Pretty Eyes and the Three Dollar Bill

"OK, I'm leaving at last,  you won't see me again!" I said to the woman, the manager there, and I stepped out of the office carrying my backpack. At least, that's how I remember it happened.  Outside I realized I had forgotten my photo camera and returned back to my old desk, where I discovered that the camera was already in the backpack. Oops! I retreated and, unfortunately, I ran into her walking to the elevator.   She saw me again, but said nothing.

Downstairs, I opened the front glass door to see that it was raining hard. I noticed George W. Bush standing under the awning, wearing a blue raincoat, probably waiting for a ride.  Laura will drive up a big olde SUV and pick him up, I figured, and wondered if they would mind giving me a ride to the station.  Then, a big olde SUV was turning from the avenue into the driveway when the rain suddenly stopped, and I proceeded to the path, two young women right behind me.

I asked them where they worked, and they said at the top floor, and explained the technology they were working on.  They must have arrived with the last corporate takeover, I thought.   I told them that I had been laid off two years earlier but somehow managed to hang around doing occasional and part time work until today when the gig finally ended  for good. Where do you live, I asked the taller woman. "In Napa," she said. "That's a long commute."

I started running along the avenue toward the station as I usually did, and the women were running behind me. I sped up wanting to lose them but they managed to keep up.   We arrived at the traffic light where you cross the avenue southward toward the station.  The light changed and we crossed together to the other side where we had to walk under construction scaffolding. There was a minor traffic jam there, some disabled people on wheelchairs were blocking the way and we had to wait, then squeeze in around them.

I found myself right beside the taller, prettier woman with large blue eyes. I told her, "You have pretty eyes".   We kept on walking. Suddenly our faces were close to each other, side by side, and I saw that she was as tall as me, maybe even a half  an inch taller.   She asked, "Are we going to stay at this stage?" and  I replied, "I want to see you again". She repeated "I want to see you again."  I wondered how my being unemployed would affect this acquaintance.

We arrived at the station and approached the ticket dispensing machine.  A couple of drunken old men were sitting on top of it and chattering.  I told them to shut up.   The taller woman wanted to buy a $20 ticket and inserted a $10 bill into the machine first.  I moved closer with the idea that I'll trade her second $10, and insert my 1, 2 and (2) 3 dollar bills that a bookseller had declared counterfeit before all this happened when I tried to buy two books for $7 each and he sold me one returning these bills.  Now by mistake the back of my right hand pressed a wrong button and the machine spat out a $10 ticket.   What to do now?  While I thought of a way to still get one $20 ticket instead of two $10 tickets, my bladder called and woke me up.   I got out of bed upset and depressed that the dream turned out to be only a dream.

Throughout the day I looked at women I passed in the store and on the street trying to match the face I saw in the dream, which didn't remind me of anyone I know.   In the afternoon, I walked past a McDonald's, and sitting by the window an older black man waved to me as if he knew me, and knew me well.  I didn't recognize him, but waved back nonetheless.

Jumping

"Never before have I wanted to jump inside a book and strangle the main character."  

This from a one star Amazon review of this year's Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction.  One of those sentences that says so much so well in so few words that you wish you had said it yourself.

Mem'ries

I don't look for jokes, they find me.  It's true. Last time I looked for a joke, it had to be about cowboys, to send to a friend an MC at a cowboy concert, I went to joke websites and found nothing funny, but the very next day I read a review of some book that quoted a joke which I copied and forwarded to him.

On Sunday, a good joke found me and before I repeated it to anyone, two more arrived on Monday, the last one asking why a German must take two Viagra pills.  On Tuesday I forgot the one from Monday, and tried every trick to recall it.  Was it about somebody walking in the bar? Was it about passengers on an airplane with one too few parachutes, was it about a Jew and a priest?  None of the above. I tried single images: women, politicians, hunters.  Nothing worked.  No template I applied jerked my memory to remember the Sunday joke.  I couldn't remember where I had read it. I gave up and  began to worry about the usual age and memory related illnesses.  I'll have to write them down in the future, I decided, something I had never had to do in the past.

This morning I went to the fruit and vegetable market to buy a few things and to discover how prices shot up in just one week, I glanced at the stand with organic bananas, and it clicked.  Yes, the joke had a banana in it! In fact, the banana spoke the punch line.  It all came back.  The entire joke.

Then I realized that I had forgotten the second joke while  I still remembered the short one about the German.  I walked past the carrots (also organic), and remembered that there was a carrot in it.  No, the carrot didn't speak, but the hare certainly did.

All's well. Until the next time.

P.S. I still haven't written them down.

Conversing

Last week we talked about the short attention span of  current generations (which needless to say include ourselves.)  Blame television, computers, smartphones, overload of information, there is nothing original about this disturbing observation.  My friend noted how long conversations have disappeared from most human interactions.   People exchange bon mots, one liners,  clever remarks, like the characters they see  in TV sitcoms. I couldn't disagree (we nevertheless conversed for a couple of hours.),

Today, in the same cafe where I read whatever volume of fiction I have grabbed off the shelf that day, sipping my Earl Grey tea, sitting among  a dozen or two of students, seniors, all of them staring at the screens of their laptop computers,  mostly Apple Macs, it was crowded, final exams are near, I noticed a couple of youngish people, a man and a woman, both about 25 years old, sitting at one of the two large tables there that can accommodate a half a dozen people each, two older women with computers beside them, this young pair conversing the entire time I was there, two full hours, they were there when I arrived and when I left, they had no laptop computers in front of them like everyone else around except myself, smartphones sitting on the table, unused except as sort of pacifiers, turning them over, up and down in their hands, the way older generations in olden times would occupy their hands with pencils or pens, and talking the whole time, the young woman facing in my direction, pretty, long hair, no makeup, large eyes which she often turned up toward the ceiling as if concentrating or seeking inspiration, her eyes showing the largest whites I have ever seen,  totally absorbed in the conversation, unaware of being observed or of anything going on in the cafe or outside its wide windows on the busy sidewalk, except as mentioned the ceiling or maybe the fans turning beneath it.  I was sitting too far from them to hear what they were saying, classical music playing on the speakers as always, and I only managed to determine that they were speaking Russian like native speakers.

Impossibility of Knowing

A friend told the author that for years she had observed a particular couple in a cafe every day.  Then one day, the couple stopped coming, and as it turned out the man had been killed.   The story became the seed of a novel  titled  "Los enamoramientos" which has been translated as "the Infatuations". The author Javier Marias, the narrator, for the first time in Marias' novels a woman, the themes, those occupying Marias in all his novels, love, death, loyalty and betrayal, impossibility of knowing, as he says in an interview
"the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself, for sure."

I have read all of Marias' recent novels translated into English, and have just ordered A Man of Feeling, which he says is the first work where he developed his digressive style, and I must say that I have not yet read a more fascinating writer of such power, who gets to the core of things, and whose prose hits so very close to home as to become disturbing, sometimes forcing me to step back in the middle of a novel to take a breath and distract myself with some other author's writing, as happened a month or so ago, and again last night when I returned to the third volume of his masterpiece Your Face Tomorrow.


But let's stay with the main theme, which Marias says in an interview published on Youtube, has been a theme of all literature, the impossibility of knowing.   I know.  As I return in memory to things that happened to me in recent times and a long time ago, things like stumbles and failures, but also successes, I cannot honestly say why and how they came to be, I cannot to begin guessing the motivations and reasons of other people involved, and this can be particularly painful when one thinks of the defeats that somehow came my way all too often, or so I tend to think.  No, the truth is that I have been guessing at the others' motivations and I haven't reached any conclusions, just questions that I cannot ask of anyone, theories based on thin evidence, conjectures and fantasies. And why I behaved one way or another might have been clear to me at the time, but was it right, or should I have done something different, and if I had would the result have been different?

Words Forgotten

In the first volume,  Fear and Spear, of the three-volume novel Your Face Tomorrow (page 85), a retired Oxford don Peter Wheeler experiences a sudden blockage and cannot find the word for the object he's asking the narrator to bring him.  It's not an age thing, we learn, just a momentary slip, something that happens to all of us, he calls it "momentary aphasia" and it happens to him with "the most stupid words", he says.   The word in question was "cushion".

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a friend and he was telling me how up until the 1950s , 1960s Americans had a common culture, references they all shared, agreed upon and understood.  This is no longer the case, we both agreed, and to describe it I sought a word that just wouldn't come eluding me completely.  I used some poor substitute, which I no longer remember, and then, an hour later, the topic long past, we were parting,  by a stroke of luck I somehow managed to avoid the familiar l'esprit d'escalier  experience by remembering the verb "to disperse". Yes, the culture became dispersed, I said.  But no, I later realized that a better word would have been "fragmented", and still not the word I needed.  I searched the Thesaurus and found nothing better.

Until three days ago, when I was reading Decoded by Mai Jia, where I found my word.  The following day, I tried to recall  the sentence in which it appeared, and I searched the book backwards 5 pages from where I had stopped, reading it forward, then 10 pages, again reading forward, then 15 and 20, until frustrated I gave up to return to my bookmark, when I found it one page back (202), where an epigraph from some book (non-existent) that the main character had bought is quoted saying (while describing  genius):

Like any other treasure in the world, they are delicate, fragile as a newly planted bud; once hit they crack; once cracked they fracture.