Bathroom Acoustics

I haven't posted any of the daily play-lists lately.

I started the day with mellow. A little Eldridge and Dizzy jazz to start, followed with Bebel Gilberto, followed by Ustad Zakir Hussain, and repeated over and over again with Louis Armstrong's Definitive thrown in.

It stayed that way all day. Some folks bitched because it was rainy and they thought I should have more upbeat tunes playing... but if I was home (which by all rights, at 2pm, I should have been... but my help was sick and so I opened the day.... and then closed it, too).... but if I was home, I'd have played those same tunes, maybe tidied up my house and then taken a bath with a glass of wine. Music playing and rain hitting the windows. Lovely.

But I was here and that was the play-list.

Then 5pm came and it was time to close. I still had tons to do and the single shot americano wasn't quite cutting it. So I changed the play-list. I started with some Del McCorry bluegrass, followed with some Old Crow Medicane Show bluegrass and finished with some classic Grateful Dead.

I was just about done with all the little details and as I was pulling the floor mats from the bathroom hallway back to behind the counter, I decided to stop and take a quick wizz before I locked up that section of the cafe.

While I was in the bathroom, Ripple started to play.

' If my words did glow
with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played
on the harp unstrung,
Would you hear my voice come thru the music,
Would you hold it near as it were your own?'

When I was pregnant with Ella... and pretty much fresh off of Dead tour.... I used to sing this song to her while she lay...curled up in inside my belly. I'd find big rocks to sit on and sing. I'd sing by ponds or sing while I washed dishes. It became our lullaby.

'Its a hand-me-down,
the thoughts are broken,
Perhaps they're better left unsung.
I don't know,
don't really care
Let there be songs to fill the air.'

I tend to sing under my breath alot while I'm working. Just kind of carry the song a little bit as I move from sandwich to latte to register. Sometimes I just mouth the words to keep me company and sometimes, if it's a really good song, I find myself dancing a little as I work. Thank god for music.

'Reach out your hand
if your cup be empty,
If your cup is full
may it be again,
Let it be known there is a fountain,
That was not made by the hands of men.'

I found myself standing there in the bathroom, eyes closed, singing all over again.

'Ripple in still water,
When there is no pebble tossed,
Nor wind to blow.'

And I realized a really great thing.

The bathroom has incredible acoustics!

'There is a road, no simple highway,
Between the dawn and the dark of night,
And if you go
no one may follow,
That path is for your steps alone.'

I don't know if it's because the bathroom is no bigger than your average Job Johnny but I can't carry a tune if it's in a bucket and I didn't sound half bad in there! Thanks for all the practice, Bean. Maybe tonight, when I get home, after we read a chapter of Harry Potter, I'll try it back on for old time's sake.

'Ripple in still water,
When there is no pebble tossed,
Nor wind to blow.

But if you fall
you fall alone,
If you should stand
then who's to guide you?
If I knew the way I would take you home.'

Ella was right...

Her new art teacher does look like Uncle Vernon from Harry Potter.
A bit nicer, though.
Says Bean has some real talent.

We missed the jello molds... got there just as the principal was announcing that the parents could now take a look around and get the tour. Ella walked us through her classroom and their daily routine, we visited the book fair where she purchased a marker that smelled like buttered popcorn, and I tried hiding my many yawns... the thoughts of coming back to the shop after the open house just lingering like bad mosquito bites in the back of my head.

We came home, ate what little food we could find in the house (since mom has no time any more for things like grocery shopping and daily household maintenance), I read a bit of the first Harry Potter to Els, and said my goodbyes and goodnights.

I'll be back at 6am to open. I should have just brought my feather blanket and curled up on the couch.... have myself a one person slumber party. I could have brought our portable dvd player and Ella's buttered popcorn marker.

Blip

It's one of those rare moments where I have the laptop open on the counter during business hours. I figure that I'll get three sentences in before people come flooding in. We'll see.

I'll have to lock the doors tonight and head out without taking care of any of the closing duties....come back late night to put it all together for the morning staff. Ella has open house at her school tonight. We'll miss the potluck segment, which I can't say I'm entirely disappointed about. One can only handle so many jello molds and macaroni salads in their lifetime. But we'll get there in time to take the tour of her classroom, meet the parents and teachers, etc. These events are always a little weird. I don't know if I'll ever get used to being the parent of a school aged kid. In my head I'm still trying to rush home in time to sneak the 'poor work notices' out of the mailbox before my folks find them. Those little pink pieces of paper haunted me viciously from third grade till twelfth. I'd have been a perfect candidate for either Ritalin or homeschooling.

Well, that was ten sentences. Forty minutes later. This is getting old.
Signing out.

Biography

The Grateful Dead played twice in Highgate, Vermont in the mid-nineties. In 1994, I was supposed to work that night and the following day at Katana... the local, mid-town sushi joint. Two hours before I was due in to work, I called in desperately sick.... and was on the road. I was living in an old, brick Sesame Street double block at the time, that my mom still has nightmares about..... I'm surprised I don't still have nightmares about it.

We made it to the show, got in for free because they just plain old opened the gates (gotta love Vermont) and then left immediatley afterward at midnite. According to plan, I would have been home with three hours to spare before I was due in for my shift at the sushi joint, but we took directions from our friend TJ, who happened to be way too high to give effective directions, and what could have been a seven hour drive from Vermont to Pennsylvania turned out to be a twelve hour drive through Connecticut rush hour traffic, where everyone that drove around us either beeped or flipped us off because a Volkswagon bus, with it's windows down in fast rush hour traffic on a Connecticut freeway, is not dissimilar to a woffleball in a wind storm.... and I had to call in almost four hours late and ended up bathing and changing and finally, after all that time, brushing my hair in the bus and they practically (whoever was driving, I think it was you, Dave) just dropped the thing down into second gear as I jumped out at mid-town in my black pants and black shirt.

The second year I drove into Highgate, Vermont I was in my bus again... but this time it's interior was sweetly decorated and packed to the gills, ready for some kind of cross-country venture. Our quack mechanic supposedly rebuilt the engine and my dad advised me to, "every time the oil gets low, throw in a quart or so of oil".....'

It was seven hours to Vermont. By the time we hit the Adirondack lakes, we blew our air filter from all that oil (we kept a whole case under the fold out sofa in the van).... We ended up sawing off the end of a broom handle and lodging it between the air filter and the roof of the engine compartment to keep that filter on through a basic, first-into-second acceleration. Our first, of many, chic McGyver moves.

It was after that Highgate show that we drove into Johnson for the first time. We pulled into Main Street, just across from the coffee shop, and went into ~ what was then ~ The Pie Safe... a gift shop/deli type joint that was once the big bank in town. I think the safe had been transormed into the beer cooler.

It's now the corner book store/yarn shop. A beautiful place. Makes me wish I actually bought books new. Or bought books at all, really. My walls are too full of books I've collected over the years, books I have yet to read, to allow myself the luxury of new books. And I have way too much going on to actually knit. Much as I'd like to.

From there we landed at the farm house... and it was there that me and my van spent most of the rest of the summer.... floating through the pastures out back in patch work dresses, drinking iced coffee, smoking cigarettes and figuring out the world on the front porch of the coffee shop... all in between the four or five swimming holes we "clocked in" at through out the afternoon.

It was that summer that Johnson became my stomping ground. It was that summer that the cops would slow down as they drove past the coffee shop... taking long looks.... taking notes. It was that summer that the big cedar flower buckets placed all along the Main Street corners kept gettting trimmed down by local officials because, in between the pansies and wisteria, weed kepting growing up.

It was the same summer I learned to swim naked, that I read Mists of Avalon, that I learned to hoola-hoop, play devil sticks and widdle. I learned that summer how to build a fire, how to fish, and how to walk across a log (or as Kalinas called it... do the "walk of faith"). The first time I walked that log, my ass was black and blue for weeks. Faith took me some time. The better part of the summer, really.

I spent the next summer in Johsnon without the bus. It was the victim of my driving.. a head on collission outside of Philadelphia... the frame cracked... poor girl ruined. I lived in a tent and all my books got moldy. We built a clay oven and baked lasagne, we built devil sticks in the garage, I hitch-hiked with girlfriends. Slept on the ocean in Maine, got ticks on the ocean in Cape Cod, wrapped my arms around a Redwood in the middle of the night on a new moon in Northern California, slept in the Sequoias in Oregon and in a van in San Francisco.

That was the first year that I came back to Vermont and watched the summer turn into Autumn. It was the first time that I felt the nights here cool to an early frost, watched the rivers build a great, long mist in the morning, and woke to snow on a mountain top in September. It snowed in the valleys on Halloween that year... the first snow.

The shop porch is starting to collect red and yellow leaves. When I arrive in the morning, everything still wet with early frost, the paper having barely arrived (if it arrives at all) and the Main Street traffic still a bit sporadic, the porch is covered like confetti with dry, colorful leaves.

I can hardly remember that first fall. I can just remember the smell of the air. The way it felt on the skin. The shock of shorter days and the pace at which they shortened. I can remember renting a small little farmhouse apartment and loving the taste of maple syrup on a spoon. I can remember not having a bookshelf and so stacking the books from the floor on up. I can remember the jet-liner sound of the oil heater in our living room and just how quickly we would run out of hot water. I remember the horses up the road and how I would not wash my hands for hours so I could keep the smell on them.

I remember the transition from iced coffee on the porch of the shop to drinking hot coffee in the fall. And now, here it is late-ish September and I've had the same half gallon pitchers of iced coffee in the fridge since last weekend and, kinda like wearing flip flops till Mid-November, I just can't bring myself to pour them down the drain.

All of a sudden, I'm running out of little tea pots for my customers, instead of running out of pint glasses.... I'm making an awful lot of hot tea and hot lattes instead of iced tea and iced coffee. I'm walking faster from my car to the front door in the morning and I'm wondering if the place came with it's own snow shovel and rock salt.

We had dinner tonight with friends. Yellowtail nori rolls and miso soup with a 1990 Jerry Band show playing on the TV in the other room.... the year Brent died and they moved from the regular tour into Jerry Band tour. A mean Lucky Old Sun..... like nothing I've ever heard.

Before dinner, Ella did her homework... which was just a free-write in her journal. After dinner we tried doing splits in the living room (the hosts were Bean's karate teachers and they had come straight from karate to dinner). When we got into the car to go home, after our splits and dancing in the living room, Ella said to me, "Mom, I think I brought out your inner child." We sang to Regina Spektor the whole way home.

She wrote a poem for her free-write.

A POEM FOR AUTUMN

A chilly evening
Underneath the moon
The thought of summer
Usually means fun
Many colors fill my eyes
Now that I'm back to fall.

Chai Lattes and Star Charts

For the past year or so, Ella has been somewhat obsessessed with glow-in-the-dark sticker stars. Little by little they show up in new places throughout the house... newly noticed at night as we navigate our way through the dark. They now line the trim of windows and doors. There's a long strip of constellation along the top step in the upstairs hallway letting us, as well as houseguests, know where that drop off point is... should we come wandering into the hallway at night with something less than our full senses. Now there's a little halfcircle around the belly of the sink in the bathroom. Occasionally, in the middle of the night, when I wake up to take a wiz, I find a bit of the cosmos.... one speck of a star, usually.... clinging to my shoulderblade or maybe my hipbone. Sometimes when I lift the covers at night I'll find one or two or three giving off wee bits of light from within.

Last night I was at the shop, music blaring and buckets of bleach water everywhere, hogging out the backroom ...finally. I've entered that room sooo many times in an attempt to start that project but each time I end up walking around in circles like a dog trying to make itself a bed in the dirt... and then I find myself abandoning ship directly afterward.

I haven't had coffee for a little over a week and have been generally avoiding caffeine. I seem to have enough external stimulants right now to keep me on my toes. Caffeine, at this point, might just make me manic. I'd likely end up in the fetal position rocking back and forth... mind spinning.

But last night I made myself a chai latte when I arrived and drank the whole thing. I have a friend, and a regular customer at the bar, who comes in two, sometimes three, sometimes more than three times a day. He doesn't drink coffee and he doesn't eat wheat... which basically leaves him the choice of an italian soda or tea. He's a chai drinker. That, or Earl Grey. Most days, he comes in, downs two full pint glasses of iced chai, no ice. And then repeats that same routine every time he shows back up..... tallying him, easily, anywhere between 4-8 pints of chai per day. Each one loaded with maple syrup.

I had one pint glass at 8pm, cleaned the fuck out of this god-awful room, came home nauseaus with a bleach headache, crawled into bed at 1:30 and realized that there was absolutely no chance of sleep whatsoever... even with all that hard labor after all that caffeine. I'm now wondering how this friend's heart doesn't explode on him every day.

It was 1:30 in the morning and I was lying there thinking about picking up a check from the bank the following morning. I was thinking about my business account... about placing orders, about bills that would be popping up at the end of the month. Rent. Utilitites. Costco runs. I was thinking about the drawer's total every night and depositing that into the bank. Taxes. Thinking about whether or not all these figures will be leaving me upside down or right side up when it's all said and done. Thinking what a disastrous history I have when it comes to keeping track of dollars. I could feel my insides tightening and the little balls inbetween my shoulders blades screaming "stop stop stop".

I was able to see from the window last night that the sky was full of cloud cover but I knew that there was a meteor shower happening up there where I couldn't see. I also knew it'd be a long time before sleep would come and I could lay there in a panick about money or I could take myself outside and let the elements settle my nerves.

I followed Ella's star charts in the dark, dressing myself in warm layers and gathering our biggest fleece blanket, a pillow and my wool cape. I spread myself out on the hill in front of the house and listenened to the winds move through the trees in the valley. There were pockets in the sky where the clouds were stretched thin and little blinks of stars would shine through and then extinguish.... barely visible to begin with.... just a canvas of dim, random light.

I laid there for two hours....long enough for the winds to blow the clouds from the northwest to the southeast and, as soon as the canopy directly above my head was finally free and clear of cloud cover, a long, white streak jumped from the night sky and left a long, sweet trail as it fell.

I'd have been perfectly content with the little blinks of stars shining randomly through the pockets of clouds. There was a sweetness to just knowing that there were meteors falling up there, out of sight. It was just one more quiet, invisible mystery among many. But by the time the sky did clear, my nerves were settled, my bleach headache faded and the meteor shower that followed was like big bonus to the night.

When I followed Ella's treasure map of glow-in-the-dark sticker stars back to bed at 3:30 am I felt like thinks might be alright. Like maybe I might be able to balance the books. Like maybe I might be able to sleep.

The Deathly Hollows

I took the day off from the coffee shop yesterday to celebrate Ella's tenth birthday. I couldn't believe how unbelievably sentimental I felt all day, remembering exactly where I was a decade ago. Laboring through the night with the full moon, calling the midwife at dawn, lying under that gorgeous cherry tree, the unexpected ride in the ambulance past the coffee shop where all my knotty headed, patchworked friends were sitting drinking iced coffee and wondering when the hell we were gonna call them with the big news. Holding that incredible small bundle in the nook of my arm as that same moon came in from the window, lighting her up as it still does these years later.

As it turned out, when 8:58pm rolled around last night, ten years following the birth of that little girl, I found myself in a big room with big noise pumping from about a thousand different video games. For years Els has wanted us to take her to a place called Pizza Putt for her birthday.... an indoor mini golf course, enormous indoor jungle gym, batting cages, driving range, laser tag and really bad food. It's kind of like an amped up Chucky Cheese. I've never been able to rationalize taking her there for her birthday, in the middle of July, when the sun is shining and the days are long and the river is the perfect temperature. But yesterday's big plan included hanging out on Church Street in Burlington in anticipation of the new Harry Potter book being released... so Ella, to her great joy, was able to take two of her girlfriends to get rowdy, rifle through tokens, score tickets and trade them in for lots of cheap, plastic shit from China.

We bagged doing the release party on Church Street and opted to keep our business local but we kept our Pizza Putt commitment. Afterward, we drove home from Burlington, quick milked a cow while the girls changed into a strange concoction of fairy renaissance wizard garb, and loaded up the Suburu to drive into Johnson.

Tom was in the front seat with me, taking charge of the new Ipod to keep me from swerving all over the road and poor Bill was crammed in the backseat with the girls. I say "poor Bill" only because I had just spent the last hour serving my time in that backseat on the way home from Burlington. I was still feeling a little naseaus.

I got pulled over about two hundred yards from Main Street in Johnson. I was driving ten miles over the speed limit, which just got dropped from 35mph to 25mph so he let me go with a warning. I think he pulled me over because he saw all those heads in the backseat and was maybe hoping to nab some partying college kids coming from Johnson's one and only bar. I cannot even begin to explain the look on this young cop's face when he glanced into the backseat to find those three fairies in their velvet head wraps, sparkling wings, glittery faces and flowing dresses. And Bill.

And now we have the new book but I can pretty much figure on getting to it sometime in November... when my life frees up. Maybe.

Happy Birthday, Bean. Ten years riding this Earth around the sun.......making your mama proud.

Copy Gold Leader

"Wanna pretend we're in a spaceship
and all the other cars are droids?
You're my teenage sister and my name is Belle."

How's that for a merging of commercial culture? The Jetsons meets Star Wars meets Beauty and the Beast.

I drove down to the Cape to pick up Ella early this week. With no book on disc for the car ride and no portable DVD player to occupy her, she was about to implode by the time we hit the tunnel in Boston. So we slipped from one galactic belt ( 93N ) to a slower, less hostile galactic belt (89N) and carved our way home avoiding as much enemy fire as possible.

We were home for ten minutes and she was back in calico, feet filthy, picking currants and swinging on her recycled tire dragon swing. Today she was back on board here at the shop, hair pulled back, apron strung around her tiny little waist, clearing tables, drinking hot chocolate and drawing a birthday card for her Granny Jean.

My helper is back.