Category: Before

Another tourist, I think Fiona said she was a German girl, was searching for a word. She asked Fiona, “What do you call the flowers that are yellow, and then they’re white, and they go ‘Poof!'”

Dandelions.

After remembering the anecdote, Fiona picked a dandelion and blew away the dandelion fluff. To my confusion, this is what she did with it: She asked, “What time is it?” and blew a short puff of breath at the dandelion head. Then she said “One o’clock,” and blew again. And she alternated between blowing short bursts of breath at the dandelion and reciting the hours of the day, until all the seeds had been blown away. “Two o’clock.” Puff. “Three o’clock.” Puff. Etc.

A privileged glimpse at the English schoolyard dandelion ritual. The American dandelion ritual, or the one that was most common in my corner of Eastern Washington during the ’80s, involves making a wish and trying to blow away all the dandelion fluff in one breath. Maybe there are some regional variations, I don’t know.

I stopped handling dandelions when I was pretty young. Someone pointed out that each fragment of dandelion fuzz was a seed and that dandelions are classed as weeds. Blowing out a dandelion would be akin to planting a hundred weeds and I didn’t want that hanging over me head. (I was a bit neurotic and maybe a little sensitive about our lawn.)

I don’t remember what I ever wished for whenever I blew out a dandelion or a birthday cake. I always felt foolish making a wish, I could never think of something that warranted one.

[Correction 6/6/03: I misremembered. The anecdote at the beginning wasn’t Fiona’s, it was Tracy’s.]

Lake Washington

The last shot I took with my old camera seems to be foreshadowing.

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I got my new camera today and headed out to give it a test drive. Strangers everywhere were giving me advice – where I should go because I was obviously a tourist, what I should take a picture of. I must have seemed both confused and approachable.

One woman had an intermittent conversation with me over a two-block stretch of sidewalk. I was maneuvering around a number of people waiting at a corner – people waiting to cross or waiting for the bus. When I walked around a baby carriage, the mother spoke up, “I know what you’re thinking. He’s a little long to be in a carriage.”

“Okay.”

I continued up the street, stopping every couple of minutes to take another photo. I was being a little shutter happy.

The woman strolled past while I was pointing my camera up at a flagpole. “I took photography in college too. But they didn’t give us digital cameras.”

“. . . Okay.”

I nodded a short acknowledgment when I passed by her again a few minutes later.

She was there when I stopped to fiddle with one of the camera settings. “There’s another sphere on the other side, just like the one you saw back there,” she told me, “It would make a nice shot – just like connecting the dots.”

A sphere? “Well, uh, . . . alright.”

She continued up the street.

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Updates at Horizon have resumed. I think that, going forward, Horizon will be updated less frequently than before.

Two helium-inflated balloons that someone has released: Each balloon trails a shimmering ribbon behind it. The balloons aren’t tied together, but they rise together. The wind blows them to the east, over Alaskan Way and then over the city. The green balloon moves steadily upward; and the red balloon keeps apace for a time, swaying back and forth beneath the first. The red balloon nods a few last circles around the green balloon’s tail, before the green one rises so that its ribbon is out of reach of the red. They continue their ascents separately.

Seattle Aquarium

Chinese Room, Smith Tower

A couple of photos in lieu of a larger gallery. I’m going to stop posting a regular Friday gallery in favor of posting photos with the usual text entries more often and irregularly posted galleries.

Every time someone gets up, he or she will shed a scrap of paper without noticing – maybe not every time he stands up, but definitely every time he stands up and “goes” somewhere. It’s a known fact. Going to the bathroom? Going outside? Going to the car? Going down the hall or across a bridge? Lose a piece of paper.

If you’re carrying your dirty dishes to the bus tub before leaving a cafe, a crumpled tissue will fall off your plate. As someone leaves his apartment building, he’ll reach into his pocket to feel for his keys one last time. When he pulls his hand back, now confident that he’ll be able to get back into the building later, a receipt will be freed from the pocket and will blow away into a corner of the entrance. Two friends who run into each other in the street and walk for awhile, arguing over a misunderstanding, will get to a street corner where one has to cross in one direction and the other has to cross in another. One friend will trip and drop his latte. He’ll bend over to pick it up (while the coffee leaks slowly out of the tiny sipper hole in the lid) and one of the extra sugar packets he’d taken from Starbucks will slip out of his shirt pocket and fall in the gutter. While waiting for the signal to change, the other friend will put his jacket on and a phone number will slip from a pocket and then away with the wind. If someone is going upstairs, she’ll drop a dollar on the landing. If she’s poor, she’ll only lose a dime. That’s the only exception to the rule.

If you noticed that you dropped a scrap of paper when you got up to go somewhere, then you must have dropped a second scrap that you didn’t see, because you never notice the dropped scrap of paper. If you don’t lose a scrap of paper when you get up, then you’re not really going anywhere, even if you think that you are.

There’s one barista who sometimes asks me what books I’ve been reading lately. Last time I asked him what he’d been reading, he said, “I haven’t reading very much fiction in a while,” in kind of a defensive tone. Today he was wearing a dark blue t-shirt with a picture of the galaxy on the front. There’s an arrow pointing out a point in the galaxy and the words, “You are here.” I had a shirt with exactly the same design when I was around eight or nine years old. I realized that it’s the type of shirt I would’ve considered buying up until pretty recently, except I would’ve dismissed it out of hand because I’d had the shirt when I was a kid.

Just a handful of photos this week. These were taken on Lake Washington, right inside Seattle.

For Photo Friday: Small, this was taken at the Seattle Aquarium.

A tall old man with a friendly face is sitting with six or seven other locals at a diner in Snoqualmie Falls. “Twin Peaks Pie” is listed on the dessert menu, though the diner from Twin Peaks is a few miles down the road in the next town. The man gets up as soon as everyone at the table has finished ordering and loads up a plate at the salad bar. The wrinkles on his face are deep and round, shaped by years of smiling.

A bit of conversation overheard at Elliot Bay Cafe: “She has problems with you because you’ve had affairs.” There are people having these conversations and this is as good a place as many to have them.

A pair of teenagers are hanging around on bicycles at a busy corner downtown. We maneuver around them and head up the sidewalk. Up ahead a young guy in jeans and a t-shirt is turned away from us talking to a chauffer about a square black sedan. They’re about to leave or they’ve just arrived. The kids with the bikes call out to the guy at the car, “Hey, man. Over here!” The conversation at the car is ending and the young guy says, “I’ll just be a second.” I catch a glimpse of his face for just a moment when he turns around to shake the kids’ hands. I recognize the face in the way you’d recognize someone who you’ve see around a lot but who you don’t know. My brain idly tries to match his face with a place. Does he live in my neighborhood? Is he a barista at Vivace? No, wait. He was Tommy on Third Rock From the Sun.

A woman keeps walking by the restaurant where Fiona and I are having lunch. She wears light and vibrant colors that match her pale complexion and faint red hair. Sometimes she passes by from the left and sometimes she passes from the right. Sometimes she’s pulling a cart filled with spiral bound notebooks; sometimes she carries nothing. She must have gone past a dozen times before we finished with lunch. Later, I’m spending a few minutes of quality time with a cup of tea on the sidewalk outside Bauhaus. The same girl strolls up to the corner, waits for the light to change, and crosses the street, where she climbs into a Volvo and drives away. And that’s it.

There’s a guy on a bicycle stopped at a red light. He has two long crutches balances across the handlebars. The light changes and he peddles into the intersection. He’s wearing a brace on his right foot.

I opened a CD case and found an extra CD doubled up with the CD that was meant to be there. It was a regular commercially manufactured music CD, but it had no title printed on the disc. I didn’t recognize the music. So with the help of CDDB I could identified the disc. Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci – a band that I’ve never heard of.

There’s a label on the underside of my computer monitor; I can see it reflected in the CD, which is now shiny side-up on my desk. I reach under the monitor and tear the sticker off. I read the words printed across it: “Warranty void if seal broken.” Oops.

There are some days where your canoe is capsized by a wave coming up from the wake of a giant powerboat, figuratively speaking. You’re dunked underwater and you manage to get the boat turned back over. You retrieve the paddles and what suddenly seems like an excessive amount of cargo for a brief spin in a rented boat. Metaphorically, some kind soul in a boat who’s crew has managed to remain above water will take the waterlogged valuables that you and your shipmate are holding over your head to shore for you while you try to tow the boat to shore. You’ll try to tug the boat toward shore, working your legs against the waves but not gaining any ground; and then your figurative shipmate will point out that the water is shallow enough for you to walk to shore.

There are other days where your rented canoe capsizes quite literally. I’ve calculated how long ago I earned the Canoeing Merit Badge from the Boy Scouts – I’ve had more birthdays since being awarded that badge than I had before I received it. I think my credentials have expired.

The University of Washington’s Waterfront Activities Center near Husky Stadium rents out canoes for $7.50 an hour. You can paddle out beneath little footbridges and freeway on-ramps. We saw sunbathing turtles, herons, and the usual ducks. Make sure you steer into the wakes of large boats so that they hit you at the bow and not the side.