It's just amazing. I can be walking around with my boiling over with ideas and inner monologues, but as soon as I sit down here and pull up a new blank file, by mind seems to mirror the empty white space immediately and flawlessly.
In any event, John and will be going home tomorrow, at some nose-bleed early hour of the morning. He's at his newly-inherited property now, making little improvements -- a new light switch here, a new window blind there. I've stayed behind, wandering around the picturesque center of Claremont village. Ate a late breakfast at the diner. Overhead two men, conversing at the booth across from me, one of them telling the other about his cancer, and about how he's now getting all his ducks in a row, because the doctor doesn't give him much longer to live. Then they started talking about sports.
I was feeling conspicuous, which I often do, and felt that I was eating as though I hadn't had a meal in a month. I wasn't all that hungry, but the bead store I wanted to visit hadn't opened yet, and the Starbux up the street didn't have any copies of the NYTimes, so I couldn't think of anything else to do. And of course, as I ate, I couldn't help picturing myself in the almost-dead-man's place, and wondered how I would handle such a reality, such a prognosis. Could I put on a sweat shirt with a football logo on it, and go have breakfast? If this were an episode of the Twilight Zone, of course, there would be a terrible accident, just as the two men were leaving the diner, and the healthy one would be instantly killed, and the dead one would survive, improbably enough, for another twenty years.
The bead store was open by the time I'd eaten my scrambled eggs and bacon (wondering all the while about what toxins I was shoveling into my mouth, death death death), and I felt kind of stupid, walking down the aisled holding a basket that looked like a child's version of one of those shallow conical hats that people wear when they're working in rice paddies. I was sure there wasn't anything I could use for the stupid project I've given myself, but sure enough, here was one bead, and here was another, and a few more here, and couldn't I use these as well... I was clearly a magpie in a former life -- I'm surprised I didn't fill the shallow basket, and go back for another one.
And then, because this is how things work, I got into a conversation with the owner of the store, who's had the place for over 20 years (really? A bead store? For twenty years? Most remarkable), and when it came to her attention that I was from 'back East' as they say here, she wanted to know about my experience with the hurricane, and we ended up talking for twenty minutes, about robotics and unemployment and regional biases, and '60 Minutes'... As I was leaving, she gave me her business card, and said that, in case there was a systemic, nation-wide breakdown, we could give each other shelter, depending on which coast was safest at the time. It seemed like a funny idea at the time.
I thought I would try to find a nice, out-of-the-way table, outdoors, where I could sit and sift through the collection of buttons I had, and hope to use for this silly project I mentioned. But such a surface was not readily apparent, and I was having one of my not-atypical feelings of uneasiness, and a need to get indoors, someplace where I could take off my shoes, so I'm back at Jamie and Nancy's house, in their living room, in the company of sleeping pets and a great ray of sunshine spilling in through their front window and across the honey-blond wood of the floor in front of their brick fireplace. I feel like I'm an erroneous element in a magazine layout for a high-end home furnishings catalog, and that either the art director will be shooing me away in a minute, or I'll be Photo-Shopped into oblivion. I still haven't gone through the buttons.
So. There's this scarf -- a colorful length of Polar Fleece, that the daughter of very close friends turned into a scarf for me, some years ago now. Sadie cut the cloth into a kind of fringe at either end, and then punctuated the space where the fringe began, with a row of colorful buttons, four across on each side, and with a button on the other side of the fabric too. Eight smart, bright buttons that catch the colors of the fleece. She also ran a loose stitch, in orange embroidery thread, along the cut sides of the scarf. I was thrilled with it when she gave it to me, and told her that she should think of starting her own clothing line 'Sadie Wear', but she was only in 7th or 8th grade, and she was already thinking of something else.
This scarf never fails to attract admiring attention whenever I wear it, to an extent far greater than any other piece of clothing I've ever owned. And last month, when I'd broken it out for the season, an older woman who volunteers at the Summit YMCA just crowed about how much she liked it, how exciting it was, and (this was the shocking part) that she thought she might be willing to kill someone to get a scarf like this.
Well, this attracted my attention. I considered, for maybe seven seconds, just giving her that very original Sadie Wear creation, but I just couldn't. What I could do, I thought, was to use a length of the very same Polar Fleece I'd picked up somewhere, and make her a scarf almost exactly like it. If only to save her from a life of crime. Prison, at her age, wouldn't be pretty.
The challenge was those buttons. Where on earth would someone like me find a variety of colorful buttons -- even eight seemed an improbable goal. I thought of buying things at the Goodwill Store, and then taking off the buttons and throwing the actual garments away. I thought of sneaking through the racks with a small pair of scissors, and stealing the buttons off womens' coats at my favorite Salvation Army store, but that seemed like bad karma.
Then, as I was looking for a book on perennials, that would explain why things I planted in John's mom's garden were now fifteen feet tall, when I'd expected them to be ground cover, I saw a tall, narrow, rectangular glass vase on the book shelf, and the vase was full of buttons. It turns out that they came from his mom's house, and he didn't even know he had them. So, if I wanted eight of them, I was certainly welcome to them.
I ended up pouring the whole lot out onto my air-mattress/bed, and picked through them as though they were jewels. Which, I guess, in a way, they are. I picked out far more than eight. I put the rest back in the vase, and it really didn't look all that much emptier than before I'd emptied it. (I also liked the oddly-shaped little gathering of buttons on the pale yellow sheets -- as though something had melted there, and these drops were all that was left) I'll probably thin out my horde before we go home, although I can always mail the surplus back when I'm done saving this poor grey-haired YMCA volunteer from the Big House. Or, as is more likely, in reference to the mailing of the extra buttons, not.
My heart is beating in time with the mahogany clock on the mantlepiece.
Well, now I guess I'll go do something else. Though I have, for the life of me, no idea what.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
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