Category: Before

There were seals flopping around in Elliot Bay while I was down their today. They were splashing around and making so much noise that for a moment, before I had a good look, I thought they might be orcas. They were swimming back and forth, floating on their backs and waving their flippers in the air, jumping up out of the water, turning somersaults, and just generally making a ruckus. Very unusual – in the past all of the seals I’ve seen in Elliot Bay have been pretty sedate, only surfacing long enough to catch a quick breath before heading back underwater to catch some fish.

At one point the seals were only about ten yards away from the pier and I was walking alongside them trying to get a good photo. They stopped short and one of them looked up at me – his face was bigger and fuller than I’d expected. I’m anthropomorphizing here, but the expression on his face seemed to be saying something along the lines of, “What the hell do you think you’re looking at?”

I was mulling this over a few minutes ago, when I was posting today’s Horizon photo, and it dawned on me. I did a quick Google-search that, had I landed on someone’s weblog, would have been borderline-eligible for Disturbing Search Requests. My suspicion was confirmed. It’s mating season. Oops. Sorry, guys. I’ll leave you alone next time.

The Turf, a remarkable seedy little dive down by Pike Place Market, is being pushed out of its space by its landlords. (A number of low income housing units in the same building will most likely also be cleared out soon as well.) There’s something about that place, I can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s unnerving.

The fragments I’ve been piecing together don’t really do the place justice. To really fill out the picture, read the hard-boiled portrait of an evening at the Turf that the Stranger published a couple of years ago along with this more balanced obituary of the Turf’s former owner from Real Change.

• Hey, look. Beans for Breakfast is the title of a Johnny Cash song.
• I tried to rent Human Nature the other day. But the two video stores that I went to only had the movie on DVD. Neither store was stocking a VHS copy. (Now I’m officially behind the times.)
• There’s a superfluous zipper-pull on my jacket that’s pulled down the front zipper. It’s gotten kind of loose lately. After I’ve been wearing the jacket for awhile, the zipper-pull creeps up the zipper a few inches. So I’ve found myself having to pull it back down again whenever I’ve been out walking around, a motion which I suspect doesn’t look entirely unlike someone surreptitiously adjusting his fly.

Within the span of an hour there’s a shift from heavy rain to a cloudless sky. Later a bulky purple-gray cloud passes across the sun. A number of low clouds are being carried by the wind at a faster speed than the large cloud; and they’re gone by the time it’s allowed the sun to shine through again. Now the sky is covered with an entirely different variety of clouds. The quality of the light is changing constantly.

We usually experience the day as a long steady shift from darkness to light to darkness again marked by handful of exceptional phenomena – sunrise, sunset, dusk. This day was filled with notable light changes, so the day seemed to pass more quickly. It always seemed like the sunset would be coming along at any minute.

A grey grey day: Grey sky, grey plants, grey buildings, grey streets, grey rain filling grey puddles.

Only a few splashes of color: A red Honda parked nearby. A red Jeep parked across the street – (its headlights were left on). A pink and blue flyer pasted to a (grey) lamppost beside the Jeep. Half a block down the hill, a billboard (dimly lit by an overhead light) printed in fluorescent colors. Beneath the billboard, a pale blue phone booth, its hood is decorated by a backlit sign bearing one of the local phone company’s old names. (Everything else is sky, plants, buildings, streets, and rain – grey.)

At the coffee shop, there’s a ragged, bearded, middle-aged man sitting two chairs down from me. For awhile he’s turned around sideways watching the chess players gathered in the corner. They give him a quick glance, and return to their games. He mimes interest for awhile, then turns around and stares out the window, sometimes taking notes with a blue Bic pen on the front of a newspaper. Now he taps on the window as if trying to get someone’s attention. He climbs down out of his seat, picks an umbrella and a plastic grocery bag off the floor, and drops them onto the seat beside mine. A minute later, he’s pacing back and forth outside, smoking a cigarette. On one of his passes, he taps on the window right in front of his chair. His seat has been taken by the time he gets back inside, so he pushes his things off of the chair next to mine and moves in there, where he sits quietly for a long time. He eventually breaks his silence with a string of incoherent muttering – nothing aggressive. He wrestles with the newspaper that’s still in front of him on the counter and crosses out some of what he’s written before climbing out of the chair. He gathers his things and walks out. He heads down the hill, toward downtown. Later, I gather the newspaper to see what he’s written. On the front page he wrote a name, his own I assume – first, middle, and last -, repeated several times. On the sports page, he wrote out the alphabet and then the numbers “101 202 303 404 505 606 707 808 909”.

As I was drifting off to sleep the other night, I was absently exploring a gravel-sized chunk of something that was moving freely around in my mouth. I pressed my tongue up against it and felt a smooth irregular surface – it felt like a tooth. I woke up immediately and felt around the back of my teeth with my tongue. I couldn’t feel the gap where the tooth had been and couldn’t find the metallic-tasting burst of blood that I’d expected. But my mouth felt odd – kind of numb. I jumped out of bed and ran to the bathroom, pressing the loose tooth up against the front of my mouth so as not to swallow it.

In the bathroom, I spit the tooth out carefully into my cupped hand. I held it out in front of me and looked, bracing myself for an ugly site. The tooth was a translucent brown-orange. I’d fallen asleep while sucking on a cough drop, and it had dissolved into a bumpy tooth-sized lump.

Daniel and Masha, the youngest kids, both have trouble picking away at the wrapping paper on their gifts with their tiny hands. Christopher gets anxious and steps in to help, tearing the paper off with a couple of quick swipes – the sooner this one is opened, the sooner he can open one of his own.

We’re taking turns, opening one gift at a time – the youngest goes first and so on. There are sixteen of us. The night rolls on, gift after gift. Half of us are self-appointed referrees, shouting out opinions whenever the system breaks down. (Someone is out of the room – do we skip him? If we skip someone – do we give him an extra turn later? All of the kids are downstairs playing and it’s time to start a new round – Do we call them in or do we start a new round, this time starting with the oldest person?)

Masha cries when her turn comes again too soon. “This isn’t my present!” She points at her name on the label, “See, it says ‘To Not Masha’.”

Everyone is exhausted by 10:00 on Christmas Eve. We all go to sleep, only to get up on Christmas day and continue the gift opening.

Most of us have opened all our gifts by the time we break for Christmas dinner at around 3:00. I head home a couple of hours after we finish eating, my sister’s kids still have presents to open. It’s been about 24 hours since we started.

It was madness. It was like The Berenstain Bears and Too Many Presents (if there is such a book), except we never learned our lesson and didn’t have a healthy and restrained Christmas in the end.

Thank you to Melissa, my Secret Santa. She sent me Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnappped and Catriona. I hope everyone had a good Christmas.