Who goes there? Please leave comments so (An Aries Knows)!
The other night when I was going out to Green Acres for a sewathon with Tim, he decided he wouldn’t wait for me before he ate, because “you never know what may happen on the road.” I’m sure he was talking about traffic, and not my tendency to get sidetracked if I have a camera with me.
But indeed, I did, and here’s what caught my eye at the Baby River Oaks theater.
Today I was thinking that I haven’t done much in the way of LJ posting this week. Just Runway Monday, Hump Day Happy, and Photo Friday. I can’t regret that it means life has settled down a notch or two after months of upheaval and turmoil. I like it when things at The Compound are serene (with the exception of Rex’s stitches, but that’s really Tim’s LJ domain). It has either rained or been sweltering all week, so I haven’t felt like getting out much, plus I don’t feel quite the same compulsion when my camera is with Nikon instead of with me.
Tonight, however, I had to run a couple of errands, including to Walgreen’s. As I pulled up, I noticed a pair of red high heels on the trunk of the car next to me. I really wished for my camera as I was walking inside. When I returned, they were still there. I remembered that I could use my cell phone camera, even though every photo I take with it is crap. Still, I snapped this photo.
Not entirely happy–it’s hard getting used to a new phone–I decided to take another. That’s when I spied a cute blonde walking out of Walgreen’s. She didn’t seem to be heading for that car, but I stepped back just in case. She clicked her key chain and the car lights flashed.
Here’s our conversation:
Me: Is this your car?
Her: (slowly) Yeeees. (starts to open door)
Me: (pointing to back of car) Are those your red high heels?
Her: (gasp) OHMYGOD, thank you! They’re not mine, but she’d have KILLED me if I lost them. (tosses shoes in back seat, then gets stricken look on her face) SHIT! I wonder what else I set on the back of the trunk?!? I gotta go!
Me: Good luck!
Current Photo Friday theme: Awful
Abandoned houses are
illusion reaching
its end;
wind and rain and time
root for the
ground.
They have the calmness brought
by defeat,
the bearing of farmers
who are whittled
and resist no more than
enough.
See how easily the earth
takes them back:
an eye here,
a bone there, the same rite
as with the animate.
The open windows
are in the flight path of night
tired and bound
for home.
Zorika Petic, 2001
This morning I was awakened by the baying of the hounds as UPS breached East Gate security to deliver a box. I lay in bed for a while, trying to remember anything I might have ordered. Maybe I accidentally won an ebay auction or bought books in an insomniatic stupor. With a sigh, I finally caved to my curiosity and retrieved the package.
It was my address all right, but it was to the name of a person who didn’t live here. I called information for Mr. MW’s number, but he isn’t listed. (Farewell, landlines, with your helpful operators.) Once I knew that Tim was up, too, I called and asked him if Mr. MW was one of his pseudonyms or aliases. He denied it. I tried to locate a number for the business in Brooklyn that shipped the package, but that didn’t pan out. So Tim leashed EZ and we walked down to the Abomination That Is The Ginormous Condo to see if anyone named MW lived there. No one was home in any of the units, but the name didn’t match their mail. (Yes, okay, we checked their mail, but we didn’t tamper with or steal anything, so leave us alone, USPS Police.)
I really didn’t want to take the box to UPS, because I know what it’s like to wait and wait for a package that never comes. So Tim, EZ, and I loaded up in the car and drove to a couple of Montrose businesses that might have more familiarity with the residents in the ‘hood than we do. One of those businesses is a florist. I spoke to the owner, J, outside his shop. He didn’t know MW, but since he thought it was sweet of us to go to such effort, he lured me inside to his cooler and presented me with an Augusta Louise rose, which is pictured here in a vase from The Brides’ wedding because I couldn’t bear to cut any of its elegant length. It smells DIVINE. If you ever need a Houston florist, just ask, and I’ll hook you up.
After J was introduced to Tim, we were on our way–this time to surrender the package to UPS. Sorry, Mr. MW; I hope it all works out for you. In the meantime, thanks to you and your mysterious address and especially to J for giving me such a lovely gift to share with my LJ friends and readers.
In July of last year, I posted about one of the best times I ever had at a booksigning when I saw Dean James, Carolyn Haines, and Mary Saums at Houston’s Murder By the Book.
I got to repeat that pleasure Saturday when they returned to the scene of the crime. Dean was signing his new Bridge Club mystery, The Unkindest Cut, written under the pseudonym Honor Hartman. Carolyn was signing her newest Sarah Booth mystery, Wishbones. And Mary Saums was signing her second Thistle and Twigg mystery, Mighty Old Bones.
After last year’s post, Mark commented that I must have been in a good mood, but I attributed my high spirits to giddy exhaustion. Yesterday made me rethink that. There is just something about these three writers up close and in person that uplifts me. It was unexpectedly hard to tell Dean that my mother had died. He met her on several occasions, and as fellow Mississippi natives, she loved talking to him. Besides being funny, Dean is the soul of kindness. We promised to get together soon over dinner and just talk.
“Just talking” is a favorite Southern pastime, and I suppose that when I’m with these three, I feel a sense of kinship because we are all Southerners. Mary’s an Alabama native who now lives in Tennessee. Carolyn, like Dean, is from Mississippi and now lives in Alabama. I realize that technically, Texas is part of the South (it did fight, after all, on the right losing right side of the War Between the States), but perhaps because, as Lynne has pointed out to me, I live in such a multicultural city, Texas doesn’t feel like the South. When these three writers start talking, their accents are musical, and their stories crack me up. I told Carolyn I could listen to her all day, and she suggested that I might want to call her ex-husbands for another opinion.
For my readers who enjoy Dean’s work (including his Simon Kirby-Jones Mystery series), this is the last of the Bridge Club Mysteries. He will, however, have another offering from his Trailer Park Mysteries, written under the name Jimmie Ruth Evans, and I was allowed an advance peek at the new cover, which he said I could share with you.
Dean, Carolyn, and Mary made my day–and now I get to look forward to the pleasure of reading about murder and craziness at a bridge players’ retreat in the Hill Country of Texas, in the fictional town of Tullulah on the edge of Alabama’s Bankhead National Forest, and in the life of a scrappy P.I. with her own personal ghost as a new adventure takes her from fictional Zinnia, Mississippi, to Costa Rica via Hollywood. These are three writers who have certainly managed their caffeine properly.
On July 12, 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born. While I suspect Thoreau the man might have been a bit dour, I find that I turn to him often for his intellectual brilliance. To fulfill a promise I made earlier today, and to honor Thoreau’s love of nature, I shot photos of a few characters enjoying the great outdoors.
I’ve got no vacation plans coming up, no Jackie Collins stories, no dancing poodles, no gorgeous flower photos, no great shoes to show you. I’ve got crafts night photos, but those are top secret until next week. I don’t even have adventures with Rex at the drive-through to share.
However, I’ve got some signs.
First, I finished my copy edits about ten p.m. and you know what that means.
Yup, a trip out to the no-longer-at-the-airport post office. They have the BEST freaking postal workers out there late at night. Really, I think these people need to write Marika’s post office in NOLA and tell them to be nicer to her.
Since I was out that way and hadn’t had dinner, I went to Houston’s only location of the Little Burgers With the Big Heart(burn).
But when I was on my way to fill up with another kind of fuel, I saw my very favorite sign of all.
WhYYYYYYYYYY?
People sometimes do strange things when they grieve. The stories I could tell–but I won’t, because I save the really juicy stuff about my friends for novels.
I think I’ve said on here before that I began adding Barbies to my collection after my friend Steve R died in 1992. It made perfect sense–I even KNEW what I was doing and why I was doing it. When politics and faith and hate and love and injustice and death all collide, and you lose the last shred of your innocence, it’s not so crazy to start spending your money on something that harks back to a simpler, better, less complicated time–and Barbies were a perfect symbol of that for me. A few years and a few losses later, grief finally loosened its grip on me, and the Barbie-buying compulsion stopped just as suddenly as it began.
I’m grieving now, but I’m aware of other friends who are grieving (you know who you are; call me when you’re ready), including Lynne. Monday marked the second anniversary of her husband’s death, and I’ve always contended that seconds are harder than firsts. We mentally prepare ourselves for firsts. We know they’re coming long before they get here, and we’re probably still a little numb. By seconds, we’ve stopped constantly guarding ourselves against the shocks and jolts of memory–so when those anniversaries come, not only are our defenses down, but we’re back in full-on feeling mode. Hopefully, if we’ve allowed ourselves to grieve, and we’ve channeled some of our grief into positive outlets, thirds are not as sharply felt–that doesn’t mean the sense of loss isn’t still there, but it’s not as cruel to our emotional systems three years later. As the years go by, time softens our memories, taking the edge off the painful ones and shining more light on the happier ones. This is all part of healing.
Some people actually say grief is about a two- to four-week process. I think these people may be alien life forms, but that’s not the point of this discussion. I’m not big on judging how and for how long people grieve. We do what we need to do. In my own life, I’ve found that when I emerge from my first haze of stunned loss and start feeling things more intensely, I feel ALL things more intensely. If I’m prone to cry more, I’m also inclined to laugh more. The lines between mourning and celebrating become blurred. Fortunately, although my friends are as diverse a group as I can imagine, they all have one thing in common: a sense of humor. Laughter is one of the best healing forces of all.
After Lynne took me to Mark’s on Monday night (which seems backward, as most people would have treated her; just call us rogue mourners), when I said, “I need to go Barbie shopping,” I caught her raised eyebrow and added, “No, no. It’s not like before. I want them for a wedding photo shoot, and I’ve already got plans for all the other bride-and-groom dolls I’ve shot.” Then she said, “Well, at least you’ve already had your kitchen remodeled,” and we both started giggling. That was her big pricey project after Craig’s death–though I contend that putting money into updating a home is a more sensible reaction to loss than, for example, buying a 1970ish Datsun 240z. Not that I’m saying anyone did that.
Behind the cut you can see a bit of our Monday night in photos.
You may remember this shot from last year’s Parade.
Here’s this year’s version (“Where’s Rex?”):
It was a great day of Pride, starting with my breakfast at Baby Barnaby’s. I wish they were open all day, because I’m rarely out and about early enough to eat breakfast there.
I have three small stickers on the back of my car which are badly faded. I decided it’s time to replace them, so I went to Hollywood Video/Books to see if I could find duplicates. I got a new PFLAG sticker no problem. But when I asked the cashier about a red ribbon, all I got was a blank look. He honestly didn’t know what a red ribbon is for! I’m still trying to get my head around that.
However, their former manager had bought tons of our books for us to sign. After all these years, there’s one lone copy of The Deal remaining. I thought about buying it–it’s out of print and I only have a couple of copies myself. I decided it’s just waiting for the right reader and left it there.
For the rest of my Pride photos, check out my Flickr set. If you do a slide show, you won’t see titles and captions, but if you go through them individually, I’ve tried to identify most of what I shot.
Someone asked me recently about a post I did that “disappeared.” A lot of times when I write about something private–especially having to do with my family or friends–I’ll keep it public long enough for it to be read by them. Once I know they’ve seen it, I’ll make it private, which means it stays in my archives for me to see, but it’s no longer accessible to the public or even to my LJ friends. I can’t make those posts “friends only” because–weirdly–not everyone has a LJ account. I know; it mystifies me, too.
This is one of those “Dear Diary posts,” so I’ll put it behind a cut and y’all can skip the boring minutiae of my daily life because honestly, I know it’s not that riveting. It’s just my chance to include far-away family and friends in things they’d normally be part of.