So It's True, Shit Does Happen

 The other day my boyfriend had an endoscopy to see if all that nasty old cancer was gone from his stomach. "Ain't no cancer here!" the pictures said. Awesome!

Later that night I came out of the kitchen, where I was eating ice cream out of the container (I do that sometimes), and found him doubled over on the sofa, what's left of his hair all matted down with sweat.

"Is something wrong?" I tried to sound casual because when your boyfriend's going through chemotherapy you can't get all worked up over every little thing.

"I think I need to go to the emergency room," he answered in a voice like a cat with laryngitis. Um, not awesome. Turns out he has pancreatitis, which is painful but not deadly. So I was right not to get all worked up. But it still made me think of that line from "Shakespeare's Sister" by The Smiths: I can smile about it now, but at the time it was terrible. (groan)

Good Morning, Baltimore!

Oh, Larry...

Autumnal Tints

On Thanksgiving morning I woke up in the rosy dawn and saw an explosion of autumn colors outside my window glowing in the early sunlight. People probably say this every time they see an extravagant sunrise, but I really don't think I've ever seen anything like it before. The sky was all streaked psychedelic with pinks and tangerine which gave an electric sizzle to the color of the leaves that lasted all day. Admittedly, I'm rarely awake early enough to see the sunrise unless I'm still up from the night before, so that could be part of the reason why it seemed so incredible. And granted, I had probably taken Percocet the night before.... Oh, Larry, at this point, I don't remember. But it's very likely. Nonetheless, the fantastic autumnal glow made me think of an essay called "Autumnal Tints" by Henry David Thoreau in which he describes his idea for an autumn leaf book. On each page of the book he would duplicate as exactly as possible the color and vibrancy of each variety of leaf around his home in Concord as it acquired its full intensity. "You would need only to turn over its leaves to take a ramble through the autumn woods whenever you pleased."

Unfortunately, he never got around to doing it. But that's part of Thoreau's appeal for me---he had plans for several ambitious projects that he never finished. Some were so varied and complex he didn't live long enough to figure out how they would come together. And because he spent so much of his time on what looked to others like a waste of time, many people thought of him as a failure who lacked ambition. Familiar story. Anyhow, he never made his leaf book, but he knew what the leaves looked like and he knew their sequence of change in the landscape. And luckily he did manage to leave his descriptions of these autumnal tints for those who wouldn't see them otherwise, since he also knew that "a man sees only what concerns him."

The San Francisco Twins

A couple of weeks ago I was having dinner with some friends in San Francisco. As we were being led to our table, one of my friends let out a muffled groan and I noticed, sitting at a table diagonally across from us were the famous San Francisco Twins. Well, I guess they're kind of famous considering I found an entry about them on Wikipedia after I Googled them. I had seen them around Union Square a couple of times before, talking to tourists and smiling while a half-dozen work-a-day types snapped photos of them with their camera phones. And come to think of it, I'd seen them waving to passers by from the window of the very restaurant we were sitting in now.

Being fairly new to San Francisco I thought they were pretty cute, little whimsical gnomes in their faux leopard coats and matching hats, their dress suits all a-twinkle with sequins. After we got settled at our table, my attention kept being pulled in their direction, mainly because the two lady gnomes were talking pretty loudly to the captive audience closely surrounding them, the restaurant being fairly small. A few moments of observation made me realize all the diners within close proximity were polarized into a few distinct camps---those who had innocently and unwittingly entered into conversation with the lady gnomes and were now enmeshed; those who had been reluctantly drawn in and were now almost futilely trying to withdraw; and those (my group was of this last) who had managed to escape by avoiding direct eye contact and by eating their food as rapidly and purposefully as possible.

But the main item that kept drawing my attention back to them was the carafe of wine on their table which was a constant cause of bickering between them. It was obvious they'd each had a glass or two already and now the question seemed to be---who was going to finish the last of the cheap jug wine? At one point, one of the lady gnomes grabbed the carafe and poured most of what was left into her own glass. I say most, because much of it she poured out all over the table which caused the other lady gnome to scold her. Some elbowing and arm wrestling followed which we thought might develop into an actual physical fight. It was like watching that scene in Clash of the Titans where the three Stygian Witches are fighting over the glass eye so they can each get a glimpse at Perseus. I thought for sure that carafe of wine was going to go flying. But the lady gnomes managed to work it out somehow without it coming to that.

Afterwards I was telling some other friends about this encounter with the Twins and somebody exclaimed, "I thought one of them had died?!!" Maybe so. But it would be difficult to tell which one, exactly.