of brown tobacco the color of rawhide leather. Also the color of Ian's skin.)

So I said, "Hot damn, Ian. That's a lot of tobacco."

And he said, "You roll your own too?"

And I said, "Don't smoke. Hey, can I take your picture?"

And he said, "What for?"

And I said, "Because I like the composition of your loitering."

And he said, "If you want to take my picture you'll have to sit here and listen to me for a minute. That's my sitting fee - you listening to me talk."

And I said, "Ah OK. Go on."

And just like that Ian went on. And on. And on. He spoke with a slight British accent that reminded me of when Madonna started speaking with a brogue back when she was writing children's books. I listened to Ian for 20 minutes and in those 20 minutes I learned that he's a reporter investigating corruption within the local power structures, including the daily newspaper, and that the biggest problem with people today is that no one wants to make eye contact anymore.

I later realized that when I took these pictures Ian neglected to look me in the eye. It turns out that homeless people are as fearful of us as we are of them. The next time I see Ian I might tell him this, except that in listening to his stories I feel the people he fears most are ... his parents.

So be good to your kids, guys. Try not to name them two unisex names at once. It's hard enough finding your identity as a kid. 

Goodnight. 

On seeing butterfly nets.

There's this fantastic theory, this conceptual theory first suggested by psychologist Carl Jung, called synchronicity that surrounds my every move. 

It is the idea that a collective unconscious pulls random things - ideas, names, events, places - from whoknowswhere and plants them in your head only to have you happen upon them later. Whether later means 15 minutes or 15 years, is as Einstein would say, completely relative. 

All you need to know to understand synchronicity is that coincidences are meaningful.

A few years ago when I was out shopping for a religion I came upon Jung's theory. I naturally gravitated toward synchronicity as I was raised to believe in similar faiths such as Shit Happens and It All Comes Out in the Wash, the likes of which my father preached daily.

Synchronicity is the natural evolution of these two theories, less crude and with the right amount of Faith and Magic, which we all know is the same witchcraft anyway. I fell for synchronicity on the spot. I figured if Carl Jung was a fan of Lewis Carroll than I was a fan of Carl Jung. 

It is also important to note that around this time I also learned I could control my dreams. Not in the sense of willing myself to dream certain things, but in the sense of taking control of my dreams while having them. For example, once while sleeping over at my Oma's house, I dreamt that a man walked through Oma's sliding glass door and held a gun to my head. 

I was scared at first. Guns to your head will do that, even in dreams. And so I screamed. I was sleeping next to my Japanese exchange student Yuuki, and according to her I screamed pretty loud and then zonked back to sleep. What happened next I can only explain in the way out-of-body-experienced folks talk about death on the operating table, except of course instead of watching myself die I was watching myself dream. 

Floating out of my dream, I hovered close to my sleeping head and peered down at my nightmaring self. I was asleep on Oma's pullout couch, asleep in an old folks community on the Gulf Coast of Florida. The only thing pointed at my head was a snoring pug. Fat, content and puffing like a diesel engine. 

Well I'll be damned, I snorted and then I slipped back into dreaming armed with newfound power.

The gunman was still there, still standing with a gun at my head as if the dream had been on pause.

"Pull the trigger," I taunted him. "Won't make a lick of a difference."

I have no idea if he actually did. All I can remember is feeling like I was let in on something, like the first time I was told the sky wasn't blue, that my brain just makes it that way by processing scattered light.  

Once I understand that, the sky could be neon green if I wanted. 

...

Anyway, back to why I brought up synchronicity ...

This vacation has been one big bowl of collective unconscious, a series of synchronic flashes that all began with a butterfly net about a month ago, around the same time my sister PK moved to Florida.

Joe and I were walking the pug down 3rd Street in St. Pete when we both remarked that the 10-year-old boy across the street from our apartment catching butterflies in a long handled net was so ... Leave it to Beaver that why of course we'd have to purchase a home in Old Northeast, the quaintest hood in town.

From that point on butterfly nets kept popping up. About a week ago I watched someone on I-275 near the exit for Tropicana Stadium pass me going 85 mph with a giant butterfly net half hanging out of their passenger door. A butterfly net dragging along the interstate at 85 mph! The dragging sounded like a chain saw running out of gas. It was impossible to miss even if you weren't in the business of looking for butterfly nets. 

There were other net incidents too of course, but I won't bore you. Suffice it to say that when I got to St. George Island last week I walked into the island's lone convenient store, noticed a big box of butterfly nets for sale at the counter and figured perhaps it was butterfly hunting season in Florida. 

While on vacay I finished reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, an amazing memoir that everyone should read, and then upon thinking of my next read I thought: Ugh, I hope I don't pick up one of those poor, pitiful divorced thirty-something works of fiction that usually start with the female protagonist sulking around her house in her ex-husband's white button-down shirt. 

And then two days ago Joe and I drove up to Tallahassee, walked into Borders to find new books and on the first page of the first book I selected was a sentence describing some trifling thirty-something woman pondering love in her ex-husband's button-down shirt. 

Around this time I remembered a book I bought years ago from a used bookstore in Port Colborne, Canada, a tiny Lake Erie fishing village my family ended up stranded in when the transmission failed in our antique Chris Craft boat. I wandered this port town for hours looking for bookstores. I eventually found one and ended up with several books, all of which I read during our shipwrecked time in Port Colborne save for one collection of short stories - Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter. 

So I wonder, on the car ride to Tallahassee, how come I never read Burning Your Boats? Was it because I was only 17 and fancied Salman Rushdie's introduction to the book arrogant? 

Back in the bookstore I shelve the story of the divorcee in the white button-down and begin randomly scanning the store again. I shuffle to another part of the store, pull a title at random and kazaam ... it's Angela Carter's Burning Your Boats. I lose my shit and move on to a book by Pam Houston, whom I had the pleasure of meeting last month at a writer's conference in Boulder, Colo.

OK, so I'm on to something with books and butterfly nets. No big deal, eh?

The next morning Joe and I turn on the Today Show, because we're on vacation and all about morning TV and intravenous coffee. 

He comments on Al Roker, whether or not Roker is a freak of nature or something along those lines and I say, "I used to work with a woman at the newspaper who's good friends with Al Roker. She flew to New York for Roker's wedding. Her husband sings all that Trop Rock Jimmy Buffett crap and Roker is a parrothead. They met him in the Cayman Islands back when he was fat." 

That night, Joe and I drive down to the convenient store - the same joint selling butterfly nets - and on my way out the door I grab the local newspaper, The Oyster. I turn the front page over and there he is, on the second page, my old coworker's husband the Trop Rock singer, headlining some sort of Oyster Spat Festival on St. George Island.

"Get out of town with this freaking synchronicity!" I cry.

So this morning I sat down to write this post and as I did Joe walked past me at the computer and said, "Hey I updated your computer. All those system updates started piling up."

I said, "When my sister did that her hard drive crashed. That's why I ignore them."

And he said, "System updates won't cause your hard drive to crash. If that happened it was a coincidence."

A coincidence! Are you kidding me? I re-read the beginning of this post, paused and narrowed my eyes into distrustful slants. The word I had just typed was coincidence. 

Egads! What does it all mean?!

..

 

PS. The Alice illustration at the top of this post is by Stephanie Fizer. I love her work. I love that she like to eat pickles and lives in West Virginia with her boyfriend. I love that she compulsively makes lists. I love that she's a vegetarian who hates meat more because of the texture and less because of animal cruelty. 

St. George Island, Alaska

I just discovered there's a St. George Island, Alaska. The pictures posted here were taken by Al and Linda.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census SGI, Alaska is 182 square miles and populated by 152 people - 92 percent of which are Native Americans.

I've got a rummy ache.

The house we're renting is called Carpe Diem. It's spelled out on a rooster sign hanging over the front door. Every house on St. George Island has a name. A Place in the Sun. Blues Away. Casa Blanca. Cubby Hole. Fun Kissed. Bay Watch.



The rooster sign doesn't mesh with the rest of the decor, which is all sea-faring creatures, stuffed or otherwise. Wait. On second thought the rooster sign does mesh with the bullhorns on the wall in the master bedroom.



Bullhorns aside the place feels like the inside of a boat. The smell of wet wood will do that, transport you to the stern of a boat where as a girl you slept in the shape of a question mark beside your sisters and your parents on long trips to Port Colborne, Canada.



Joe and I took a day trip to Tallahassee today. It rained bucketloads, so it was a wise use of our time. We toured the FSU campus and tracked down Joe's alumni brick, which was no small feat since we had no friggen clue where his brick was laid.



We ate lunch at a diner neither one of us can remember the name of on Apalachee Parkway, passed up several nitty bookstores on our two-hour drive from Apalachicola to Tallahassee, where we settled on a big box Borders, drank fancy coffee drinks and bought an assortment of poli-sci books and literature.



I would proclaim the day a wild success had it not been for a devastating 515 to 530 Rummy loss two hours ago, robbing me of a 15-minute massage I rightly deserved given that last night's loss ended in fisticuffs.

A case of the Mondays.

On Mondays I usually plead with my fish Martha, whom I keep in a bowl on my desk, to finish writing my stories so I can write sentences that start with things like "... a man walked into a forest and stumbled into a clearing, where under the shade of a sycamore tree a redheaded woman was seated at a piano playing spy music."

So what am I doing with this moment? This 1:18 p.m.-on-a-Monday moment when normally I'd be glued to a story, the next callback, a too-tiny reporter's notepad and a bout of procrastination? I'm drinking a Coors Light on the balcony of a big blue beach house on stilts, trying to figure out why there are currents in the Gulf of Mexico that are wavy and currents that are calm.

Joe's working on an album, not at this moment but in the ongoing sense of it. He's wants to record an album concerning the various wooden sea creatures that are nailed to the walls of this house. The tracks are all named after each species of wooden sea creature. 1. The Blue Marlin 2. Hammerhead 3. The Dolphin Saves the Day and 4. How Did a Cow Get in Here? I copied these titles directly from the reporters notebook he scribbled them in.

We're burning through books and with no amenities on St. George Island save for The Big Top market located on the mainland 15 minutes away, we're off to find a bookstore in Eastpoint, Florida (population: 2,158.)

In a county where the nearest city is Apalachicola, which sounds to me like something pirates fall sick from, I have no doubt we'll find an interesting used bookstore.

Residual fireworks.

On the 6th of July I remembered four things:

I remembered the first time I tried to swim without arm floats. How the water felt like pudding and my arms felt like whisks. I was five years old and treading chlorinated water in a concrete pool in Myrtle Beach. How I prayed, even though I didn't believe in Jesus, that my father would pluck me from the water and set me back on dry land. How I regretted instantly thinking I could make it on my own to the water slide, which was the color of a robin's egg. How when my father grabbed me from the deep end it was with one hairy arm. How water ran out my nose and burned my throat when I coughed. How I was scared of the water for three days after that.

I remembered a railroad tie, a broken pier jutting into cold Lake Erie on the shores of Crystal Beach, Canada, where I stayed with my best friend Sarah's family. How Sarah's family always rented a ramshackle beach house in a ramshackle beach community that profited from an amusement park that closed in 1989 that everyone including my parents and grandparents used to go to. How my mother told me she rode The Comet coaster when she was pregnant with me. How every time I looked at that ghostly roller coaster from the end of that jagged pier I used to squint at it, frozen in time, frozen seven years after my birth, frozen before I had a chance to ride it, and imagine my mother with her red feathered hair, riding it pregnant with me. How when Sarah and I jumped from that jagged pier we'd hold hands and curl our toes just in case we landed on rocks when we hit the water.

I remembered the smell of model airplane fuel. The sweet sticky smell of model airplane fuel. How my father kept it in little bottles on his work bench in the basement. How the bottles were tiny because model airplanes don't require much fuel. How the fuel was the color of pink lemonade and the bottles were shaped like old lady face potions. How next to the fuel there was model airplane resin, that in its powder form was softer than baby talcum and whiter than sugar. How I loved to sift my hands through it. How I loved that my dad had stuff like this in our basement. Jars with skull and crossbones symbols on them. How in school they told us to stay away from stuff like that, those pale pink potions that powered fiberglass Nazi warplanes.

I remembered eating vanilla pudding pops in the summer. How we used to buy them from Crances Superette from a woman named Mary who worked behind the counter. How Mary hung a yellow fly strip by the milk freezer. How she had short brown hair that looked like a winter cap. How she lived in the apartment upstairs and had big round glasses and a sad wistful smile.
...


PS. The picture above was taken July 4 in Sarasota's Bayfront Park.

Panhandling Take 1.

Good morning.

It's 8:30 a.m. Joe is still sleeping. We're headed to SGI for a week in the Florida Panhandle. (We're staying here.) It was Joe's plan to wake up at 8, but of course he's still zonked. I've considered blasting a Toby Keith song in an effort to wake him, but that's probably not the best idea.

I have lofty post ideas for this vacay. My only concern is that I won't have wireless. If that's the case and I'm MIA you'll know why.