Category: Before

About three years ago I met a girl in a coffee shop. I think her name was Nicole. We had a few strange conversations over the next couple of months and that was it for awhile. Several months later she walked up to me at the same coffee shop and said, “Hi Kyle.”

I answered, “Hello, it’s Jeff actually.”

In the course of the confusing conversation that followed, she referred to an email she’d sent me. Though we’d traded email addresses, we’d never actually exchanged any email. Later I made the connection between “Kyle” and the never-received email. I fired off an email to her, explaining that she’d confused me with someone else, the subject line was “mistaken identity”.

She replied, saying that she’d gotten Kyle’s email, thinking it was from me, and at one point had even denied to Kyle that he’d ever written to her. (Wow. That sentence could be lifted from the chatter of a couple of high school girls.)

I wasn’t able to fall asleep until really late last night. I was woken up this morning by the sound of my neighbor sanding the moulding in the hallway outside. (We’re slowly repainting outside. I’ve meant to do my part, but after missing the first couple of painting parties, I’m out of the loop and haven’t been able to find a place to start. I’m a procrastinator.) I wasn’t able to get any more sleep through the grinding whine of the sander, so I ended up having a pretty rough and scattered day.

I was shit on by a bird again today. I had it coming, I guess – I chose to eat lunch outside at Ivar’s, where there are signs posted encouraging customers to feed an aggressive pack of seagulls. I had another near miss a few weeks ago, a bird hit my backpack that time. I think this only happens when I’m in a bad mood. It’s nature’s way of telling me to calm down. Okay, maybe not.

When I stopped at a bookstore earlier, the book I was looking for didn’t turn up. Though I didn’t feel like browsing, I forced myself to stay awhile longer and look through the new releases. I always have a tug of meaningless Catholic guilt when I go into a bookstore and don’t buy anything. I browsed the new releases absently, paranoid that my tired posture and heavy jacket were making me look like a shoplifter.

The fog obscuring the base of the Space Needle this morning reminded many long-time Seattlites of the early days of its construction. The Space Needle was built from the top down – the saucer and the top third of the base were suspended above the ground for several months in 1962, before construction of the legs of the structure were completed.

A little girl at the coffee shop today was wearing a sticker on the back of her hand – the little label from a banana bunch. Not Chiquita, it was another brand. In my day, if you were lucky enough to get a stickered banana, you would apply the sticker to your nose and say, “I’m a Banana Nose”. Alternately, if you were feeling generous, you could stick it to your brother’s or sister’s nose and point at him or her saying, “Banana Nose”.

Now that I think about it, I realize that, after Banana Nose had been used a couple of times, I may have been the only kid who found this behavior funny. My family might have just been humoring me the whole time.

I remember when it all came crashing down around us. I gave my overly sensitive little sister the Banana Nose treatment one morning. She’d either forgotten about Banana Noses, or she calculated that plenty of time had passed since the last use of The Banana Nose and decided she might be able to get some sympathy out of the situation. (At the time I probably didn’t considered the first theory.) So she went to our mom and complained, “Jeff called me a ‘banana nose’.” My mother mildly rebuked me, “That wasn’t very nice, Jeff.” I was both disappointed by their flagrant use of selective memory and surprised that someone might consider “Banana Nose” an insult. And that was it – the end of the days of the Banana Nose.

At around 5:00 today, there was a flurry of activity around Westlake Center. Not people – birds. There had to have been thousands of birds swarming between the buildings and trees, their bird-chatter louder than the sound of the rush hour traffic. For a moment, a group that took flight from the top of the Westin Hotel flew together in formation – the shape of a perfect arc, matching the curve of the cylindrical tower they’d taken off from. Then they scattered back into chaos.

Leaves flutter around on the street. A sudden shift in the wind (maybe a passing truck), and a flurry of leaves fly up into the air. They remain airborne, floating around thirty feet above the street alongside the traffic lights and telephone lines. Traffic passes beneath them, the air shifts and the leaves dance.

Off in the distance, a blue helium balloon is rising skyward. (Was it decorating the Honda dealership’s lot downtown?) A few minutes later, another balloon – this one red – flies up toward the clouds, its string pointing at the ground. (This one came from somewhere else, south of the car dealership.)

Most of the leaves that were suspended above the street earlier have scattered now. Gravity’s job is done, it has won out over the wind.

Now it’s raining. Leaves stick to the street and dam up around storm drains.

A steady rain of leaves. Neighbors bent over, plowing through a thick blanket on the sidewalk with their arms. The leaves end up in a pile on the strip of lawn between the sidewalk and street. What I first understand to be a quick effort to clear the sidewalk without the benefit of a rake turns out to have a different motivation – when it’s tall enough, the two of them stand over the pile and look at it with satisfaction, before jumping into it with a, “Wheee.”

“‘Curiouser and curiouser.'”

“. . . ”

“It’d be interesting to go back and read that book now.”

“Wait. What book is that from again?”

“Alice in Wonderland.”

“Oh right.”

“I’d probably get something entirely different from it now. You know, as the person that I’ve become.”

The bike cop wears a pair of those little velcro fingerless gloves. There’a an oversized pair of gloves clenched to the handlebars of his bicycle – starch-stiff and disembodied.

The Chinese restaurant is drafty. The girl dishing up fried rice wears sanitary plastic gloves over her black knit gloves.