[title removed because it most likely involved a fish-related pun]

It takes us roughly 20 minutes to unload 80 boxes of frozen fish from the back of the refrigerated semi-truck parked in front of Kmart.  The floor of the truck is slick with condensation, and I concentrate on not falling by imagining the spectacle: two boxes worth of sockeye salmon scattering into the air, a pause, then 35 pounds of solidly frozen seafood raining down at 9.81 m/s².

The fish fills two station wagons, one S.U.V., one pickup truck.  Yes, it smells a bit fishy.  The recipes, however, are mouthwatering: dill and sour cream and coconut milk and fennel pollen, the latter of which sounds as if it belongs in a magician's incantation.

The fish is bound for residential freezers throughout Ann Arbor; local orders and delivery are coordinated by members of the informally-organized Ann Arbor Wild Salmon Minyan. We shall save the wit and why of their acronym for another day.

persephone, on the road

The eighty-year-old woman I work with has a small dog who has been her near-constant companion since her husband's death early this year.  He follows her everywhere, nearly dissolves when she is gone, and defends her against friend and foe with every fiber of his vocal chords. 

It is a symbiotic relationship.

On a semi-weekly basis, I drive to the grocery store, where they have the long plastic vegetable bags and twisty ties best suited for picking up and securing fresh feces.  I walk nonchalantly past the tomatoes and the pomegranates and the sweet potatoes, scan the room, and pull as many bags off the roll as I can before I start to feel sheepish.  The twisty ties come off in a clump. 

My traveling companion is waiting for me in the car, with the doors locked.  (Years ago, in California, a man climbed into the driver's seat while she was waiting for a friend in the store, and he drove off, despite her protestations, and would have proceeded to kidnap her had she not jumped out of the vehicle when it slowed for an intersection.) 

My purse bulges.  I unlock the doors and start the car.  "Forget about the seat belt!" cries Thelma to my Louise.  "Just drive!"

of a certain age

Living as I am, in a state with a fifteen percent unemployment rate, I am grateful to be partially employed, especially as I have found myself in a situation in a position that lets me zip into handicapped parking spaces in pursuit of all sorts of errands. [I am working for a family whose mother recently moved in with them. This means, on any given day, I find myself at the library, the hardware store, the doctor's office, the candy store, the laundry room, the nail salon ("an eye-opening experience for the nail care neophyte" reports yr. correspondent), the veterinarian, the Secretary of State.]

nightmares are relative, i suppose

Ask nearly any teacher about the teacher dreams. Their eyes will grow wide, and they'll nod slowly. They will recount the nightmares: Their classroom disappears. They are unprepared. They lose their lesson plans. They are possibly unclad. T–, their honorary student-from-hell, is—somehow—the principal. Their third period class pulls off a coup d'etat.

The nightmares often appear in August. Perhaps it is the moan of school buses, shuddering past the house on practice runs. Or the prodigious advertisements for mechanical pencils and Mead notebooks and My Little Pony Trapper Keepers. Something slips into the subconscious and worries the pedagogical nerves.

The nightmares lay in wait. I shouldn't have been surprised when they appeared last month, even after two years away from the classroom. Relax, I said, banishing visions of T– and gum-slathered desks. There's no school for you this year.

But that was before the brouhaha over the President's speech, which he will be delivering tomorrow to students across the country. I'll be heading to a nearby school, for one big voyeuristic round of watching-the-students-watch-the-speech. The brouhaha is a story for another day; tonight I'll dream of English class and brown bag lunches, not-so-secretly delighted that even this year, I get to go back to school.

day laborer

in memory of last year's labors...

Konstantinos found me before I found him; that is, his camera lens captured the sky above my profile as I leaned against the Coney Island pier. He was, he told me a few minutes later, testing out the capabilities of his new camera, a Nikon whose exact model now eludes me—an unfortunate fact, since its night-light capability was surprisingly superior for such a small camera. He’d just picked up the camera at a flea shop and he made me guess how much he paid. I overestimated.

I suspect that the $300 camera held some pictures of me; I had watched out the corner of my eye as he captured the Coney Island skyline: the languid Ferris wheel, spooling on its endless spindle, the lights, blinking and burning, the Cyclone as it shrieked and rattled its wooden slats. The lens tilted slightly in my direction, and, while flattered, I wondered at a man, alone, slightly plump, with hair glistening and receding like a coastline, who would take pictures of anonymous women. He smiled and asked me to take his picture.

heartland

Saint Peter, population 10,000, home to Gustavus Adolphus, a Lutheran college whose salivatory namesake was the king of Sweden at about the same time Shakespeare was jiggling bellies and piercing lovesick hearts. Gustavus Adolphus (the king, not the college) raised his only surviving child, a daughter, as a boy, and took efforts to guarantee her succession to the throne, a move that was remarkably prescient, or perhaps just realistic, seeing as it was a habit of kings to bloody themselves in battle, as Christina’s did, in honor of their Protestant faith (and burgeoning economy), dying when she was six and leaving her to in charge of the third largest nation in Europe. She ruled for ten years; her first duty that of receiving the Russian embassy, no small task, considering her age and the fact that her mother was so distraught over Adolphus’s death that she would not allow his body to be interred, rather preferring to visit his open casket every day for nearly eighteen months. Eventually, Adolphus’s daughter secretly converted to Catholicism, abdicated the throne to her cousin, and moved to Italy.

ou gen...

I once almost went to Haiti. My sister, who lived there when I was in high school, and returned there for her doctoral research, was in the country conducting interviews for her dissertation. We planned to rendezvous in Port-au-Prince and spend two weeks wrapping up her research and visiting her friends. And then she fell off a rock and injured her leg, the result of which was a thigh-length cast and a truncated trip. (Interested readers may also want to read about zombies and roosters and foreign girls wandering the Haitian mountainsides.)

Three years later, thanks to the same sister, I have a new plane ticket and hope to arrive in the capital next week (I have learned not to count planes until they touch the tarmac). This means, of course, that we get to go shopping for gifts. Would you prefer markers or crayons, if you were six? Coloring books have undergone quite the face lift in the last 20 years—they feature Disney characters, or Barbie, or worse, and have more stickers than places to color. We hunt down an air pump, so I can pack a deflated soccer ball. P—finds cleats at the thrift store, but my sister doesn’t know where they’d find a soccer field. All the books at the thrift store are Disney, or Barbie, or worse.

to-do, houston

townie

at the A2 Art Fair, you can...

sign up for the New York Times (highest home delivery rate outside the 10000s)

listen to men playing recorder/s

buy a $165 hat

or support a 5-acre rabbit sanctuary

enterprising

One of the perks of my job is driving the rental cars. I am hopeless in terms of name brands—was that Chrysler or Pontiac?—but I have been in Focuses and Acuras and PT Cruisers and G6es and even a Commander, which, being the size of a small house, certainly lives up to its name on the road.

I also get to coast on gas fumes, call AAA, inspect scratches, buy tire gauges, fiddle with broken cigarette lighters (damn GPS machines), locate mystery keys, lecture drivers about the significance of the check engine light—in sum, to deal with the statistics of over two dozen unpredictable and overworked machines. My contacts at the local rental company no longer ask to take down my number and I am becoming quite accustomed to the bowl of tootsie rolls they leave on at the counter.

This past weekend the passenger side window of one vehicle was smashed and forcibly entered—I would have happily spared the thieves the trouble and told them the GPS machine didn’t work. Instead, I found myself filching from the candy bowl, reminding one of the attendants not to kill the messenger. "Don't look at me," I said, entering the cool of the rental car office, which is thoughtlessly tucked up against interstate exit 45.

"Oh, I get it” he replied. "You're just the go-to. You're the Kobe Bryant—the one they pass to."