a fourth approach: stamped

I frame a day playfully. The elements include tasks on a list in my mind, and added loose threads of being in a town, I left almost a decade ago.  I have 30-year roots. A college town changes, but some of the characters remain the same or recycle themselves. I walked into 411 for dinner and thought Heidi was at the bar, only she isn’t a member of this cast. The conversation brought to life a few friends who have been dead a long time. I remember people who have been dead 30 years. I am fascinated.

One friend ended up with a blueberry farm in the northwestern part of the state. I think he told me that the last time we unexpectedly ran into each other. I had been thinking about him in the way that someone can be remembered without personal details, because I had eaten lunch in his hometown. I hadn’t been there for a long time and it was the setting for an old television show.

The morning developed around the theme of not wanting to get out of bed, and I decided to play at indulging myself. I lightly wondered at the lethargy, but ended up reading for an hour about the brain, pain and education in three different sources. Eventually a shower was more inviting than bed. During my stretches I was particularly curious about the further stretch of my Achilles tendon.

Breakfast had the extra treat of a few homemade raisins.
I don’t know why I get such a kick out of the sour candy–like taste of my Washington raisins. But from the beginning they have brought me a joyful zing. I want to jump up and down and say "I made these, aren't they grand?"

Remembering that John Scott had asked me who was going to help me deal with the mess in West Virginia, I decided to enlist my brother’s help in filling the Andrew’s lane pothole. I still wonder about the natural formation of potholes. There must be knowledge about this. A few shovels and brooms, some broken cinder block and we were well on our way. In fact we were done very soon. Ray mostly checked something on his blackberry.

I decided that banks were the task of the morning. I suddenly had the urge and energy to roll up max’s damaged Polaroid pulls from his 60th birthday party that had been altered by the fire in Hinton. So although I didn’t get out of the house until noon, I did manage to visit 3 banks and one post office and a copy center and accomplish five nested tasks. There was something about walking down the street and seeing the college town as it reinvents itself for the next set of students. This seemed obvious rather than nostalgic. The panhandlers still rub me wrong. While in the copy center an odd fellow came in; and overhearing his comments, I had to wonder about his sanity. It inspired a brief playful inquiry into the not all accounted for characters that a town supports. And that made me think back on the panhandlers and their stories. I felt like a town could have a portfolio of characters that everyone knew. It seemed to playfully promote safety, rather than compromise the right to anonymity.

In my own quirky way I was getting glue from the copy shop to use on old stamps that had gotten stuck together in a safe that some undoubtedly quirky fellow had had in his house in DC. They had become the responsibility of the real estate agent to remove. I became the user, reuser, and recycler of these stamps. Since they had to be soaked, they didn’t meet a standard of philatelic interest. I was using some of these stamps to finally send a scoutmaster in Texas some other stamps for his troop. This man, also a physician had contacted my lawyer brother for some unknown reason and solicited stamps from him. My brother was uninterested, though I was quite amused to think that there was finally somewhere to send vast numbers of n-plicates that had begun to fill more and more space. Although I don’t know this man, I included a note to document the times I had tried to send this envelope over the past year. I had lost his address when my hard drive died, as we say. And I had been surprised to find an envelope that he had sent to confirm he was still doing this project with the scouts. Of course, this year’s hard drive crash almost threatened to force a repeat of last year's dance of the envelope without an address, but part of the back up saved his address. So I can only hope he gets a kick of the energy required to supply him with said stamps.

The woman at the post office looked familiar and I asked her how long she had worked there. Did she say 37 years, with Friday being her last day? She liked the old stamps on my envelope, which reminded her of when she started working at the post office and the rate was 8 cents for a first class letter.

I went over toward the other bank and was distracted by a photo and the word ‘Hapa.’ Having links to Hawaii, the word immediately evoked “Hapa Haole,“ the term for mixed ethnicity. Sure enough some guy in LA had a traveling show of photographs of mixed ethnic humans with hand written text below their image about how they answer the question, "Who are you? I was delighted with his work and the way it was displayed and how I had stumbled across it and taken the time to explore it. It inspires an oral history project in Hawaii: Were we what we remember?

On the walk home, which took me along a route I used to walk everyday for years, I came to a sudden construction block with no path around. I had to retrace my steps. I had an intuition some path would be blocked, I had no idea how blocked it might be. Along the reroute, I picked up two crushed cans and wondered about the value of a single recycled aluminum can. They remain an icon of our time. The crushed form spoke as well. Which king paid more than the price of gold for a set of Aluminum utensils? When had it become cheaper to reuse aluminum than mine it from Bauxite? Did I drive through bauxite mines at the border of South Dakota and Wyoming in the Riley 1.5? Those photos were sadly lost; part of the first hard drive crash. The Riley continued to run.

I stopped in at Fine Feathers at University Square, after I noticed it again last week. The store had been new in my first years here. It was like walking onto some kind of stage. I saw no one, then after a moment I realized there were two women sitting to the far left. One spoke. I asked how long the store had been there and who had started it? How long had they worked there? They answered my questions. In some fashion, they were of another age. The age that wasn’t fully extant even when the store opened, I imagined. I think we were each charmed by the other. 34 years she said, and she had worked there from the beginning for the owner. What wonderful and possibly grotesque stories of dresses and the people who wore them…
I came home to write this, enjoying peanut butter on rice cakes and a little Point Roberts dried fruit leather.
We’ll go and swim for 45 minutes this evening as a conclusion to the day's play. The love of life is in the details. Was it playful? So it seems to me.