Saturday, September 22, 2007
Discoveries
I have discovered caffeinated gum. It’s mostly made of that blue putty used to stick posters to walls, coated in a hard minty shell. At first, the prescribed two pieces feel bigger and more bubbalicious than you really want, and then they feel too small and hard, but when you try to spit it out, it won’t even ball up neatly. This gum is horrible stuff. You’d think I’d not have “tried” it more than once. The warning label says quite clearly: If you have some before classes at 8pm, you will still be thrashing around in bed at 2am, hot and frustrated and with a brain that won’t stop humming. You will give up and read, and fall asleep with all the lights on.
I practically can’t sleep without the lights on now. It feels productive.
My nights and mornings got ruined this week. I can’t sleep before almost 3 now, and then I dream with such ridiculous vitality and action, of such wild all-sorts, places, people, chewing gum, then I wake at 6am, full of ideas and needing to pee, before crashing out again, horrifically, until almost 11am (typically i wake at 7:30am, alarm or not).
My back is killing me. I might have a kid, so it can walk on it for me until it’s big enough for junior high.
I’m enjoying the compilation of my grandmother’s writing. I have a letter from the author Carl Glick, in response to a review she wrote of “Shake Hands with the Dragon” when she was probably a junior in high school. He wrote her back, very nicely, and said he would show her review to the publisher, and include it in his scrapbook. He sent her a Chinese New Year card. I just googled him, and found that he in fact was a die hard scrapbook keeper, and they are part of a collection of all his works. Super cool.
She wrote the fashion column for her high school paper and calls her readers “kittens” the way I call you folks “bunnies”. I like it. I can’t imagine the Lucy I know calling anyone “kitten”, but then, I’m not surprised either. I feel like we will have a little tradition, she and I. We have a lot in common, tastes, flaming swords of justice, a resolute belief in our own perseverance, tea, drinks, purple things, I like it.
She fell in love with a drummer when she was 14. He was 18, and asked her mother if she was allowed to go for a walk. There was “necking” on a bench up behind the Hudson River Museum. She was in love.
He went to college and she to high school, Her first “real” love was some hottie named Hans. The drummer showed up at her prom with another date, whom he immediately ignored once he saw my grandmother.
They’re still married.
She was editor in chief of the yearbook for the United States Cadet Nurse Corp, a special uniformed service formed in 1943 to respond to the dire need for nurses during WWII. She joined when she was 17, signing up for 12 hour rotating shifts, plus nurse training, and classes. And she looked stunning in her uniform. Amazing to me, since my new hobby is finding time to do things that I love or feel are important, and they are all related at the moment.
Right before I moved to NY and she moved down to Florida to finally retire, she volunteered at the Bedford maximum security women’s prison, and wrote about that. The associate director of my program has authored a handbook for writers in prison, that I will mail to her. Finding all these random connections might be one of the nicest feelings there is.
Alright bunnies, my brain is drifting elsewhere. xo
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