In only a few short quickly-passing, time-devouring* weeks, while waiting for various persons to pick up on their ends of the line, I’ve been treated to Traditional Classical, Something That Sounds Remarkably Like Polka, and the rare and delightful office boasting bad 90′s soft rock. Re-entering Le Office Space, I was almost instantly reminded of the delightful variety of hold music chosen by offices throughout the world to entertain their callers, or, most likely, and sometimes a little too obviously, as a desperate attempt to distract their patients from remembering they are out of their respective medications, and probably have called eight times already today. And also, for good measure? They are probably riding the Train O’ Crazy.
There are the hold queues that so efficiently distract you into singing along to Wilson Phillips that you blissfully forget why you were calling in the first place, and anyway, I know that there is pain, but you hold on for one more day, and you break free, break from the chains.
And then there are the hold queues that seemingly send you to a deserted Siberian mountain summit to sit in silence and ponder your place in the universe and, more importantly, what your great great great uncle’s initials REALLY stood for, because ever since you failed to unearth such earth-shattering details of your family history during your Genealogy Project in seventh grade you’ve wondered and couldn’t stop yourself from plugging in various ridiculous potential monikers for a man you always imagined to be tall and broodingly handsome to make up for the fact that his parents named him, simply, A.B. (As a small consolation during said project you did discover you aren’t related to Napoleon, and that the problem you faced as a child, you know the one about your pores being large enough to swallow a small schooner? They can almost surely be attributed to genetics. (Thanks! great great great grandma).
But the golden ticket for the best* hold queue recording, to date, has to be awarded to the business who today treated me to this gem of a message:
“Hello, and thanks for calling Dr. So and So’s Office. We are located on Such and Such Street, Near Such and Such Place. We are frequently visited by wildlife, and by mother deer with their young, stopping to drink at our pond.”
I suppose it’s not an altogether unoriginal marketing strategy.
“Clearly, Bob, as you can see from the graphs here, quality of care=number of wildlife visits, especially if by ‘number of wildlife visits’ you don’t ever mean ‘cougars, who are hungry.’”
*And by “quickly-passing, time-devouring” I mostly mean “literally, eating all of my time like a hungry hungry hippo eats marbles that surely most be covered in invisible vegetation otherwise why would a hippo eat a marble?” I also mostly mean “wonderful”; the job, it is still wonderful. Unless you count the day I stubbed my toe on the copier.
**You didn’t think it could get better than Wilson Phillips, did you? I know. Me, either.
Stories I said I had. Tangential stories and life-changing ones.
Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.
I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?
(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)
(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in → Read more...
This week I’ve been finding pieces of writing long lost and forgotten. Unearthing words belonging to me, and words penned by some of my favorite of all literary voices, collected and saved and scrawled excitedly on pages littered with foggy memories of past lives, obscured now in light of all that was and is and is to come.
Of the words not belonging to me, Lucille Clifton’s were the ones I found most often, recounted in notebook after notebook, or inked → Read more...
They say water changes stone, carving it over time to angles and dimensions in harmony with water’s need to reach the sea; but sometimes, stones change the watercourse instead.
-The lovely and eclectic Shari
I’m collecting my favorite corners, like the one with the stunning oak tree on display for an entire neighborhood to see, its limbs shading a bustling crosswalk shooting confidence into pedestrians like electric currents of white light, fresh graffiti on a nearby curb: an infinity symbol, black and simple.
I’m collecting stories about the apartment window filled with small elephant figurines along one of my favorite walking routes. So many trunks standing side-by-side and none of them alive.
I’m collecting the surprisingly → Read more...