frankness
Full of gifts this week
This week’s Frank : Waln Oyate Teca Obmani (“Walks With Young People”), Lakota artist, writer, activist, speaker
Gift : Encounters
Meeting with my cousin Amy1 for dinner during the past few weeks when she came to our town for her Christmas concert performance rehearsals
Babies on the plane + at the convention I worked last weekend - I care 0% how silly I look interacting with sweet new humans who are absolutely enthralled with me repeating HI! HELLO! in a cartoon voice while making faces & wiggling my fingers at them
Neighborhood corgi who escaped her owner (technically on purpose, I discovered) to tear into & around our yard on her determined little legs and gleefully chase crows & squirrels into the trees2
As I held open the door from the loading dock at the convention, one of the celebrity guests paused in front of me to say good morning and tell me I had beautiful skin3
Gift : Ideas Added to My Wish List Recently
Gift : Memories of Music
1970s Paul Simon songs will always conjur 18-year-old foolhardy me in the car of an upperclassman I vaguely knew in the parking lot of our dorm. I had walked back alone late after a party one night to discover I’d forgotten my key; he invited me to sit inside with him while I waited to see if my roommate would come by.5 After the CD finished and she hadn’t appeared, he set me up in his room for the night while he stayed over with a friend next door. As an adult I have to wonder why he was sitting alone in his car after midnight but in the end it doesn’t matter, because he6 was there for me and offered only kindness and a safe space, with good tunes.
I liked R.E.M. well enough before my [first] senior year of college but after the fall of 1989, they became a favorite. I’d been pursuing a certain younger man for a year who had been resistant yet stayed around, mostly going dancing and to cheap movies with me but also fixing my crappy cars. When I broke down yet again on the Pullman-Moscow highway, he came out yet again to help so I paid him back with tickets to R.E.M.. And I bought him a concert tank top that he looked really cute in, even after we’d been married for a couple of decades.
I cannot properly explain how much I have always loved getting to see “Amos” - she’s two years older which automatically made her Very Cool to me as we grew up, but she also lived closer to Seattle than I did, bought department store makeup & perfume, played violin, was friends with all the theater kids, skiied…all things I aspired to (except skiing, too scary) or at least admired, though we also had a lot in common: constant reading, listening to all kinds of music, devouring our grandma’s baked goods, watching crying movies, love of vocabulary, smart mouths, sentimentality. So, these Monday nights have been real gifts.
I deeply regret not going down to wrestle some pets from her despite being in my pajamas & slippers.
I have a feeling the brisk 18°F Ohio air might have helped create a youthful glow, but I thanked him anyway.
Of course I had the 1986 cassette that I played at earsplitting volume throughout college, and we have the CD (probably two, each of us having brought one to the marriage), but somehow we hadn’t gotten the record yet.
For any Millennial or Gen Z readers, this was very very pre-cell phone era, and few of us had landlines in our rooms. Unimaginable, I know.
If anyone knows Rob Scott (I think that was his name?) from Washington State University circa 1986/87, please let me know so I can thank him again for being an extraordinarily decent man.