Amusing Coincidence

I use Gmail for nearly all my email needs, so I don't really have much of a spam problem. I check the spam folder from time to time to make sure nothing good got caught in Gmail's mighty filters, and delete all with a single stroke. Some days, spam and email subscriptions collide to amuse me, as they did this morning when I found this in my spam folder:

And this in the folder that contains my newsletters from the Daily OM:

 I won't even bother apologizing for giggling like a twelve-year-old.

Counting Pennies -- A gem from the past

Naked trees at Shilshole Bay

Back in 1999, I wrote this letter to my friend Jason, in part to encourage him to come to Seattle for a visit over the holidays. With his permission, I shared the letter with the nice folks who run rivertrout.com, a strange little website devoted to epistolary literature. Because their site is built in a strange way, I've never been able to link directly to the piece, so I've decided to republish it here because I like it and because its message holds true not just for Jason, but also for so many friends and loved ones near and far.

Seattle, WA
September 15, 1999

Dearest Jason,

Autumn lurks around the corners of the Olympics and the Cascades, creeping in disguised as marine fog in the night, and lying thick about the land well through the day.

Fall comes so slowly here, not like in Pennsylvania, where one hard frost paints the hills all gold and crimson in a day or two. It takes its time both coming and going, as if it likes the Northwest best of all, so it arrives early, hands summer its hat, and sticks around to make sure winter is settled in before it goes away again.

The change in weather prompted me to stay home yesterday, as if in reverence to the upcoming season. I took the chance to clean the kitchen, and nearly broke my wrist lifting the Mason jar I keep on the counter for spare change.

The weight of it surprised me, and it made me laugh when I imagined what a fortune we would have found it in the old days.

It is a strange new feeling having some money: My new job is more rewarding financially than I've even had a chance to comprehend. It's odd to know for the first time in my life that I'm not perched on the brink of economic disaster, not rolling coin to make the rent, the way we used to do back home.

I took the jar to the grocery store and dropped the contents into one of those machines that counts your coin and spits out a receipt you can take to the cashier for paper money. According to the machine, I had $63.48 in change. I made it a gift to charity.

The process got me thinking about days even older than ours, days when I spent so much time with my grandfather learning most of the stuff that gets me through my life. I remembered rainy afternoons when he would sense my boredom a moment before it arrived and reached up onto the high shelf in the living room for the metal canister where he kept the pennies.

It was always full, I swear.

In childhood, I thought my grandfather was among the richest men in the world because he always had that can full of pennies. He would spread them out in the middle of his desk, and we would go to work counting them up, two by two: my index and middle fingers trapping a penny each, then gliding them to the edge of the desk and dropping them in my catching hand.

We would count them thus, five strokes to a dime and fifty to a dollar, stack them up in rows, ten high and five deep, and Pap would shimmy them into those dull red paper wrappers, fold up the ends, and stack the finished product like firewood on the corner of the desk.

That was the work of it, what we did with the preponderance of 1955 to 1965 Lincoln heads, but the fun was in the ones we didn't roll. He taught me to look for the ones with wheat on their backs, for Canadian ones with the face of the young queen or, better still, her father. He told me legends about ones that had an Indian's head on them, but I never found one of those.

Still, those unconventional pennies were precious to me, and the thrill of finding them was not at all unlike the wonder I figured I'd experience if I found a dinosaur bone in my back yard.

When we were finished counting, I'd have a little pile, at most a dime's worth of minted excitement. I'd scoop them into my hand and close my fingers around them tightly until I gotten them back to my room, where I kept the velvet box.

Pap had given me that, too: a long, slender jewelry box covered in dark blue velvet, hinged with shiny brass, and lined with silk the color of cream. I'd pry open the lid, and slip the pennies inside to join the others I'd collected over time.

That box got pretty heavy over the years, and by the time I was past counting pennies for entertainment, I couldn't open the lid without some spilling out. It shouldn't surprise you to know that I still have that box.

I'm not counting pennies any more, but I do still count my oddities as treasures.

Consider yourself counted.

With love,

L.A.

It's NaNo Time Again

A few weeks ago, I was lost without a single good idea swimming in my head and looking forward to a blissfully lazy November with no word metrics, no plotting, no character-birthing. I was simply going to sit in my comfy chair reading books that other people had written and getting caught up on my knitting.

Then I started thinking about Steampunk Angels. And I couldn't think of anything else.

I was sunk.

If you want to know more, you'll just have to wait for the finished book, but if you'd like to show your support for my writing habit and help the good folks at NaNoWriMo continue to sponsor free creative writing programs for kids and adults, please consider making a donation on my fundraising page.

That's really about all I have time to write. I have a little wordcount widget over there to the right that says I'm on track, but I'd like to keep my wordcount high at the beginning of the month just in case I slack off a bit over Thanksgiving.

What I remember

I remember being not awake enough to fully grasp what I was seeing, what Matt Lauer was talking about on the Today Show as I poured my first cup of coffee.

I remember sinking onto the couch as the reality sunk in.

I remember worrying about friends in New York City on business and feeling utterly despondent over the unfathomable loss.

I remember the next few days under a pristine blue sky, unmarred by contrails.

I remember the strange silence under that sky.

I remember a few days after, walking to the convenience store/deli on the corner not far from work and telling the Middle Eastern owner and his wife how sorry I was that people had come into their business and called them horrible names.

I remember watching as liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, folks of all stripe and order, came together as Americans. We reached out to each other in charity and fellowship. We gave what we had to give, and sometimes a little more. We helped out. We practiced random acts of kindness. We set aside, for the most part, our petty differences.

Yeah, I remember that.

My grandmother's girl

Back when my father was alive, he and I would frequently get into discussions in which I was obviously the person playing the role of the responsible adult. His favorite insult to throw at me at such times was, "You sound just like my mother."
 Though I never said it aloud, I often thought, "Thank you. That's the nicest thing you could possibly have said."
True, my grandmother was not an easy woman to live with. Strong willed, highly opinionated, powerfully intelligent and prone to meddling, she was ahead her time by at least a half century. Educated, professional, enlightened well beyond the immigrant middle class constraints of her birth and upbringing, she lived a life of her own choosing, even when her choices -- like divorcing the father of her young son at a time when decent women did no such thing or getting herself a college education and later marrying a man 13 years her junior -- made her the talk of our little town.
I adored her and I grieve the loss of her still after nearly 40 years.
There is no denying that I am hers. Whenever I look at my hands, I wonder why they cannot simply pick up knitting needles and manifest sweaters, scarves, afghans, and all manner of wonders the ways hers did. Some days, I catch my reflection in the mirror or a storefront, and my breath catches in my throat. I look more like her every day. Today, a little more than usual, I think:

This is my self portrait for today. I'm doing one a day this year to document myself at 50. I think she would have liked this one. My hair is out of my eyes.

Unintentional Domesticity

So, my husband, Damon, played his guitar for a few hours today at the Magnoloia Farmer's Market. I went along in my traditional role of Swiss Army Wife, prepared to help carry his gear, sell a few CDs, and smile at the nice folks who stop for a few minutes to listen while he plays,

After he got set up and started playing, I strolled the booths, discovering local honey, some beautiful beets and baby carrots, kale, and leeks. I also picked up 6 pints of strawberries and two very sexy tomatoes. I was all set to come home, take a nap, and whip up something tasty for dinner.

Damon played well. I sold a couple of CDs, and the transient audience made mostly of people stopping to sit while they ate their really yummy looking veggie & cheese quesadillas was generous with their tips.We also swapped a CD for some delicious garlic-dill Cheddar curd from Appel Farms.

After he finished playing, one of the sweet ladies who works at the market came by and dropped a bag of carrots and chard on the table. She told Damon to hang out a bit, then returned to our table three more times, each time carrying more fresh, lovely (mostly organic) produce: more baby carrots, arugula, sorrel, asparagus, green onions and leeks. It seems that far from being a gig for sales & tips, the market pays its performers in produce.

When we got home, I went to work in the kitchen, cleaning the beets and carrots first, tossing them in olive oil, salt & pepper, and popping them into a hot oven to roast while I cleaned and bagged the greens. When the beets and carrots came out of the oven, I turned it down to 175 degrees and popped a couple of canning jars in to sterilize. Then I went to work on two pints of the strawberries (I gave two pints to our neighbors when we got home), cleaning and cutting them into pieces just the right size to dissolve slowly into jam.

The jam is done and cooling. While I was making it, I kept thinking about baking biscuits or scones or making Monte Cristo sandwiches. Sounds like I may know what we're having for breakfast and lunch tomorrow. I also want to incorporate some of the leeks and the asparagus into a nice risotto.

I still have two pints of naked strawberries waiting to be eaten or turned into a pie.

It's almost time for dinner. I think we'll eat the carrots and beets with salmon or tuna. 

I never did get that nap.

Memento Mori

Some events refuse to fade from our consciousness. They linger in our memories, insinuate themselves into our value systems, shape the way we think about basic concepts such as home, love, innocence, and security. Moments that are either too wonderful or too awful to forget stay with us, to comfort or confound us as their context demands.

One such event from my youth was the murder of a school mate more than 30 years ago. She was a nice girl who dated a not-so-nice boy. She had a sweet smile and a soft voice. I will remember her forever with feathered bangs and the striped shirt that she wore in her 1977 school picture. The picture that her parents and police provided to the media during the brief search that ended with the chilling news that her body had been found.

It is that moment, six days after she went missing when we learned that she was dead, that haunts me. Death had come knocking before in the guise of old age, accident, even suicide. It wasn't death that left its mark, but something darker, stranger, far more terrifying. A girl who went to my school, walked the same hallways that I walked, sat in the same molded plastic desks, ate lunch in the same cafeteria, had been murdered. Brutalized, raped, and murdered. Until then, I had no idea that such things could really happen outside the pages of books or the dark, blighted alleys of the inner city.

Mary Irene Gency's murder changed the way we all thought about our town, our friends, the people down the street. Fear came to stay after that. I don't know if I ever felt really safe again. Especially since no one was ever charged, tried, or convicted of the crime.

But that may change. It seems that forensic evidence has provided police with a break in the case after 33 years. The men accused of committing this heinous crime, it turns out, are the two boys suspected at the time: her boyfriend, who lived down the street from me, and his best friend, who had dated one of my friends.

Time will tell whether they actually committed the crime. Justice may or may not be done. Regardless of what happens, one thing will never change: Mary died a horrible death, she was robbed of her innocence her life and whatever future she may have dreamed.

The news comes in part as a glimmer of hope that her family may find some peace and closure and in part as a new chilling reminder to embrace every minute as if were your last.

Mary, I do hope you're able to rest in peace.