Whitewash and Boredom

Edward F. Gumnick — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:18:50 +0000

Sheldon Avenue in Baltimore was where my maternal grandparents lived, the home where my mother grew up, the place my brother and sisters and I dreaded visiting. Or at least I dreaded visiting. It was an orderly street of row houses and sycamore trees, with long concrete staircases at the lower end, shorter staircases at the top end where the street intersected with Belair Road. Belair Road was the limit they’d placed on our wanderings; we were not to cross the six busy lanes of asphalt under any circumstances.

Their house was the fourth from the bottom of the row—fourth on the right as you climbed the street in the front, fourth from the left as you climbed the alley in the back. In the back, the outbuildings were landmarks to find our way into the correct backyard through a gate in the low chain link fence. All the fences on Mommom and Granddad’s street were of the same height, as if someone had started putting up fences at one end and worked their way up the alley. Most of the yards had clotheslines; my grandparents had rose bushes, too, and a garden hose and sprinkler.

From the front, you had to find the house by more subtle signs. All of the houses were of red brick and white-washed concrete, and all of the porches had the same open brickwork front railings. Mommom and Granddad’s house was marked by rectangular, whitewashed ceramic planters that were always filled with stinky red geraniums. The porches ran together in a row, ascending the street, separated by low concrete dividers that an adult could step over. A child could sit on the little wall and swing one leg over at a time. On one side, you could walk to the neighbor’s porch by way of the shared landing at the top of the conjoined concrete staircases on either side. Mommom and Granddad shared their staircase with Miss Elizabeth and Miss Marie. Miss Elizabeth was friendly but stern with a surprising old-lady mustache and fierce eyebrows. Miss Marie had wispy white hair. She was older, very kind and sweet. She would invite us in and offer sugar cookies from a tin, but only if she knew that Mommom was away from home or busy somewhere else in the house.

Granddad had whitewashed the planter boxes to match the concrete face of the basement wall, below where the bricks started. Many years later, I stripped the white paint off of one of those planters to find a glaze of gingerbread brown with a wash of green highlighting the ivy pattern wound around the top.

Note: An unfinished piece from a travel writing workshop called “Wish You Were Here,” which took place on July 26 at the Spectrum Center. The assignment was to “Write about a place that is either dominated by a certain color or color scheme, or by a certain emotion.” I was working toward describing both a color and an emotion, but I ran out of time, so the piece doesn’t say all that much about boredom (so far).

50/50 Exercise #47: “Two Pages” from Abigail Thomas

Edward F. Gumnick — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:08:07 +0000

“I picked up your shirts at the dry cleaners today,” she said.

“Which shirts?”

“The ones I took last week. Your favorite blue one was in there.”

“Which dry cleaner did you go to?”

“Across from the oil-change place.”

“The oil-change place on 15th?

“No, over by the school.

“Mm.”

“You’ll never guess who I ran into at Walgreen’s while I was refilling my prescription. Oh, by the way, they had Zest on sale, so I bought you some.”

“Oh, who?”

“What?”

“Who did you run into?”

“Oh, guess. But you’ll never get it right.”

“Judy?”

“No, guess again.”

“Mrs. Benderson?”

“No, but you’re closer. Guess.”

“Do we have to play this game?”

“What do you mean?”

“This whole guessing-game thing. Who did you see at Walgreen’s?”

“You don’t have to be like that.”

“Look, I’m sorry. Who did you see?”

“Diana, and she was out with the baby for the first time.”

“Oh wow.”

“Yeah, she looks great.”

“Mm.”

“Oh, did you see that David and Lee Anne got a new minivan?”

“Yeah, I saw it out there. When did that happen?”

“Friday I think. Oh, no wait, Saturday. Oh, no, it was Friday, because I was just coming home from the meeting at school.”

“Uh-huh. What are they doing with the old one?”

“I haven’t asked Lee Anne yet. There’s a ‘For Sale’ sign in the back window of it, so I guess they’re selling it.”

“I guess so.”

“I think they liked it.”

“What? The new one?”

“No, I meant the old one. Lee Anne told me once they were pretty happy with it.”

“Uh-huh. Oh, are we going to that party?”

“What party?”

“The anniversary thing.”

“At the Wassermans?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. Do you want to?”

“I feel like we ought to.”

“Yeah, probably. We have a bag of chips and an unopened jar of salsa, so we don’t have to pick up anything.”

“Are chips and salsa enough?”

“Don’t you think that’s enough?”

“I wasn’t saying that, I just didn’t know whether we should get something else.”

“We’d have to stop somewhere, because we don’t have much in the way of party food.”

“Mm.”

“You don’t love me any more,” she said.

The sound of the back door slamming echoed a moment in the empty kitchen. Then I listened to the silence for a while.

Note: The assignment was to write two pages on any of a variety of topics suggest by the writer Abigail Thomas on her “Getting Started” web page. I chose “Write two pages of boring dialogue.” She says, “You’ll be surprised how hard it is to be boring on purpose,” but I didn’t find it so hard. Had trouble staying awake long enough to write two pages, though.

Incompleat Iconoclast » Ennui

Whitewash and Boredom

50/50 Exercise #47: “Two Pages” from Abigail Thomas