Since I started blogging about eighteen months ago I’ve passed on most of the memes that have come my way (OK, all of the memes) mostly because I use this forum to work on my writing. This week, however, I’ve been tagged several times for the “Eight Random Things” meme and it’s Saturday morning and I’ve got an hour to kill before I pick up a friend at the train station and why not?
I’m what is known as a Third Culture Kid. I grew up as a missionary kid and lived in four different countries in Africa – as well as a couple of years in the US – by the time I was sixteen. From kindergarten to twelfth grade I went to ten different schools in six different cities. I’ve lived in over forty different houses. Finding my way home is no easy task.
I have an irrational disdain for Celine Dion. I don’t want to hear her sing or talk. I don’t want to see her on television. She is the only black mark on what I see as Canada’s otherwise impeccable record. The Mark of the Beast is somewhere on her body, I’m sure of it. She is the reason for most of the problems in our world today. (Remember, I said my disdain was irrational; please don’t try to convince me otherwise.)
My favorite song is “Angel From Montgomery” by John Prine, songwriter extraordinaire. The person I most love to hear sing the song is Bonnie Raitt. My favorite story about the song is I was singing it at a coffee house one night and introduced it by saying I identified with it more than any other song I knew. Then I sang the first line: “I am an old woman named after my mother . . .”
As long as we’re talking about music, Christina Aguilera is my guilty listening pleasure. I know my cool quotient probably crashes here, in alt-country acoustic terms, but I like her music. “What a Girl Wants” is fun to hear. I also like her cover of “A Song for You” on Herbie Hancock’s album of duets.
I feel called to help raise other people’s kids. I have never felt called to have children of my own. Neither has Ginger, which has worked well for us. We have always felt our call was to have an open door for anyone who needed a place – and there have been several over the years. I love working with teenagers. Babies always seem to smile at me. I think it’s because we have the same haircut.
If I could figure out how to get paid for it, I would go to school for a job. I love taking classes and learning. I don’t really care what the class is, I just want to go. Sometimes I think about pulling into a community college and asking what class is about to start and enrolling. I’m not particularly concerned about a degree or even credit; I just want to go to school.
I’m an incredibly average athlete. My brother got the sports genes in my family. He also got the knee injury, unfortunately. In tenth grade, a kid who had a leg injury beat me in the hundred yard dash. I’m arguably the worst basketball player on the planet. Who else can only shoot a two-handed set shot? The one sport I can play well is volleyball.
I think Guinness may be the best liquid ever invented. It is the nectar of heaven, the ultimate substance, the drink of all drinks. Great – now I’m thirsty.
Those are the first eight things that came to mind. I will leave you to decide whether or not you want to meme.
once in seventh grade I think our teacher gave us a page of words without punctuation or capital letters and we had to figure out where the sentences were and how to make sense of the words the words could be divided up in more ways than one sort of like how my life feels right now when unemployment and alzheimers and marriage and schnauzers and friends and stopping at the post office all run together and I’m not sure which one starts the sentence and which one ends it whether the night is sandwiched between two days or the day between two nights or how time flies whether or not you’re having a good time with my second cup of coffee I’m waking up a bit here in the coffee shop maybe that’s why I’m typing so fast and watching the lady with her baby who is here every week with her friend for her afternoon out of the house and the baby is vocalizing like a rabid soprano not the TV kind maybe she likes being out of the house as well who knows how life gets punctuated certainly not in passive voice we punctuate life I think without having a chance to see the whole paragraph or even the whole sentence before we have to decide on a period or comma or when we’re really feeling adventurous a semi-colon how I long for some parentheses from time to time but they don’t seem to keep as much out as I would like I didn’t expect them to be translucent they look so strong on the page a period of time is not a full stop it has room to move around while I figure out where to go next then again maybe I’ll just sit here awhile longer and listen to the baby she has a grammar all her own punctuating the air with untranslatable exclamations I wonder what would happen if I tried a few of those myself the guy behind me would spew his soup and I would be asked to leave and I have to go home anyway time for dinner new recipe
that would be a good title for your book about depression she said, as if it were something I could come home and put into words that could one day be pulled from the shelf
she knows I have it in me my darkness has ebbed and flowed like the tides each season sometimes quiet sometimes lashing against the sea wall throwing stones
when we walk together we stop at the same spot and look out over the water we gaze from the same place but the view is different every time we stop
seven summers at the beach and I know my ebb and flow, the gathering storms and the quiet seas and I have survived like an old seafarer
one day my view will change I will not see the sea when I stop to find myself she will be beside me still that’s how I will know where I am
and she will take my hand and say, remember our seven summers at the beach oh yes, I’ll say and we walk home together as sure as the tides
I heard it at church this morning when our pre-kindergarten and kindergarten age children led us in our prayer of confession as a part of our worship service celebrating our children. Five or six little munchkins stood at the front of the church and said together, “Let’s pray” with more energy than I’ve ever heard in such an invitation. Then, in unison, we all said:
God, we’re sorry for the things we did that were wrong. Help us love one another better. Help us love you better. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.
Then God spoke in the children’s voices:
God’s love is so big! We are forgiven! We get to try again! Thanks be to God!
And everyone said, “Amen.”
When I was a kid, Samuel was one of my favorite biblical characters. I loved the story of him going to wake up Eli because he thought the old man was calling him. When I pictured the priest, I saw him like my father who woke up in the night whenever my brother or I made a noise and then, as long as he was awake, would wander down the hall to the bathroom from which one of us was exiting because that was why we had made noise to begin with. In my mind, Eli was standing in the middle of the hall in his boxer shorts, his hair standing up in all directions, squinting and saying, “What are you doing up?”
“You called me,” Samuel said.
“You’re dreaming,” said the old man. “Go back to bed.”
When it happened a second time, I imagined Eli was a bit more perturbed and a little less sleepy. When Samuel came down the hall the third time, Eli was awake enough to realize what was happening.
“Samuel, you’re hearing a voice that’s not mine. The next time you hear it, say, ‘Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.’” (I learned the story from the King James.)
When I animated the story in my mind, I never had a clear idea how God sounded. I never really bought into the booming bass voice that blows out the woofers. And, I guess, I never spent a lot of time trying to imagine how God sounded at all. But this morning when the children proclaimed, “We are forgiven,” I knew that’s what God sounded like. I really felt forgiven.
I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic and she said yes I asked her if it was okay to be short and she said it sure is I asked her if I could wear nail polish or not wear nail polish and she said honey she calls me that sometimes she said you can do just exactly what you want to Thanks God I said And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph my letters Sweetcakes God said who knows where she picked that up what I’m telling you is Yes Yes Yes
About three lines into this wonderful poem, I could hear the kids reading the words. “Yes, yes, yes,” is best said by energetic kindergarteners, don’t you think? Alongside of how it sounds, the voice of God reads like a Mary Oliver poem, for one. One of my favorites is her work simply titled, “Poem”:
The spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes,
shoulders, and all the rest at night in the black branches, in the morning
in the blue branches of the world. It could float, of course, but would rather
plumb rough matter. Airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body,
lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids; it needs the body’s world, instinct
and imagination and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility,
to be understood, to be more than pure light that burns where no one is —
so it enters us — in the morning shines from brute comfort like a stitch of lightning;
and at night lights up the deep and wondrous drownings of the body like a star.
I came home from writing yesterday to find a small box addressed to me in the mailbox. Inside were four CDs of a band I knew only by name and a note from a wonderfully caring person who talked about what the music of The Innocence Mission had meant to her and how she hoped it would resonate with me. I started with their self-titled record and have yet to get to the second one. The music is haunting, meaningful, and resonant.
Here are the lyrics to the final cut on the record, “The Wonder of Birds”:
we keep our hands above the water we know that, someday, we will fly away with all the wonder of birds with all the wonder of birds
we keep our voices as guarded secrets wait for a while and we will surely sing with all the wonder of birds with all the wonder of birds
we make a sky where we may be we build a home with windows to fly through windows to fly through
we learn to dance with broomstick partners grace will be ours
when we will grow our wings with all the wonders of birds with all the wonders of birds
Sometimes around sunset, the bay near our house stills and the surface of the water smoothes to mirror the last flames of daylight as the turn to embers on the horizon. There is a medium sized bird, whose name I don’t know – who starts high and dives down, leveling out inches, perhaps centimeters, above the glass surface and glides without moving so much as a feather from one side of our little inlet to the other, pulling up at the last minute and climbing back into the sky, often circling to do it again, perfectly.
How much information—all the Web pages, instant messages, video streams, and everything else you can imagine—passes through the Internet as a whole? Not an easy number to track down, but finally we got our answer from Clifford Holliday, author of Internet Growth 2006 (published by the telecommunications consultancy Information Gatekeepers). He estimates the total amount of Internet traffic by looking at the activity of end-user connections, such as dial-up modem lines, DSL, and fiber-optic connections. Broadband connections to homes and businesses, like DSL and cable modems, are responsible for generating most of the load, which also goes a long way toward Holliday’s discovery that 75 percent of all traffic on the Internet is due to file sharing, with 59 percent of that file sharing attributed to people swapping video files. Music tracks account for 33 percent of the file-sharing traffic. E-mail, it turns out, accounts for just 9 percent of the total traffic. And that total is… a staggering 40 petabytes, or 40 x 1015 bytes: a 4 followed by 16 zeros.
Taking Holliday’s 40-petabyte figure and plugging it into the same formula that we worked out for our 50-kilobyte e-mail results in a grand total of 1.3 x 10-8 pound. At last, after much scribbling (and perhaps a little cursing), we had our answer: The weight of the Internet adds up to just about 0.2 millionths of an ounce.
Love letters, business contracts, holiday snaps, spam, petitions, emergency bulletins, pornography, wedding announcements, TV shows, news articles, vacation plans, home movies, press releases, celebrity Web pages, home movies, secrets of every stripe, military orders, music, newsletters, confessions, congratulations—every shade and aspect of human life encoded as 1s and 0s. Taken together, they weigh roughly the same as the smallest possible sand grain, one measuring just two-thousandths of an inch across.
Here’s what a grain of sand looks like up close – real close:
Google was my next stop, where I typed in “grain of sand” and found a Dylan song called, “Every Grain of Sand”:
In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed. There’s a dying voice within me reaching out somewhere Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair. Don’t have the inclination to look back on any mistake. Like Cain, I now behold this chain of events that I must break. In the fury of the moment I can see the Master’s hand. In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand. Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear. Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer. But the sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay. I gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame And every time I pass that way I always hear my name. Then onward in my journey I come to understand That every hair is numbered, like every grain of sand. I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night In the violence of a summer’s dream, in the chill of a wintry night In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face. I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me. I am hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.
(I picked the Nash cover because I could understand the words and I’m trying to learn the chords.)
Some Like Poetry Some – thus not all. Not even the majority of all but the minority. Not counting schools, where one has to, and the poets themselves, there might be two people per thousand. Like – but one also likes chicken soup with noodles, one likes compliments and the color blue, one likes an old scarf, one likes having the upper hand, one likes stroking a dog. Poetry – but what is poetry. Many shaky answers have been given to this question. But I don’t know and don’t know and hold on to it like to a sustaining railing.
Shot in the sprawling refugee camps of the North West Frontier Province in Pakistan and Kabul, Afghanistan, View From A Grain of Sand foregrounds the individual voices of three Afghan women, each dramatically affected by the different regimes of the last twenty-five years. Principal taping began almost a year prior to September 11, 2001. At that time the issues of Afghan women’s rights were of little interest to the international community. Subsequently returning to the region in November 2001, the director was uniquely positioned to portray the extraordinary shift, which had taken Afghan women from being a forgotten population to becoming a focus of global outcry. Through the personal stories of these women, the broader history of Afghanistan (since the late 1970s) is elucidated, offering a first-person perspective on the socio-political context behind the situation in which the refugees now find themselves. The documentary follows the three women over a period of three years: 2000, 2001 and 2003, to form a continuum through a period of dramatic change going from one year before the Taliban fell, during the time of their fall, and one year after.
Here is the trailer.
When I left the house this morning, the wind was blowing in from the ocean. Some of the sand from the beach was blowing past my head, no doubt, each grain large enough to carry everything I found today and more. And I thought sand in my eyes was a bad thing.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, Look! This is something new? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. — Ecclesiastes 1:9, 10
If I had to pick one book of the Bible as my favorite, Ecclesiastes would be the odds-on favorite. The Poet’s sense of what it means to be human, with its rich mixture of hope and despair, has always spoken to me. Like a lot of folks my age, my first introduction to the Poet’s words was in a Byrds’ song. Turn, turn, turn.
Speaking of music, it was forty years ago two days ago that Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, perhaps the most original rock record ever made, first took to the airwaves. I still have the original vinyl record, complete with paper cut-outs, that I purchased as a ten year old. On June 3, twenty years ago, I bought the CD as soon as the record store opened. The BBC aired the first part of an anniversary documentary where they recruited musicians to go into the Apple studios and remake the songs using the same equipment as the Beatles did in 1967, which is less powerful technologically than the Garage Band program that came with my MacBook. The narrator commented that some of the artists recruited dropped out because it was too complicated. What was done could not be done again.
It was forty years ago today that the Six Day War began between Israel and its Arab neighbors. I’d never noticed the chronological proximity of the two events until this afternoon. I don’t know of even one of the forty years since when the fighting has not continued. NPR is in the middle of an excellent five part series on the causes and consequences of the war. What was done is being done over and over and over.
Three years after a U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, only one major U.S. building project in Iraq is on schedule and within budget: the massive new American embassy compound.
The $592 million facility is being built inside the heavily fortified Green Zone by 900 non-Iraqi foreign workers who are housed nearby and under the supervision of a Kuwaiti contractor, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report. Construction materials have been stockpiled to avoid the dangers and delays on Iraq’s roads.
“We are confident the embassy will be completed according to schedule (by June 2007) and on budget,” said Justin Higgins, a State Department spokesman.
On the other hand, the latest is that the facilities for the 8,000 people scheduled to work in the vice-regal compound will be completed on time next year. Doubtless the cooks, janitors and serving staff attending to the Americans’ needs and comforts in this establishment, which is said to exceed in luxury and appointments anything Saddam Hussein built for himself, will not be Iraqis either.
According to Knight Ridder, “US officials here [in Baghdad] greet questions about the site with a curtness that borders on hostility. Reporters are referred to the State Department in Washington, which declined to answer questions for security reasons.” Photographers attempting to get pictures of what the locals call “George W’s Palace” are confined to using telephoto lenses on this, the largest construction project undertaken by Iraq’s American visitors.
Our government’s assessment that a fortress is somehow the way to freedom leads me to my best new thing of the day: discovering poet Wislawa Szymborska, also thanks to the folks at NPR. (Here are some of her poems.) She was born in Poland in 1923 and has lived in Krakow since 1931, living through World War II and the Soviet occupation. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. Here’s part of what she had to say in her acceptance speech:
All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.
Regardless of the angle from which any of us views the state of affairs in our country and in our world, we have those who would call themselves leaders proclaiming their superior knowledge of The Thing To Do as reason why they should be in charge. We have allowed ourselves to become accustomed to the definition of a leader as one who does something (anything), rather than one who thinks and discerns. Szymborska continues:
This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.
I don’t know. Those are not merely words of ignorance, weakness or failure. On the contrary: they are words of hope, relationship, and imagination.
The world – whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? We just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world – it is astonishing.
There has always been wars and arrogant leaders and death and disease and love and hope. In our turn, turn, turn what is new is us. This is our time. Perhaps we could do something other than repeat what has come before by saying we don’t know what will happen next.
I’m now deep into Barbara Kingsolver’s new memoir, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and have been fed so many wonderful things that I’m struggling to know how to write about them. I have three or four things bouncing around in my head, so I’m going to try and blend them into something both interesting and nourishing, like a good recipe.
The first ingredient is this story of hers about “saving” time:
When I was in college, living two states away from my family, I studied the map one weekend and found a different route home from the one I usually traveled. I drove back to Kentucky the new way, which did turn out to be faster. During my visit I made sure all of my relatives heard about the navigational brilliance that saved me thirty-seven minutes.
“Thirty-seven,” my grandfather mused. “And here you just used up fifteen of them telling all about it. What’s your plan for the other twenty-two?”
Good question. I’m still stumped for an answer, whenever the religion of time-saving pushes me to zip through a meal or a chore, rushing everybody out the door to the next point on a schedule. (124)
Why is it that life feels harder to live with now that I have any number of time-saving devices. I used to lose time waiting for phone calls, or talking on the phone unable to multitask because the cord was too short. I typed my term papers without spell check; I went to the library to look up stuff on the card catalog. I reheated and thawed foods without a microwave. I got letters in the mail that were actually something other than credit card applications and notifications of what I might have won. Though I’m also quite grateful for answering machines, cell phones, and wifi, none of them has helped us use our time in a more meaningful way. They’ve trained us to believe that life is 24/7/365, that we are indispensable, and we have to keep moving. Granddad’s question stumps us all: what’s our plan?
Perhaps we could use the extra minutes to sit down for a meal.
If I were to define my style of feeding my family, on a permanent basis, by the dictum, “Get it over with, quick,” something cherished in our family would collapse. And I’m not just talking about waistlines, though we’d miss those. I’m discussing dinnertime, the cornerstone of our family’s mental health. If I had to quantify it, I’d say 75 percent of my crucial parenting effort has taken place during or surrounding the time our family convenes for our evening meal. I’m sure I’m not the only parent to think so. A survey of National Merit scholars – exceptionally successful eighteen-year-olds crossing all lines of ethnicity, gender, geography, and class – turned up a common thread in their lives: the habit of sitting down to a family dinner table. It’s not just the food making them brilliant. It’s probably the parents – their care, priorities, and culture of support. The words, “I’ll expect you home for dinner.” (125-26)
Meal times matter a great deal to me. (In the early days of the blog, I wrote about them here and here.) I love preparing the meal and sitting around our table as long as folks will stay and I love going out to eat with folks when the point is to be together. One of the not-so-subtle messages of Communion for me is “the congregation that eats together grows together.” Though the message is clear, we mostly miss it. Ginger and I keep imagining congregations who would intentionally decide that committees could only meet one night a month – all of them on the same night – so people could have time to get together for something other than institutional reasons, or not have to miss another family dinner because of another church meeting.
When church is That Place We Go On Sunday and our jobs are The Place We Go Everyday, and meals are What We Do On The Way To The Next Thing, life turns into a train of barely connected compartments in a runaway train. When suppertime connects to scholastics and church to companionship, poetry sneaks in like the aroma of a fresh baked pie, making room for rest, filling our souls, and reminding us living as though we are enough and we are together is a quotidian exercise, rather than a quixotic one.
The connections are crucial.
Modern psychologists generally agree, noting that workers will build a better car when they participate in the whole assembly rather than just slapping on one bolt, over and over, all the tedious livelong day. In the case of modern food, our single-bolt job has become the boring act of poking the thing in our mouths, with no feeling for any other stage of the process. It’s a pretty obvious consequence that one should care little about the product. When I ponder the question of why Americans eat so much bad food on purpose, this is my best guess: alimentary alienation. We can’t feel how or why it hurts. We’re dying for an antidote.
If you ask me, that’s reason enough to keep a kitchen at the center of a family’s life, as a place to understand favorite foods as processes, not just products. It’s the prime motivation behind our vegetable garden, our regular baking of bread, and other experiments that ultimately become routines. Our cheese-making for example. (131)
First, of course, I have to get this out of my system: blessed are the cheese makers.
In two working days, my package of cheese-making supplies will arrive and I will begin my attempt at mozzarella, ricotta, and – eventually – cheddar and friends. When Ginger learns I have a recipe for queso blanco, a white Mexican cheese used in chile con queso, I know I’ll be making that regularly. I can already taste the salad of fresh mozzarella, tomatoes from the garden, and basil picked from the window box, even though the tomatoes are weeks away.
And while I wait for the tomatoes to grow and the cheese to cure (is that the right word?), or even for dinner to finish cooking, I’ll be saving time: redeeming time, that is. How did Isaiah put it? “They that wait upon the Lord will renew their strength.”
I couldn’t help but notice the teaser on the AOL homepage as I logged on to check my email: “What happened to Lindsay Lohan?” To top it off, they included this picture from her Parent Trap days. For those of you not keeping score at home, 20 year old Lohan was arrested for being high or drunk or both. I read the question twice. At best, it’s satirically rhetorical; at worst, it’s cynically stupid. My hunch is the latter. (Why is no one busting the club owners for serving an underage person?)
Some time during my late night TV viewing, I came across a BBC documentary called The Human Face starring John Cleese. The segment I saw was called “Famous Faces” and had to do with fame, which, as far as Cleese was concerned, is overrated in our modern culture. He ended the episode standing in a newsstand surrounded by magazines covered with pictures of movie stars and models. “All of these people are famous and they don’t have an idea between them that will be of any help to you.” As he walked out of the shot, the camera panned back to show a whole row of magazines with his face on the cover.
When I looked in Roget’s Thesaurus, it made a distinction between “widely known and esteemed” and “widely known and discussed.” What I heard in Cleese’s commentary was what appears to matter most in our culture is simply to be widely known; being esteemed carries very little currency these days. Being famous has been reduced to the lowest common denominator of the tabloids and, worse still, has turned us into cultural cannibals with voracious appetites for the salacious and the stupid. That’s what happened to Lindsay Lohan: we chewed her up and spit out nothing but bones.
In 1999, Ron Howard made EdTV about the ridiculous concept of someone putting his life on camera 24/7. Eight years later, in our reality show world, EdTV seems sentimental and naïve by comparison. Our twisted sense of reality means more people in our country know about Sanjaya than the Sudan.
I’m stating the obvious.
Since I saw Cleese’s piece, I’ve been thinking about my favorite Naomi Shihab Nye poem. I know I quoted it in the early days of the blog, but it feels essential word right now in reminding us what the word means:
The loud voice is famous to silence, which knew it would inherit the earth before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds watching him from the birdhouse.
The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosom.
The boot is famous to the earth, more famous than the dress shoe, which is famous only to floors.
The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.
I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing streets, sticky children in grocery lines, famous as the one who smiled back.
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.
The other day when I was downtown waiting in line to get my sandwich, a homeless man stumbled my way. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and was clearly drunk, even though it was just after noon. He started staring at me from several yards off and began veering my way as he stumbled along. As he got close, he said, “You’re bald,” and then he grinned. I smiled back, wondering what was going to happen next. His grin got bigger and he said, “And you’re AWESOME.” Then he went on his way.
Thanks to my crystal ball of a scalp reflecting the sun on an early summer day, I was fleetingly famous to a guy on the street. I smiled back and thanked him, but my fame was neither substantive or sustainable. I met a woman this week who is a social worker in Framingham working mostly with homeless teenagers. She talked about making an extra sandwich when she makes her lunch everyday and making sure she always has an extra pair of socks in her bag when she goes out to find the kids. They are always hungry and they need the socks because they don’t have any kind of access to do laundry. She may never get a movie deal or snort coke in the back of a fancy limousine, but she’s famous, I tell you.
