Subsequent arrangements

I know some people have these bronzed, which, even at the time when I’d been in the stores that offered the service, seemed strange…

Maybe it was the little white “first shoes” that got bronzed more often.  Still an odd keepsake.  Maybe it made more sense in days when polio or other childhood illnesses meant that some children didn’t make it to any larger shoes, or walking was a bittersweet milestone to look back on after that became impossible.

Or maybe it was “the thing you did” because the nice people at the store offered a service, and everyone else in the neighborhood had these things on their shelves, so….?

I remember buckling these on and off, running to the edge of the beach in them [and needing to shake out sand], going to school…little white cotton socks…discussions of why toes should be “piggies” and why on earth they would want roast beef…

But for the last few years, now that these shoes live with me, rather than my parents, I have been trying to figure out WHAT THE HELL to do with them.

The current [literally] solution is to use them to hold charging cables up off the floor and out of the immediate visual field of the current baby in the household, that kitten I keep photographing.

What things have you got that have found odd new purposes?

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They’re in the air and everywhere

Holy Saturday mornings of ages past, Batman:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/movies/31dave.html

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Forever young

Alphaville is proclaiming themselves from the speakers on my lap — there’s an image, eh? How much farther from stadium Euro-rock could you get? But the distance shouldn’t be measured from concert venue to little laptop: the distance is really from being an undergraduate studying in a dorm lounge to being a professor grading assignments the night before the final exam.

Back in chilly suburban Philadelphia, I would have just come in from class, or in from the graveyard (where I would often chill for a bit after class). Orion would be twinkling over the parking lot, someone would be making hot chocolate in a hotpot, and I’d have Milton, or Turkle, or Piaget to review one more time… There would be some drama, some impossible thing to sort out before morning, there would be the uncomfortable memory of a less-than satisfying cafeteria meal, and sense that too many things needed to be done before the end of the week, oh God, and then I’d have to be back in Jersey remembering how to live at home again.

Here, in Elsinore, I slog through other people’s mangled thinking and my own spreadsheet formulae, while trying to postpone thoughts about social obligations [who will be where? when? for how long? how many presents need to be completed before X date, given who will be where, when, etc? were we getting a tree? were we going to try to bake anything? could I pretend to be Russian Orthodox and buy myself another week of time?]……

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