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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 …more
I received an e-mail today from Patty Gras at KUHT (Houston PBS). She’s a producer and the host of a “health and lifestyle” show called Living Smart. The show features topics related to health, alternative medicine, diet, self-improvement, and so forth. Here’s what she has to say about an upcoming show:
“Did you know the happiest man on the planet is a Buddhist monk? Scientists checked his brain waves and found him to be the most joyful person on earth, so we decided to talk to another monk, Master Jian Xiao Shih, so he could share some of the secrets to happiness!
“Master Shih of the Chung Tai Zen center of Houston will share the art …more
I embarked on a new initiative today. Inspired by what I’ve accomplished in the Boot Camp, I’ve set an ambitious new goal: to write 3,000 words of first-draft text every day. It’s my hope that with this commitment, I’ll push my daily writing routine to a new level and generate some material I can get published.
Today’s 3,000+ words took the form of several fragments—the very raw beginnings of a few stories and essays mixed together with assorted rants and ramblings. I’m going to select a chunk of 1,000 of those words to send to Max as today’s submission for the Boot Camp class, but I’m not ready to post anything (else) new to the blog today.
But don’t worry! I’ll be posting more here soon.
I love to-do lists. It’s great to gather the details of your life into concise bullet points, to organize the universe of tasks by priority or category or color-coding. It’s great to check things off a list.
I have a lot of problems with to-do lists.
I don’t like being told what to do—even by me. I never know how to deal with recurring tasks. Do I really need to remind myself to make my bed? Once upon a time, I did. If I take it off the list, will a day come when I forget to do it? On the other hand, it’s an easy job to check off early in the day to get …more
If I’m going to poke fun at goofy signs, it’s only fair that I applaud the ones I like:
Everyone should wash their hands
Employees must
I found this nugget of wisdom on an unassuming, hand-lettered wooden plaque in the restroom at Antidote Coffee (729 Studewood St, Houston). It’s a refreshing change from the standard-issue health department signs that you see all over the place. I like the reasonable tone, the gentle admonishment that could be spoken by your grandmother, or maybe a patient nursery-school teacher.
“We want you to wash your hands because we care about you,” it seems to say. “Oh, and if you work in the kitchen, we really must insist. Thanks for being so understanding. Have a great day!”
I had to go to the post office yesterday.
I’d finally gotten around to doing one of the most heinous tasks on the to-do list I call “Noxious But Necessary”: I had written a letter to the Houston Police Department’s red-light camera enforcement unit to explain why I should not be held responsible for running a red light that I didn’t run. I printed and signed the letter, made copies of the letter and original citation, enclosed the exculpatory photos of my actual car with its actual license plate, and packed everything neatly in a 6-1/2 x 9-1/2 envelope. (Everything looks more reasonable, law-abiding, and forthright in a 6-1/2 x 9-1/2 envelope, don’t you agree?)
Unfortunately, my sister, though not usually given to conspiracy theories …more
The first thing I had to do this morning—after brewing a pot of coffee, of course—was to soak in the bathtub for a while. See, I overdid it yesterday in a couple of different departments. I walked 6-1/2 miles in the stifling heat and humidity of mid-day because I had received an invitation to a party that would conflict with the usual timing of my walk. Then I went to the party in question and drank four beers, which is about four more beers than my normal daily consumption of late. So when I rolled out of bed at the crack of 10:15 this morning, my first rudimentary (dehydrated, hungover) thought after “must have coffee” was “must soak in tub long time.”
Coffee mug in hand, I crawled into the tub with the latest issue of Granta, my favorite “literary magazine.” I had read most of the issue, so this morning’s soak was focused on finding every scrap of text …more
On the wall to the left of my bed hangs a mosaic that I call The City. I don’t know if I made up the name or if it was one given to the piece by my parents. It’s about 18 inches wide, maybe 30 inches high, and it consists of hundreds of squarish tiles, each a little less than half an inch wide, laid out in neat rows to form a crude cityscape. The top half is made up of even individual rows of uniform color, mostly shades of sky blue, but with some yellows, metallic gold, browns, and darker blues thrown in to suggest pollution or the heat of the afternoon, or maybe the coming of night. In the bottom half, there are clusters of rectangular shapes that suggest a skyline. In this part, there are blocks of orange and off-white and gray and larger expanses of metallic gold tiles. The whole composition is set in a bed of white mortar and framed with a narrow, plain wooden frame of cherry-stained wood with a flat finish.
This piece of art has been …more
There is one thing that stays the same she said and I said What’s that? and she said We always end up talking about Peru and I asked her Do you want another coffee and she said No, I’m fine, but go ahead if you want and so I was gone for a minute and when I came back the conversation turned to other subjects like how hot it gets in Dallas in the summer and how the grass turns brown for what seems like six solid months and all you can think of is Will it ever rain again? and how we don’t know why we stay here but we guess we’ll stay put for a while and then she told me that she liked to think of herself as a poet and I said I can see that in you so why don’t you go back to writing poetry? and she said It hasn’t been the same since he left, but maybe I will.
Note: The prompt for this piece was the lead line, “There is one thing that stays the same…,” which is taken from the work of Abigail Thomas, and the inspiration was a real conversation to which I’ve added a few imaginary elements in order to protect the innocent.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
Gordon knows his wife could use his help inside the house. There are many things to do before the children arrive for Easter dinner. She likes to put out the good china, and there’s silver to polish, and linens to iron, napkins to fold, but he doesn’t consider any of that to be his responsibility. Early in the marriage, he would have been more accommodating on this point, but that was a long time ago.
Bernadette was up at 5:30. She made coffee and began puttering in the kitchen. Gordon lay in bed until 6:15, his usual time, then got out of bed, put in his dentures, took a four-minute shower in the coldest water he could stand, and went to the kitchen for a cup of black coffee. As he drank the hot liquid in impatient sips, he toyed with the garage door opener in his other hand.
“You don’t really have to …more
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