Category: Before

A black shape tossed by the wind among overhead powerlines caught my eye. When I turned and focused on it, I saw that it was a crow being blown sideways, with its wings spread out. I thought it was dead or stunned – you usually don’t see crows coasting with the wind the way seagulls fly. It looked like it was going to capsize and fall, but it righted itself just before tipping into an impossible angle. It turned and flew into the wind, flapping its wings in quick scissor-like gestures, hovering in one place for a few seconds. Then it fully regained its composure and flew confident and now crow-like against the wind.

---

A light ridgey thumbprint cloud spreading out directly above is the defining feature of this sky. It’s not prominent because of its size. It’s prominent because of the way it’s centered and framed by other clouds. It’ll pass overhead and disappear behind me, where it’ll merge with the others into a dense mass of cloud, and empty itself onto the Cascades. Snow in the mountains.

The tissues are packed tightly into the jumbo-size box of off-brand Kleenex. The first one is lost when you try to dig it out. It comes out shredded. The second tissue comes out with some resistance, but mostly intact – any tears in the second were made in your efforts with the first tissue. The next several tissues also come out with resistance, the entire box comes up with the tissue and you have to either hold the box down or shake the tissue loose. Once you’ve made some space in the box, you can pull the tissues out with one smooth pull, though the tissue isn’t freed as gracefully as Kleenex brand tissues. Either these off-brand tissues are folded together using a different technique than Kleenex or the tissues stick together after having been compressed into the small space for so long.

---

The third hole in my watch’s wristband, the one I usually fit the buckle into, has stretched out enough that my watch fits a bit loosely on my wrist. When I check the time, I first jerk my arm out to the side so that the watch slips from inside my jacket sleeve up to my exposed wrist and the watch-face centers itself. When I use the second hole on my wristband, the watch-face slips off-center toward the outside of my wrist. The wristband has curled over time into the shape of my wrist, but fitting the buckle into another hole undermines the wrist shape.

The construction area across the street was pretty quiet. Construction workers had set up orange cones to block off the outside lane and now they were standing around waiting for something.

Up ahead of me, a man stopped to talk to a group of teenage girls. They ignored him so he moved on, walking in my direction. He flinched when we passed each other and said, “I thought you were a girl.” I took a short appraisal of him, trying to calculate the intent of his comment. But couldn’t arrive at any conclusions. I walked on, glancing at my clothes and feeling my posture, looking for something feminine.

A U-Haul drove slowly past me. Its body was leaning a little toward the right and bouncing low on its suspension. The front mud flaps made a short scraping sound when they hit the street on each down-bounce. The construction workers watched it head up the street.

I walked past the teenagers that the man had been hassling earlier and overheard a bit of their conversation.

“This is really good.”

“And it totally has twice the caffeine of a regular cup of tea.”

“Wow, I’ve got to get me some of that. It’s called a vanilla chai?”

“Actually, it’s a chai with a shot of vanilla. If you go to a coffee shop, ask for a chai tea latte.”

The U-Haul had stopped in a loading zone. The driver and his passenger were crouched down on the curb looking under the front tire.

I was looking absently at the side of the U-Haul when the teenagers all shouted in surprise: “Holy shit!” “Oh, my god!” “Wow!” I looked back, craning my head out to see around the parked U-Haul. There was a car stopped in the middle of its lane. A second car, perpendicular to the first, had its front bumper resting gently against the side of the first car. Traffic heading in both directions was just then slowing to a stop. I didn’t even hear an impact.

Everyone – the teenagers, the idle construction workers, the U-Haul guys and me – stood and looked at the scene for a few seconds before going on with their business. I think I would have preferred having been startled by the fender bender, I’d had too much mild puzzlement already.

Walking in through the front entrance, instead of the usual sidedoor, after my blind date, still a little tipsy. There’s a steep set of six or seven tall steps that lead up to the first level, the main staircase is across the lobby. My apartment is on the basement level, so I’m going up and then down. I jog up the marble steps, misjudge the third or forth, and trip forward, catching myself with hands on the top step. Just as I’m tripping, an upstairs neighbor emerges silently from downstairs, gives me a maybe-bemused, maybe-irritated, “Hello Jeffrey.” I recover my footing and return his hello. He reaches the lobby and turns to head up the next flight. He’s out of sight before I’ve crossed the lobby to head down the main staircase.

At lunch my dad and my brother-in-law listened to me explain to my nephews and niece how the Ballard Locks work. “. . . and the water level inside the lock rises until it’s at the level of lake..” Somehow I failed to inspire. “You’ll see what I mean when we get there.”

We headed up to Ballard through slow traffic. A man walked up Market Street with a huge restless parrot hopping around on his arm. The Bird Man of Ballard.

The kids found the Locks something less than magical, and I tried to redeem the trip by locating the viewing area for the fish ladders. There was only a wall of swirling green water behind the windows in the viewing area. The fish aren’t spawning yet, so the dank concrete room ended up being a low point in the field trip. We loitered around the displays. A recording about the fish ladders repeated itself on an endless loop. The kids hovered around the only interactive display – a magnifying glass that you push across a set of test tubes filled with fish embryos preserved at various stages of growth.

My dad remembers it differently: “The kids really enjoyed it. A batch of boats went through the locks. On the way out we walked through the botanical gardens.”

“Hey, Jeff. How are you?”

“I’m good.”

“It sounds like you have a cold.”

“Oh. No. It’s, umm . . .,” for some reason while hesitating, I pointed off toward the street, “uh, allergies.”

Steve had a puzzled look on his face. He was trying to work out the connection between allergies and the direction I was pointing in.

“. . . I guess I’m pointing at the pollen.”

“Okay.”

(I blame the allergy medicine – “Drowsiness may occur. Excitability may occur, especially in children. Be careful when driving a motor vehicle or operating machinery.”)

The Kinko’s clerk commandeered my project after noticing I was looking critically at a dot the copier had left in the top margin of my resume. There were scratches on the copier’s glass, he tried to polish them away with Windex and a paper towel. He called me by my first name, the first time looking from the corner of his eyes for my reaction to see if it was correct to shorten “Jeffrey” (what he’d read off the resume) to “Jeff”. I excused myself to retrieve an invoice for the computer time I’d used earlier. The guy at the main desk found the invoice and said, “I can ring you up in just a minute, . . . except it looks like you might have some other business,” staring past my shoulder. I turned around, and my friend was gesturing for me, “Hey, Jeff. Come back. Come back.” Back on his side of the store, I asked, “What’s the problem.” “I need you to get some more of this heavy-weight paper.” He’d burned through the fistfull I’d grabbed earlier. I went back behind the clerk’s desk for some more. Every copier he tried left its fingerprint on my resume, but we both pretended that the last one didn’t. “See these look great. Wasn’t that worth it?” I thanked him. He gave me a discount. I walked out of the store with a small stack of resumes; and each resume had an identical line of a dozen tiny dots scattered across my name.

I spent half the afternoon trying to decide my stand on the clear and clean sky. I can’t quite get a hang of it.

There have been a surprising number of sightings of adults wearing Winnie the Pooh sweatshirts today. I chalked the first one up as an anomaly. But without looking for them, I’ve noticed a number of others throughout the afternoon. It’s possible that this isn’t a fair sampling. People who were caught off guard by today’s mild weather may have had to search their closets for a light jacket or a sweater, but ended up settling on a Pooh sweatshirt that they were given for Christmas.

Having just made what could be read as a dismissive remark about adults who wear shirts featuring the likeness of a cartoon character, I feel it’s only fair I disclose that I sometimes wear a t-shirt with an image of a cartoon rabbit, McConey, printed on the front. Judge me if you must. (I’m sure I would.)