Unringing the Bell

Egg-solent

Yesterday, Alex and I went down to see my family and color Easter eggs. It took until this afternoon to get the green off my fingers, but my niece, Julsey-Bop, had an easier time of it despite the fact that her hands were green and orange and purple up to her wrists. (She dunked her hands in the toilet and poured about a gallons worth of hand soap over her head and rubbed it in while no one was looking!)

But you can't help being cute when you are cute!

While we were there, we also went through some old and embarrassing boxes full of my journals and photographs from my mother's storage space that we recently cleaned out. The really embarrassing part is that the journals weren't all that old. I will spare you the details (which unfortunately Alex can now hold over my head) but I can't help but show you this picture from when I was six. It's actually a sheet of pictures that are actually stickers. In it, I am wearing an Izod sweater and a white chain around my neck with a dollar sign on it! I thought I was the PICTURE of preppy cool! (Though my older sister insists everyone thought I was her little brother because of the hair.)

So I was a bit of a tom-
boy. What of it??!! My moth-
er always had us with long hair like in this picture when I was four in nursery school (note my incredibly chapped lips and the ears that stuck out so far they caused my neighbors Ricky and Joey to tell me if I caught a high wind I would fly away and that I looked like a car with its doors left open) and I felt so liberated when I got my first short haircut.

Anyway, it's always a trip when you see old photos and letters and journals. Makes you long to open a portal into the past and to make sure it's seal shut tight at the same time.

Today we went to a picnic with some math friends and though Alex and I both got ringers (while no one else did) we got out butts kicked in horseshoes.

I can't believe the weekends already over and it's back to the races for us in the morning.

Anyway, Hoppy Easter from us to you!

Fridge Film

For those of you who pay attention to my photo albums, you know that I have a fridge full of latent images that I am slowly developing. It's bringing up a lot of old memories of times in New Haven & Boston and of friends and things that in some cases are very much in my past now. Some photos are of evenings long since forgotten, but as soon as my CD drive whirs them into being I can immediately place the feelings and experiences from when the photos were taken. In one case (on the Candy Land film) I came across a picture of a guy I later dated briefly before realizing he was a creep, but what's funny is I took the picture several months before ever officially meeting him. Strange.

Seeing pictures of my friends makes me feel a real void and also causes me to wonder at how different my life has been over the last months since I moved to the middle of nowhere (MON). Don't get me wrong, in fact, recently I have been finally coming into my own. And I even said to Alex yesterday, "You know, it took me at least 6 months to catch my stride in New Haven as well."

I have met several people (mostly via the cafe) and I am about to embark on a new adventure what with new apartment and job and that all seems grand. Even the pace of things is starting to feel right, if not ever exCITing. No doubt with this new job too, I will begin making even more connections, whether they be career connections or personal I have yet to see, but either way I am excited for it. I am also pleased that my resume will bulk its little self up again and I have hopes that after the next 1-2 years we will leave here with a certain sense of fondness for the subtle opportunities we have been given. And of course, there's Alex's PhD to look forward to!

I am feeling a little disconcerted because our house is truly a shambles whilst we half-pack all our belongings for the move. I have a lot of little projects I am and/or want to be working on, but again, I feel like I have to wait until we are all moved into the new pad. I am NOT looking forward to moving. Being there, yes. Getting there, no.

And now, before I go off to upload new photos in my albums, I will leave you with this creepy-eyed photo of me and my friend Peter who's art show we went to last week. I met Peter a little over a year ago. I now don't remember how, but I remember immediately feeling at home with him like we had been friends for eons. Maybe because he is from Vermont? Maybe because we are long lost brother and sister? Maybe because of the ear muffs.

The Bridge Over

Last night Alex and I drove to the video store where we returned two terrible stand-up comedy DVDs (unfortunately, one of them was Margaret Cho's Assassin. I used to love Cho quite a bit, and maybe it was just that this DVD was more social commentary and less comedy and it wasn't what I was in the mood for, or maybe it was that her shtick seems a bit hackneyed, but whatever it was, we couldn't even sit through the first 20 minutes. The other was Dennis Miller and we got it on a whim partly because I had always heard his name and really didn't know much about him. Alas, even though Cho was too social commentary-y for me at least her points were valid and not totally bombastic; Miller, on the other hand, was a big-time conservative ASS! I fell asleep, Alex stayed up and got mad.)...anyhoo.

On the way to the video store, I fell into the rhythm of the truck as it bounced along on the icy roads and I felt much like I did when I was a teenager riding along beside my mother in her blue Crown Victoria (yes, it was the exact make, model and color as the Milford, CT cop cars during that time frame for those of you in the 5-0 Know). My parents (mostly my father, but my mother did it as well) were known for going the scenic route, the back roads, the long way. Looking back, I think on these "shortcuts" with a sense of comfort and happiness and I often find myself taking the beach route when  traveling. From Milford to West Haven, I avoid the highway and enjoy the curve and sway of the roads along the seawalls. The smell of the beach at low tide a rancid-pleasurable mix, much like the sensation of skunk-smell, and during high winds, the crash of the waves over the rocks and sometimes even the seawall itself, delight and terrify me.

On longer trips with my mother, often to or from my grandmother's house in Monroe I would stare at myself in the side view mirror and think what I thought at the time were incredibly deep thoughts. For instance, on the universe: "How could it end? It must be boundary-less. What? Is there a sign that says UNIVERSE ENDS HERE, TURN BACK?"

In my mind I envisioned, for some reason, a cartoon character, much like Marvin the Martian rocketing out to the sign and saying "Zoinks!" or some such cartoonish phrase before turning back into the universe. (Ohmigod, come to think of it, DID I see this in a cartoon??? Could that REALLY be why I thought such things? Was my 13-year-old mind really just re-hashing an episode of Bugs Bunny and commiserating on the philosophy of it? Sheesh, with the amount of TV I used to watch, I wouldn't put it past myself.)

Sometimes I would recount these thoughts to my mother. She would usually reply with a nonverbal grunt or nod or hmmm. And I would go back to thinking, my mother hugging the inside of the road because as she said "I am afraid to fall off," listening to Eddy Arnold or Kenny Rogers or 99.9liteFM. I would sing along and wonder at it all. And as we drove over the Sikorsky Bridge whose original construction was wrong (the slats had been put on in the wrong direction and it caused cars to fishtail across it and rather recently (in the last 5 years) it was rebuilt and fixed). As we came upon the bridge--years earlier it was just before or after the toll, and after they took the tollbooths down I knew when to get ready by reflex--and I would push the automatic window opener (a luxury in the Crown Vic my father took pride in), unsnap my seat belt, lean forward in my seat and put my head just so far out the window until I could see the water beneath the bridge through the slats as we rushed over, the tail end of our car fishtailing, my mother hollering not to lean out too far, Eddy Arnold yodeling from the speakers inside the car; and me, the wind on my face, the water whooshing below, yelling inside, no end to my universe.