Lynchian Moments

I am not a fan of David Lynch films.  Generally, I find his works to be annoyingly self-conscious and guilty of trying too hard to be weird.  Kinda like most heavy metal music.  But there have been moments in my life that I can only describe as ‘Lynchian.’  Instances when all of a sudden, I have to check my skull for caved-in spots.

For example, a while back, I was walking down my street when mine was one of only three houses here.  I knew the other two homeowners and nothing in their habits would explain away what I saw this day.  I walked to the corner, one foot in front of the other as I like to do it, when suddenly my right ankle turned, the ball of my foot wobbling off a something that wasn’t smooth road.  My left foot stomped to the rescue, only to be betrayed by a similar fate and I pitched and yawed for what had to be an entire two seconds (which can seem quite a long time if you’re trying not fall down.)  The reason for my troubles was simple.  And one of the oddest things I’d ever seen.  Apparently, God’s golf bag had broken and it had rained hundreds of baby blue golf tees.  They were everywhere.  WTF?  Yeah, things like that.

Another such time came in the middle of a trans-continental red-eye journey from San Diego, on my way home to Washington DC.  It was well past midnight and I was minding my own business in the echo-ey and largely deserted domestic terminal of the Dallas/Ft.Worth International Airport.  I was reading, sitting alone in the middle link of a chain of rigid chairs in the waiting area at my gate.  I’m pretty sure the seats were upholstered in folded pillowcases overlaid with all the black vinyl tablecloths Wal-Mart never sold.  Not too great a demand for black table cloths.  Someone should have told them.  Ah well, their shortsightedness became my gain, as I could not complain, at least, that I was sitting on the bare steel frame.  And apparently, it was just going to be me and the pilot on that flight.  Everyone else had either got where they were going or weren’t leaving ’til tomorrow.

It was because of this quiet isolation that I had a long time to contemplate the growing jingle-shuffle-thud that began so faintly, I first thought I was imagining it.  But as the sound swelled, I started playing Name That Tune while scanning the dim hall for a-janitor-with-too-many-keys-and-a-gimpy-leg or a-flat-tired-wheel-barrow-full-of-teaspoons or  a-clown-walking-with-coffee-cans-full-of-pennies-strapped-to
-his-big-clown-shoes. or maybe a-herd-of-metal-shod-chihuahuas-or a, huh?, a sawed off Magnum PI wannabe dragging Pigpen from the Peanuts comic strip, shackled at the wrists and ankles.

It is almost impossible to gawp discretely. My only salvation was that I kept swiveling my head to get a look at the film crew.  If they were there, they were a platoon of ninjas.  Magnum’s runty brother swaggered in jeans and a giddy Hawaiian shirt, tugging on his disheveled companion’s lead whenever his smirk needed a refill.

I can’t say I felt immediately compassionate in sizing up Pigpen.  Call me cynical, but if you find yourself shuffling through a Texas airport, limbs chained to your belt, and the Bonneville Salt Flats puffing out of your pockets, I’m betting you have a penchant for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He was pathetic: cowlicks saluting every compass point, dust rising off him like steam.  He had only one shoe.  And it was a flip-flop. Needless to say, he kept his eyes downcast.

Private Dick was a bit of a jokester too.  In the empty stadium of the terminal, he found a view that amused him.  With much yanking and tussling, he shoved the human dust mop into a seat that went immediately from black to grey in a fine powdering of wherever-he’d-been-rolled.  Of course, that seat was two away from my own.  Slickyboy grinned, gave me a nod and slid down deep in the seat next to me.  I’m pretty sure I heard him chuckle into his crisp floral collar.  Pigpen cringed and tried to make himself very small.

And I was simply too polite to change seats.

The last I saw of them was Pigpen stumbling ahead of a great many unnecessary nudges from Fancyshirt to their seats in the back of the plane.  I took mine over the wing.  I always get sat over the wing.  I have no idea why.

I’m sure knowing the rest of the story would have made it a little easier not to wiggle around for a glimpse of the goings on back there.  But I don’t really regret my ignorance.  There’s nothing to make you feel alive quite like not having the faintest clue as to what just happened.

For Kent

 

I can’t imagine Kent turning forty. Not because he would have been all that likely to get himself killed between then–those days we orbited the same space–and now, but because he is, more than almost anyone I can think of, the standard-bearer of my own youth. When I think of him (probably more often than he might guess) what washes over me is the perfect memory of what it felt like to be happy doing nothing at all. This is something I’ve lost over the years and it may very well be an exclusive province of the young, but contentment trumping boredom is its own brand of magic.

I met Kent in the tenth grade, on the leading edge of a rough transition in my life– displacement by my mother’s divorce, neck deep in puberty, and floundering in an immediate poverty that we’d hoped we’d left behind for good. That it was a new part of town helped by way of distraction. In the DC Metro area, moving house can mean crash-landing on another planet, albeit only a dozen miles from where you’d started.

The first class period of the day was Geometry at some really ungodly hour for math. After a little while, I stopped being the new girl and, as subtle as staring out of a predawn window and realizing that you missed the instant when there was finally enough light to barely see by, all of a sudden, I had a friend. I don’t remember how it happened, only that he was there every morning and that I looked forward to math class on more merit than the satisfaction of geometric proofs.

But our playful rivalry of wrestling theorems at seven-something each weekday morning is not what anchors Kent in my mind. Or that I had to duck his girlfriend for the last few weeks of eleventh grade, because she was inexplicably angry that he’d stopped on his way to pick her up to show me his prom tuxedo and limousine. What I remember are the phone calls. Our friendship was pure, beyond whatever impure thoughts we may have entertained of the other from time to time over the years. I don’t know that he knows what he meant to me and how his patience with my oddness saved me in a way that’s still easily right there in the forefront of my mind. Even now. My life was very strange, and I was very strange, but he was my friend anyway.

My family didn’t have a telephone. I would walk two blocks to the supermarket and stand at the payphone there, literally for hours, with Kent on the other end of the line. Usually, he was building a guitar. Sometimes we’d talk, but there were long stretches of companionable silence where I’d watch the traffic on King Street and the clicking of Kent’s screwdrivers and wrenches would be the only sound in my head. I don’t know if he thought I was crazy, or if he minded my being there, without actually, you know, being there. But if he did, he never let on and the blessing of that acceptance, of not being alone when I felt lonely, kept me from floating away on whatever cold current could have blown by.

We never know how our casual kindnesses or cruelties shape other people’s worlds, which is probably a good thing. It would be a lot to bear. But on the occasion of my good friend’s fortieth birthday, it might be a bit of a present for him to know how fundamentally good he’s always seemed to me and that I remember him for it all the time.

At the very least, it saves me from having to go out and buy him a gift.

Happy, happy birthday, Kent. I wish I was there.

 

 

(This essay was my contribution to a memory book presented to my friend Kent, by the friends and family who organized the celebration.)

The Greatest Invention

I am a great fan of inventions that advance the cause of human comfort. Specifically, my comfort.

I’ve argued often and passionately that air-conditioning is the pinnacle of pampering ingenuity. I’ve bullet-pointed its superiority over the admittedly admirable elevator and the coordination-coddling automatic transmission. (I do like to eat and drive at the same time, so that was a tough one.)  I’ve considered the bliss of cool air sighing from a vent in the wall as compared to the convenience of ordering delivery pizza on my mobile phone. But the freedom-phone loses out. If you threaten to take away my climate control, I will beg you to let me dangle at the end of a springy tether in a rotary phone that’s bolted into the wall – and I won’t even cry about it. Hell, I’ll even cook my own supper. Just let me stay cool. 

And my dedication to internet access is boundless, but you’d likely get only sniveling and cursing out of me if I had to do it with my sweat-damp blouse clinging to my back.

But all that changed this morning. And there is no truer truth than what’s to be found in the amazement of a four year old.

I was watching something on my computer and the littlest housebeast came into my office to ask a question. I missed the first half of her query because a) she started it halfway down the hall, and b) I was watching Jeremy Clarkson on my Windows Media Player.

She shuffled over to my elbow, still chattering even though her entire point was hopelessly buried in the last few irretrievable seconds of me not paying attention.

“Can you pause that?” she asked.

I could and I did, then answered the great concern of the morning. I assured her that it was indeed warm enough for her to wear her new shirt – the one with the butterflies on it. All puzzles solved, she and I were left contemplating Mr. Clarkson, frozen onscreen – droopy-lidded, skewed-lipped, rolled-eyed, all in all, stuck in a very unfortunate facial pose. But it’s a rare man as looks good zapped to a standstill in the middle of a sentence.  Which got me thinking…

“Do you know, we didn’t have a pause button when I was your age?”

I was being silly, of course, but the effect was perception changing. My daughter’s face nearly fell off.

“You had to miss everything?!”

I realized then the true value of creature comfort. It allows us (or it should, if we’re paying attention) the easiest possible route to our generosity. The taped-glasses and pocket-protector set have afforded me every opportunity to have my cake, or my Clarkson, and eat it too. Courtesy and cheerfulness should be so much more accessible now that I can do almost anything, almost anywhere, at virtually any time of the day — and it’ll even wait for me if the baby needs a weather report.

The pause button is the greatest invention of all time.

Secret Admirer

I shared a cigarette with a friend the other night.  He doesn’t think I should write this piece; thinks it might be bad for impressionable kiddies.  So, kiddies, first off – there is no amount of wishing that will make something good for you out of something that isn’t.  Poison is poison, no matter it wakes you up, calms you down, tastes like heaven or feels like love.  The sooner you recognize that, the better.  There is no glamor in watching yourself rot from the inside out, with only hell to look forward to for your own foolishness.  (Strong enough, Steve-o?)

But in the matter of this cigarette I was sharing, these thoughts preceded my asking for a toke, not the other way around.  I asked for a drag out of pure green envy.  Smoking looks good.  And I’ve thought so forever.

On the surface, I am not heavily burdened with vices.  In fact, my veneer would suggest I’m the poster child for clean-living.  Not antiseptic living, mind you – a little dirt is good for the immune system.  But I could pass a drug test.  My lungs are clean, my liver is pink, and my pancreas is not overwrought.

There is simply something so human about smoking.  We like to go on about our opposable thumbs and our ability to reason, but all creatures achieve to the limit of their capacities.  I just can’t think of any animal equivalent to the pointless eloquence of the cigarette ritual.

I once saw a man strike a match with such fury and burn the raw end of his Marlboro with such sadistic intent, that it didn’t matter I couldn’t pin a name on what sparked his rage.  I knew exactly how he felt.  And I trembled for the tobacco that flared just in front of his gritted teeth.

I’ve watched shaking hands soothed to competency by the torching ceremony and seen confidence bluffed successfully, just by giving the reluctant limelighter a graceful, practiced task to busy him.  Urgency is broadcast doubly when the words flow out around a bobbing white wick; sadness seeps out in a grey cloud, veiling a bowed head.  And a handsome mouth, lipping and pursing over the paper, makes me wonder… well, nevermind.

The thing is, there is artistry in movement.  A heavy dose of agility and you’re a dancer or an acrobat.  But even just a little dexterity, with some rehearsal, can make a pageant of your moods and preoccupations.  The smoker’s sentence is punctuated for him – habit as performance art, especially at the lighting up and the stubbing out. I love to watch them.  Generally from upwind, but still…

My Friend

I have a new friend.  He’s hilarious and, if I may say, quite handsome.  His office is close enough to mine that our acquaintance has blossomed friendly in a just a short amount of time.  We’re very much alike, my new friend and me.  (I’m not implying that I think I’m handsome, but he does stare a bit, and I blush.)  I don’t think he’ll mind if I talk about him behind his back.  Although to be fair, I doubt he’d be able to tell one way or another.  I don’t think he can read.

My new friend is a hairy woodpecker.  Not to suggest that he’s unkempt.  Like I said, he’s a fine-looking fellow.  Well, here, see for yourself .  It’s a stock photo of one of his cousins.  If I lean far enough out the window to snap a proper picture of my friend in the actual feather, I risk falling twenty-five feet onto my head.  Some might suggest that it could only improve my appeal.  

At any rate, ‘hairy woodpecker’ is his species, just as ‘suburban housewife’ is mine.  But our labels never do us justice, do they?  My friend wouldn’t give his name.  He’s a bit coy like that.  I call him Hugh, because I’ve run across two people in my life named Hugh and they both made me smile.  So now it’s two men and a woodpecker.

Hugh’s tree is just to the left of my office window.  It’s enormous – sixty feet high – and quite dead.  The builders killed it when they graded the lot and I’m up to the molars with ripe words for them.  They don’t want to lend a hand or a few dollars (well, a bunch of them) to ensure that it doesn’t fall on my house.  But that’s another, and very boring, story.

Hugh’s taken to pounding holes about halfway up the trunk, more or less right next to my office window.  I may be flattering myself, but I think it was to get my attention.  He may look ordinary, but he’s got an eagle’s soul.  I can just tell.  His camouflage is pretty spiffy.  It took me ages to find him that first time.

I’m quite sensitive to rhythmic tapping.  I hate it, in fact.  I can’t stand clocks to the extent I gave away a lovely wood and brass hall piece that was a wedding present because I thought it would drive me mad to have it chock-clocking away in the foyer.  I moved it three times and I could hear it from anywhere I was once the house went still.  Then it annoyed me to have it hanging there, sullen and wrong for all but two minutes each day, after I’d silenced it.  It looks fine at my sister’s.

So I didn’t like Hugh at first.  I don’t think he liked me either.  I’m rather bigger and scarier than his usual audience of squirrels and butterflies.  The first few times I bent to the window, he bounced across the bark to the far side of the tree to where I couldn’t see him, and wouldn’t come back until I’d gotten well situated behind my desk.  But we got used to each other and I see there is common ground.  He doesn’t flinch anymore when I go to the window.  Now we just stare at each other, his shiny little black eyes boldly glittering into mine.  I think the seam in his beak stretching back into his little bird-cheeks looks like a smile, so I return the grin and he cocks his head.  I must look better sideways.

He clacks away at his oak and I bang away on my keyboard.  He beats his head against solid wood, literally, as I do it metaphorically.  He probably gets bugs and mites for his efforts.  I get the correct words to explain myself or my characters.  We both devour the fruits of our jackhammering, although what he gives back for his successes, I don’t want to know.  Me, I write stuff down.

Just today I got the words to put to bed a bastard of a problem.  I just wanted to say it right – thoroughly and clearly.  The satisfaction was a feast.  The kind you need to undo your waistband for and doze off in a comfy chair afterwards.

I’ll be hungry again tomorrow and I’ll have other things to answer for and there’s always chapter thirteen to finish, but for now, I just hope Hugh got a fat grub.  I can hear him out there.  But he won’t tell me.  He never tells me anything.

My First Rock Concert

(spring 2008)

I’ll be happy to stipulate at the outset that most of the problem is with me.  There is a certain dollop of soul missing from my ingredients and, like unleavened bread, I have mostly failed to rise.I’ve simply never had the music in me.

Don’t get me wrong, I like music just fine and it can be quite nice to have a soundtrack to my day, but it’s almost always something external, a set piece, an acquaintance kept at some distance.  Last night, it was at the length of a foam earplug – I went to my first rock concert.

I don’t much go to concerts, but that has nothing to do with the music.  It’s the people.  Large groups of enthusiastic strangers rarely bring out the best in me.  And I don’t have any of last night’s fare in my own music collection.  Last night was for brownie points.  My husband was, and is, a big fan of the band, Def Leppard.  For the price of the endless goodwill of my spouse, we got to hear three bigname (if old school) bands.

I’m not going to be unkind (well, yes, I probably am) but let’s just say that if the year is 2008 and you are in the band REO Speedwagon, you should probably wear a shirt while working at anything other than gardening.  And maybe even then too, just to avoid sunburn.   There’s something to be said for knowing your place in the rockitude food chain.  Unfortunately, that’s all I really have to say about that portion of the show.

Afterwards, that band got the biggest gufffaw of the night for asking $50 for a logo tee shirt.  Get real.  You may be wanting to give those away, boys, publicity being what it is.

Styx was talented, though.  Over the years, they’ve shuffled band members to the point that nothing sounds like it did on the radio, which is a shame.  I think there should be a law that if  two roadies and the bass player are all that’s left from the band’s heyday, you should have to change the name.  But still, they made a pleasing, if really, really loud, noise.  I had two major complaints, though.  (Only two – that’s not so bad, now is it?)

First, fairly high up on the list of things-that-are-tedious are  endless grinding and screeching flourishes.  It’s indulgent and unbalancing to the audience.  We don’t know when to clap.  If they’d have stopped the songs where the blessed things ended, they’d have had time for ‘Mr. Roboto’ and ‘Babe’.  If you’re going to do Styx, there are going to be certain expectations.

The other problem was ‘Renegade’.  I only agreed to this whole undertaking (in the row I had with myself over the expenditure of eardrum vs. money element) to hear that song.  It has to be started a capella from silence.  It wasn’t.  And the singer kept interrupting the opening lines by tipping the microphone at the mooing herd in the first eight rows.  I didn’t pay to hear them moan.  I’d probably pay them not to.  They didn’t give me the chance.

Anyway, at a point, I was becoming skeptical of the whole production.  Come to think of it, I think that point was in the car on the way to the show when we realized it was too late to stop for dinner first.  But there was a White Knight.  And his name was Showmanship.  Def Leppard was tremendous.  Go figure.  And what I said about certain people keeping their shirts on?  There are double standards that are delightful, no matter if you’ve seen fifty winters.  If your name is Phil Collen and you wring a guitar for Def Leppard, you should never wear a shirt ever.  Not even in church.

Joe Elliott can still sing.  A one-armed drummer smashing his toys rightly is still as cool as it ever was.  And the angelic sound crew knew how to keep it crisp without making our ears bleed.

I clapped.  I cheered.  I didn’t know the words and still I even shook a hip.  And, believe me, my wiggle is highly reclusive.

I don’t know that I’m a Def Leppard fan, but I do know that I didn’t want my money back.  Great show.

Make Yourself Useful: Why They’ll Eat The Writers First

Once the apocalyptic smoke clears, they’ll go for the canned goods. We can breathe easy for as long as the Chef Boyardee and mandarin orange segments in light syrup hold out.  Although, ‘breathing easy’ is probably a relative concept in clouds of radiation and billowing ash. No matter, once they get down to the beets and off-brand potted meat products, it’s time to be looking for any light you may have been hiding under a bushel.  You know, abilities – fixing things, building a Boy Scout-worthy fire, tying knots in cherry stems with only your tongue. Oh wait. There won’t be any cherries. Better find out now if you can do it with a twist tie or a bit of shoelace.

Writing grammatically correct prose won’t cut it. Writing even tantalizing, gripping, I’m-sorry-your-thumb-is-dangling-by-a-tendon-here-hold-this-dishtowel-to-it-I’m-almost-finished-reading-this-chapter brilliance will not keep you out of the soup for long. Sure, they love literature when their bellies are full and their bank accounts are flush and the sky isn’t poisoned orange. But let the comet collide or an odd little man with too many incendiary toys have three bad days in a row, and, after a fortnight of licking gum wrappers for flavor, writers will be looking a little too much like milk-fed veal.

As much as we hate to admit it, they don’t need us. Not in the way they need mechanics and engineers and guys who can tell them their tongues will turn purple and swell up to airway-obstructing proportions if they eat that particular plump, pretty mushroom. If we ever ride the evolutionary pendulum back to days full of foraging and nights full of fretting, verb-tense agreement and snappy dialogue are doomed to lining everybody’s boots against the damp.

Painters and sculptors and those able to craft ‘art’ from dryer lint and bodily fluids will be trying their best to look inedible too, snatching paranoid glances over their shoulders and sleeping in shifts, but the rabble will go through the wordsmiths first. Let’s face it, even the crappiest piece of visual art doesn’t require an eight to fourteen hour commitment, all the while holding out hope that it may get better if we just give the artist a chance to find his stride. To be fair, poets generally aren’t that demanding of our time either, but their status is jeopardized from the outset by the appearance of elitism. Being hungry is bad.  Hungry and made to feel stupid because it’s hard to grasp the connection between paralyzing angst and the sighing sun on indifferent hills is asking for a homicide.  Homicide begets a roast, a stew, and leftovers for sandwiches. And the wheel goes round and round.

The musicians are relatively safe. Damn them and their unkempt hair and bong-smoke.

You see, Nature is a competent painter. Chemical sunsets, I’m sure, will give us all something to gawp at as we pass the gas mask around for a few moments of respirational ease before the dark takes us all to bed. Highly developed linguistic capability not only separates us from the chimps, but ensures that even the dimmest hillbilly can relate a story or the news, more or less. So artists and writers are a redundant and showy indulgence that we trot out once survival becomes routine.

Varied, complex melodies, however, are the exclusive province of man. Birds pipe and warble. Waterfalls crash. The wind hisses, moans and sends boughs clattering. The rainforest can deafen you, but not like Scheherazade or California Dreamin’ turned up really loud. Even the Oscar Meyer Weiner jingle is pretty impressive when you hum it and compare its complexity to any natural symphony. They won’t eat the musicians, because they just can’t get Happy Birthday To You or Feliz Navidad from a gaggle of geese and any old seasonal change or meteorological event.

It sounds grim. It is. And it isn’t. It’s us against them over and over. Man against nature; dreamer versus laborer; words estranged from tangibles. The best ammunition in these wars is the acknowledgement of their existence. Everything is the most important thing in the world – to somebody.

So to the writers, write. It’s not like you can help yourselves anyway. But do master something of use, you know, just in case. Study the manual until you can fix an engine.  Practice assembling an assault rifle blindfolded. And if you’re built for it, boys and girls, learn to lap dance – they’ll always need that. If you’re not, learn first aid or to cook or sew or how to patch the blessed roof.

Above all, before the cataclysm, whatever you do, go out today and make yourself indispensable to a musician who knows Kung Fu. You just never know when you’ll need a minstrel between you and a hungry machinist.

The Dressing Gown

At the outset, there are a couple of things you should know about me: one, I am not sentimental in strictly normal ways, and two, I have a bathrobe.

A lot of people have bathrobes, I realize, but I never bothered with one until I was twenty-eight years old, chiefly because I have a general disdain of sleepwear. I’m either dressed or not.  Anything in between is usually an exercise in discomfort. It’s either of the psychological variety (borne of the conflict of striking sexy while the lace scritches hives all over the bits it’s covering – in its not-covering sort of way) or else it’s the practical kind of annoyance. I do not care for being strangled by flannel.

However, being enormously pregnant and staring down weeks, if not months, of racing to the nursery six times a night in the altogether, I figured I should have a dressing gown. It was hideous – a Wedgewood blue, murdered bathmat. Maybe five bathmats. It was enormous. Believe me, it needed to be. But it was functional and sturdy and, for the first few weeks of each of my children’s lives, the only thing they ever saw me in. They bonded to a bundle of coarse, blue terrycloth with a milk machine inside of it. It was my uniform and it cuddled me through the most exhausting days I’ve ever known.

Since then, I’ve become accustomed to having a robe for out-of-the-shower-puttering, nightly-face-washing, and make-the-coffee-before-all-else-for-god’s-sake mornings. I’m thoroughly domesticated now. But, not being much of a romantic, I’ve been callously looking to replace my tattered blue rag for ages. And that’s another thing about me – I’m a hopeless shopper. I don’t like it and I’m no good at it. Ergo, I’ve been wearing the same threadbare cover-up for years, well beyond its decency. I can’t even grab up the newspaper from the driveway dressed in it on trash days for fear they’ll cart me off with the rubbish.

Yesterday, I found a new robe. It’s long enough (don’t really see the point in being cozy from only the tush up,) it feels like whipped cream and it’s an excellent shade of red. And it was a bargain. I love it. My girls are at a sweet age where they still find me interesting, so late yesterday afternoon, we were all three cooing over and petting my purchase as I sheared the tags from it. It’s that yummy.

I shook the old blue monstrosity free of its hanger and unceremoniously wadded it into a trash bag, reminding the girls of all that it had seen. It had been with me in the hospital for both of their births. It had been cried on (by them and me,) spit up on, peed on, and covered in strained sweet potatoes. I’d tucked them inside of it for cold middle of the night feedings and slept in it on the nursery floor when I was just too tired to go back to my own bed, knowing they’d need me again as soon as my head had found the just-the-right-temperature spot on my pillow. I’ve worn it every Christmas morning for the last nine years.

“I don’t want you to throw it out,” said my oldest.

“It’s a wreck,” I said.

“No, I love it,” wheedled the littlest, hugging its hem to her chest.

“How about if I give you a piece of it?”

They both agreed and I went to work, cutting a wide band of sleeve for each child. Then finally, they let me load the sad, ragged thing into the big garbage bin.

The little one wore her bathrobe blankie sleeve to bed — on her head.

What neither of them know is that the ratty old bathrobe has been without a right-hand pocket for almost five years.  It’s been snipped into two terrycloth hearts and tucked away in the box where I keep my special things.

I may not be overly sentimental, but I’m not made of stone.