Here’s a link to an article I knocked out real fast for Present Magazine this week. In all, this piece about the Kansas City Public Library and KCPT’s Meet the Past living history performance series took me about two hours to compile. There were some great interviews involved (at least, I thought so), though it is really a summary piece intended to give audiences a taste of what they might expect should they go to the live show or sit in the audience. These are the facts, as I saw them, and for the first time in about three years, I actually end an article with a quotation. I thought it worked in this case. Thanks to editors Pete Dulin and Pam Taylor for the opportunity and the wonderful layout.
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Tags: Present Mag.
She is fascinated by soap shaped like seashells. Anything she finds in the house to her liking she takes down from the shelves and display tables, countertops and bureaus – even the bath tub ledge – and stuffs them into her baby stroller to push around the neighborhood like a miniature bag lady.
The stroller isn’t meant for real babies. The model she’s taken to is a miniature one intended for baby dolls with small wheels to carry light loads around a living room or to be pushed up and down a sidewalk, gently – not to carry the enormous weight that results from her collecting sprees. She loads the seat and its undercarriage with stuffed animals, puzzle pieces, pinecones, marbles, synthetic flower stems with the blossoms cut or fallen off, potato chip bags, a backpack and a hippo figurine. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Kids
The writing won’t let me go on good nights. Not every night is that way. I was up after 1 last night. I started in about midnight, hoping my thumbs could put together something beautiful on my BlackBerry. I felt I owed my handheld a little literary brilliance since I occasionally use it type out my thoughts in a way that would send my former writing instructors into therapy (What r u waiting 4?) Granted, I usually got through the trouble of spelling everything out, but on the rare instance that I butcher my thoughts with symbols that rival Prince album liner notes, those few instances are egregious enough to be made up. Before closing my eyes for the night, I came up with an idea to map my childhood, to literally chart the people and places where I grew up but without using a legend or latitude and longitude lines. Instead, I’d use words – describe the settings and told about the people the way they were then. Below is what I came up with in about 45 minutes. Largely unedited, you can see here what a decent first draft looks like (I hope.) Mozart’s first drafts were near perfection. This is certainly not close to that. (More notes follow this piece.)
On the west side, the houses hadn’t given in to their sighs of mid-summer. Mostly everyone’s house was well kept and the ones that weren’t, even their families mowed the lawns under the sagging eaves and drug out ladders with cob-webbed rungs to add fresh paint. The kids played in the streets making makeshift ramps from phone books and leftover boards, setting fireworks off at the edges of driveways in July, and in August, sitting on basketballs under shady overhangs just staring at the baskets and never breaking the heat more than two or three times to take a shot. One lawn was perfectly manicured – poisoned evergreen bluegrass, thick and Catholic lawn mowed and raked and the lawn mower and driveway washed extensively afterward by the holy man of sorts, the caretaker, Mr. Crandski, who’d waste gallons rinsing the dirty blade and clearing pavement. He’d smoke when he was finished with the yard and had the hose in hand, post coital almost, or maybe like he would after a big meal, the high-pitch and thudding all the same spray sound wash, wash, washing down the drive. We kids used to love him smoke and wash his driveway. His sons were good boys, older than us by just enough grade levels to separate our groups. They’d end up in the loudest, filthiest fucking arguments you’d ever heard in the middle of the day, the boys walking out in the summer sun on the clean driveway, yelling in adolescent voices right into their dad’s big sound, almost a roar. Crandski was a big man, with big lungs and good sized pants. His sons would walk off on him after they’d drawn the neighbors to the windows.
These fights were among the more interesting events of the summer. The others generally happened in the same place, down the street and up a hill, past the trees and chain-link fence to an old graveyard. The headstones were perfectly looped by a gravel road, and some more headstones were outside the circle, on the edges. The loop made a perfect race track for kids on bicycles, about 1 and 8 of a mile around. The races always started at the far end, the northeast corner. Someone would yell go, usually someone in the race and looking for a head start. Smooshed socks and worn shoes would kick the pedals down and after the first long, slow pushes, the feet would move faster, the pedals lighter, around the first corner and full speed down the straightaway. The first corner was the toughest. Some riders would lose it there, take it too hard. Their expressions would change. Smiles would turn to “oh shit” circles, like guppies, then the bike frames would waver, then a scream an actual oh shit, and that rider would go careening off into spaces between headstones. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Childhood
One more love letter in the canon with the others that got no response. The words were put down for the one that got away, and she still gets away, swimming faster from the bottle corked with your message inside. All your words pass under her eye (you’re lucky they get that far) and after the first reading, she’s finished. This world has become so unromantic and immediate – it’s a bottle of wine two, three years old, no more. You take a pull straight from its top, alone on the couch first, the bedroom next (too depressing), back to the living room on the same sweaty cushions as before, and finally the bottle dumped in a fresh trash bag – a hollow drop to the bottom – finally back to bed for the night, this time, and the memory movies play over and over. Oh shit, this is just the beginning. The stale letter crisping already in her hand and the small paradise you’d hoped to build flaking to the floor. Let the pieces spread. Let the next woman come along, but this time don’t tell her you’re a writer. Then maybe she’ll be impressed in the final moments when you can communicate so clearly, so emotionally. If she knows you’re practiced at the craft, the words will mean a lot less.
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Tags: Letters
Table
July 6th, 2009
Backed into a table, we sat by the French doors eating Spanish food. The cafe had gradually filled with lovely office workers from the low-rise buildings on the mid-town street. The area had been made over recently, but the sidewalks were still cracked and the fire-plugs covered in layer after painted layer – alternating in yellow and red paint bubbles from where it dried in the sun some other summer afternoon. The sun helped itself to the ice water on the table shinning through the limbs from the trees rooted in the bare spots along the cement. The whole cafe felt like stepping into a mirror: while people side-stepped between the rounded tables more bodies passed by the glass, some on bicycles, others with mouths loosening from cigarettes to breathe a few cloudy words that would look profane to an amateur lip reader. In this see-through spot, it felt like the whole city wa staring in to see if its hair was straight, which made it hard for me to surrender anything – to make any ground with her.
She came in late after sending a polite message to my handheld device that I’ve taken to carrying with me after pledging not to. The light fell slanted on her the whole time. Off-balanced, she shifted in the light, kept up the conversation and kept interested. But still, I couldn’t give anything of me away. We talked about the light-hearted topics that you talk about on a first meeting after some time has passed. Then, once you’ve asked about the last few years, their career, their family – once the first few drinks are down and the table has been cleared, the meaningful material comes out, or it doesn’t. Read the rest of this entry »
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