Category: Before

This little closet-sized shop on Olive Way, one of Capitol Hill’s bigger arterials, was packed with odd wine glasses, porceline figures, and troll dolls. The little woman who staffed the store consistently kept the hours as they were posted on the door, Saturday from noon to 5pm. (I saw her filling in at Fillipi’s Used Books and Records – Seattle’s oldest bookstore & her landlord – next door, a couple of times.)

It has a small place in my personal mythology. The first time I walked by the store eight years ago, I noticed a little perfect round teapot placed in the center of one of the window shelves. It had a masking tape pricetag marked $2. I made a mental note of the store hours and continued with my day. Over the next several weeks I walked past during the store’s off-hours a dozen times, each time reminding myself to stop by on a Saturday. I never made a conscious effort, but the teapot was still there when I happened to wander by on a Saturday afternoon. I stepped inside and paid. I got the teapot home and pulled it out of my backpack – it hadn’t make the trip unscathed, a chip fell off as soon as I set it down. It’s still my teapot, I use it almost every day.

I still give the store a mental nod when I walk by. I peak inside and think, “That’s where I got my teapot.” Now it’s closed, the owner of the store died – not the little old lady who was there every Saturday, she was apparently an employee.

“I was trying to get to sleep, up front in the driver’s seat, but there was this really hyper guy moving around in the back of the van, keeping everyone awake. A. said that some ice water would calm him down, so he told me to go out and get some. It was about twelve o’clock and I didn’t want to go out there, I wanted to get some sleep. It’s A.’s van though – he’s the boss – so I walked around until I found a place to get water. I got back to the van and the water really calmed him down, he went right to sleep as soon as I got back. I don’t know why.”

“Uh, Robert . . .”

“Yes?”

I try to figure out what to say, “Oh, never mind.”

VeriSign sent me a “Domain Name Renewal Form”, odd considering that my domain wasn’t registered through VeriSign. I considered that my host might be in a reseller-relationship with them, but that doesn’t turn out to be the case. An uncritical scan of the form would lead one to believe that their domain’s registrar was VeriSign, that the registration expires two and a half months before it actually does, and that filling out the form is simply business as usual. The word “transfer” is only used once on the front of the form. An uninformed person would only work out the true nature of the form after reading the terms and conditions in small print on the back: “[Y]ou hereby authorize us to transfer the registration of your domain name(s) from your current registrar to VeriSign.” I can easily imagine someone in the accounts payable department of a company quickly scanning this form, vaguely recognizing the VeriSign name, and sending off a check and filing it away.

This little piece of misdirection is pretty mild compared to the neglect and contempt that VeriSign recently offered one of their paying customers.

After the little going-away party for someone I didn’t know, in which I expected to be teased for suddenly appearing with Ingrid (after wandering in the same circles for four years) as a couple (but wasn’t [teased] much because the main group of common acquaintances were a pretty sedate bunch), I drove a stick shift for the first time in eight years, taking pleasure each time I moved into a new gear.

Ten Five Anecdotes That, Through Repeated Tellings, Are Truer Now Then They Were When They Happened

• When I was very young, I saw a monkey climb between the bars of its cage at the zoo into a neighboring cage. Nobody else noticed and I didn’t tell anyone at the time.
• I once went down to the waterfront in the wee hours of the morning with my friend Marjoree and a film director, expecting to see the sun rise over the water. But the sun, once again, rose in the east.
• After a nearly sleepless night of taking care of some family matters, I was woken by the start of a festival at the Catholic church next door. Not the start of the festival exactly, the start of the testing of the sound system for the festival. Testing the sound system involved playing the first bar of the same Vietnamese-language unbearably poppy song over and over again. Loud. Loudly playing the first bar of the same loud Vietnamese-language super-poppy song over and over, loudly.
• At an Amazon party once, Jeff Bezos pumped the keg for me while I was pouring a beer.
• I sat in a train car with a group of Gaelic-speaking Boy Scouts. They played Pokemon.

The distressing cycle of closings and openings continues.

The Green Cat Cafe is closed. They started operating under new management about a year ago, and my impression was that the new owners didn’t quite get it. They replaced the selection of hoity-toity natural sodas with Coke products, hung a “Vegetarian” neon sign in the window, and practiced the habit of hanging little neurotic notices about nothing in particular on the cash register. I had no complaints though, plenty of the old staff stayed in place that and the menu wasn’t really changed. In the last few months, they’d cut back their hours – closing at three in the afternoon and not opening at all on Tuesdays. The windows are covered with white shelf paper now. I peaked inside where one of the sheets of paper was collapsing – all of the furniture is still there – the little collection of green ceramic cats, the dishes, everything, it’s all there. There’s a legal notice on the front door which seems to indicate that one of the business partners is making some sort of claim against another (though I may be interpreting it incorrectly). That’s too bad.

The owners of Broadway Market are giving Landmark Theatres the boot in favor of a big ugly chain gym. This is simply criminal. The Broadway Market Cinema has been a key part of Landmark Theatre’s middle- to semi-high- brow antidote to the horrible monsterplexes that ave helped squeeze the life out of downtown. Big movies like O, Brother Where Art Thou or Mullholland Drive move here from Landmark’s larger theaters and enjoy months-long runs alongside uncelebrated foreign gems, like Enlightenment Guaranteed or Yi Yi. I’ll give odds that the gym throws in the towel within two years.

Eileen’s is, of course, dead as a doornail. Construction has been proceeding quietly behind the big boarded-up storefront for months. A banner was put up a couple of weeks ago introducing Broadway to “Julia’s”. Today, one of the giant plywood barriers was pushed a little to the side and I had a look at the transformation that’s taken place inside. Big airy windows, light colors, a corner entrance – nice. But I’m a bitter old man, I’m distrustful of these new places. I think I’d be happiest if that storefront remained forever boarded-up. I’d walk by and point out where the sign burned the word “Eileen’s” into the bricks above the doorway, and if you look just so, you can see where the “Ernie’s” sign apparently did the same thing years and years ago. I’d point at the plywood covering the doors and shake my head saying, “Look what they did,” not sure what accusation I’m making or who it’s targeted at.

You know that move where your nose is either a little too dry or a little too wet and you run your finger under one nostril to make sure your nose is still there? Yeah, I happened to be pulling one of those when the groom, my new brother-in-law, came up and introduced himself.

It had been pointed out that Mary’s wedding would be the first time in ten years that my core family would all be together in one place. And there was this moment at the reception when all the brothers and sisters happened to sit down at the same table and we realized – oh hey, here we all are. I made a little joke, apologising for not letting anyone else play with the Mickey Mouse bowling set that I’d opened one Christmas. We decided that we needed a picture. So everyone got out their cameras and siblings-in-law were pulled in and forced to stand behind us. Everyone was getting restless after the first picture was taken, there were shouts of, “Hey, don’t move. There’s one more camera!” Most everyone had had enough as soon as the last photo was taken, and we all wandered away in different directions.

On the trip from the airport to my sister’s house, I looked down at the dashboard and noticed that the odometer had just turned over to 10,000. Why was I chosen to witness this milestone for this anonymous little rental car? Poor Daewoo, no one who cares was there to appreciate this birthday. I grabbed my camera and recorded the sad moment for posterity.

Endless subdivisions of winding roads. Houses, painted the color of dust, look like they’ve grown out of the ground. Palm trees, cacti, orange trees, and lemon trees.

I played babysitter at various times throughout the week. Whenever Natasha was gone, Masha would cry for her mama until falling asleep. I’d sit down next to her and try to comfort her, “She’ll be back soon.” Once when I got up before she was asleep, she ran after me and leaned up against my legs crying. I picked her up, my heart in my throat, and sat down with her in my lap until she fell asleep.

It was a madhouse when my sister Rachel arrived with her kids. There were eight kids running around and wrestling. Chris had a spontaneous nosebleed earlier in the evening; and somehow he became the target of most of the tackles. Seeing three kids holding down a kid with spots of blood on his face and shirt was a little disturbing.

At the wedding reception my Uncle John showed everyone a baseball card with a picture of his grandson on it. “His team was in the Little League World Series. The only team they lost to was the crooked one, with the fourteen year-old pitcher.”

When I was little, Uncle John showed me how to crush a soda can into a perfect little hockey puck. We compared our current crushing techniques, my can turned out more compact, but he’s able to crush his in one fluid motion.

In the car on the way back from the reception, my brother Chris played with my camera, snapping a few pictures out the window. When I got home and looked at all the pictures, I noticed that the three photos he’d taken were pretty much the only good ones from the trip.

I’d gone to Arizona with a little bit of a cough, it cleared up pretty much right away. On the day of the wedding I developed a slightly harsher cough, it got worse after I tried to pack too much into my first evening back home. I had an unlikely theory that it was caused by a reaction to orange juice. But now I’m running a fever and sleeping through most of the day, I guess I caught the bug that was being passed among my nephews and nieces. Ugh.

Ryan asks me to push him on the swing. He goes outside while I get my shoes. Masha sits down in the gravel in front of Ryan’s swing. He criticizes her, “She follows me around all the time because she loves me so much.” I ask him, “What’s wrong with that?” Ryan resists when I ask him to move over to the other swing, but switches soon enough. I push him a bit and Masha climbs onto the free one. I give Masha a couple of cautious pushes, she’s small and I don’t want her to fall. Nate comes over and says he wants to use one of the swings, so I ask Masha if she wants to get into the baby swing. I’m not sure how much she understands me, though her one year old English is definitely better than my Russian. She just sits contentedly. And she doesn’t complain when I lift her out of the big kid swing and set her into the more secure baby swing. But now Nate wants to sit in the baby swing – I point out that Masha is the smallest. I offer him the swing that Masha has just vacated. But he takes up a position a few yards away in the gravel, whining occasionally. I give Ryan a push and then give Masha a push on alternating swing-backs.

Imagine you’re at The Comet on a Wednesday night. Someone comes in and starts setting up equipment in your vicinity. A band? The long table that you’re sitting at is moved and replaced with the big round industrial-spool table and an extension cord is threaded behind your legs. You take the hint and find a new seat at the end of a table where an old man is staring blankly at his Budweiser.

Two guys are across the table from you, one with frizzy curls and the other dressed a little conservatively. They keep telling you that they’re from California. “So, what are you doing up here?” “Oh, we work at Amazon.” Of course they do, where else would they work?

You don’t figure out what’s happening until the tables are seeded with song-directories, despite the fact that the equipment in the corner has started to resemble a karaoke machine.

Ingrid perks up. “Karaoke? It’s been awhile!” She pretends she’s not interested. But after the slightest encouragement, she starts making a list of all the songs in her repartoire. She says they’re all men’s songs. Songs with female singers tend to be kind of syrupy. (You don’t recognize most of the titles.)

She chooses Knock Three Times. She frets a bit before taking her selection to the karaoke-guy, and she worries a little while she waits for her turn and a singer pours her heart into an Alanis Morisette song.

Ingrid is introduced and she shuffles over. She takes the microphone, the music starts, and she closes her eyes. And she is into it! She sings with complete confidence, not looking at the lyrics scrolling by on the monitor, hitting every note. And she’s good! She punctuates every other note with a practiced hip swing or an arm motion – different knocking motions for “knock three times on the ceiling” and “knock two times on the pipe”.

That’s it.