Short gray days make me think of long bright ones.
Cedric the Entertainer joked recently that the main reason parents go trick-or-treating with their kids is so they can see what other people have in their homes. A peek into the atelier, if you will, Atlanta, GA and Brooklyn, NY.
Here are two places that I don’t live, but that if I knew what the hell I was doing, my place would look something like them.
At another friend’s 30th birthday party last night, we celebrated the fact that he had finally put his rug on the floor. The rug had spent months rolled up and leaning against a wall in the same room. is there hope for us yet?
The lights above the fairgrounds were visible for miles around, a beacon in the dark night sky. It was a county fair. I parked my rented Mustang and walked down a dirt path past the rides and vendors towards the source of all the noise. A truck and tractor pull. The noise was deafening and scent of gasoline so heavy it even covered up the smells of the ajoining carnival.
“Wait, let me go smell this guy,” She laughed as she said it, but afterwards she climbed up to the window of the approaching truck and put her sniffer inside. “Some of the drivers use nitrous [oxide in their engines],” she explained — an unfair tactic –, “and you can smell it on them. I have to sniff each driver after his run to make sure he’s clean.”
Later, two firemen let me use the bumper of their truck as a tripod to capture the action head on.
It’s not too difficult to tell from this photograph who’s posing and who isn’t.
There was a time when we’d take pictures like this before going out someplace. But once the march of toddler steps is audible even in the rec room, then Sundays are when you show off the new wares, and the soundtrack is the football game.
“Miiiiiiran los plieeeegues,” he would plead while dying a thousand little deaths along the way — Loooook at the foooolds. He was the only person besides Martin Luther King, Jr. that I’d ever heard speak with vibrato. And I got to hear him every Wednesday afternoon in art history class. “Miran los pliegues,” he would exclaim with each new slide. And his whole body shimmied with the samba of his voice – or Sardana, it was Spain after all. I had been learning a new language at the time, Spanish, and living in Barcelona. Miran los pliegues is probably the first phrase that made more sense to me in that language than in English. To this day, I can’t imagine any of my stiff high school teachers or college professors loving folds so much that to merely talk about them would be to sing.
The folds in cloth, the details, betray an artist’s ability and mastery. He explained that it wasn’t until Michelangelo that a sculptor could create folds as well as the Greek masters had. Miran los pliegues! And the class would giggle. But we looked at them in spite of ourselves. Plee-AY-gase. Pliegues. Somewhere along the way, much later, I would have to translate them back into English, but I never had as much use for them once they became folds.
There are lonlier places in the world than Penn Station at 2 a.m. on a Sunday night. But probably not that many.