I want to make a rhubarb pie. I’ve only ever made one pie before, and it was an apple one, and perhaps “pie” is a generous word for what I made. I used to make a lot of tarts, though, in school. Raspberry tarts and peach tarts and blueberry tarts. And then the teacher told me I couldn’t make tarts anymore, this wasn’t Tart School, I had to learn something else if I wanted to graduate. Joke’s on you, mister, I told him. I don’t WANT to graduate from Tart School. I said THIS ISN’T Tart School, he said. IS NOT. Anyway that’s why I have a desk where I keep cat pictures and shiny stones and a tiny clay pig instead of a cooking show.
Last night in my dream I was on a bus, a pretty full one. All the seats were taken and there was a little boy next to me in one of the seats that face into the bus instead of forward or backward. He was holding a cardboard sign but he wasn’t looking at it, he was looking out the window at a man standing outside. The man was crying – like, a lot, like really really crying, like with his whole face. The bus started to pull away and suddenly I understood that the man was leaving the boy. Had some weird dream-thoughts re: the boy being the one physically doing the leaving since he was on the bus moving away from the space where he’d been staying with the man. Right? Write. Rong. I snatched the sign out of the boy’s hands and decided I’d take care of him, and then the boy’s mother was found and she took him from me and they were gone. Until they weren’t gone anymore, and we were at the front of the bus where the seats were more like school bus ones than city bus ones. And she’d decided she didn’t want him after all, and she handed him back to me wrapped up in a blue blanket. He looked more like a puppy than he had before. And then I had two kids that weren’t of my loins that I was taking care of, and they were kissing each other and I said “Don’t do that you’re brother and sister” and they laughed and said, “Too late!” And then someone I couldn’t see was asking me if I was sure I wanted to take care of them. Griffon woke me up with his old-lady yowling before I could figure out how to answer. I’m still trying to figure it out.
At the end of last year I got a really, really cute haircut. This year I learned that the cuter a haircut is, the uglier it will be to grow out. My hair is currently at my least favorite length and every time I pass by a salon (which is a lot of times) I have to physically restrain myself from running inside and screeching “CUT IT OFF CUT IT OFF” because when the day comes that I can put all of it up in a ponytail again without the aid of bobby pins, well. That will be a great fucking day.
For Diego’s anniversary present (Saturday marks our fourth year of arguing about how to fold towels and whether or not it’s okay to order Corona at an establishment where there is also an option of a fancy beer or cocktail; one of us doesn’t fold anything ever and so is automatically wrong about everything, so) I got him tickets to A Bronx Tale because he’s been dropping subtle hints like “I WANT TO GO SEE A BRONX TALE.” I picked a matinee on the day of our actual anniversary, because we’re leaving for Maine suuuper early the next morning. And thennn his brother went back in time, knocked up his girlfriend, and purposely planned the baby shower for the exact same afternoon. In Connecticut! So now I get to wear my pretty new dress to an anniversary day-date AND a baby shower for my new nephew. (I bet you thought I was going to complain about having to reallocate my theatre wine fund into a diaper/tiny clothes/othersuch landfill fodder fund and also about losing half a day/the only day I planned for packing. Well, joke’s on you guys (in addition to being on my high school culinary teacher, remember him from the beginning of this blog? Oh the places we’ve been) because I am choosing to see “inconveniences” as “opportunities” and being grateful to the universe for nourishing my growth.) Thank you, universe. You crazy kid.)
