On winter weekends, my father would drop me off at the ice skating rink with a ten dollar bill and I stayed there the entire day, skating in circles under bright lights with my best friend, B96 blasting hits. I wasn’t a great skater, but I came for the chewy pretzels slathered in hot, gooey cheese, eaten on paper plates with plastic knives and forks around a crackling fire pit. We had very little supervision in those days but all the time in the world to obsess over boys and lace our skates as tight as possible so we didn’t slip on the ice.
I learned to sing folk songs at summer camp and saw my soul mirrored back to me in the key of Joni Mitchell, and company. So I begged my parents to sign me up for lessons at Guitar Works when I was 14. My mother reluctantly bought me an a gorgeous acoustic guitar but somehow, that act of faith in me crushed my will to practice. It felt like a jinx of sorts. I’d feel so cool lugging my guitar in its black case on the bus to and from my lessons with a guy named Brian with John Denver round wire glasses on his face, but I couldn’t stay loyal to the pursuit and my fingers burned with the cuts of trying.
Yesterday, I went to a local diner with my boyfriend and we stopped in the lobby to buy girl scout cookies at a little table set up by a few girl scouts and their enthusiastic mothers. I noticed the patches on their vests and felt a pang of sorrow for the girl scout in me who earned so many patches but never saw them fastened to my sash. I collected so many patches for my good deeds and tasks, but I didn’t have that kind of mother. Of course, we forgive our dead mothers for their mishaps, but I envied all the girls whose patches made it to their sashes.
I’m reading this book about surfing and one idea keeps washing over me, the notion that to ride a wave you have to learn to read a wave. That requires a “close, painstaking study of a tiny patch of coast.” A wave is a guitar is a poem. No matter where we choose to fix our gaze, we must learn to pay attention to the “innumerable subcortical perceptions too subtle and fleeting to express,” and then find a way to express it.
Sometimes a pair of words will pop up in my mind like floaters. Coated, coded. Enormous, anonymous. I usually just plop them on some platform and forget about them, but really I should be cataloguing these little gems. Word play is a more subversive game than it looks; writers untangle knots and open boxes; writers slice into a cake and then they bake it; writers crack open a word like an egg and out comes its bright yellow yolk asking if it’s the sun.
Transit Slips, #9
I learned to sing folk songs at summer camp and saw my soul mirrored back to me in the key of Joni Mitchell, and company. So I begged my parents to sign me up for lessons at Guitar Works when I was 14. My mother reluctantly bought me an a gorgeous acoustic guitar but somehow, that act of faith in me crushed my will to practice. It felt like a jinx of sorts. I’d feel so cool lugging my guitar in its black case on the bus to and from my lessons with a guy named Brian with John Denver round wire glasses on his face, but I couldn’t stay loyal to the pursuit and my fingers burned with the cuts of trying.
Yesterday, I went to a local diner with my boyfriend and we stopped in the lobby to buy girl scout cookies at a little table set up by a few girl scouts and their enthusiastic mothers. I noticed the patches on their vests and felt a pang of sorrow for the girl scout in me who earned so many patches but never saw them fastened to my sash. I collected so many patches for my good deeds and tasks, but I didn’t have that kind of mother. Of course, we forgive our dead mothers for their mishaps, but I envied all the girls whose patches made it to their sashes.
I’m reading this book about surfing and one idea keeps washing over me, the notion that to ride a wave you have to learn to read a wave. That requires a “close, painstaking study of a tiny patch of coast.” A wave is a guitar is a poem. No matter where we choose to fix our gaze, we must learn to pay attention to the “innumerable subcortical perceptions too subtle and fleeting to express,” and then find a way to express it.
Sometimes a pair of words will pop up in my mind like floaters. Coated, coded. Enormous, anonymous. I usually just plop them on some platform and forget about them, but really I should be cataloguing these little gems. Word play is a more subversive game than it looks; writers untangle knots and open boxes; writers slice into a cake and then they bake it; writers crack open a word like an egg and out comes its bright yellow yolk asking if it’s the sun.
Transit Slips, #9
