yet another reason to love NYC

the red line, nyc
mar 31

stopping time at grand central

R.I.P. - Dr. Del Champion Bonzer

january 1, 1992? - january 26, 2008
the best burrito hound of a friend that a girl could ask for. he will be sorely missed.

ah, jenny...

i really hope that you enjoy miss jennifer schemke. a comedic genius and one of my best friends.

R.I.P.

november 4, 1948 - january 7, 2008
circa 1994

you're like me

You’re like me, he said. We like sweets.

This was only partly true, because I also loved the potato chips in the pantry - thick ridges curled with salt or thin barbeque the color of burning embers - and the canned corn, sometimes just straight out of the can. Or the plain slices of white bread he kept in the metallic breadbox that I would use as a mirror, making faces at myself as I stood on the kitchen stool so I could reach the counter. But our time together was special, so I didn’t mind his assumptions.

Which one do you want, he asked me, Pistachio or Neopolitan?

I never really cared for the flavor of Pistachio, but I was entranced by its pale green shade because it looked like a party dress or the nonpareils in the glass candy dish that sat on the coffee table. I always felt that the small flecks of nut that were no longer crunchy, but instead soft and slightly salty, were out of place - strangers in a strange creamy land. I much preferred the Strawberry strata in the Neopolitan, but didn’t want to break it apart from its friends, Vanilla and Chocolate. They would certainly get lonely and then jealous.

Can I have a little bit of both?

Of course you can – a girl after my own heart! We’ve got big appetites, you know. And big bones.

It was a ritual we repeated often. We’d eat our ice cream in silence, relishing the flavors and textures, as we watched the Lawrence Welk Show. Polkadots and petticoats twirled through cascading bubbles and across rotating stages while Mr. Welk introduced the various numbers in his thickly accented English. Maybe this reminded him of his Polish roots - but I didn’t think about this until I was much older. Old enough to know that he had been the eldest of many children, though I’m still not exactly sure how many there were because there is no one left now to tell me and such questions didn’t occur to me as a child.

He was from a Polish-German family that looked Polish-German, or at least as I thought they should look when I didn’t know any better. They were stout and reserved. Pinched in the face and bearing the sadness of poverty. Only he at times was smiling, laughing even, depending on the picture. I could tell the photographs were taken in an era long gone - during the Great Depression in Minnesota. I was told later that he had been lucky to leave school and take a job at a bakery to help support the family before he joined the Navy and before he became an insurance salesman with AllState.

He would sit in his creaking LazyBoy recliner that reminded me of a bear trap – cantankerous and obviously dangerous to my small frame and extremities. Though I often sat on his lap reading the comics with him on Sunday, there wasn’t really enough room for the both of us and our ice cream bowls. All elbows and slurping mouths, I was made to sit on the floral couch to his left, my back facing the piano, my face turned towards him, watching his every movement – the way he squinted occasionally at the TV screen or rattled his dentures in his mouth unconsciously. Or sometimes I would sit at his feet and take in the room from half my height.

Sitting on the braided oval rug, I would imagine us as frontiersmen – us in this gigantic, whitewashed farmhouse that looked out over the wildly uncut grass field, his raspberry vines that grew in the dappled sunlight under the natural filter of what I figured to be a 100 year old walnut tree. It wasn’t too hard to imagine, even though I had what the adults always called an active imagination - the black stove pipe that craned impossibly from the ceiling down into the woodburning barrel stove; the hardwood floors that were scuffed and waxed and scuffed again over decades; the dry, musty smell that inhabited the long, drafty hallway that I imagined to contain families of ghosts that couldn’t bear to leave their grand old farmhouse. Sometimes I thought I heard their voices or the rattling of chains from those invisible places where they agonized in captivity, held against their will for all of eternity, roaming the hall and envying the lives of the living.

In my frontier fantasy life, horses grazed in the uncut grass field and often got into his strawberry patch. They picked the berries gingerly from their stems with their velveteen lips and strode away proudly, wearing the juice like lipstick, switching their tales. One of the ponies was mine – a beautiful Palomino with blazing, intelligent eyes hidden behind a golden mane that I would brush and braid. Really it was just the horse that lived in the neighbor’s corral, but in my frontier existence, he was mine.

When we’d gather the figs or walnuts that had fallen from his trees, I would imagine that we were filling huge burlap sacks that would be taken to market. And when my fingers got pricked from the blackberry bushes, he’d tell me to do just as his frontier daddy before him had done – to suck on them to stop the bleeding.

I imagined that we’d take all our berries and make pies. The kind that would sit on windowsills to cool in the afternoon before being eaten with fresh whipped cream. But the berries were never made into pies – they rarely made it past the journey from the vines to our mouths. I didn’t know yet that their sweet juice was totally pure, uncontaminated by the pesticides that made other fruits pale in comparison. Instead he would emerge from his pale yellow Cadillac and present a store–bought pie, usually cherry, and tell me that we’d have it for dessert with Cool Whip.

Other times, we were just a little girl and an old man, eating ice cream together in 1979 in an old, dilapidated farmhouse that no longer had a farm. He would wash his ice cream down with a highball, swirling the cubes around in the glass, making the most delicious sound as they clinked and cracked. I would sit and trace my fingers along the floral pattern on the couch, little empires of miniature people springing up from the daffodils and tulips, crimson sunsets splashing color across the horizon of the ruby poppies.

He fell asleep with the empty glass in his hand, his breathing even and labored except when broken by a deep snore or cough. I took his empty ice cream bowl with mine to the kitchen and stood on my tippy-toes to push them atop the tiled island. The back door creaked open and slammed shut in its customary way and I jumped in surprise. He sauntered over to me slowly and stood over me, his long hair falling into his face as he looked down to meet my gaze. I felt like I had been caught in a lie or that I was in trouble - the ice cream bowls as evidence.

You’re just like your Grandpa, he said. Frontiersman qualities ran quickly through my mind and I mistakenly thought he meant it as a compliment until he finished his thought. That’s why you’ve got those Thunder Thighs, he said as he pinched my leg. And though he said it laughingly, I knew there was something more hurtful in the subtext and I was filled with shame.

You two both love those sweets, he slurred. I like the salty stuff, like potato chips.

Buy Nothing today!!!

brought to you by the folks at AdBusters, today is "Buy Nothing Day". when i first heard about it, i was super excited. i've tried the whole "don't buy gas today" thing and never felt much satisfaction from it. and it never seemed to really do anything. but declaring "Black Friday" - the busiest shopping day of the year when retailers unleash orgiastic sales on the stampeding christmas consumers - is perhaps one of the most genius and audacious propositions yet. i mean come on, this is America we're talking about - land of the free but cripplingly indebted.

• last year i wrapped soy-based candle votives in some pretty vintage hankies that i had collected over the years. •

everyone that i've consulted this year agrees, buying presents - or worse, being expected to buy presents - totally sucks. perversely, one's gift is usually perceived as the amount of love or friendship the giver feels towards the gifted. to avoid spending obscene amounts of money that i don't have on the ones i love, i get creative and always try to make something, because then it's always made with love and no one can argue with that really - even if they think my present is totally hideous.

i used to love buying gifts for the people i love - and i'm really good at it. so much so that i considered being a professional shopper. but realizing that i would be selling my soul to the devil in the process, i slowly backed away. but the point is, we can all celebrate "Buy Nothing Day" everyday - not just the day after thanksgiving. we should all be making gifts for our friends, colleagues and loved ones. even people who claim they don't possess a single creative bone in their bodies can make something. whether it's cookies or bath salts, a knitted cap or a watercolor. and yes, you do have to buy the materials to make your gifts, but i'll give us all that because chances are, whatever materials we're buying are not going to benefit the giant corporations that produce total crap and convince us that we need it.