Walk Ins

11:50AM: Either a man or a woman with a hunched over sort of demeanor comes in. I can't see his or her face so I am unable to determine a gender at first, but the voice would be high for a man and low for a woman. S/he asked the receptionist how she was doing and then started saying "Good, good" before the receptionist had actually answered. Turns out it's a man with a bushy black mustache and a few days old beard. He had sort of a hang dog appearance, the kind that makes you want to give the man a sandwich and a bowl of soup, ask him how he is and then really listen to the answer.

 

11:55AM: Realize that I rarely wonder what the person on the other end of the phone looks like. Which is to say that I don't consciously think "I wonder what this person looks like?" But I do know that I develop a kind of infrared image of the person and that in the event that I do see them in person, I am almost always completely wrong about what they really look like. I wonder what that means?

 

11:59AM: Early 20 somethings playing professional and showing their age, wearing shoes with heels too high to walk in. Probably their first apartment. I'm getting out of here.

 

4:25PM: I was stretching and noticed that the box elder bug that was flying around in my light earlier this morning is now motionless. I don't know at what time it perished, and I am slightly sad about that. Wait. It's moving. Things are not looking good though. [Update: several days later, I don't see it's dead body in the light. Maybe it made it after all?]

 

2:33PM: Lady with sleepy eyes, dark red hair (wine red, an unnatural hair color), red face, long black coat, soft voice. Hair was curling-iron-curled at the ends but she was wearing a sweatshirt under her coat, and make-up.

 

Can't remember the day or time: Man paying rent for invalid sister: "I'm doin' ok but you know it's tough gettin' old for some folks."

 

Co-worker: "If it weren't for two oopses, I'd have never had kids."

Laura Ingalls Daydream

"We bought the house," she said, "in 1948. Before the children were born." I was listening to her precisely because she was the type of person who would say "before the children were born." Her children were "the children". She was born in Manhattan in 1922. This Manhattan life she spoke of was something I would never know being from the Midwest. Certainly I had visited Manhattan, certainly I had friends living in Brooklyn, working fancy jobs in the city.  But all I could guess about her life in the city, and the time in which it was lived, was based on Jack Kerouac books I'd read: shiny lunch counters with heavy bottomed mugs of black coffee; bowls of split pea soup eaten on rainy days; men's raincoats hung on coat racks by a steamy window. Times Square in black and white; bohemians in loft apartments with mattresses on the floor. I can insert myself in there but I will never really know.

 

This is something I dreamed of as a youth. Going to New York. A thing you say to your friends when you're 15 and you're so sure that's what you will do. You will go to New York to become a writer, playwright, actor, painter, sculptor, a filmmaker like John Cassavetes.

 

I didn't go, though. That thing I held on to, that thing I daydreamed about, sitting in Midwestern coffee houses on rainy April days, or algebra class while I looked out the window at a dandelion filled courtyard and the sun fell on my school desk. This thing was my little jewel, a treasure because I was so sure that even though there was no money to send me to a school out East and I had no trust fund or inheritance or pile of money to go and live in the reality of New York, I was so sure that somehow it would work out. That I'd just pack a suitcase one day and go. Preferably on a train or at least a bus.

 

Years later, I am a little sad at the realization that I let that dream go. In that time, I've come to realize that I am not a fast-paced go getter, not a Business & Marketing major. Now I look out the sliver of window in my dry office at my dry office job and daydream about moving to the country and living on a small amount of land and growing my own wheat and grinding my own flour. Selling eggs in town laid by my own chickens like my grandmother did, having a few goats and making my own cheese. I pine for this now like I pined for it's inverse, New York, before.

 

Is it any different, being dreamy and being stuck in high school than being dreamy and being stuck at work? I'm still at a desk. I still find moments when no one is looking for me or talking to me or emailing me with something they need right now. This is just a daydream I'm writing down while at work. A calico dress and sunbonnet daydream. A Laura Ingalls Wilder daydream. Except now I also think about how exactly do I get there.

1

I am a small tow-headed girl of about seven. I am standing in the middle of an empty field that butts up against the backyard of my parents’ house. I am visible to my mother from inside our house but she is not watching me; she is cleaning the bathroom and has told me to go outside and play. I have this whole field to myself.

It is a sunny, summer day and the sky is very blue. The grass has been not-too-recently mowed so that it is starting to grow back from its last trim but the clippings are still laying in clumps on top of it and they have turned brown in the sun. I am making nests for ducks with the clumps of dead grass. There are no ducks living in this field, yet I continue making nests for them.

Twenty years later when I wake up lying on the floor of the bathroom in a motel room in Amarillo, Texas, I will remember those duck nests and the smell of the dead grass and the way that the breeze was so warm and how the only sounds I could hear were a lawn mower running up the street and the breeze. I will remember this and will get goose bumps.