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.
It was here, while waiting for my brother, that I started this story, although, of course, at the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books. But I knew a story had begun, perhaps long ago near the sound of water. And I sensed that ahead I would meet something that would never erode so there would be a sharp turn, deep circles, a deposit, and quietness.
-from A River Runs Through It → Read more...
I posted a picture of him for a silly Instagram-related game and found him waiting for me in my dreams, something which occurs so rarely it still explodes solidly-constructed dams inside me each time I see his face, mustached and smiling at mine just the way he always did, just the way I always remember him. As usual he didn’t say much, not anything I could hear or remember, but he was there and I knew it, and when I → Read more...
I have words washed out to sea. Words ushered quietly from my lips to my fingertips, waiting patiently for the right tide, for the moon to bring my stories alive.
I have words being reviewed, words accepted and words rejected, and I’m clinging to my favorite lines, fighting for them, and it feels strange and new and exhilaratingly infuriating, this tug-of-war of wills and how the slightest bit of caving can make me feel like I’m flirting with abandoning the sanctity → Read more...
[Alternately titled: Story, The Second: The Girl Who Moved To Washington State]
It began simply. A direct message on Twitter first, followed by texts; those texts, in turn, begat plans. With those plans came anxiety and apprehension – I didn’t know you, not your face or your voice or anything else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to – but also something exciting, a strange and unexpected hope hovering quietly on the horizon. And then we met, conversed and laughed → Read more...