fifth grade math

      In the particular type of neighborhood where my parents live, a ringing doorbell can only mean one thing. It's an event which occurs every spring with only three variations. The variables this time: let x= two, y=girls, and z=pecan pies (whose value is greater than wrapping paper). The result of the equation has always been a constant, the equation being: x plus y plus "doorbell" plus "fundraiser" plus "selling" plus z = "please come back when my parents are home."

     "Oh!" the x y giggled. "Sorry, we thought you were a grown up."
     "I'm not," I assured them with utter confidence.
     "Wow! You look like a grown up."
      "I'm not."

     Then they complimented my earings, and we talked about the redsox, and they marvelled at the twelve foot tropical tree that has turned my parents' foyer into a jungle. (So I told them the story of the tree in our entranceway, the telling of which involved definitions of "bat mitzvah" and "centerpieces".) They showed me glossy photographs of z and told me they were glad I wasn't a yankees fan.

     After a while: "How old ARE you?"
      "Twenty-four."
     The gasp was audible. I think they even took a step backwards. "Twenty-four, is grown up!"
     "No it's not!"
     "Really?"
     "It's not!"

     And a few minutes later they took their marketing campaign to the next house on the block and I went back to eating chocolate chips in front of the tv.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

automath

One summer spent in New York with my car (my LA sweetheart) has yielded this conclusion: Having a car unjustly towed by the NYPD, and having its window smashed and stereo stolen by a garden variety Brooklyn thug feels exactly the same. It costs about the same too. Conversely, the resulting misery is inversely proportional to the sweeping lights of joy experienced when the last concrete building outside the city fades away and all the adventures of the countryside spill out onto the road. So it was worth it I think as I send my car back to its winter hideaway in my parents' driveway in Massachusetts. Despite the price.
Read more

the water

     I found Kelvin on the roof of the yurt, a round, home-made structure in the woods behind the house.      “Hi,” I said, approaching.      He peered over the edge to look down at me. “Oh, hi.”      “Alexandra sent me here to help you get the shingles on the roof before it starts to rain.”      Straightening a little, he studied the sky in his slow way. The trees in the hills below were only just starting to change color, and far off in the distance, down beyond the forest, we could see the grey cloud waiting its turn to break up the blue above us. It smelled too like it would rain soon. “Oh. Ok. Come on up,” he said.      Kelvin and Lee had built the yurt together the previous month. Tall and octagonal, with weathered wood walls and a high ceiling, it was tucked away between the trees and almost ready to be inhabited by artists or wanderers. They had raided the junkyards on Martha’s Vineyard for the windows, so each face of the octagon had a different shaped glass cut into
Read more

february 2019

“I have died many times,” Lanie said to me, listing offhand just a few of the experienced that changed her.   These were “before and after” moments, moments after which she grieved for the person she thought she would be, for the life she thought she would have, for the person she once was.   She had to “die” and then emerge as someone else. “That’s part of growing older,” she said to me.  Looking at Lanie, at this person whom I admire and respect so much, but whom I met only after the events that currently shaped her and brought her to my life, it was comforting somehow in my grief. So many different layers of grief.   It was difficult to see where one ended and the next began.   How to peel it apart to determine the provenance of this darkness versus that one.     We’ve had a rough time of it lately, I would say, thinking first of my friend whose simplicity of life choices I had found myself relying upon as a kind of barometer, until that simplicity blew up in her face and t
Read more