The Neighborly Thing

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Edward Hopper, American Village, 1912

I wish I could say I was putting the finishing touches on a riveting short story when the doorbell rang, but the Google Doc page I’d opened this morning still had just five meandering paragraphs on it. Instead, I was on YouTube, watching SNL clips, the tenth or twentieth one that day. Laughing, but feeling bad about it.

I closed my computer and went to the door. It was C, the kid from diagonally across the street, dressed head-to-toe in kid-sized Army fatigues that were still a little too big. His mom had carefully rolled up the sleeves in one neat fold, and from beneath the slightly-too long pants, she’d matched his shoes: suede forest-green Vans.

“Is Artie home?”

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Wanted: proper dining area for dinner parties

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Oil painting of a dinner party in a wealthy, upper class home from the early 1900's.
Jules Alexandre Grun, The Dinner Party. 1880’s. Oil on canvas

It’s been seven months since we’ve moved back and we are still house-hunting. By now, we’ve probably toured over thirty houses, a third of them decrepit tear-downs, a third outrageously overpriced flips, and a third that were in decent or even great shape, but location-wise, not where we wanted to plant our cosmopolitan toes.

Last week however, we found a flip that we actually liked.

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Alarm clocks

Betty3 Comments
Franz Krischke, Old clock

I’d just signed Artie out at pickup when his after school teacher, a young woman named Miss Bai, came up to me.

“Arthur is so cute,” she said. I relaxed a little bit. These short exchanges during pickup are often when she provides feedback – most of which is positive: “Arthur played very well today, not too rough.” Or, “Arthur spent most of his free play time coloring in. He likes cars, especially fast, expensive ones, so you could also print some coloring sheets out at home for him.” But sometimes she’ll tell me that he did, albeit unintentionally, play too rough with some unfortunate classmate or that he had a harder time than usual keeping his fingers out of his mouth.

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Low energy parents

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  • tired parents relax at the end of the day surrounded by laundry
    This is my first (and last) time using WordPress’s AI image generator. Clearly I could have put in more description of the entire family but the androgynous narrator character whose legs are too short for the ground (but great hair and ankles) is my AI spirit person.

Last night, just before Tom and I settled onto my parents’ lumpy couch to watch “The Wire“*, my dad said, “Aren’t you going to put the laundry on?”

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A few thoughts (and a book) for the New Year

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Woman reading a novel in watercolor on paper painting by Winslow Homer
The New Novel, Winslow Homer 1877 Watercolor on Paper

Last night I stayed up late reading Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. I had to request it twice from the library before I actually started it, and when I finally did, had to give it a few goes – mainly, getting past the first chapter – before I was running off into the world and finding myself reluctant to leave, even though it was nearing 3AM.

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The Bear and I

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Two months after my friend gave birth to her second child, we met up for lunch at a cafe, on a tree-lined street in Redfern. Normally extremely punctual, she arrived a few minutes late, but this was by design. As she approached the cafe, she saw that her baby was beginning to doze, so she took an extra loop around the block to ensure he made it to the land of Nod. A small investment for what she hoped would be a cry-free lunch.

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