Sepia Saturday 572 Remaining Belongings

 

I hope this photo isn't the record of an unhappy or unwanted move. They have the essentials—a coal scuttle, a tea kettle, a mattress and a chair. 

I'm cleaning out our attic and garage and other storage spots around the house. The top shelves of closets and cupboards. Stuff, stuff, stuff. Now that I work at the Angel Shop and watch the donations coming in, I see we

all accumulate the same kinds of things—half completed craft projects, broken things you think you're going repair some day, paintings and wall hangings and decor stuff that doesn't fit into your decor anymore. Tons of clothes. Every time I hesitate over a thing, I envision it priced for a dollar at the shop. 

Here's a typical heap of stuff I sort through on the Angel job. 

George Carlin calls it what it is: shit. And like everyone else, we have too much of it.

Here's what George has to say:

 "A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You can see that when you're taking off in an airplane. You look down, you see everybody's got a little pile of stuff. All the little piles of stuff. And when you leave your house, you gotta lock it up. Wouldn't want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff. They never bother with that crap you're saving. All they want is the shiny stuff. That's what your house is, a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get...more stuff!

Sometimes you gotta move, gotta get a bigger house. Why? No room for your stuff anymore. Did you ever notice when you go to somebody else's house, you never quite feel a hundred percent at home? You know why? No room for your stuff. Somebody else's stuff is all over the goddamn place! And if you stay overnight, unexpectedly, they give you a little bedroom to sleep in. Bedroom they haven't used in about eleven years. Someone died in it, eleven years ago. And they haven't moved any of his stuff! Right next to the bed there's usually a dresser or a bureau of some kind, and there's NO ROOM for your stuff on it. Somebody else's shit is on the dresser."


Here's the whole schtick:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

An interesting story about Hartlepool from Wiki:

Hartlepool is known for allegedly executing a monkey during the Napoleonic Wars.^[44] According to legend, fishermen from Hartlepool watched a French warship founder off the coast, and the only survivor was a monkey, which was dressed in French military uniform, presumably to amuse the officers on the ship. The fishermen assumed that this must be what Frenchmen looked like and, after a brief trial, summarily executed the monkey.

Historians have pointed to the prior existence of a Scottish folk song called "And the Boddamers hung the Monkey-O". It describes how a monkey survived a shipwreck off the village of Boddam near Peterhead in Aberdeenshire. Because the villagers could only claim salvage rights if there were no survivors from the wreck, they allegedly hanged the monkey. There is also an English folk song detailing the later event called, appropriately enough, "The Hartlepool Monkey". In the English version the monkey is hanged as a French spy.

"Monkey hanger" and Chimp Choker are common terms of (semi-friendly) abuse aimed at "Poolies", often from footballing rivals Darlington. The mascot of Hartlepool United F.C. is H'Angus the monkey. The man in the monkey costume, Stuart Drummond, stood for the post of mayor in 2002 as H'angus the monkey, and campaigned on a platform which included free bananas for schoolchildren. To widespread surprise, he won, becoming the first directly elected mayor of Hartlepool, winning 7,400 votes with a 52% share of the vote and a turnout of 30%. He was re-elected by a landslide in 2005, winning 16,912 on a turnout of 51% – 10,000 votes more than his nearest rival, the Labour Party candidate.

The monkey legend is also linked with two of the town's sports clubs, Hartlepool Rovers RFC, which uses the hanging monkey as the club logo. Hartlepool (Old Boys) RFC use a hanging monkey kicking a rugby ball as their tie crest.

A Good Idea

The Sepia Saturday prompt this week is the letter G, as we are working our way through the alphabet. I couldn't find anything appropriate, so I've scraped the bottom of the barrel. G, for this post, introduces a Good Idea.

I watched Marie Kondo's show on NetFlix, Tidying up with Marie Kondo. Although she's a pleasure to watch, two episodes were more than enough. I'm not disorganized enough to benefit from most of her suggestions. The show features people drowning in stuff—epic messes far beyond my experience or imagination—families immobilized by their possessions. We're not that bad. All I have to clean up are two garden storage sheds and fifty boxes of memorabilia which I fear will end up in a thrift shop when Richard dies.

But I have some important organization failings. One of them is my mess of a purse. How I confront the problem every day but continue to endure it, I don't know. It's my Waterloo. I've never managed to have an orderly purse and have so envied my friends who can reach into their bags and effortlessly retrieve an item. If I need something, there will be several minutes of pawing around and cursing and in the end, I'll have to half-empty the purse to find the thing. 

The purse is black outside and inside—the inside is a dark maw. If I drop something into it, the item will probably get interleaved with the one hundred pieces of tissue or the twelve yards of cash register receipts floating around inside. If an item sinks, forget it. Fishing through the layers of paper is tedious and usually unproductive. It's so bad, that I frequently don't put important items into it, preferring a pocket or something I can trust, like my hands. How crazy is that?

I hand carry my phone when I'm shopping because if it drops in the purse, when it rings I have to search to find it, and when I do, it's usually too late and I've annoyed everyone around me with the uber-loud ring (which I have set like as loud as an air raid siren because of my bad hearing and because the phone is often muffled by the purse garbage when it slips to the bottom.) Yes, the purse has exterior pockets, but too many. For me, extra pockets just mean extra searching. 

But all of that is now in the past. This morning, I cleaned out a drawer in the bathroom near where I keep my purse when I'm at home. As Marie instructs, I emptied the purse into it and then from the mess, picked out the items I need—phone, wallet, key fob, pen, post-it notes. The rest remained in the drawer. Every day you do this. 

Purse drawer

Purse and purse drawer

You might say that this is simply cleaning out your purse every day. Not so. Dumping (my word, not Marie's) everything out into a temporary holding area and starting over isn't the same as cleaning it out. Not by a long shot. Dump/empty, I can do. Such is the particular genius of Marie Kondo.  

Stuff from purse

Once a month, you empty out the drawer which you will find is full of tissue and cash register receipts and grocery lists you couldn't find when you needed them, spare change, wrapped mints from restaurants, flyers someone stuck under your windshield wiper, maybe an expired coupon. You do not look at any of it. It's proven itself to be useless by its very presence in the drawer. You dump/empty it all into the garbage.

Stuff remaining after purse is refilled

Using this system, you could actually change purses with confidence that you'll have everything you need. I have ten or fifteen purses, like most women and use none of them, because changing a purse—oh my God—is a huge hassle. 

Speaking as an old dog, I'm very happy to have learned a new trick.

Essentials back in purse

Sepia Saturday 570: Shadow of Frankenstein

Th

I've got a special box of several dozen photos sporting my father's white ink captions. The ink bottle and the special pen he used were stored in the same drawer as our photo and negative boxes—both of which I sort through when recalling days of my childhood. During Canadian winter weekends when it was too wickedly cold to go outdoors, when the jigsaw puzzle was finished and it was too early for cocktails, Dad would get out the most recent photos, his pen and ink, and catch up on the labeling. 

At the time I thought the photo captions were corny and that he was defacing the images. Actually, I was five years old in 1947 and I probably didn't have an opinion at all. It was later, during my early teens, when I knew everything, that I remember criticizing my father for this practice.

Since then, I've learned a lot and realize what a good idea his notes were. Dad's been dead for almost sixty years and aside from one diary in which he wrote sporadically, I have little tangible evidence of his wit; these photo notations capture some of it; even though he's not actually in most of these photos, the notations make him a part of them. I wish I could go back in time and apologize to him for my baseless teenaged righteousness. 

The "Shadow of Frankenstein" note, referring to himself as the photographer, was both amusing and a bit macabre. I like the way he fit the writing across the shadow. It's another clue to his creativity and my match for the prompt.

I wondered what my Uncle Louis (on the left) and the other man (unknown) were doing out in a field dressed in their office attire? The date turned out to be a major clue and explained that knot of people in the background.

September 1st, 1947, the day before this photo, thirty-one people died in a disastrous train wreck in Dugald, Manitoba. The Minaki Camper's Special, a seasonal excursion railroad service, loaded with students and families riding the rails back to Winnipeg after the long weekend, hit a standing train in the station, head on. It was one of the ten worst train accidents in Canada. 

From the Manitoba history website: 

"Fire spread at a frightening rate, as the old wooden coaches of the Minaki Special were lit by gas lamps. Only seven of the victims could be identified and the remaining 24 were buried in a mass grave at the Brookside Cemetery, Winnipeg."

The wooden passenger cars were flimsy and Pintsch gas lights used in them ran on a compressed fuel gas derived from distilled naptha and stored in tanks. These lights were brighter than the alternatives of the time, but unfortunately the gas was very flammable. 

From the Lethbridge Herald, the Lethbridge ,Alberta newspaper, Sept 3rd, 1947:

"While relatives and friends returned to the Transcona morgue again today, hoping that in a second visit they might recognize jewelry as belonging to the missing, work was resumed at Dugald of clearing away the maze of debris covering the tracks by the little red-walled flag station. Their overnight rest was the first the workmen had had since the collision took place late Monday. Even before they retired last night carloads of spectators thronged the area, anxious to get a first-hand glimpse of the wrecked train.

Twelve R.C.M.P. constables were needed to control the traffic, while others were constantly on the alert to prevent the almost 10,000 visitors from pushing their way through the ash-strewn wreckage. Today the number of visitors was down, only the odd automobile stopping at the small village. Workmen continued sifting through the ashes and police officials said that some of the dead would probably never be discovered, even if the sifting continued for a week, so devastating had been the flames which swept the train."

I'm assuming my Dad, my Uncle and their friend decided along with 9,997 others to rush over to Dugald (population in 2011 was 384), fourteen miles from Winnipeg, to take a look. We didn't own a car in those days, but I presume Uncle Louis had one. The crash site must have been an incredible situation to keep under control with only twelve RCMP constables on duty and 10,000 rubberneckers! My guess is that the two men in my photo are "playing" in response to having viewed the gruesome scene; a bit of comic relief perhaps. Maybe they were simply stretching their legs before returning to their car. Dad must have taken the camera along with him thinking they'd record the event, but if he got any photos, they weren't in the photo box. Maybe he thought better about keeping disturbing photos of the wreckage at home.  Here's one from the scene on that horrible day after. 

Transcona Historical Museum

I wonder how many people caption their digital photos? —now that we have 60,000 (like me) or millions, like some?

Fiction - Rescued

I saw you drive by and tried to look the other way to avoid your line of sight. That’s difficult when you’re stuck on a canvas like me and wedged sideways in a garbage can. Let’s face it, even though I’m one dimensional, my measurements are 36” x 36”. Pretty zoftig by today's standards and hard to hide.  

Unknown artist: photograph by Nancy Javier

I’d just gotten out of the basement. For twenty years I was shuffled in a pile of half-finished paintings—a stack of poor judgment and bad taste; a heap of crappy art with mold growing on the fake Picasso at the bottom threatening to engulf us all. Mr. Artist, pardon my sarcasm, painted and repainted me trying different styles—take a look at them below my text. Can you imagine how I felt. I should be thankful, I guess that I ended up at the top of the heap—the others are still there with the junk.

Feeling the sun on my face that morning when he took me outside was the best thing that happened in decades. At first, I relished the warmth and the light but later, I realized where I was. The sign to my right said FRE, and I hoped it said, Freida, because that was my name. But the wind blew the paper sign and I could see it said FREE. I realized I wasn’t on an easel (sometimes it's hard to tell). I was so humiliated. FREE? I’d hit bottom.

When I heard you brake, I cringed and if you’ve never seen a painting cringe, you can’t imagine. And then I realized the engine was going into reverse. A shudder ran over my canvas. Here we go into a thrift store, I thought. That’s what happens when you turn FREE. I’d almost rather have remained in the moldy basement than plunked on a shelf at the Angel Shop. Once, I spent a humiliating six months in the store being pawed over and rejected, before he took me back. Every day, thrifters peered into my face trying to see if there was “something of value” on the canvas, rejecting me to buy a cheap, chipped cup or a bad print.

 

Now hanging on the wall in your living room I can recall those days and laugh. Do you notice me chuckling? I try not to do it when you’re around because I know you like me as I was . . . kind of sad and thoughtful. Do I worry about mold, or the Angel Shop or that tortured painter? No! My biggest concern is what we’re watching on Netflix tonight!

Something artsy-fartsy? I hope so.

He painted me like this....

And then he tried this.

Then, multiples.

psychedelia....

He ruined my eyes!!

Jeune et Jolie

Courgette. Early season squash, ricotta dumplings, abalone mushrooms, marjoram

Birthday dinner at Jeune et Jolie in Carlsbad for my husband. Lovely restaurant with a energetic open kitchen. We asked to be seated neat the kitchen and sat almost in the action, fun if you like the details of foodservice. But the noise and activity is not for everyone, nor for every occasion. We loved it. Service was excellent but not stuffy or overly formal. For a quiet dinner, sit outside or near the front of the restaurant.

Jeune et Jolie

"Bagel Kit"

I held my severed fingertip and stump in a towel applying pressure to staunch the blood. It was a two-handed job which made hailing a cab difficult. They kept passing me by until I stepped out on the street almost in front of one. 

“Bellevue, emergency,” I shouted, climbing in the back. The driver looked at me in his rearview mirror and pulled away. That’s when I realized my lab coat was covered in blood. No wonder the cabs wouldn’t stop. 

Nobody on the street had given me a second look either. I guess it’s true what they say about New Yorkers. I was in Manhattan working for a bagel company and I’d whacked off the tip of my finger in the appropriately named bagel guillotine. 

At the hospital emergency entrance, I handed the driver my purse and asked him to find the fare, another two-handed operation impossible for me at the moment. 

“Shall I take a tip?” he asked. 

“Take whatever you want and give me the purse back,” I snapped. Geez, the guy didn’t exhibit

a drop of sympathy. 

I went to the check-in window. A nurse was fiddling with papers. 

  

“Help!” I whined. “I’ve cut my finger tip off. I need to see someone right away,” I said, on the verge of tears or fainting. 

“Sit down, honey. It’ll be a few minutes,” she said as she waved her hand towards the waiting room, about half-filled with people looking like me-- nervous and shell-shocked.  A huge Black guy with about six inches of knife hilt protruding from his bicep sprawled over a couple of seats. He too had a towel and some kind of ice pack they’d given him. Seated next to him was another blood-soaked woman. I sat down and managed to keep my whimpers internalized. A volunteer brought me a cup of water. 

Bellevue emergency sees on average 290 patients a day. People poured in like it was a sale in Filene's basement. Everyone cooperated, giving up seats to the people who needed them most. It felt like a MASH unit. Eventually, it was my turn. I felt like apologizing for even being there after seeing how bad some of the others were.

“Bagel Kit,” the young emergency room physician shouted after I unveiled my injury. My kind of accident happened so often in New York that they kept a kit just for the purpose of reattaching fingers, guillotined off, just as mine was. There was a nice selection of sutures and needles. 

The young doctor told me I was lucky the guillotine had been clean and even luckier that I wasn’t a little bit older. He selected a needle and suture from the nice selection in the kit. 

“The older you get, the less likely bits like this will reattach. It should be fine.” He was right. But I never regained the feeling and I never typed as fast again. 

Fiction: Double Moon Luck

Every day in Chengdu ended with a double moon night. The real moon would appear, forever cycling through its phases followed by the replica moon, an intense orange ball, always full and ringed with a fluorescent icy blue halo or golden yellow light. When both moons aligned for a few minutes each night, the commingled shine radiated luck in love on any man who sat beneath it. Everybody in Chengdu knew this to be true. 

Sadly, you could no longer see mountains or seas on the replica and it had ceased to light up the city streets as in the past. The replica was dying, running out of essential thruster fuel which kept it in orbit. With expiration imminent, the moon had shifted on its own into an unengineered fuel savings mode, and cut its light by half. The handler rocketeers, bewildered by the replica’s independent behavior, were trying to keep it aloft longer before it got sucked into earth's gravitational pull and disappeared. Nobody could predict when. One night it would be there and the next, gone. This could happen any day.

I had to get to Chengdu before the replica disappeared or its magic no longer worked. I’d promised Wingo.

Unlike most people, I couldn’t make my travel arrangements online because my reaction to antibody testing was erratic. Even though my at-home monitors registered all clear, I failed at public testings, so I was using the services and pre-clearance convenience of a live travel agency. There were few of these left in the city and they specialized in cases like mine. 

The office was on the forty-fifth floor of a half-empty glass tower, one of thousands in the city. They had converted the bottom half to rez use and the top was office space. I stepped through the heavy doors into an atrium and looked up to the sky, a small blue patch eighty floors up. Clothes, fluttering like bird wings, hung on lines that crisscrossed the open atrium space. Although laser cleaning had been available for a decade, many people still preferred to wash and dry using a clothesline. It made me dizzy to look up.

 

As I walked toward the elevator the smell of smoke, wheatmeat ribs and caramelized sugar hung in the air. Special scrubbing exhausts were added to the structures after they turned rez, but the household cooking aromas, too boisterous to be contained, leaked out from under apartment windows and doors. 

In the elevator I checked my cloak and looked at myself in the reflective metal of the elevator control panel. I reminded myself to keep from adjusting my crotch—an unconscious nervous gesture. My mother had excoriated me all my life for this nasty habit from my childhood. Last week, when we were out together, she scolded me about it. 

“The cloak doesn’t cover that, you know,” she said. “Cut it out! No woman wants to be seen with a man whose hand wanders to his crotch. Not even his mother.”

You’d never guess from the quiet hallway that the travel agency would be so busy. I stepped through the door into a riot of bustling people, flashing screens, people shouting and others talking into displays. There were old-fashioned screens on each desk rotating images and data at tremendous speed. Printers hissed and clattered, grinding out documents in a rainbow of colors. A young girl rode around the space on office skates, moving piles of boopaper from desk to desk. She’d pick up speed on a straightaway hallway and then brake suddenly, like a hockey player, and make a delivery. A gong sounded from somewhere and she’d be off again. 

I chewed a mint to cover the smell of the lunch beer I’d shared with Lan and Zio, my best friends. They were sympathetic when I told them about my Violet experience, sympathetic and curious.

“Did you call her?” Lan asked. 

“Nah. She made me uncomfortable,” I replied. 

“Uncomfortable might turn into something better,” he said.

I thought of her grope in the bathroom and shuddered. 

“I think you’re being a wimp,” said Zio. “So, she’s more aggressive than you bargained for. It could be a test. Shirley made me jump through a few hoops when we first met.”

Lan and Zio had been to Chengdu together last year and did the moon tour. Lan bumped into Ana in Chengdu and they married two months later. Zio was engaged to Shirley. I’d planned to go along with them, but failed to pass the antibody testing. Now they were starting new lives, and I still floundered around. 

My display buzzed and a pretty travel agent greeted me with an elbow bump. Even before I saw her wedding ring, I guessed Shio Kew was married. Most of the attractive women in the city were taken. She waved me to a chair near her desk and pushed an envelope full of travel docs toward me. 

“We rarely get requests for boopaper docs these days. It’s quite a pile, isn’t it?”

Besides testing for this trip, my moon trip, I was at the agency because I wanted to have paper tickets and brochures as souvenirs. If everything worked out as I hoped, I’d meet a woman and I wanted to start out on the right foot. My last relationship had crashed because of my lack of romance. 

“You throw everything away!’ Lila said when she saw ticket stubs from a concert in the trash. We’d been dating for six months. Lila saved everything, even the wrappings from straws from restaurants we visited together. She glued her memorabilia into books or made collages from them. 

“What?” I was bewildered by her anger. An orderly person, I kept my apartment tidy and didn’t let paper of any kind lie around. 

“I don’t keep useless papers. Just clutters everything up.” I should have known better.

“Useless?” Lila said. It was soon over between us. We broke up in one of those furious fights there’s no coming back from. But I learned something about how women think. 

When I told my mother about the break up, she was disappointed because she’d liked Lila and her family. But my excess status didn’t worry her as much as it did Wingo. 

“Don’t be too anxious,” my mother said. “Marriage is a cage. Those in want to get out and those out want to get in.”

As I shuffled through the papers, Kew cautioned, “Look over the details. Easy to fix now, harder later.” 

I concentrated on the itinerary and matched dates of trains and hotel reservations. My seat number, 088, was the luckiest number available for the moon platform. It had cost an extra triple premium for five nights and I made sure I had the boo tickets, confirmation of the fingerprint ID and the photo ID. 

Modern China was in many ways unrecognizable from the Before Times, but the cultural superstitions hadn’t changed. My father paid a premium for his display number, which ended in 888. When apartments went up for sale, the eighth floor units were priced highest and sold fastest. Even the Chinese government had honored the lucky number tradition when the BT summer Olympics began in Beijing at 8:08 p.m., August 8th, 2008.  

My tour included a round-trip ticket for the high-speed train to Chengdu, and five nights in the Moonlight hotel, a simple walk away from the moon observation platform. By day I’d visit the panda breeding station and the museum. I reserved one night for the face-changing Schezwan opera—the remaining four nights I’d bask in the moon glow.

“Your seat has Feng Shui too,” the travel agent said. “And it faces the Sea of Fecundity.” She didn’t have to tell me this was the most desired position for men looking for wives, and for men unable to conceive a child. 

The very last piece of business was the test. My armpits were damp. I ran my hands over my bald head and shifted in my seat.

“I’ve had trouble with the test,” I told Kew, understating my problem.

She shrugged and asked me to put my index finger in the V machine, which had double screens—one facing her and one facing me. I rubbed it on my shirt and inserted it. I could feel my heart rate increase. The ancient Mac sputtered and fussed for a few seconds as it woke up, and then data splashed across both monitors. My temperature, blood pressure and oxygen levels were all normal but the fucking antibody level was blinking red. 

“Oh, oh,” said Miss Kew. 

Not again! My corona vaccine reaction had been abnormal since my first shots twelve years ago. It took three rounds of jabs before it caught on with me and I boosted every January. I had sufficient antibodies, but they didn’t show up on many of the various screening tests still in use. 

This agency test set-up with the finger was antiquated, but the trains accepted the results, unlike the airlines. 

Kew was reassuring. “Let’s take it again,” she said. “Take off your cloak.” I stood and let it fold itself and settle on the desk.

I pushed up my sleeve, shook my wrist to relax it, took a deep breath and stuck my finger in the machine again. New data sprinkled onto the screen. No red lines. I was clear to travel out of my sector, to Chengdu.