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April 22, 2000
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sunday number one or what friday off can do It started out rocky today. I woke up from a dream in which FFP and I were buying monumental artworks. As quickly as I could admire them, they were being crated up and added to the bill. I was more worried about where we would put them than what they cost. Which I suppose is either a good or bad sign. Then I woke up with my hand on my neck, on the poison ivy, wondering 'what's this?' A helicopter roared overhead. What time is it? It's 8AM...hmmm...I thought SuRu was going to call before this. I stumbled out of bed and into pants, shirt and hiking boots. Chalow comes back from her constitutional and sees the boots and starts to think: walkies! "Where are the ads? Did you already toss them?" I ask Forrest. "No. This is it. This is the entire paper." "The entire Sunday paper?" I whine. "It's Saturday," he points out. Cool, and I still have Sunday. I love having Friday off. I'm sitting in my office with my first cup out of the Capresso and SuRu calls. "I had good intentions to get up earlier," she says, "but the truth is I'd still be sleeping except a helicopter just went right over." I finishing the second cup of Capresso elixir when SuRu pulls in the drive. Chalow does a little ritual dance around SuRu's CR-V in the driveway, I let her in, Zoey comes from the back to lick her and I stand in the door until I finish the magic juice. The Capresso, by the way, has worked well since returning from warranty maintenance. It has made over 200 cups. I know this (or think I know it) because it asks to be cleaned with a special cleaning tablet every 200 cups and we've been through that. The plan for the walk was this: park near the center of vegetarianism (Windsor and Exposition) and walk to Mozart's and back. We park on the street behind the center. The center used to have a little meat market and high end grocery. They were ejected by the landlord for selling meat. (Groceries and meat markets will do that if they are trying to stay in business.) Now Texas French Bread is going to an all vegetarian menu for soups and sandwiches. And I wonder if Mike Adams Hardware was kicked out for selling barbeque grills. I liked that place and miss it. We amble and weave over toward Mozart's. We stop at Walsh Landing and SuRu lets Zoey off. She runs ahead about fifty feet, turns and looks at us and dashes back, passes SuRu and runs into my knee. I initially think I'm killed but it turns out to not be that bad and we continue. Mozart's has lots of dog customers. We get off in a shady corner by ourselves. I wonder that Zoey grew to exactly the height where her chin rests neatly on the table while she hopes for a morsel of bagel. On the way back we see my friends Anne Elizabeth and Will. Will is running for City Council. They have a new house and they've been working on it for a long time. We compliment the landscaping and they say it comes from firing several landscape firms. A lot of blooming things have come and gone. But cacti and cannas are just going into flowering and budding. I lead us by the house where we attended the party last night. It doesn't look all that special from the street. So many houses in this neighborhood look fantastic from the street. Imagine the secrets all the others hold. Our friends Anne and Les wanted us to come by. Les has a new super duper Dell laptop and I fear this will fuel our desire for more gadgets. It certainly fuels Forrest's desire for the trading expertise and software Les has. I can't get interested in the trends and bands. They show us the future artificial spring, river, ponds that he is building. And the skeleton that is going up for the massive log greenhouse. And the ferns that will occupy the greenhouse someday, in their temporary greenhouse. They also show us a room she is decorating called the 'Cowboy Room.' Very impressive. They serve us apple pie and coffee and we have a nice talk. Today, not a work day, provides more photographic material than I can use in one day. So it goes.
I figured out last night that the mouse might be the problem I was having with one of my computers. (Not the one I'm doing the page on but the other one where I read mail, do most of my surfing and download pictures.) I thought that the computer was locking up as the cursor would freeze. But I discovered keyboarding always worked. SuRu had a new trackball in her truck. She tried it and decided she didn't like it and wanted to return it to Office Max. (I almost never return things. She often does. I should do it more.) Hmmm...I ask her if I can take it and try it? And...so far so good. It works. Plus the space this sleek trackball takes is just right for the extra space on the keyboard drop on my desk. So no more need to balance a mousepad on the tray in the drawer. It's amazing how satisfying it is to fix a small thing.
We spent the evening reading. We were going to watch TV but I couldn't find a single movie or show I was interested in watching. Forrest has a cold or allergies. He didn't feel like being DJ for the CD player. "Silence would be nice," he said. So we had silence and reading. He went to the grocery store in the early evening. He got orange juice and some boiled shrimp and bottled queso. Beer, shrimp and queso was my dinner. He had the same but orange juice and Echinecea tea. Later he wanted some bananas. And Dimetapp gel caps. I went to Randall's at 9:30 on the Saturday before Easter. In the over the counter medicine and hair products aisle a handsome young black man and pretty young white woman were shopping. She asks an employee about some hair stuff. "I used to work over on 290 and I had a whole section of those, but..." he said. "I told you. We have to go to the east side," she said. "I don't even know you," he said, apparently embarrassed for the haplessly honest clerk. I briefly consider telling them to go to Eckerd's on Burnet where ethnic hair products are certainly sold (it is a half mile east of our house and the spot where we stand is about that far west). Instead, I ask the clerk about Dimetapp gel caps. "Tavist-D sells better," he says. "This is all I have." No gel caps, but tablets. We aren't wimps, the tablets will be fine. I think about the time that I sent Forrest into Eckerd's to get some hair gel and I ended up with what I think is something intended for hair with the natural kinks that people with some African origins may have. I didn't return it. (We've been over that.) I'm tempted to try it, but I need the body the other gels promise (but don't really deliver). That young man and I should have both gone to Eckerd's. The question is...would it have embarassed him further if I'd offered that solution? Probably. I hope that is the worst discrimination he saw this Saturday. The discrimination of the Randall's computers deciding the products don't sell there. A self-fulfilling prophecy in his case. But you can't blame them from trying to stock what sells. This store is far smaller than the HEB ones. In fact, maybe the HEB on Far West actually has these products. It's much bigger if farther west. But I do see fewer non-whites in general at this store than one mile away. Subtle demographics that one only notices, if one is white, if one is asked to consider it. The young man's presence in the store would not have seemed out of place to me by itself. Groggy from sleep, I'm hardly aware of the subtle demographics a mile makes. Only the fact that he was trying to buy products intended for his hair, and could not, made me think of it. There are times when I have realized, in business, that only men were expected in some situation. I have looked around and realized, well, that makes sense, there aren't any others...or very few. One day I hope the world is more equitable. Meanwhile, we would do well to regard how subtle these things have become and be thankful, at least, for that.
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"I can well imagine looking back on these entries later and blushing at the pettiness of my herein revealed...." W.N.P. Barbellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man
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spring arrives for the cacti
fern awaits impressive home
log greenhouse
tuning into the market |
