I Owe No Allegiance to the Facts

Like many people who write, I spend a lot of time in my own head. It’s pleasant in there. The skies are blue; the barometric pressure, steady; the edges, rounded; the unsavory facts encased in bubble wrap and unable to hurt anyone.

It’s nice, in my head.

And as can be expected by someone with a limited loyalty insofar as reality is concerned, I make stuff up.

And sometimes, people who should know better mistake my stories for truth.

Years ago, I wrote a piece as part of a writing exercise. Certain elements were to be present: danger, colorful dialogue, humor, resolution.

There was never mention made that it must be true.

So I made it up. I used an actual vacation I had taken, made up some names, created both situation and dialogue. It was published online and quickly forgotten.

Or so I thought.

Months later, at a party, I am approached by a woman whose name I had used in that story.

“You remember that, Pearl? You remember that night? Everyone, this is Pearl. She’s the one I was telling you about.”

I shift my beer from one hand to another, look around the room. Linda is a dramatic and insecure person prone to both hysteria and self-aggrandizement. She wears me out.

“What night are you talking about?”

“You know! The story! Remember that?” While I run my eyes over the rest of the room, looking for a way out of this conversation, she lays out everything I had written, quotes it extensively. A crowd gathers as she relates the fictional tale as something she personally experienced, adds details not in the original story implying that she saved me from a dangerous situation and that I, being young and foolish at the time of said story, owed her a debt.

Linda laughingly finishes up by saying, “Really, Pearl, you need to be more careful.”

Mary appears at my elbow. “None of that happened, did it?” she whispers.

“Not a word of it!” I hiss. “What in the world is she talking about?”

Mary laughs. “This is what you get for writing a story using her name. What’d you use her name for anyway?”

I shake my head. “It was just a name, just a location. Now she thinks it’s real!”

“You going to call her on it? She’s made herself out to be a hero!”

And you know, I thought about it. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. As annoying and needy as Linda is, I couldn’t take away a story that made her a hero.

Like I said, it’s pleasant in my head. Even when what’s in there is fueled entirely by the imagination.

I Say We Just Hold Him Down and Remove the Limb Entirely

If you’re ever in the area, I insist you meet Mary and Jon.

Mary, of course, you already know. Quicker witted than the average bear, able to clean your place for a mere $15/hour, if you ever see me wiping my eyes while bent double laughing, you’ll know Mary’s near.

Jon is her boyfriend. Jon is a special man, built, it appears, just for Mary. Like many women, Mary can be driven to the edge by her boyfriend’s lackadaisical attitudes toward the dirt/snow/engine grease he tracks into the house – and Jon laughs, in the good-natured, taunting way that we reserve for those we love; and she, after sweeping up and beating him with a broom, laughs too.

And Jon and Mary tell the best stories.

You know how some people’s allusions to stories are sometimes better than the stories themselves?

This is never the case with Jon and Mary. When Mary says, “Jon, tell Pearl about the time you used a front-end loader to drop several tons of snow into the neighbor’s yard”, well, you’re going to want to turn your phone off, make sure your smokes are in reach, maybe have a towel handy for wiping your eyes.

Same applies for the home surgery story.

Oh, come on! We all know people who’ve had surgery performed at home, don’t we? I myself once removed a skin tag from under my right arm with nothing but a nail clipper and my own steely determination.

But I got nothin’ on Jon.

So sit here, won’t you, next to me, and let’s listen to Jon’s story:

“Jon!” Mary shouts from across the room. “Tell Pearl about the time you developed Zombie Leg.”

Jon frowns. “Zombie leg…” he mutters, rolling the words off his tongue, his eyes staring up and off into the distance. He is looking for a connection.

“Remember?” she prompts. “The spider bite?”

Jon laughs. “Oh, yeah! Right! The spider bite.” He smiles, lights a cigarette. An ashtray in the shape of a motorcycle engine is on the coffee table in front of him, and he lays the lighter next to it.

“So I’m washing the truck, right?” he says. “In a car wash, one of those places where you do it yourself. And there in the corner of the bay was this enormous spider’s web; so as I’m finishing and the water pressure is dying down, I give it a good spray, clean it out, right?”

He pauses. Takes a hit off his cigarette.

“And I’ll be damned if this spider doesn’t shoot out, bite me a good three, four inches above the ankle! I mean, hot damn if that didn’t hurt!”

He takes another drag from his cigarette, lays it in the ashtray.

“I’d been bit before, got bit in the neck in Florida, so I knew I was in for some trouble; but at first it wasn’t that bad.”

He picks up his cigarette. “At first.”

“At first? Why, the very next day,” Mary jumps in, “he’s getting out of the tub, comes into the living room, and says to me “Does this look funny to you?” And there, where the spider had bit him, is a lump the size of a golf ball, right on top of his shin!”

Jon nods, inhales. “A golf ball,” he repeats. “A big ol’ lump. So I let it go a couple weeks –“

“Wait,” I say. “You let it go? It’s already the size of a golf ball?”

“We don’t have medical insurance,” Mary interjects.

“SO I LET IT GO A COUPLE WEEKS,” Jon says, giving us both the Evil Eye, “and the damn leg really starts to hurt. I mean, it’s turning colors.”

“It did,” Mary whispers, “it really did.”

Jon looks at her sideways but continues. “So Dan – the neighbor Dan? – his wife’s a doctor. Yeah, a real doctor. I mean, Dan’s not, but he comes over, takes one look at my leg and says, Man, you are going to die.”

I look at Mary, who pulls an imaginary zipper across her lips.

“So I go to the pharmacy, right? I mean, they have to have something that will clear this up, right? So I walk in there, pull my pant leg up to show the pharmacist and this old guy gets mad! Tells me, Get out of here!” Jon laughs. “I mean, I’ve been thrown out of places, but never a pharmacy!”

“It looked like a zombie leg,” Mary whispers. I look over at Jon, who winks at me. I look back to Mary. “Seriously. He even dragged the thing around, it hurt so bad.” She shakes her head, lights her own cigarette. “A zombie leg.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jon says, winking at me. “A zombie leg. ANYway, the leg’s color is all wrong by this time. It goes from green to blue to purple, finally turning black. By now, it’s all the way down to my foot and I can barely walk on the thing.” Jon takes a long drink from the Fresca in front of him, lays his cigarette back into the ashtray. “I give Dan a call, who gets his wife’s medical bag, and he comes over.”

I shoot a look at Mary, who nods, bright-eyed, eyebrows raised.

Jon is silent.

“Well?!” I shout. “What happened?”

Jon arches his back, rolls his head from one shoulder to the other.

“I died,” he says.

“Shut up,” Mary says. “You did not.” She turns to me. “They cut it open. Right there in the kitchen. Dan pulls out a scalpel and goes, You hold his leg down, and I’m like, Oh, no you don’t!" Mary shudders visibly. "I left."

Jon laughs. “Mary couldn’t take the heat. She had to get out of the kitchen.”

“Wait, now,” I say. “What happened?”

Jon picks up his cigarette. “Dan cut it open,” he says. He pulls on the cigarette, exhales smoke toward the ceiling. “He cut it open and took out this big black ball of blood or something. I don’t know. All I know is it was pure relief.”

He laughs. “Went to a doctor a couple days later, just to make sure we got all of it. Shoulda seen his face when I told him who did the surgery. His eyes went all big and round. He tells me, stay right here, I’ll be right back. He takes off, probably going to get his doctor buddies and I just thought, aw, screw this. I left before he could get back.”

Jon takes a hit off his cigarette and smiles. “Whole leg was back to its normal color in about three weeks.”

He stands up, stretches.

“So we gonna call for pizza or what? Who wants pizza?”

Mary Gets Hurty and a Good Deed Comes Home to Roost

A hush falls over the office, the kitchen, the train, as we contemplate the completion of another week of our lives and the approach of the weekend.

If only there was some way to know what to expect. If only we could be, say, forewarned so as to be forearmed…

But wait! Didn’t I tell you? My iPod! My iPod, set on “shuffle” and played during Friday morning’s commute holds the key to all of our questions!

What? Yes, really. Oh, humor me and play along. I have so little…

Bang and Blame by R.E.M.
Ziggy Stardust by David Bowie
Ball of Confusion by Love and Rockets
I Want Some More by Dan Auerbach
We Are The Ones by The Coup
Love Long Distance by Gossip
A Perfect Twist by Mike Patton

Uh-oh. Someone’s heart is going to be broken, I just know it. Luckily it won’t be mine, as I had it removed in splinters some time ago…

So! Do we have time for a story?

You remember Mary, don’t you? Mary, the woman with whom I earn an honest living, the cleaner of other people’s bathrooms and visitor of the elderly, the woman who has promised to keep me, as I age, from getting a wiry perm or acquiring sweatshirts appliquéd with teddy bears waving the American flag, had a serious problem.

Mary needed to have a tooth pulled.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. Not when you have no money and no insurance.

For the last two months, Mary has struggled, consuming up to 16 Advil a day.

The left side of her face eventually became quite swollen.

“Looka be,” she moaned through clenched teeth. “I ab so hurty.”

The first dentist, whom Mary feared she’d have to pay in foot rubs and popcorn hulls, diagnosed the wisdom tooth as abscessed, gave her a course of antibiotics, and sent her out the door with a figurative foot to the small of her back.

“We’ll take it out when you’ve finished the pills!”

With two days of the pills left, however, the tooth, Mary swears, slid off her jaw and deposited itself under her tongue.

I went to visit her.

“Awb tellin ya,” she slurred from between clenched teeth, tears in her eyes, “dat guy’s tryin ta kill me.”

She sipped a Fresca through a straw. “Int’restin fack,” she slurred. “Dey train cadaber dogs wif dead teef. My mouf’s lak a cadaber dog’s trainin groun’.”

Luckily, having lived with a man who believes there’s no need to move the jaw while speaking, I am fully versed in Slur.

“You think a cadaver dog would signal on your mouth?”

“Awb sure ub it.”

The next day, Mary’s friend Becky stopped in. Becky’s mother, Rose, is in an assisted living facility, and Mary visits her a couple times a week. Mary doesn’t have a car during the daytime hours, and visits Rose come hell or high water, via bicycle.

“I’m taking you to my dentist,” Becky said.

“No, no, no…” Mary said, grabbing her coat and her purse.

Pages of paperwork were filled out, but the last page stopped her cold. “All services to be paid in full at time of service.”

“OK,” Mary muttered, “we gotta go.”

Becky put her hand on Mary’s shoulder. “I’m paying.”

Mary stared at her.

“It’s the least I can do. You visit my mother-in-law when I can’t. Let me do this for you.”

Mary burst into tears. “I’ll pay you back. I swear –“

Becky stopped her. “Don’t you dare.”

The second dentist’s response to Mary’s abscessed wisdom tooth was encapsulated in one word: “Whoa”. Several shots of Novocaine later, a little gas to set the mood, and his knee was on her chest and wresting the offending tooth from her exhausted and swollen gums.

The tooth – and the pain – was gone.

“Everything okay, then?” he asked her. “You feeling okay in there?”

Mary grinned, her mouth packed with cotton gauze. She gave him the “thumbs up” sign, the "A-OK" sign, and an earnestly slurred “Ah luh yoo mang”.

"I love you, too," said the dentist.

And just like that, it was over.

Mary is smiling again.

You Think There Are Fights About Cleaning the Litter Box NOW...

I go places. I do things. I listen as often as possible and I interrupt far less than I used to. It’s a pleasure, being out and amongst the peoples, not to mention that it is the field from whence I glean any number of perplexing ideas not my own.

And just the other day a conversation with my friend Sarah revealed something I had not previously considered.

She told me, over ice water (her) and a pale ale (me) that one of the men at her Condo Board Association Meeting last week wanted everyone to know that he had 40 fifty-pound bags of kitty litter in storage.

You know. For 2012, when “it all goes down” and the water is no longer running.

For “waste management”, as he put it.

Let us now pause and consider the Condo Board Association on their way to the litter box, newspaper tucked under their arms.

“’Mornin’, George.”

“’Mornin’, Ralph.”

You know, it’s a question I hadn’t previously considered, but now that I have, I have my concerns.

Just where will us city folk poop when The End comes and the facilities of the porcelain variety become elaborate and impractical kitty-litter holders?

It does give one pause.

Not that I consider The End much. There was, of course, the Millennium, the misnamed year that was to see the computers unable to digest the numbers “00” and send us back to a simpler, more kitty-litter-free time. People I thought I knew bought guns, ammunition, and sought real estate with defendable hilltops, while I personally bemoaned the upcoming loss of summer-time ice.

It’s not that I don’t believe that the End is Near. For some, it is; and for me? Well, it certainly could be. Of this I remain unaware, which is as I like it.

Until then, I shall continue to go places and do things.

Because there’s a lot of funny ideas out there.

What? What?! Yes, of Course I Saw The Who in ’80! Why Do You Ask?

“I’m leaving!” I shout.

“Swait!"

Swait? What? What did he just say?

“What?” I yell.

“Swait a minute!”

Ah. Just wait a minute, he says.

My husband thinks he can speak without having to move his jaw.

I don't know why he insists on making me say "what?" all day long, but he does. I say "what?" all day long.

"Marmzert," he said.

"What?"

"Marmzert," he said.

Sure. I'll play along. "How come?" I said.

"Ianno," he said. "Musta bin because of alla the cans I crushed yesterday."

Ah. I can see this now. His arms hurt.

Well, what are you going to do when aluminum is up to a whopping 55 cents a pound, let it just collect in the garage? Besides, the money he made should just about cover the Ace bandage he’s going to need.

A woman could drive herself mad suspecting her hearing’s on the wane, but I’ve come to discover that the key to success here lies in treating the lock-jawed vocalizations of the male sex as a foreign language.

"Mungree," T said the other day.

"What?" I said.

"Mungree," he said. "Skweet."

Well, ya see that? He’ll get no argument from me. I could eat a little something myself. Let's go!

I've noticed this affliction in men almost exclusively. I don't know what that says: perhaps that men are more apt to clench when talking, or perhaps that women do much more talking than men and are therefore more apt to be good at it.

Steve called. "What're you doing?" he asks.

"Writing," I say. "What're you doing?"

"Buildin' a Stratocaster copy. Gonna put African Babinga inlays on the neck."

OK. So sometimes there are different reasons for my inability to understand the men around me.

All I know is that these guys are making me say "what?" a lot.

So Apparently There are FISH in the Ocean Now…

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it, no doubt, until I’m forcibly restrained, but looks like we’ve made it through another work week.

As on previous Fridays, I’ll be divining the overall tone of my upcoming weekend by the songs on my iPod during the morning’s commute.

Exciting, no?

Here goes:

One Man Guy by Rufus Wainwright
Catch All This by Del the Funky Homosapien
Move Over by Janis Joplin
Conventional Wisdom by Built to Spill
This is Radio Clash by The Clash
Believe Me, Baby by James Hunter

What’s it all mean? Near as I can tell, Fall is coming. Everything’s looking rather thoughtful, don’t you think?

And thank heavens I wrote today's post last night, before I realized I was to spend more time thinking…

You may not know it to look at me, but I’ve spent very little time in the ocean.

What would give this away, you say? Oh, I don’t know. My skin's hue, the color of mashed potatoes (without the peelings) would probably be the stand-out indication. I may be wrong about this – I am, after all, from a landlocked state – but I equate the ocean with sun, with wind, with laughing and splashing and the formation of new freckles.

What I had not associated it, surprisingly enough, was fish.

Yes, yes, yes, everyone have a good laugh now. Get it out of your systems.

I’ll wait.

Now, I’ve known, since the year that Jaws came out and my brother and I paid for and saw this movie 7 times over the course of a weekend, that there are large, carnivorous things in the ocean.

I just never thought I’d see one.

And I still haven’t. But you wouldn’t have known that by my reaction Monday.

Monday I went swimming off Bradenton Beach, an island ostensibly governed by the State of Florida. Those living on this island may argue with you about that – they have a lot of strange ideas down there – but take my word for it: Florida – and all its bits – are part of the U.S. of A.

So there I am, standing in water up to my armpits, staring out toward open water, thinking about the time my brother Kevin chased me down the beach at Lake Superior holding the remains of what may have been, at one time, a very, very large muskellunge, when some thing slams into my lower legs.



I am not a dignified person. I found this out on Monday.

“Ack! Ack! Fish! Fish! Big fish in the water! Ack! Ack!”

Oh, it’s all very funny, isn’t it? Laughing at the tourist? Watching her graceless and hasty departure from the ocean?

I like to pretend now that it was all to get a laugh out of T.

And laugh he did, on and off, until my plane departed the next day.

Who ya gonna laugh at now, T?!

Just Living the Good Life!, or Wherever You Go, There You Are

I spent the last several days in Florida visiting my friend T.

You remember T, don’t you? Smiter of Squirrels, One-Liner Aficionado, T moved from Minnesota to Florida in March of last year. Having lived through the bone-biting cold of winter, as all right-thinking Minnesotans do, he inexplicably threw his mittened hands into the air one day, cried “I give up!”, and moved to an island.

And while I have gone on record a number of times as being four-square against my friends moving to places that I cannot reach easily, I would also like to go on record as approving of those that, feeling they must move, do so to a place perfect for vacationing.

Well done, T.

Have you been to Florida? The sky is bright blue; the people, dark brown. The sun is insistent, the humidity oppressive, and large, talkative birds sit on telephone wires holding their wings out to the wind, airing their feathery underarms.

T picked me up at the airport. We hugged.

“How are you? How have you been?”

“Oh, you know,” he says, grinning. “Celebrating life.”

Celebrating life, huh? Celebrating life. The cynical Midwesterner in me seizes upon this phrase.

“The pamphlet distributed on the airplane suggested that there might be some of that,” I said.

“Relax,” T said, laughing. “You’re on island time.”

Everywhere we went, we heard variations of this phrase.

“How’s it going?” “Celebrating life.”

“What you been up to?” “Just livin’ the good life!”

I am wary of expressions like this. Pat answers make me narrow my eyes in concentration. Embedded in me at an early age by a father who insisted that I be a lert (“Be alert, Pearl - the world needs more lerts”), by the time the woozy-looking man at the bus stop hollered “Livin’ the good life!” as we walked past him on the way to the beach, I’d already written this phrase in my notebook.

There was a party that first night at Elliot’s house. Elliot, a man from New York, and perhaps the hub of neighborhood life, held court on the large, tented patio; and people came from all sides bearing large platters of food. Almost everyone there was originally from somewhere else: there was Milla the Grilla (Ohio), Dave (Florida), Bob (Tennessee) and Kim (Texas), Rob (Minnesota) and Colleen (Wisconsin), Mike (Massachusetts) and Julia (Florida, Okinawa, Germany).

There was plenty to eat, and plenty to drink.

And there was entertainment.

You know the young and often beautiful people who perform in parks, for “fringe” festivals, often sharing space with drummers, face-painters, and jugglers? The long-haired free spirits dressed in clothes from another generation, bracelets and earrings jangling?

Julia and Colleen, Hula Hoopers of the First Order, took their hoops into the backyard, just beyond the light of the patio, just in front of the docks, and danced in the dark, a background of a million stars running the mirrored length of the ocean, hoops spinning up and down their bodies, around their necks, sliding up one arm and down the other.

And while I won’t be following The Dead in a VW bus any time soon, like karaoke or gluing stuff onto things with a hot glue gun, I can now add “hula hoop” to the list of things I do just a little bit better with a couple beers in me.

It was a long night, a warm night with just the right amount of cool breeze and smart talk, and I couldn’t begin to remember all of it.

But I do remember this: hours later and in my room, my head spinning from drink and hula-hoop muscle-memory, I drunkenly considered the differences between where you’re from, where you are, and what it all means.

I decided that wherever I was, that was the place I should be.

And I believe I fell asleep smiling.





Still have some time to kill? I was published in an online magazine called Praxis. Click here to read "So What Do You Say You and I Get Together After Work?", a lovely piece I would like to take just one more editorial crack at...

Say That Again – I’m Writing It Down

I cleaned a house not long ago with Mary, a delightful woman who makes me laugh until I fall off furniture. Generally speaking, I’m against falling off furniture; but if it’s because of uncontrollable laughter, what can you do but go limp and succumb to gravity?

Frankly, we think we’re hilarious.

We scrubbed this house silly: baseboards, the doors, the floors, and the piece de resistance, windows covered with Venetian blinds. Nasty things, Venetian blinds. Normally, I wouldn’t recommend washing the truly dirty ones when you can replace them cheaply, but on the one hand, it’s a waste of money to replace what’s not broken, on the other hand, they were actually quite nice wooden blinds, and on yet another, perhaps abnormal hand, we were paid to do it.

And somewhere in all of this, between the parquet floors and the enormous picture windows, Mary makes the claim that she can idenfity, by taste, the blue M&Ms.;

She can identify the blue M&Ms; by taste. Why I oughta…

I’ve been trying to work that little revelation of hers into a post ever since.

I collect these little remarks. I have wrinkled, stained piles of these little tidbits: the comments I’ve had directed at me, made myself, overheard, written into and onto books, receipts, take-out menus. Every day, I am confronted with situations, features, sentences that make me pull out the book I keep in my purse and scribble furiously, often with a smile on my face. What can I do but write these things down? Surely the day will come when something like “I Don’t Shiv A Git: I’m Not Really Swearing, Mom” becomes the topic of a thought-provoking post.

I received an e-mail the other day asking me how many posts I had written. After I told him that I was coming up on my 800th, he then wondered if I wasn’t about to run out of ideas.

Now why would I run out of things to say?

The truth is that there are ideas everywhere. They’re not my ideas – they simply present themselves, rarely politely, rarely one at a time – and if you don’t write them down immediately, they’re gone.

Only to be replaced by other ideas.

Which reminds me: my parents seem to be stocking up on water chestnuts. What do they know that I don't?

Oh, and I need to buy some M&Ms.; I think Mary’s bluffing.

Pierce Would Like You To Move Along? He Has Things to Do?

I go through a pair of black flats every year. Humble, dedicated shoes, they are my "go-to" footwear, my Run!-The-bus-is-coming! shoe. Like the other functional items in my life -- my car (may it rest in peace), my yoga mat, several ex-boyfriends -- they ask little of me and I, in turn, run them into the ground.

Saturday was the day my latest pair of black shoes left this mortal coil.

Leftie and Stompie, as I liked to think of them, will be missed.

That's why Mary and I found ourselves at the mall Saturday evening. And one new pair of black flats and a meander or two through another shop later, we had stopped at the Panera for a bite.

Semi-interesting side note here, the mall closes at 10:00. The Panera closes at 9:00.

We didn't know this when the woman behind the cash register took our orders at 8:58. We didn't realize it when my sandwich became available at 9:07.

We take you now to nine minutes after I received my sandwich and just moments before Mary and I suffer joint incredulity. I have the last bite of my sandwich in my hand, a handful of potato chips on my plate. Mary is waxing rhapsodic about her mother's shortbread and comparing it to the cookie she has just bought.

"It's not bad, but it's not my mom's. I mean, what is this? Butter, flour, sugar? Ooh and I can feel the seams of my pants straining. You hear that? You hear that, Pearl? The threads are going to let go any --"

A uniformed weasel slips into view, his hair in his eyes. In a rather theatrical move he slides up to our booth and manages to somehow click his heels and slouch at the same time. In a cutesy voice he may have picked up from the Disney Channel, he interrupts.

"Excuse me, ladies."

I look up at him. What shockingly appears to be truly fantastic nose hair is quickly realized to be some sort of septum piercing, an upside-down horseshoe, its ends emerging from each nostril and hanging almost to his upper lip. His hair is in his eyes, and he is brushing it across his forehead, as I'm sure he must do several hundred times an hour.

He gives us a condescending smile. I am thinking that he believes himself to be quite attractive. I am thinking that he believes that we believe the same. Mary and I are awash in youthful, hipster smugness.

"I'm sorry, ladies," he simpers, "but as I'm sure you know we close at 9:00? So if you could just finish up? If you would finish your sandwich, you know, we close at 9:00?"

Poor guy. Completely devoid of a declarative sentence.

Mary and I look at each other, communicate telepathically: They close at 9:00? Is this little !@#$ kicking us out?

We turn back to him, eyebrows raised. He brushes his bangs out of his eyes and continues. "I have to vacuum this area? So if you could finish, that would be great? We close at 9:00?"

Again with the closing-at-9:00 bit. I look at my phone: 9:16.

Mary jerks her head towards our little weasel. "What do you think of this one, huh?" she says to me. "He says they close at 9:00."

I nod and turn to look up at him. "So you're saying you close at 9:00?"

He nods enthusiastically. "Yes."

"And I should finish eating and leave?"

He looks relieved. The middle-aged women in front of him are getting the picture. "Yes."

"Just so we're clear," Mary muses, "do you think we should finish first and then leave? Or should we leave now and then finish?"

Pierce, as I like to think of him, is magnanimous. "Oh, you can finish first."

"So I should finish my sandwich and leave, is that right?" I say.

He is still grinning. "Yes, if you could finish up..."

"Perfect," I say. "I will finish up, and then I will leave. And when I do leave? You, my friend, will be the first one I notify." I turn away from him.

Mary looks up. "We'll call you," she says, smiling.

Pierce backs away, grinning, his face becoming more confused with each backward step.



We left not long after that, after briefly discussing and discarding the option of taking the next 45 minutes to eat the last five chips on my plate. Frankly, hanging out at the Panera to make a point seemed silly.

He was, after all, just a kid.

And of course neither Mary nor I were ever as eager as ol' Pierce to leave work on a Saturday night.

Careful Around the Punchbowl, There, Karl

Like all right-thinking citizens of the mostly-modern world, I’m on Facebook.

I got tired of people saying things like “didn’t you get the update?” or “oh, we knew about their new dog on Tuesday, when they got him. That’s old news”.

So I bought in.

And out they came, every person I’d ever met. Facebook had all kinds of friend suggestions for me, from my junior-high boyfriends to high-school science partners to people I had suspected were dead and/or imprisoned, all with pictures and links and frighteningly angry opinions on everything ranging from how to parent your children to fast food.

Here I thought ol’ FB would be more like a party. You know, we’d chat, share some photos, buy each other a couple of virtual drinks and talk about that screenplay we’re pretty sure we could write if we had more time.

But like every party, I seem to have wandered into the part of the kitchen cordoned off for the politically angry, the porch dedicated to several weeping individuals who want to know WHY, the back steps where a group is (virtual) hugging fervently and passing out (virtual) promises.

I am not among the most readily in touch with my (virtual) emotions and tend to look at these things askance.

And for this – and for using the word “askance” – I will pay.

I offer you this unseemly exchange from a couple weeks back as proof.

Brent - a person I knew a good 15 years ago and now seems prone to sending warm and loving regards to all, sparkling angels, and What Kind Of Elf Would You Be quizzes - posts on his wall: Until you have loved an animal, a part of your soul remains undeveloped.

Pearl - a callus individual I sometimes claim not to know and will refer to here in the third person - responded: And once you have loved an animal and been caught, you have a police record.

I worried about my cynical post immediately, only to have a number of comments of the “LOL” variety follow in quick succession.

Despite the (virtual) validation, I can’t help but wonder: Perhaps FB is a party, just one I don’t understand.

Could I be the turd in the FB punchbowl?

There's Got to be a Morning After

Bearing in mind that each day’s post is written the day before, meaning that I am writing this on a Sunday, and that Sunday is the day after my annual Summer Party – is it still considered a separate day if you’ve not truly slept? – and that I’ve willingly stupefied myself once again – today’s writing may be nothing more than a bit of correctly spelled fluff.

I’ve got all that worked out in a diagram at home, if you want to stop by.

I love having parties. The trick, I think, to a successful party is to invite just about everyone you know, add food and drink, and see what happens. This attitude, embedded by a rather hippie-ish babysitter at an impressionable point in my early childhood, is based on the idea that we are all, on a basic level, brothers and sisters.

This is not to say that I don’t sometimes dislike some of my brothers and sisters, but hey! "Let’s not bicker and argue over ‘oo killed ‘oo," as my Monty Python-quoting brothers would say. A party’s a party.

I’m a happy drinker, a smiling, laughing, possibly singing drinker. I don’t necessarily want to sit on your lap, I definitely don’t want to talk about BP/politics/immigration or welfare, and no, I will not go to a second location with you.

But if you’re headed toward the cooler, grab me one, would ya?

The aftermath of a party – aside from the recycling, the stale crackers, the discovery of mystery bruises – is also the reflective part of the party. Me, I tend to find words floating around, post-fete.

“No, no, no. The best ways to die are freeze to death, a fall from a very tall building, and being trampled.”

“… so sometimes you just have to ask yourself, why did I even bother to wear underwear?”

“An above-ground pool? So is that, like, in the ground?”

“Are you kidding me? I am the Rubik’s Cube MASTER! Hold on. I’ve got one in my car…”

“We should try to bring back the word “besmirched”. Someone quick go look it up.”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the party is over, I’ve drunk an enormous amount of water, and somewhere, someone is practicing a drumbeat using what sounds to be two pieces of rebar on a large bit of sheet metal. Boom-boom CHOCK! Boom-boom CHOCK!

I’m only mostly confident that that sound is external.

Bob’s Not Supposed to Drink Pop

Mary has a soft spot for people.

The little weirdo really likes them.

Want to laugh until you fall over? She’s your gal. Lonely? Same person. Afraid that weird woman at the bar is going to come after you when you head for your car?

As her ancestors would say, “Is this a private fight, or can anyone join in?”

And I tell you that to tell you this: Mary’s been visiting an ex-coworker’s elderly mother.

Once a week, Mary takes the bus to the nursing home to check on Rose.

It is possible, on some days, that Rose believes Mary is a daughter. And isn’t she? Like a good girl, Mary brings her little treats: flowers, sugar cookies, stories, her full attention.

Rose is not the only person in the home, of course, and Mary knows most of them, brings them jokes and smiles, teases them.

She left her purse and a bag containing a gift – a two-liter bottle of root beer – in the common room the other day while she went to go get Rose. Rose likes a glass of root beer after lunch and dinner. It aids in her digestion, she says.

When she came back, however, the root beer was out of the bag and in the hands of Bob.

Bob, an 84-year-old man no longer allowed pop due to his diabetes, is almost half-way through the bottle.

“Bob! Drop the pop!”

Bob may be 84, but he’s still taller than Mary; and having found the treat, he is not to be denied. He shakes his head “no” vigorously, droplets of root beer flying, his moustache holding shiny, fragrant beads of the forbidden treat.

“Mph mphh,” he mumbles, his cheeks full to the point of explosion. Bob looks like an elderly, trumpet-free and guilty Dizzy Gillespie.

Luckily, Mary happens to speaks Mumble. “You are too!”

Bob lifts the bottle to his lips, chugs root beer as Mary swats at his arms. “You know you’re not supposed to have pop, Bob!”

Root beer runs down his chin and onto the front of his shirt as he swallows.

“I’m not,” he challenges between swallows. “I’m not having pop.”

“Oh my God, Bob, you liar,” Mary teases him. “You’re not drinking pop? Right now? You’re not drinking pop?”

“Nope,” Bob says around a mouthful. “Not allowed pop.”

The nursing home authorities were called in, of course – “He looked so happy, but I knew he wasn’t supposed to have it” – and the half-finished bottle was wrested from his happy, sticky hands.

Mary reports that Bob harbors no ill will against her.

And he’s the first one at the door when she visits now.

T-De Leon Discovers Florida, or See If the National Guard Will Pick Up Chips, Too

I flew out Friday night and returned home Sunday afternoon, a quick trip down south to see how T was doing.

He's doing very well, thank you, having gone from being a short muscular white man to a short muscular dark brown man.

Oh, and one other thing: now that he has discovered Florida, he wants it closed to tourists.

"Look at these," he says, shaking a child's plastic bucket at me. "They leave their stuff on the beach when they go home, certain that someone else will use them, I suppose, when really all that happens is that it gets sucked out by the tide."

He's got a point, of course.

T now lives on an island, far from the icy climes of the Great State of Minnesota, in an area defined almost entirely by banking institutions, all-you-can-eat buffets and medical facilities.

And the ocean. We spent a lot of time in it, bouncing blithely and limiting our saltwater intake to only those waves that hit us in the face.

It's an incredible thing to live on a strip of land that is a block or so from the ocean on the one side and four to five blocks from the ocean on the other and it suits T just fine.

Me, I don't trust it.

The signs posted along Gulf Drive are clearly marked: it is a hurricane evacuation route, one lane in each direction.

That's one lane in each direction, two bridges.

For cryin' out loud.

I told him if a hurricane hits that he should forget the car, stuff the two cats in a carrier and run, that he'd stand a better chance of actually getting off the island hoofing it than sitting in the inevitable traffic jam/fist fight that will occur before, during, and after the hurricane hits.

He pointed out to me that I am prone to death by freezing.

I pointed out to him that I am still a stranger to storm surges, objects delivered through living room walls via 200 MPH winds, and waiting for the National Guard to deliver emergency cat food.

It's nice to see that our relationship has not changed.

So I Guess Craig's List's Not An Option

Mary’s getting downright crabby.

“Have I told you,” she says, “that I need a new mattress?”

She has. A number of times.

We can’t blame her for being slow to pick up on another expenditure. The economy has not been kind to her and Jon in the last few years – and the years before that weren’t so hot either. A mattress is simply not in the budget.

“Lay here. No, seriously, lay down. Tell me what you think.”

How to describe Mary’s mattress?

Let’s put it this way: If you were to take a large burlap sack, stuff it with irregularly shaped pets – cats, ferrets, your smaller dogs – and then threw a couple of sheets, a decorative bedspread and a couple of pillows on it, you’d have an idea of what Mary’s mattress could be like if only it were a wee bit more comfortable.

“So what are you going to do?”

“Well, I can imagine this going a couple different ways,” she says thoughtfully. “I will either carefully hide $10 a week until I can afford it –“

“Prudent,” I interrupt.

“Thank you. Or I go ahead and take a cleaning job’s offer of borrowing me the money outright and then working it off – “

“Fiscally responsible,” I offer.

“Thank you. Or I avoid the whole outlay thing entirely, the police show up after you call them when you don’t hear from me for a week or two and they find Jon and I in a mutual-murder scenario brought on by lack of sleep wherein they find us with our hands locked around each other’s necks and T-Bone has eaten away parts of our faces out of hunger.”

T-Bone is their Labrador.

Mary takes a deep breath and there is the briefest of moments as I mull over these scenarios.

“All vivid and possible,” I muse. “I can see that you’ve put a lot of thought into this. May I throw my weight behind Options 1 and 2?”

Mary frowns. Clearly Option 3 had had its appeal – perhaps the idea of being debt-free and newsworthy carried more weight than she had initially let on when she had casually presented it – but she finally nods.

Jon will never know how close he came to being front page news.

And Mary’s on her way to getting a new mattress.

Mother Pearl Has a Nice Ring To It

When I was young, back when the Garden of Eden was in bloom and we were still counting how many turtles' shells the Earth was resting on, I actively considered following in the path of Mother Teresa.

No, really.

I was a serious child and could not understand the despair in the world – I was pretty sure I could help.

A lack of confidence has never been one of my problems.

Unfortunately, the path to righteousness has many sideroads at which you may turn; and since leaving childhood, I have gone dizzy with the number of times I've diverged from the path...

I have laughed – and not in a nice way – at a drunk woman who squatted on the sidewalk, in a very short skirt, to rummage through her purse, her underwear glowing in the dark, her butt, inches from the pavement, a chubby white advertisement for sobriety.

I once told a beggar who tried to hug me “Touch me and I’ll scream”.

I have accused my husband, the long-suffering William Throckmorton the III, of undisclosed mental retardation after having been asked to repeat myself for the fifth time.

I have chased a rather large woman on a motorized scooter for three blocks before succumbing to asthma and bare-footed-ness.

This is kindness? This is humility? This is turning the other cheek?

Ah, well, the other cheek is still squatting on the sidewalk, I suspect, looking drunkenly for her wallet.

In short, ladies and gentlemen, I believe I have strayed from the path that Mother Teresa would have asked me to walk.

I have lost patience with the people who take more than they need, pretending that they don’t notice that they’ve done so.

I have lost respect for the people who don’t cop to their own culpability, who manipulate reality for their own ends and take others with them.

I have become intolerant of the people who add nothing but only take.

In short, I have discovered that I am more human than I had hoped for.

Good Thing They Didn't Call My Bluff

You see what we got here? We got ourselves another Friday! Another opportunity at weekend greatness.

But wait! What's in store for us? If only we knew... If only we had some way of divining...

But we do! Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, for your amusement, your foray into silliness, your mocking-Pearl-pleasure, my iPod.

Because everyone knows that the songs played during my morning's commute are a portal into the future.

The Trapeze Swinger by Iron and Wine
Honky Tonkin’ by Hank Williams
Jungle Love by Morris Day and the Time
New Song by Nomo
Skinny Love by Bon Iver
Senor Blues by Taj Mahal
Whipping Post by The Allman Brothers

Well if that don't scare ya straight, I don't know what will.

Time for a story?




I’ve never been a pacifist.

But I’ve known a couple.

Interesting breed, the true pacifist: they truly believe that things can be talked through; and while I believe that talking should be the first thing done, I also believe that some people enjoy the fact that you won’t fight back.

Enter my friend Steve.

Steve and I have been friends for 30 years now. We’ve known each other for so long that, in a fit of brotherly love, we declared, at the ripe and drunken age of 21, that if we were not married by 40, we would marry each other.

Of course, on our 40th birthdays, we modified that to 80. No point in pushing that brotherly love thing.

Steve and I have shared living quarters – platonically – a number of times. The first time was in a two-bedroom apartment in Anoka, Minnesota (self-proclaimed “Halloween Capital of the World”). It took a couple months to discover that not only was Anoka a rough-edged and intolerant little town but that we were the only ones in a complex of eight actually paying for our apartment – everyone else were living by the good graces of the State of Minnesota.

The living room overlooked the parking lot, a vista on to permanently parked cars on cinder blocks and small groups of people gathered around hibachi grills, quaffing one beer after another and crushing them against their foreheads.

And so it was, one afternoon, heading out the door to my second-shift job, that I looked out the living room window and saw Steve being pushed by two men, one vicious poke in the chest at a time, up against the brick apartment building on the other side of the lot.

Have I described Steve to you? At 5’10” and perhaps 150 pounds, he is a long-haired hippie-type, a mischievous man who once “punished” me for being crabby by holding me down and making me watch part of “Apocalypse Now” (a movie that disturbs me greatly), a man who has never been in a fight – no, let's be clear. Not a man who has never been in a fight, a man who won’t fight.

Steve is one of those rare individuals who truly believes in the Brotherhood of Man, a man who will give you his coat in cold weather, a man who would give you his last dollar.

In other words, Steve is bait for a certain kind of person.

So when I looked out the window and saw him, his hands up in supplication, his lips moving, talking while being pushed backwards, I knew that the two flannel-clad, “this-face-seats-one”-hatted men who had singled him out were having fun and were looking forward to hurting the hippie.

The next stop would be a fist fight – one that Steve would not take part in, even in self-defense.

I slipped my heels on and flew down the steps, out into the parking lot. Steve’s face changed from one trying to talk his way out of a fight to one of relief.

I was yelling angrily as I approached. “Hey! Hey! Get away from him!”

They stopped and turned.

“What’s it to you? Get outta here,” one of them said.

“What’s it to me? To me?! This guy won’t fight back, but I will. You want a fight? Huh? You want to pick on someone smaller than you? Well here I am.”

“You think I won’t hit a girl?"

“Oh, I’m betting you will. Come on, you @#$!&. I’m giving you one shot and then I’m gonna kick your ass from one end of this parking lot to another.”

It was quiet as Steve moved away from the wall.

“You ready?” I challenged. “’Cause your friend here is next.”

These poor guys. I could see that they weren’t very bright. I could see that I, in a skirt and a pair of heels, was confusing them.

“That’s what I thought,” I sneered. “Couple of pusses. Get out of here before I call the cops.”

I turned.

“Steve,” I said. “Go on now.”

Steve walked, unchallenged, toward the house. “Thanks,” he whispered.

I turned back toward the two. “I’m going in the house,” I said. “If I see you back in this parking lot – ever – I’m calling the cops; and you’ll excuse me for saying so, but neither of you look like you want to talk to the police.”

I turned around, shaking with adrenalin and fear, and walked back to the apartment building; and in a show of foolish bravado specific to someone 24 years old, stubbornly kept my back to them.

When I got to my apartment and looked out the living room window, they were gone.

We laugh about it to this day, Steve and I, wondering what would’ve happened had one of them taken that free shot I had offered.

Because I’ve never been in a fight a day in my life.

Another Incident Involving Pants

T, the man who left the variable and sometimes violent climes of Minnesota for the appallingly warm lands of Florida, called to report that his pants have revolted.

My brain rolled over.

“That’s revolted,” he quickly repeated.

Ah, well, he knows me, doesn’t he, knew that my mind was spinning with ways in which to agree with him that his wardrobe could be considered revolting.

We are, after all, talking about a man who owns a tee-shirt that says, “It’s Not Going to Lick Itself”.

Poor T. The move has not been easy for him: there are limited employment opportunities on an island; free-roaming geckoes, everywhere; gangs of sea birds swirl overhead, mocking him.

The distance between Minnesota and Florida is not always measured with an odometer.

“I’ve looked everywhere,” he said.

“We’re still talking about your pants, right?”

He sighed. “Yes. They were here one minute…” he sighed again.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Have you been drinking?”

“No. Well, yes. But that’s not it…” he paused. “I just thought we had something special, you know?”

“Are we still talking about your pants?”

“Yes, dammit! I mean, we had an agreement! We would go to work, we would have some beers on the couch! I loved those pants! They were hardly stained and the crotch wasn’t even blown out!”

He went silent.

“It’s because I’m doing day labor, isn’t it? It’s because I haven’t found full-time work. Pearl, what if my pants have left me for someone who has more going on?”

I resisted the urge to enter into a conversation around what may or may not be going on in his pants.

“Look,” I said. “Do you have another pair of pants?”

A rather defeated-sounding sigh: “Yes.”

“Go talk to them,” I said. “You know your pants would never be able to keep a secret. See if your other pants know what’s up.”

I received a call several hours later by a relieved T, who found his favorite pants mixed in with another pair of pants under his bed. Things still seemed a bit muddled, but suffice it to say that there may have been some sort of interrupted rendezvous wherein the pants had suddenly found themselves surrounded by a mob of single, mismatched socks who were, oddly enough, planning a revolt.

T was downright cheerful.

“Did you know those pants were gay? I didn’t!” he chuckled briefly. “I mean, it’s not like they were pleated, you know what I mean?”

There was a pause as he took a drink.

“I threw them out immediately, of course. The socks, I mean, not the pants. I’ve never truly trusted socks, and now I know why.” There was another pause. “Do you think that maybe I instinctively had a distrust of socks for this very reason?”

I said nothing but smiled over the phone.

From the sounds of it, T was smiling, too.

“I’m just so glad everything is back to normal, aren’t you?”

I smiled again.

Glad? Yes.

Normal?

Sure. Why not.

Wherein Pearl -- Hark! -- Reminisces

Pearl has, in an effort to distance herself from the sorrow of having discovered her home laptop with its head in the oven, will be referring to herself in the third person for the purposes of this post.

Please know that she is well and resting comfortably, despite the treasonous behavior of her beloved but clearly depressed computer.

Her head is swimming. Is there something she could’ve done?

But why ask ourselves when there are so many options, so many ways to dispose of personal responsibility! Why, just this morning, she was thinking, “I can’t wait until Friday when my iPod will tell me what I can expect from the weekend!”

Because it’s true! It’s reasonably, arguably, possibly true that Friday morning’s playlist, well shuffled and taken aurally, will tell you what is in your immediate future.

Hey Eugene by Pink Martini
Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix
Dirty Harry by Gorillaz
Grace by Jeff Buckley
Silver by Pixies
The Other Side by Morphine*

Colorful, iddin it? What it means, however? Pearl has no idea.

We have time for a quick thought, if you have a moment…

My friend Erin’s grandma wonders where all the jalopies have gone, insists that there are, nowadays, no jalopies.

And outside of the fact that she lives in one of the finer, wealthier areas of Chicago and a jalopy would be as out of place there as a couple of dogs humping at a polo match, I don’t know that anyone calls them “jalopies” anymore…

Ergot, Erin’s grandma is right: there are no jalopies.

Junkers? Hoopdies? Beaters with Heaters? We have plenty of those, we’ve just run out of jalopies.

The world of words marches on.

What in the wide, wide world of sports is going on here?

Grandma had a sister-in-law whose nickname growing up was “Puss” because she was such a pretty little girl. “A pretty face, just like a little cat,” Grandma said.

But now? Calling someone "Puss"? Them’s fightin’ words.

My grandmother used to serve us “nectar”, aka “fruit juice”. She was also known to have “warshed” the car (rather than “washing” it) and say thing like “oh, for land’s sake” and “might as well, can’t dance”.

She also served “dinner” at lunchtime and “supper” at, well, what we now call “dinner”.

It gets very confusing. I have diagram I could show you later.

Hark! So many words we no longer say. So many meanings that have changed since their initial use. So much is specific to a generation that then goes away with them, once that generation is gone.

And that’s a shame, because if there’s one thing I could use nowadays would be a nice cool glass of Grandma's nectar.


* Are you sure you’re getting enough dark, honkin’ baritone sax solos in your life? You’re not?! Don’t forget to take a listen to “The Other Side”. Mark Sandman of Morphine died several years ago while touring in Europe (which is why I – ahem – never tour Europe) but the music is timeless.

So What Did You Learn Today?

Because I am a glutton for punishment, fairly easily swayed by the words of friends and excited by the opportunity to partake in the après-movie cocktails on the agenda, I broke one of my own rules Saturday night.

I saw a movie with a number at the end of it.

Quickly, now: Have there been any good sequels made – other than Godfather II! – that were worth the price of the popcorn that helped it go down?

Let’s all pause, shall we, as we ponder this question.

Sad, iddin it?

And what happens when the rules are broken?

That’s right: prompt, big-screen punishment.

Ladies and gentlemen, I saw Sex and The City 2 yesterday.

Let’s pause again, whilst we politely shake our heads at my being disappointed by the shallow nature and poor writing of a second movie based on an HBO series that went off the air in 2004.

And now let us pause and ponder the sound of me re-committing to my original tenet: There will be no watching of movies with numbers at the end of them.

I don’t know why such lousy movies are made. Maybe there was a bet made somewhere that a movie could not be made based on a one-liner. Perhaps the stars of this movie had boat payments to make. Possibly there was a wager that no one could make a movie that would be considered too long at one hour 26.

Whatever happened, my original instincts were correct; and I’ve decided that I should trust myself more often.

And with this in mind, I’ve been thinking.

The friendship, conversation and margaritas after the movie? Yes.

Going against one’s own instinct? No.

And so, as I say, I have been thinking. If our instincts are proven right only in hindsight, is it possible to just cut out the painful experience of having your gut feeling proven correct and just skip ahead to not having done it – again?

I think so.

I, Pearl, shall no longer buy “just one more Twinkie”, trying to recapture the childish thrill of that much sugar in one place.

I shall no longer count changing clothes as “exercise” and then profess shock when I discover, at the end of the day, that my thighs have had the seams of my jeans impressed on them.

And that thing about the Twinkies again – see the bit directly above re: inexplicable pants shrinkage.

So what did I learn today?

That going against your instinct will cost you a movie ticket, two pitchers of margaritas to wash the bad taste that 86 minutes of big-screen dreck will leave behind, and buttered-popcorn stains on your shorts that will come out in the wash.

And now that I think of it, I got off cheaply, didn’t I?

Take A Right! Take A Right!!

It’s garage sale time.

The season has manifested itself in a number of ways: the car pulls over of its own accord, two dollars suddenly seems like a lot of money to pay for a pair of pants, and heated footraces from the car to tables laden with pre-owned items of dubious quality occur between normally amiable people.

I’m watching you, Mary.

Garage saling is not for the weak. It takes a sturdy bag loaded with change, a stout pair of shoes.

Ah. Garage saling (excuse me whilst I verbify), a weekend pursuit whereby one cruises for home-made signs posted about town in the hopes of being lead to cheap, used goods. On foot, on wheels, these signs – hand-made neon or store bought, the wheedling “Multi-Family Sale!” or my favorite, last weekend’s telephone-pole-posted and tragically misspelled “Hudge Sale! Eveythig Must Go!” – lead me on, lead me in, a Siren’s song of instant gratification and cheap thrills.

Don’t get me wrong. I mean, I’m after a bargain; but it’s not like I’m looking to buy your old underwear. Unless they’re really cool underwear. No, no, just kidding. Not even if they’re really cool. Well, unless they were your great-grandma’s bloomers and I need them for a Halloween costume.

Don’t tell anyone.

Many a friend has been sucked into the Garage Sale Vortex with me. We can spend whole Saturday afternoons chasing down “Huge Sale” signs, the car veering to the left, to the right. Luckily, our neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods are rife with garage sales, people selling quirky art and funky clothing; and like the faithful horse of yesteryear trotting its drunken master home safely from the pub, the Honda seems to know what to do.

Best deals? A three-dollar leather coat that fits like a glove. A three-dollar 1920s rolling cocktail cart in passable condition. A set of turn-of-the-century framed and hand-embroidered floral depictions with only slight water damage. Best of all? A five-dollar unopened Husker Du original pressing.

Mwa ha ha ha haaaaaa! Victory is mine!

And that’s what it’s about. The treasure – no matter how you define it.

Which is not to say that I haven’t been had, even if “had” was only in the sense of having been tricked into pulling over and getting out of the car. There are people out there selling sweat-stained, button-less blouses; cup-less, cracked saucers; and sweat pants with blown-out waistbands.

I already got those.

And as an aside, what’s with trying to sell me things you’ve received for free?! I know where you got those Pert Shampoo samples, lady.

Of course there are some pretty specific garage sales out there that do not concern me at all: a yard full of toddler accoutrements, the grimy and esoteric tools of an old man’s shed. It comes with the territory. But we Garage-Salers are a hardy bunch and accustomed to the disappointment that comes with, say, a garage full of two-for-a-quarter romance novels or cardboard cut-outs of Easter bunnies and “Kiss Me I’m Irish” buttons.

As I say, it’s not for the weak.

But as we say on the garage-sale circuit: If you can’t handle the eight-tracks, stay in the car.