inthelouvre.org

Like a Garbage Truck Backing Up

Every once in a while I will get an email forward that’s actually, for lack of a better word, a “gem.” It’s funny and I want to pass it on, but the only people who send me email forwards have already sent it to me, so I have four copies of this hilarious email forward in my inbox that I’m just yearning to share with the world. Today I thought I may as well post it here, because it’ll be some cause for amusement - plus, it’ll be a lot more fun than reading an update about my trip to Louisiana, on which I did nothing but eat turkey and ham sandwiches at my Grandma’s house, watch various family members bicker at each other, cry, and go to Walmart. Five times a day.

I don’t know the validity of the premise, but the content is worth the read.

Every year, English teachers from across the USA can submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country. Here are last year’s winners:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli, and he was room temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River .

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

It’s Always Unexpected

We’ve been lately worried about my grandmother, who has had complications digesting food (and other such things). Miraculously, and as I understand it completely inexplicably, she recovered. Her body “woke up” and instead of the procession we expected by this weekend, she’s probably going home from the hospital to live.

However, this morning my Aunt Dorothy passed. They had given her four weeks tops and expected less, it’s true, but my mother (her sister) had plans to visit in two weeks. Clearly, this early date wasn’t what we’d imagined.

I didn’t know her very well. I grew up more or less “isolated” from the family - I lived always in a different state, and with my inherent shyness on top of that, I never really got to know anyone until I was old enough to see the importance of familial relationships. Unlike the majority of my family who lived in Ohio, she lived in Louisiana (close by my mother’s mother who I also had little time getting to know). I’ve visited her once in my post-rebellious years. After that, there wasn’t time or money. School, work, you name it - I just couldn’t get out there.

But what I remember is a loving mother and wife. She has a few children (3? 4? I don’t even know their names) and a husband who spent ample time in prison. She was always loyal to her children and faithful to her husband. Throughout my life, not only my mother called me “Dorothy” by accident, but several maternal-side family members did as well. They said I look like she did when she was younger, I have the same kind heart as she had, and it was just all too easy to have a slip-of-tongue and call me Dorothy. I always wondered about that. I never knew her.

(Left to Right: Dorothy, Susie, Debbie, Mom (Terri))

My mom told me about when she visited last week (and I’m glad I forced her to go even though I had just been in the hospital). That’s when they got the news that she had four weeks or less. Between her and her sisters (Debbie & Susie), someone had to tell the children. She told me it was the most heart-wrenching, terrible moment of her life. I can imagine. It hasn’t even been a full week since then.

Who’s Killing the Great Writers of America? by Robert Kaplow

Maybe I just don’t “get” it, like when I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac and found myself wishing I had a magazine or something more brainless to give my attention to. It’s a satire, I know, but it’s only funny in some parts, and ends up being more like a ridiculous dream of some kind, something the author pieced together based on dizzy moments and old movies, videos teaching monkeys sign language, and a bad review that causes Curtis Sittenfield (Prep) to be obsessed with her navel.

I’m going to spoil it, so you may not want to read on. Cut for length or spoilers »

Mario Vargas Llosa - Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

I’ve been reading this book for so long that I didn’t notice until just now, while writing the title of the book in my subject line, that the first name of the main character is the same as the author’s. Apparently it’s an autobiographical novel, and a response was written by the “real life” Julia called (in English) What Little Vargas Didn’t Say. I’m suddenly very interested in the topic. Clearly, this one is worth mentioning.

I’ve actually read quite a few books in between the beginning and the end of this book and before Richard left for work today my words were, “With any luck, I’ll finish it today.” Yet somehow that doesn’t speak ill of the book, at least not the way I mean it. It was superbly written and excellently composed, if you want adjectives that in the grand scheme of things mean nothing, but there, you can put my review quote on the book cover. I can’t complain about the storyline or the structure, both of which I enjoyed, and the writing style was easy flowing, but the font in my edition of the book was ridiculously tiny. Thus, given the trade paperback size of the books, there were a lot of words on each page, a lot of lines of text, and thus a lot of possibility of falling asleep.

It’s shown me a bit more about the importance of book design; how, no matter how beautifully written and engrossing the story may be, if the font is tiring or the sizing causes strain, the book won’t be devoured. And it wasn’t devoured. I started reading it, I think, in October. It was an easy book to put down and save for later because of the font properties, and even easier was picking it back up to continue because the storyline was so easy to follow. I suppose it takes a certain kind of book that is still “easily readable” after three or four months of reading it.

In any case, the story follows Mario, an 18 year old who falls in love with his Aunt Julia, who as I understand isn’t even twice his age but who is constantly referred to as an ‘old lady.’ It also follows Mario and his relationship with a scriptwriter named Pedro Comacho. The title might lead one to believe that the book was about Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter together, but actually it’s about Aunt Julia…. oh, and also this scriptwriter. It kept me on my toes wondering if Mario was going to become a scriptwriter, thus justifying the title, or if Aunt Julia was going to leave Mario and go to the scriptwriter, but it ended being what it is, and I liked it even more.

A bit more than half the book follows the storylines seen above; the other half consists of chapters that are dedicated entirely to a serial (written by the scriptwriter), like having short stories inside a novel. I have to admit that at first I didn’t quite understand what was going on, because the first serial is introduced as a regular chapter (in fact, all of them are, but you don’t grasp that these chapters are serials until the characters start talking about their plotlines in the other chapters). They all end in questions to the effect of solving a presented mystery, and I half expected the whole book to end with those questions so as to make the reader guess whether the Aunt Julia and scriptwriter narrative was also just another serial narrative - but then again, Mario’s life is referred to as a serial several times. Cut for length or spoilers »

Where No One Knows Your Name

Have you ever had one of those dreams where it seems suddenly no one knows who you are even though you remember everyone? You’ll approach your best friend and she’ll look at you like you’re insane, pass you a quarter, and hurry away. Your own mother shows less sympathy for your apparent insane desire to get into her house; she simply calls the cops or has your father aim a shotgun at you.

I didn’t have a dream quite that dramatic, but I woke up shaken and I’m still shaken, even though I’ve rejoined the real world and have been watching television for 45 minutes. I can’t explain why I’m so shaken except that it was very similar to those dreams where no one knows your name, those dreams from which I usually wake up stunned and heartbroken. I usually recover within minutes, but today that feeling has stuck.

Richard had talked us into exploring some local folklore. By “us” I mean myself and a random assortment of people we apparently knew but whom right now I can’t seem to recall. They weren’t “good friends” by any means, just the sort of acquaintances in the background whom you’ve gotten to know through other people. Some of them may have just been movie extras. In any case, we were to spend the night in an open field upon which there were two structure. They looked like wire shelves to me, very uncomfortable and extremely unstable, but his idea was to sleep on these things. To the sides were several benches and I begged Richard to keep company with me on one of the benches but he refused and we slept separately. Or at least, we woke up separately. This is one of those shady parts that most dreams have: I remember clearly falling asleep on the shelf underneath his, holding his hand which was dangling down and seeing a tuft of his hair peeking out over the edge. When I woke up, however, I was on one of the surrounding benches.

The point, he said, was to disprove some legend that witches and other magical creatures visited that clearning at night and devoured whatever was there. I’m not superstitious and usually don’t believe in this sort of thing, and my dream self was no different. I wasn’t worried about mysteriously disappearing in the night or waking up to find a gnome knawing on my foot; I was only cold, and I wanted to be close to the boy I loved in whatever endeavor he chose to embark upon.

Everyone was very excited and very hungry, so I brought out the prepackaged turkey sandwiches which somehow just turned out to be packages of lettuce that tasted like turkey, and we munched for a while - myself and the token fat kid in particular. I don’t mean that to sound mean, but he was larger than everyone, and if you would imagine his movie character, he’d be the gentle-hearted big-boned individual of which everyone was afraid because he could, if he wanted, crush your skull. Like me, he didn’t sleep in the wobbly shelving units because he was afraid he’d cause them to topple over. He didn’t want to ruin the fun for everyone else, so we camped on our benches (except that I fell asleep on the shelf).

We slept soundly, or at least I don’t remember any disturbance at this point in the dream. It was cold, and thus slightly uncomfortable, but somehow that didn’t matter as soon as sleep drifted in. It was dreamless and deep and wonderful, and when I woke up I felt very refreshed and ready to laugh along with the others that we had disproved this local piece of folklore and could go about our lives.

Except when my token large man and I woke up, everyone else was gone.

At first the shelving units were just as they were when we arrived - not in the best shape, but still holding up - but after walking around peering inside, looking everywhere for signs of life, they toppled over and came crashing to the ground. The surrounding area was perfectly silent, no noise except that which the crash made, and no sign of life, not even a bird. We looked at each other and started running, panicked, back towards home. He went his way and I found mine to my parents’ house where I cannot remember my intent. Was I going to call the police? Was I going to start a search for the bodies? Was I just going to hole up in my bedroom and cry for days?

Contrary to what the first paragraph in this post implies, my parents knew who I was. I arrived and started to frantically tell them what had happened, how my boyfriend had disappeared into thin air, without a trace, just like that, until I noticed the clutter. My parents’ house was full of broken dishes, socks that were lost, and miscellaneous objects that were indeterminable against the objects next to them. It was clutter with no organization, and it was everywhere.

My mother informed me that they were robbed sometime in the night and they were trying to pick up the pieces. Some of the things in their living room weren’t even theirs, and they wanted to find out whose so they could return them, but they couldn’t figure out why they would have so many things that belonged to other people. They couldn’t figure out how the robber came in with foreign objects, trashed their entire house, and left again, without taking any of their most treasured valuables, without waking them up (the bedroom was in a similar state), without leaving any trace of who they were or how to catch up with them.

I was shocked and devastated. I didn’t know what to say. Immediately my thought was that this was somehow related to the field in which I slept last night, that our spending the night there was as if we handed someone the key to my parents house and let them in to do as they please. There’s no logic in that, of course, and I knew deep down it was just a coincidence; but at the moment, I wanted something that I could blame on Richard so I could be mad at him. I couldn’t very well be mad at him for randomly disappearing, though it was his idea to sleep there in the first place, so I decided to blame him for the burglary at my parents’ house.

I went to my room and cried. I took in a few meals so it must have been days, maybe even a week. Time dragged. I slept through most of it, but it seemed like I’d wake up only an hour later.

Around this time, in my bed in my apartment in “real” life, I woke up. I was half asleep and tears were streaming down my face. I sometimes cry during my sleep if I’m crying in my dreams; I haven’t researched this at all so I don’t know if it’s normal or if it’s likely, but it happens. I looked at the time and while I was trying to determine how many hours I had been asleep, I fell back to sleep, back into my depressed, lonesome self at my parents’ house, crying over a lost love and wondering why no one else seemed to care.

It was true, no one had come to me, not even my fat man, to ask what had happened to their children that night, their friends, their loved ones. It was as if I was the only person in the world who remembered any of them.

“There’s a visitor for you down stairs,” my mother came in one day to tell me as she was still carrying loads of indeterminable smuck from one end of the house to the other. As I found my strength and crawled down the steps, I saw that not much had changed in the house. It was still a clutter, still a complete mess, still unlivable. I wondered why there wasn’t any clutter in my bedroom.

The porch was empty but I could see through the screen door that Richard was standing on the driveway with a few of the other people who went missing that night. He was clean. His hair was long, down to his shoulders, but it was combed down and dyed. His beard had obviously been washed and shaped into a bunchy lion’s beard; he looked perfectly kingly. His clothing was clean and nice. The others had similar looks - very pristine, untattered, shiny and pressed. For a moment I was so shocked to see him and so shocked at his appearance that I couldn’t breathe. No movement came to my legs and my heart pounded through my universe.

I walked silently to him with tears in my eyes. I wanted nothing more than to embrace him, to hold him close and never let him go, but he gave me a foreign look which I didn’t immedately translate. I approached him and he backed away, again, then once more. He didn’t know me. Our friends remembered me, but only as a friend, not as Richard’s girlfriend. My mother didn’t seem to know him either when she came out to offer everyone drinks. Here I was standing in front of the one person I ever wanted to be with, and only I remembered that we were in love. A future I thought I had lost but which was now standing just a few feet in front of me… Only to find out that I really did lose it, it was gone. Either I had made it up entirely and had never met this person, or I was the only one to be truly affected by the magic that night in the field.

I woke up again in my apartment bed and the tears were gone. My heart felt empty and I didn’t want to get out of bed, so I just stared at my night stand and sighed.

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