.at walgreens

Witnessed while waiting in line at Walgreens:

A white girl interrupts the checkout line to ask the lady if they (being Walgreens) have a crimper. At first everyone in line — an assortment of ethnicities plus me, another white girl — just looks at her trying to understand what she wants. So she repeats her request: “A crimper. You know, like a straightener, but it crimps.”

The cashier tells her that if she didn’t find it on the shelf, then no.

The girl looks at everyone in line and asks, “So is there another Walgreens near by?”

“No.”

“Or a Duane Reade?”

“No.”

“So there is not another Walgreens near by or a Duane Reade in the area? Nothing? Nothing that I can walk to.” Again, her question is answered by a varying chorus of no from the checkout line, until until I say, “Wait, what about the Walgreens near the hospital?”

My question causes much talk among everybody: “They built a Walgreens over there?” “Oh, yah, that Walgreens.” “The one by Fat Alberts.” “Fat Alberts has a Walgreens near by now?” “Oh yah. I always forget about that one.”

Then the checkout line turns to the girl and one person says, “You can go to the Walgreens by Fat Alberts. You know where Fat Alberts is right?” Clearly, we are all the people in our neighborhood, well, except I have no idea what Fat Alberts is or even where the place is located until now.

She looks confused, then asks: “Can I walk there? Is it close?” By this point she isn’t being particularly nice. Clearly she was in a hurry and didn’t like how long we were taking to help her. When she figured out that the Walgreens by Fat Alberts is about a half a mile a way, she huffed around a bit about the ridiculousness of our neighborhood then huffed out saying “I’ve got to go.”

As soon as she walked out the door, the woman at the front of the line turned to her friend and said (for all of us) “I was about to tell her that she could go to hell if she wasn’t happy with our neighborhood.”

 

.books

from The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee:

“What Greta was trying to tell me that night, and ever since, was that the books are right, we are not alone” (25).

“When Greta and I were first working together, I was a sophomore in college — both literally and figuratively– and i used to wonder aloud how I’d been selected out of all my family to be one who was going to … the one who was obviously .. well, what exactly I didn’t know, only that it was better. My parents only read, I’d tell Greta, lesser literature. While I had become .. elevated, enlightened? My preening finally wore Greta out, and one day she called me on it. We were standing in the middle of the store, alphabetizing a section that had been ignored for a while, probably Business” (31).

“One of the earliest records of a bookseller is found in a hieroglyphic tomb inscription from the classical era of the Egyptian pharaohs, where it’s noted that one undertaker has expanded his business by offering for sale to the grieving family his own edition of The book of the Dead” (50).

“Of somewhat varying sizes, books are the same basic shape, slim rectangular blocks that can be easily stood one next to the other two flat surfaces pushed together, each balanced at a ninety-degree angle to another flat surface: hence shelves of books. Imagine how much more difficult to line up a shelf of cantaloupes” (69).

“In the early days of the Tower [Records and Books], when Russ [Solomon] did the majority of the buying for both the record and bookstores, he would reach across his desk with a pair of scissors and snip off the tie of any sales rep who hadn’t yet learned the lesson” (87).

“From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries books were stored horizontally on their shelves rather than vertically, and the spines would have faced the backs of the shelves rather the customer [sic]. Most books would lack covers (title pages, however, were now included), be completely unbound, and stacked in loose quires (signatures of twenty-four pages). After choosing a book, the customer would then select the color and cost of binding that would most suit the volume and his library decor. Or one could choose to read the book as is, without covers, an early prototype of the paperback” (103).

“It is important to remember that the death of literature, of a literate culture, is not  an idea that we twenty-first centurions invented. In the nineteenth century, the invention of the bicycle was believed to mark the end of civilization; we would become leisure addicts and reading would surely cease. The same was said of radio in the 1920s, and of television in the 1950s. And at later dates, rock-and-roll, premarital sex, and the jet ski would be cited as literacy destroyers” (214).

 

.more

This time from Jitterbug Perfume

• “Pointing out that their breathing, bathing, dining, and screwing brought Alobar and Kundra much physical pleasure, and that an organism steeped in pleasure is an organism disposed to continue, he has said that the will to live cannot be overestimated as a stimulant to longevity. … Persons who lack curiosity about life, who find minimal joy in existence, are all too willing, subconsciously, to cooperate with  — and attract — disease, accident, and violence” (176)

 

.this is not a promise

School is over, and I am taking the time to read and digest.
Tripping across quotes that I want to hold on to but do not know where to save them.This seems like a good space.

from By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

• “Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows” (39)
• “The heart decides, and what it decides is all that really matters” (viii).
• “You have to take risks, he said. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen” (8)

from Herzog

• “Each man has his own batch of poems” (69).
• “It was the middle-class female solidarity, defending a nice girl from charges of calculation and viciousness. Nice girls marry for love. But should they fall out of love, they must be free to love another. No decent husband will oppose the heart. This is orthodox. Not utterly bad. But a new orthodoxy” (91).
• “He wondered, even, why he should have wanted to survive. Others in his generation wore themselves out, died of strokes, of cancer, willed their own deaths, conceivably. But he, despite all blunders, fucky-knuckles that he was, he must be cunning, tough” (103).

 

. jersey girl

As I mentioned in my last post, we moved to New Jersey and bought a car.

In order to register the car in NJ, I had to drive over to the building where they make you wait in long lines and fill out multiple forms to declare state residency. At the end of this long process, some guy behind a big counter snapped my picture and printed out a new New Jersey license with my name and information on it.

Then, chuckling to himself, he handed me my license and said “You are now officially a Jersey Girl.” The people around me chuckled as well.

I almost started crying.

As happy as I am at this very moment that I have a great job, a beautiful house, and an amazing husband,
when the license guy called me a “Jersey Girl” I suddenly realized that this was my life — I live in New Jersey. When I am 48, I’ll be living in New Jersey. When I am 97, I’ll be living in New Jersey. If I have kids, they will be Jersey kids in a Jersey school system with Jersey friends.

Now, I do not have any fundamental problems with New Jersey as a state. It is quite lovely. But, I don’t know anything about its history or quirks. I can’t even name the state flower or insect. Everything that I pride myself in knowing about Kansas doesn’t apply to my life here anymore, which makes me sad.

I’ve been sharing this story with Dave’s family as a “ha-ha aren’t I silly?” story, but something about the whole “You are now a Jersey Girl” really set me off kilter. I’m sure I’ll get over it, as soon as I study up on New Jersey history.