Category: Before

The blinds on the window in front of me are drawn down to eye level. I pull them up and watch four planes drift in four directions across the gray-blue sky. An orange sunset fades into a dim brown horizon. The planes cross each others’ paths and slip away behind buildings. The street light across from me is swaying. The movement decreases steadily into a slight vibration, and just when the lamp post becomes still, its light switches itself on.

A baby has been left alone in a shopping cart near the store’s entrance for a little too long. He’s moaning sadly to himself, not yet crying. I give him a little encouraging smile, and he quickly reassembles his composure. He looks back at me with a business-like expression on his face and waves hello. His waving gesture is oddly practiced and deliberate. He resumes moaning and begins rocking forward and back after I walk past him.

We were going back to Samantha’s apartment to sweep the glass screen door off of the carpet, but we stopped for donuts first. I recognized the two old men at the little table in the front of the donut shop. I’d seen them there before. That makes them regulars, and if I can recognize a regular, it’s possible that I’m a regular too. I ordered an apple fritter and Samantha chose two small donuts — one with chocolate frosting. The woman behind the counter assembled our order and the men at the table talked about meteors.

The more talkative man was telling the quiet man, “Scientists have samples of meteorites that fell through the atmosphere. They were red hot while they were falling, but they cooled down after they landed. You know there are two kinds of meteorites. There’s the rocky kind, of course.” A motorcycle with a loud vibrating engine went by and the old man was distracted. “I hate them motorcycles — always weaving in and out of traffic on the highway.” He didn’t get around to describing the second variety of meteorite.

Maybe someone didn’t throw a rock through Samantha’s screen door last night at three in the morning. Maybe the perfectly spherical rock-ball fell from the sky from an unlikely angle.

We took a taxi back to my apartment last night — after we were jolted out of bed by the crashing sound, after hesitating at the bedroom door because we didn’t know what or who was on the other side, after the police completed their two minute investigation, and after the neighbor’s friend told us his tires had been slashed. I looked at Samantha in the backseat of the cab and she was completely calm. I told her, “You’re such a rock, under pressure.” I didn’t even recognize the pun.

There are several of these on Broadway, between Pine and Thomas. The cone is attached to a scrap of recycled street sign and the sign is bolted into the sidewalk. At first I took them for art installations made from pilfered street signs. But it seems more likely that the recycled signs are covering holes that were cut in the sidewalk to make room for new parking pay stations.

Things are much simpler — more obviously explained — than I usually allow them to be.

A few parking restriction signs in the same couple of blocks have been covered over with blue panels.

I was only four years old, so I don’t remember this, but I’ve heard the family story. We had gone out to Breakwood Restaurant after church. My grandparents were with us. They usually skipped mass, but they had joined us on that Sunday. Mt. St. Helens erupted at some point during the course of the meal and we didn’t know it. Dark churning clouds came rolling in from the west. The sky went dark and my grandpa said, “It looks like we chose the right day to go back to church.”

Mt. St. Helens had a small eruption at around noon.

Our monthly printout of a non sequitur photograph decorating various useful holidays is up and ready to be downloaded. It’s the October Beans for Breakfast print calendar and it’s available in letter-size and A4 formats.

The files are 64 kb PDFs:
Letter-size
A4 Format

A man carries a serious-looking tripod and a heavy camera bag into a cafe. He orders a tiny cup of dense coffee, walks over to a table, and centers the cup and saucer on the table. Now he mounts the camera on the tripod and spends five minutes photographing the coffee from across the table. He takes several shots, makes subtle changes to the camera settings and winding superflous knobs on the tripod. When he’s finished experimenting, he lays the tripod down on its side next to him and packs the camera away.

Now it’s just him and the coffee. He lifts the cup out of the saucer, cradling it in both hands to put off disturbing the coffee’s surface for as long as possible. He takes one sip and lowers the glass back into the saucer. He produces a news weekly from somewhere, lays it down between him and the coffee, and pours through its pages.

He’s finished with the coffee and the news within ten minutes. He gathers his things, and walks toward the exit — bussing his table on the way out. He reaches the dorr, turns around immediately, and returns to the table to retrieve his tripod.

Smurfs live in villages of exactly 100 individuals. There are other Smurf villages, though they never appeared in a Smurfs episode. An outside Smurf did visit once to help the village conduct a ceremony that required 100 Smurfs to dance at one time. (Papa Smurf couldn’t participate in the ceremony, since he had to act as conductor. That left only 99 Smurfs.) The visiting Smurf looked and talked just like Brainy Vanity Smurf, and that episode was a mistaken identity/Comedy of Errors -type story.

Smurfette was introduced in either the very first episode or in a segment that ran on a prime time preview of the Saturday morning cartoon season. She was an evil Smurf, created by Gargamel, for some nefarious end. Papa Smurf used his magic to turn Smurfette into a good Smurf. You could tell she was good because her hair was magically turned from black to blonde.

It would be a stretch to say that the introduction of Smurfette was a sign that the Smurfs had jumped the shark since she appeared in one of the very first episodes. I assume that her character was added by the producers of the TV show and that she didn’t appear in the Belgian comic books that inspired the show, but I’m not certain. Cynics will still look down at her as a “new” character, introduced to balance out the otherwise entirely male cast.

A new Smurf is born every blue moon. Young Smurfs (those that aren’t created by wizards) are delivered by the stork.

The 1984 Smurfs Olympics Special opened with two Smurfs arguing over which of two uses of the verb “to Smurf” was grammatically correct. Papa Smurf settled the argument by pointing out that every Smurf on one side of the Smurf Village Smurfed verbs one way, and every Smurf on the other side Smurfed verbs the other. The disagreement inspired Papa Smurf to propose holding the Smurfic Games — an athletic competition between the two sides of the village. A line was drawn down the middle of the village to mark the two sides. Clumsy Smurf’s house was right on the boundary — the line was drawn along the ground, up one side of his house, and down the other. If I remember correctly, he was even standing on the border and the line was drawn onto him. He wanted to know which team he would be playing for. Neither team would have him. This upset Smurfette so much that she left her team and formed a third team with Clumsy. All but the last of the games were held and the medals were all split between the two main teams. The final event was the Smurfathon — a long race through the woods. Each team was represented in the in the race by one runner. At the start of the race, Clumsy was left far behind by the other runners. But Gargamel had some scheme in action, and he snared the first two runners. Clumsy somehow eluded Gargamels grasp. He was exhausted when he finally got close to the end of the race, and he stopped just short of the finish line. He only crossed over the line after Smurfette gave him some encouraging words and the crowd cheered for him. The other runners were freed soon after the race, possibly as a side effect of something Clumsy did during the race. In the end Clumsy was crowned with a wreath, and the Smurfs circled around him and sang, “Clumsy is the champion of the Smurfic Games” to the familiar tune of “La la, la lalala la lala la la.”

The male Smurflings were created after a group of adult Smurf characters encountered a magical phenomenon that turned them young. Some of the characters that were changed were existing characters — I believe Handy Smurf was one of them. Others were introduced entirely for the purposes of being reduced to Smurflings. Sassy Smurf was a young female Smurf that was immediately introduced to balance out the Smurfling group. She was created by Gargamel in the same manner as Smurfette.

Grandpa Smurf was introduced either during the same season as the Smurflings or the year after that. His presence and background was never explained. Baby Smurf appeared around the same time as Grandpa Smurf, also with no explanation.

In the last season of the show, a handful of Smurfs were transported to another world by a set of crystals. In each episode, they would have an adventure in the new world while Papa Smurf and Grandpa Smurf tried to rearrange the crystals into a pattern that would take them back to the Smurf village. These last seasons aired long after I should’ve graduated from Saturday morning cartoons, by the way.

This was written without checking any references. Aside from glimpsing parts of an episode running silently on a television in the back of a restaraunt last year, I haven’t seen the shows since they first aired. This is based entirely on details that I’ve retained from my childhood. I sometimes ask myself, “What happened to you?” I think I’m beginning to understand.

Also, In Holland Germany The Smurfs are called something like “Den Shloomps” Die Schlümpfe.