Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Body Prose

I love to walk. It's like writing with my body.

I walked Honey through downtown one day last week and made a loop that added up to five miles! I carried my morning iced coffee with me in my thermos mug. I like looking at people's funky houses and yards. I am not at all interested in walking through pristine suburban neighborhoods, I much prefer the gritty urban neighborhoods that tell an interesting story; the tumble-down fish-and-chips shack with the busted screen and grimy windows, the house with the Madonna and Child in a Plexiglass box on the front yard, the tiny barber shop full of guys hanging out.

I am grateful for fresh air; perhaps it is what every asthmatic feels. I get ideas when I am out walking, absorbing a neighborhood. The flowering trees makes the city look like it's having a wedding.

Later in the day I saw a hot-nachos truck drive by and I dyslexically misread the "nacho" as "ancho." Hot Anchovies! I imagined a stinky fish truck selling hot anchovies & sardines in the summer, going around the city like the ice-cream trucks!

I also saw two young urban deer eating in the woods on the edge of the highway. I imagined them sharing a leftover pizza! Speaking of dough; it pains me to hear of people being instructed to eliminate wheat from their diets. Wheat is not the enemy, unless you have celiac disease, which is actually rare. Wheat has been the dominant staple in this country and Europe for millenia; I wonder if in China people are told to not eat rice.

We saw the battleship in Fall River when we went to pick up my paintings. I always get a chill when I see it, huge and flat gray with guns. It terrifies me. My paintings had been hanging in a nearby cafe for a couple of months, and it was time to bring them home. We stopped to trace part of the river of Fall River, which is now mostly underground in this part of the city.

I made hummus: I pressure-cooked pre-soaked chic peas then blended them with fresh lemon juice, tahini, fresh garlic, and cumin. Fabulous! I ate home-made coleslaw for lunch with the hummus and a piece of my molasses route-66 bread. The loaf was one of a pair I baked for a friend for his 66th birthday. The sixty six was stenciled in flour on top! We played the Route 66 song for him at the jam.
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Anonymous said...

We saw the battleship in Fall River when we went to pick up my paintings. I always get a chill when I see it, huge and flat gray with guns. It terrifies me.

About 35 years ago, late on a Saturday afternoon, with only 10 or 15 minutes left till closing time, I became lost in the lower decks of the battleship Massachusetts in Fall River. Somehow I became separated from my father and brothers ... I had probably lagged behind to inspect something more closely. What you don't realize about the battleship unless you've been down inside is that the corridors aren't like hallways. It's a series of adjoining rooms connected by hatchways. To get anywhere, you have to step up over the threshold of the hatchway, then step down, cross the room, step up again through another hatchway, and into another room. The reason you have to step up is because these rooms were designed to be locked down if the ship were to be hit and start taking on water, so each portal has a closing, locking hatch door that swings shut and barricades the hatchway in the event of an emergency. So picture me at the age of 9 or 10 trying to clamber through these hatchways to find my family once I realized they were gone and that I was ALONE down there because everyone else had already started for the exits. ALONE and faced with the prospect of spending the night down there, LOCKED IN (or so my imagination screamed). Worse, oh so much worse, was that some of the rooms -- the ship's sick bay, dentist's office and the barber shop, etc. -- had been fitted out as exhibits, complete with old DEPARTMENT STORE MANNEQUINS in Navy uniforms reclining in the chairs. Here I am, in fifth grade, racing through these hatchways, shinning my ankles on the step-ups, too embarrassed to call out (or maybe it was some self-preservation instinct that did not want to hear my voice reverberate off the metal walls) and in a near state of hysteria that I might be spending the night in the bowels of the ship with the mannequins. Finally, I heard voices down one passage and followed them till I came to a set of stairs leading upwards and found my father and brothers having cokes at a small snack bar that had been set up on the main deck. I will never forget the 10 minutes I spent down there.

4:47 AM

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