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.

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. 

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.

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.