We spent most of the weekend in the park hurling ourselves down a little icy mound on sleds with half of Brooklyn. And also following wandering Anna up hills in the park "woods." She'd climb and dig and lick snow off of stuff and then sit really still for a long time. She never sits that still. The snow zone.

Threeish inches really isn't much but it changes everything. It's been winter here now even though it wasn't today. A mist came and slushed everything up. Now there are just a few little chunks in the gutters. Smells like spring.

King's County Clerk

I go to room 189 with two pieces of paper, to get them twice stamped and once signed (and some numbers handwritten in the stamped place). Look: scuffed bulletproof glass in the grand revolving door. Bored cop at the metal detector stares at a screen-full of the curled and nestled insides of everyone’s bag (mine: little nests of computer cords, one tiny pink mitten, pen caps, acorns, tampon, book).

Room 189 is a vast, sad blue. It’s networked with cubicles (a human or two or four in each). “Information: Window #1” says a miniscule sign at the door. But where’s  #1? Here’s “Window #12: wills…” The path winds between cubicle walls, each box hung with a number, but not next to the numbers you’d think. At the back, next to “Window #5: rewiring” (gaunt man waiting eagerly with a pliers in each hand) sits “Window #1: passports.” And next to that, “Window #1 (again): information.”  Empty, both of them. Not even a chair in there.

Wandering back I find accidentally “Window #2: business registration and bankruptcy. And juror information.” That last penciled in…an afterthought? I wait as each soul in line before me is soundly chewed out by the exhausted attendant (rouged orange, wig askew). My turn. I say nothing, just hand over the papers. She sighs mightily, throws up her hands, looks me in the eye and says, “YOU are a pain in my ass all day long.”

“But I just got here,” I offer, trying my best to be winsome. She ferociously stamps both, signs one, fills in the numbers I’ve come for, then turns around and plants herself, arms akimbo. Her cubicle is empty but for a cracked vinyl chair. Her counter: immaculate with its row of stamps and pens on chains.

I grab my papers and skip for the door, jostling out with a huge, delighted family (also fleeing, twin girls dressed going-out fancy, hair braided identically but with opposite parts, dragging grinning grandma). On the way out I pass the snack bar where a blind man sells candy bars by touch, and a woman sleeping soundly in the women’s room doorway (balanced, bent into an L). And then, past metal detectors, through dim revolving doors, into the cold, bright air of downtown Brooklyn.

I’ll take this, I think, and place it up against the cubicles: bright windows full of discount sneakers and baby clothes, women walking arm in arm, wrapped in the same scarf. And against bulletproof glass, I’ll put the boil of teenagers just sprung from school (smacking heads and grabbing hats and bumping strangers and kissing each other like no one can see).

And then, Jay St. Metro-tech. Against Window #2 and pens on chains: the tired-eyed fellow on the downtown F platform picks up a fiddle and makes the whole distracted herd of us tap our toes in unison. When he opens his mouth and closes his eyes to sing, it’s like a jar of honey suddenly poured out all over a bed of pine needles. The look and smell of that, is what he sounds like. The F blasts in and he just keeps going, I imagine, long after we all stand clear of the closing doors closing and balance our various ways home, up and over the elevated bridge, train strung through with setting winter sun.

Here he is, just before he started singing:

A List

What Anna Prefers to Wear to Bed (in various combinations, listed in order of preference):
1. Swimsuit
2. Fanciest dress ever
3. Kitty costume
4. Bandanna
5. Winter hat and mittens
6. Gold lamé number
7. Tights

What Anna Prefers Not to Wear to Bed:
1. Pajamas
2. Nightgown

Found!

Thanks to Paul, it's found. Along the back side of the top shelf, in the last unexplored box - the missing tape, Christmas in Ohio 1976! The sound quality is horrible and though I've listened to it a few times through, there is no Froggy Went A-Courting in Grandpa Bob's voice. Did I imagine it? Or just remember it? In fact, I can't pull the thread of his one voice out of the jumble anywhere, except maybe when someone says, "Hey, kid, I like that new sweater!" It might be him. Or it might be my dad, or an uncle. Mostly though listening to this tape is like being a kid falling asleep under the dinner table while the adults sit up late and shoot the shit and laugh. I'll take that. And then, towards the end, this little nugget (can't figure out how to upload straight audio,so excuse my quick first attempt with iMovie):

I guess Christmas '76 I'd have been just over 2.5. Whoo-eee. Our girl is older now than I was then. All I can think is, oh long and lovely, lucky life.

Snail Mail

I'm taking a break from the blog-as-kid-photo-vessel because I’ve been hunting down a box of old cassette tapes for the past month. There’ s a tape in there with Grandpa Bob’s voice on it. He’s singing Froggy Went A-Courting, bouncing me on his knee in the old armchair with the orange roses. I remembered that tape after finding, about a month ago, a gizmo that translates cassette recordings into mp3s, and I want to save that gravely cigar-smoking voice for all time. But I can’t find it. I’ve almost plumbed the storage depths of our tiny city home, and now I’m starting to slow down the looking because so long as there are a couple of unsearched boxes, its existence remains absolutely possible.

During the girl’s nap (upside-down on top of the blankets, wearing pink plastic heels and covered head to toe in bug stickers) I allotted myself two storage-shelf boxes worth of looking. They both said “Old stuff. Basement.” Sounded promising. I think the last time they were opened was two apartments ago. Both were completely random samplings of beloved (or formerly beloved) objects. The first was mostly out of sequence stacks of snapshots (Cape Town up against Cape Lookout up against Glen Helen up against Patzcuaro up against a truckload of rockweed, lupines growing out that lost Chevy’s back window, round bales of Alfalfa back home). No tapes.

But the second, the second box was completely full of letters. Paper letters. Entities that exist in physical space. Bent and smudged and hauled around, scribbled on and used as grocery lists, and most importantly, full of handwriting. Handwriting! A record of some loved person’s kinetic energy. Whoah. They seemed almost like museum pieces. I mean, remember when mail used to look like this?!



Paper letters sent through the mail might be to email what live music is to streamed. I mean, I’m as Facebooked and blogged and emailed up as most, I guess, and often happily. The instant exchange is what makes possible my work-from-wherever, and often whenever, whilst-wearing-whatever-I-wish gig. Among other things. But I want to take a moment to remember (and maybe a little to mourn the loss of) the weight of the envelope in hand. The little feathers or maps or pinches of far-away dirt you could slide inside. That faint winter smell of paper and glue. The crossings-out and coffee rings and oil stains. And the time it takes to write by hand, and knowing that it will be days, if not weeks, before the eyes you aim for see what you said. I know I wrote more carefully back then, pulled out a different frame of detail, a different sort of more lasting sort of storyline than I do now, shooting out emails by the dozens each day. Much has been said about all of this already, about how email etc is changing our brains. Whaddya gonna do. I wonder, though, while we’ve still got the good old USPS, if it might not be a good idea to write a letter or two. And maybe stick in a newspaper clipping, a leaf of still-going-strong kale, a picture of the girl, a Brooklyn pebble. Any takers?