Thursday, May 28, 2009
$6.66 Due
"You superstitious?", she winked as I perceptibly shook at the amount that appeared on the postage meter."I mean, about the $6.66?", she wondered, clearing up the matter in question. Or so she thought.
It’s a quirky little post office here in town, below the canal. I love it. The folks working at the counter there come in all range of friendliness, warming up to you over the years in indirect proportion to their natural wariness. I go there often enough, 2-3 times a week, to have packages shipped to various friends and family.
"Not another batch of movies?", one asks me as I dump another three self-returning Netflix envelopes in the out bin.
"Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm!", she continues. Weighty opinions via two consonants.
"Is she right?", I wonder calibrating the "mmm"'s loaded in her "Hmmmmm"'s.
"Am I spending too much time watching movies, instead of shifting my eyes to the passing clouds by my window, watching life go by?"
"Oh, another package going up to Canada with the Customs tag labeled "Family CD’s"?", another asks me as I fill in all of the requisite shipping documents.
"Don't you think they’ve had enough of your family’s pictures? Give their eyes a break, why don't you? Let their minds savor your packages so they start wondering what's up with you, instead of loading them up with pictures and CD's. That's too much information too soon, don't you think?"
"You know, she may be right!", I cogitate, my mind's cogs imperceptibly engaging.
"I'm no longer even a whisper of a mystery to my friends and family! I'm a drudge. No! Worse! I'm a self-recorded drudge!" I hesitate, before reluctantly letting the package go, vowing I will delay the next shipment for at least a month to allow a patina of inexplicability to coat my daily life.
"They forget something? Again??, he asked and laughed simultaneously as I pondered whether to overnight the forgotten items to one of my kids or make them suffer and send it Priority Mail.
"You'd think with their young minds they'd be able to remember all this stuff. Well, maybe they just have too much stuff. Maybe living without would make them appreciate what they live with?"
I nod, taking in another Post Office gristy observation that I'll roll around into a pearl later.
"The regular?", he inquires, not so much as expecting a negative reply as going through our routine exchange.
"Yep, the regular"
"O.K., Two Day delivery. $4.95. See you tomorrow?"
I hand over a five, wait for the change, and first shake and then nod my head, thus covering all possible answers to his question.
"Ha!", he notes, "Kids! They've got you to where you don't know "No" from "Yes". See you...whenever.", and he turns around chipping my package into a rolling bin.
So, today the $6.66 incident. My passport had expired 2 years ago; an indication that I'm losing it. Since I was a teen, I'd never had my passport expire without having a renewed one in hand. If you're going to be a self-perceived Man-On-The-Go, you best be sure you’ve got the legal documents to Go-Where-You-Want-To-Go. How I’d let the expiration date slip by 2 years ago sadly indicated that my On-The-Go had been going nowhere. An application was quickly filled out, passport pics taken (you don’t want to ask), check written, and expired passport shoved all together in a padded envelope destined for Philly. Registered Mail, of course, the only accepted method of Slavic Mail Paranoids.
"So, are you superstitious?", she quizzed me again.
"Me, superstitious?", I muttered to myself, the Ever-Suspicious One.
I had all reasons to be! Sure! This passport was going to be with me for 15 years. Fifteen Years! And it's begun its decade and a half life's journey by being marked with the postal total of $6.66!?
What is that saying?
Will my letter, registered,yes, but still...will it arrive at all?
Will the State Department employee who receives my letter notice the $6.66, scream and toss my letter and application into a shredder?
What if the State Department employee, droning away, misses the $6.66 postmark, processes the application, and mails the new passport to me, not realizing that the sign of the $6.66 has burned itself into my passport thus guaranteeing some horrible, nasty, unforgivable act to be done to my person in the next 15 years that I have this passport.
I hesitate. Do I take back the envelope, rip it open and shove blank pages inside to up the weight and the postage?
"Look, I know this will sound peculiar. Can you mark it up to $6.67? Can I pay $6.67? Please!?"
Slyly, she tempts me with a pause."I understand, but I can't overcharge you. It would be against the postal code. Do you want to take it back and add more blank pages?"
What! I know now that she's cruelly toying with me. She's reading my thought. Quick! Wipe out that ATM card access code from your mind!
"Uhmmm, no. That's o.k. Just send it in as is"
"As is? You mean...", she stares at me as she combs back her horns, "...as $6.66!??".
I leave, then turn around as I see her putting my package in a special bin. I take out a nickel and surreptitiously slip it onto her postal scale and quick step out the door, just barely hearing her laugh and yell, "This Washington's not going to shield you from the $6.66!!"
Labels: 2009: The Year of Living Dangerously, Glimpses, Self-Therapy
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Silica Flowers
A trip out west to Pittsburgh and Cincy to do the college conveyance thing, combined with this year's version of a "vacation" brought in more positive experiences in both cities.Pittsburgh is a treasure; I know my viewpoint is tilted as my daughter's attending college there. But I'd like to believe I'm being at least somewhat objective about the place anyway. One can't look at the physicality of the city and not be affected by the dips, the drop-offs, the wrap-around turns one whips around, self-assured that there's more pavement around the next bend. In the UPitt and Carnegie Mellon section of town, just outside the outskirts of Squirrel Hill and Shadyside, the buildings rise from outcroppings and soar into the clear blue skies. There's greenery all around the area with Schenley Park and the Phipps Conservatory bordering the north and northeast corners of the Carnegie Mellon campus.
As with most museums and publicly available exhibit spaces in Pittsburgh, a student ID from any of the major colleges and universities will get you in free. Which is a great deal for the student but, alas, not a good deal for the parent of any college student as the college fees include this privilege. So, the parent is "permitted" to pay for their students' "freebie", but is not privy to the "freebie" themselves. Well, the money all goes to a good cause, right?After multiple visits to Pittsburgh, we finally made it to the Phipps Conservatory. The wait was well worth it as we were able to catch the Chihuly Exhibit which will be at the Phipps until November 11th.
Living where we do, botanical gardens, while gorgeous, tend to glaze my eyes after annual visits at Longwood Gardens, Winterthur, or The Philadelphia Flower Show. Not being the avid gardener that my ever-loving wife is, I tend to view visits to these fine places as portent of being laid up due to back-pain induced by diggin' 'n carryin'. So, coming to the Phipps and specifically the Phipps Chihuly Exhibit was a truly relaxing experience. I could not manufacture any of the glass art pieces nor could I afford any of the available-for-sale pieces offered. It was a look-but-don't-touch/buy event. Fiscally, any of the arrangements we saw at the Phipps were impossible to duplicate back home. Finally, rest for the weary!
I'm your basic minimally art-trained kind of guy. Now, while Mr. Michael Blowhard and Mr. Donald Pittenger of 2 Blowhards, may portray themselves as minimally trained, if you take a gander at some of their pieces on art, you can conclude fairly quickly that they understate their capabilities of appreciation and analysis. The nuns would have been switching them for fibbing, in my day. While I dabble in art analysis, I tend to keep my cognitions to myself, staying true to Mark Twain's opinion about keeping one's mouth closed. So, please excuse me as I prattle on. I'm not clear as to whether Chihuly's stuff can be called art.
It is produced in a factory setting. He guides rather than gets involved with each piece intimately. He's in the Warhol camp of art manufacturing along with Jeff Koons. I'll throw in the self-described Painter of Light (or should that be Lite) in here as well. I'm certainly not equating the talent or resulting product of these artists, simply the evident non-uniqueness of their output. So, I have a conflicting view of Mr. Chihuly's glass pieces. They look stunning and beautiful but so does this, but it is not unique, nor does it pretend to be.And yet the combination of the glass objects and the setting of the Phipps had me mesmerized. It was possible to admire and to curse simultaneously without having one's head explode. At times it was mentally exhausting holding the positive and negative feelings in, but I did as spending the balance of our Pittsburgh stay in a holding cell was not a viable option.
I loved it. I hated it. I'd strongly suggest to anyone within driving distance of Pittsburgh to go see it. It is a good walk not ruined. Be sure to drop into the gift shop to check out the continual play DVD of Chihuly in Venice and to eye the Chihuly pieces available for purchase. Put a stick between your teeth so as not to bite off your tongue. If you've seen the exhibit in NYC's Botanical Garden or Missouri's Botanical Garden back in 2006, let me know what you thought of it.
Let me say a few things about the pictures of the Chihuly Exhibit. I apologize for any pix that seem ordinary or blurry and I take no credit for the pictures that turned out fine. You'd have to be a caveman to have the limited talent to take a lousy picture there. All it required was pointing and shooting. For lots more pictures of the Chihuly Exhibit at the Phipps go to this Flickr site. I'll be adding more pix as my Flickr account allots space.
(Please click on any of the pictures for a larger version
Labels: Domestic Burdens, Glimpses, Pittsburgh
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Village Life
"No, not those ones", he pointed to a box of cigarettes with the warning label (loosely translated), "May inhibit your potential and affect your growth". "The other ones...the ones with the "Proven by Science to kill you" label."
I was standing next in line, waiting to buy a paper and 3 liters of 2.8% milk. He threw down some money and ripped off the cellophane from the box with his deeply-tanned spidery fingers.
While waiting for his change, he thumped the box hard on the counter.
"Gets all that cancer down toward the tip of the cigarette", he offered as reason and advice.
He proffered a cigarette. I delicately refused. He gave me that rueful look only a smoker can come up with when dealing with a non-smoker. That look that carried a "Think you’re living longer than me?!" tone to it. Fire somehow appeared in his cupped left hand and he lit the butt he'd slipped into his mouth. He blew me the balance of his first drag. He gives me the once-over, bushy brown-blonde brow, a ledge over his piercing blue eyes.
"Milk?" As in, "What else could you expect of a non-smoker but the juice of a cow?". He excused himself. We didn't know each other but we knew we'd be seeing each other again and that would be shortly in this village.
It's a small place. You buy a cone with two balls of gelato (winter berry and stratiacella) at one end of town and you're finished and yearning for balls of tiramisu and hazelnut gelato before you're ¾ of the way through the village. Since your car hasn't moved since you'd arrived and walking is the most efficient way to get around and you are burning calories with your walking, well... a short bout of self-deception and you simply turn back to reload on the ice cream.
The village sits on the Adriatic at the bottom of a precipitous drop of the Biokovo mountain range. A tiny harbor runs the length of the village; some smaller fishing boats are anchored in chest-high waters. The water is clear and ranges from a hint of blue at beach's edge to a shimmery turquoise and finally to a dark blue where the depth drops off to 70 meters. There used to be a winding dirt road running down from the main highway. More like a trail, as it wasn't wide enough for two cars. Rather than setting an alternate and more logical course, the modernization of the road is evidenced simply by an asphalt coating of the trail. Some houses are right on the road. On the road. Evidence of late-night inebriated drives down to the village are seen in the missing chunks of the houses' wall corners. Sleeping in some of these bedrooms must require an absolute faith in your fellow man's reactions and their vehicles' turning radius. That or a few belts of rakija before you retire for the night.
The villagers and the tourists generally seem to know each other, like Alaskan grizzlies are acquainted with returning salmon. There's no biting, well at least not of the physical sort. You'll hear an occasional "Joj" or "Achhh", from the konobas (restaurants) parked on the beaches, as newly minted arrivals gape at the menus and take in the summer prices. So economic bites are being taken, at least from mid-June to late August. However, for most of the tourists there, surprises are minimal. They've been coming to this place for the past 10-15 years, so the uncalled for surliness of some of the villagers is not a surprise, simply an expected character flaw of this village. They shrug at the unkindness shown them and gaze out over the beach to the water and breath in the salty air sighing that it's all worth it, even with the lack of politeness. The villagers know their livelihood depends on these folks coming back. They jack up the prices for three months, counting on this one quarter's worth of income to carry them through the balance of the year. If it's possible to switch ambition on and off, it's proven here each summer. And yet, this sometimes uncivil behaviour toward your bread ticket strikes me as truly bizarre. The year-long residents act as if they're superior to their guests who are leagues away richer and more educated than them. In some ways, the villagers are having their cake and eating it too. And the tourists aren't complaining, well at least not loudly.
An aunt of mine has been coming here for well over 40 years. She has a house there, deliberately built by her husband with only village labor. Buying her food from the over-priced market, doing favors for the villagers, assisting them in their forays with the government, and having paid various villagers more than was honestly necessary to build the house would seem to qualify her for a full embrace into this village. And yet, she's still considered an outsider, although grudgingly approached when a favor is needed. Conditional inclusion.
It's an early weekday morning. The sun's been heating the house since about 5:30, waking us from a moonlit sleep. My cousin and his visiting friend invite me to their "office" for a morning cocktail. We slip on bathing suits, slap on some SPF 15 and scrape ourselves down to the village.
A couple has already toweled off a prime location on the beach. He's on his cell phone announcing his beach claim. His wife is lying face down, top off, feet barely touching the lapping water. Off the phone, he yells at his wife to "get me some tan." Her arm floats around the small rocks searching and finding the Nivea bottle, which she throws in his general direction. He picks up the bottle, takes five steps up the beach and parks himself in a café chair. A cappocinno’s in order.
The three of us slip by his table and make the short trip on the rocks shielding the road out of town. About 100 meters and we're at my cousin's "office", The Sahara Bar. Music's playing, softly at first, then escalating. Afro-Cuban All-Stars. "Amor Verdadero", Puntillita on lead vocals. Croatian beach. Belgian beer. Cuban music. It’s a sumptious fit.
