Discover Fresh Start Gum, while Gloria decides to keep it simple

In case you fell asleep under the rhododendron and woke up thinking all the original ideas had been taken, please pay a visit to Fresh Start Gum at this amazing post.

Yes, there really is a bright side of the street.  Be subversively attentive.




Episode 6: Gloria Decides to Keep It Simple

It starts when what used to fit - socks, shoes, underpants - no longer does.  You become a wicked stepsister whose enormous feet cannot be greased, stuffed or otherwise installed in those low-cut red flats that could have come from Audrey Hepburn's closet.  Then the rosy flowered socks, too cute with the cropped olive linen pants, right? now fit like a child's anklets and leave your aging, bared limbs looking like cold oatmeal.   Whatever has befallen the underpants, still new enough that their label can be read with the human eye, they now, even when put on the right way, feel as though they are on backward or your ass has become something so much greater (in a manner of speaking) than it was the last time you wore them.

The poor fit extends to every object that your critical gaze catches, try though they may to become invisible or pull on a quick disguise.  The voice in Gloria's head screams, "Tea SHOPPE?  SHOPPE?  Was I mad?" as she begins to dismantle her sign and discard every business card, menu, coaster, postcard and catering brochure with the offensively-spelled word.  Refinement, Gloria reminded herself, is an outgrowth of simplicity.  Too many flourishes mark one as, if not an amateur, at least one who has not given sufficient thought to the problem.

"I may have to go home and cut my hair off with the red-handled knife," she muttered.  "Everything has become too much."  She stopped herself just short of pitching all of it - furniture, dishes, baked goods - into the sea.  "Even in simplicity," she noted, "one must maintain a sense of proportion.  Damn you, Noel Coward.  It all used to work just fine."  For an abbreviated moment, Gloria forgot that Mr. Coward was part-owner of the map to the bright side of the street.

Episode Three: "A Small Fiction," aka Gloria

Writing fiction allows grown-ups to have imaginary friends.

A pre-dawn revelation.  Maybe I'd been dreaming of a Popsicle and this was written on the stick.  We surely need and are entitled to all the harmless, free fun we can find, a category that before now might have been limited to reading library books or playing with art supplies I already own.  Then Sarah Saunders Ceramics showed us "smack round the face with a wet fish?"  From which came Gloria,  pastry, ocean currents, Noel Coward and, apparently, unspooling episodes. 

My two favorite serials were "Flash Gordon" and "Shadows Over Chinatown," probably neither of which was entirely suitable for a grade school child and I had crazy passion for both.  I somehow convinced kids to play Flash Gordon at recess, guess who directed and starred?  And my paper lantern obsession lingers still, with a scent memory of sandalwood joss sticks.  Dim the house lights, please.

A Small Fiction, part 3

What with the fish and all, Gloria's bills for laundry and dry cleaning, she swore, had given all three of the sturdy, rather scabby Walthers children smiles so straight and bright they could go into the movies.  Orthodontia, skiing vacations for all five of the Waltherses, hiring local help to run the cleaners and laundromat during the vacations and other luxuries the family enjoyed were certainly underwritten in part by Gloria.  Baking, sign making, aesthetics and keeping her wits about her occupied all of Gloria's waking hours.  Washing and ironing the shop's vintage tablecloths, linen napkins, towels, aprons, curtains, not to mention caring for her own spotless wardrobe had to be entrusted to other hands.  Getting a full measure of beauty sleep was another job only she could handle.

For the time being, Mr. Apotienne's courtship, if such it was, took place in the tea room during business hours.  He did not hang about under the climbing roses waiting to walk Gloria home or ask if he might call for her one evening.  He arrived each day, guided by some infallible inner knowing that told him when the shop was quiet, took a not-large corner table near the pastry case and, after placing his "for starters" order, retrieved the volume containing three of Coward's plays from a briefcase-sized pocket in his all-weather coat and began to read wherever he'd left off the day before.  He pitched his voice so that Gloria heard him perfectly, even with some clanking of china and cutlery.  The ordinary bustle of commerce had to flow on.  Had others been nearby, the could have listened - and been amused by the words and Mr. Apotienne's skill as a reader and interpreter - or could easily continue their own conversations undistracted.

She kept a growing, fluxing mental list of what she most enjoyed, admired or was made dizzy by at the hand and voice and other segments of Mr. Apotienne.  In no particular order - or a slightly prejudiced order - she counted that he assumed she had the refinement and humor that Mr. Coward required, he seemed not to have a fish phobia nor the sometimes observed distaste for any sea-borne smells.  His eyes were the blue of chambray that had seen years in the sun and many washings.  He did not appear to be overly hairy.  She wondered if he had tattoos.  If his voice had been a disembodied thing, a box that sat on the table or a sound piped in over a loudspeaker, she had to admit she might have been every bit as enthralled.  Smitten was too frail a word.  If once there had been benevolent gods - powerful yet kind - and if they once spoke to mortals, that was the voice.  For their divine qualities, her pastry, his voice, they were handsomely matched.  Perhaps benevolent gods still played behind the scenes, having their fun, testing the waters.  Gloria's heart, she found, could beat so fast she thought she'd developed a panic disorder.

A Small Fiction continues

A Flinty Resolve.  That wouldn’t have been a bad name for Gloria’s tea shoppe. It was her, at least one aspect.  Gloria was, as I suppose we all hope to be, greater than the sum of her parts.  And her parts were many.

A childhood friend of Gloria’s once told that her mother had learned to make baklava from their neighbor, Mrs. Dalgarian.  The test, said Mrs. D., was to have dough thin enough to read the newspaper through and would determine the perfection by doing just that.  The friend’s mother being the contrarian that she was, chose to use the Sunday funnies rather than a page of news articles.  Mrs. D. assumed it was a cultural thing, this insistence on doing it some other way than the teacher said, not knowing that her pupil would have taken another path no matter what the instructions.  She did, however, the friend reported,  learn to make very acceptably authentic-tasting baklava, a skill that served her well the rest of her life.  Gloria was like that, a perfectionist about her pastry but how could she be anything else?  In the first place, it was one of her passions and, secondly, it had a pleasing margin of profit as a shop specialty.  The shortbread crust on the tarts, layers and layers of puff pastry on the creme horns and turnovers and her bar cookies?  Nearly scandal-producing in their rich variations.  The most abstemious patron would think little or nothing of ordering a “wee” plate of six different varieties, then using a moistened fingertip to press up the crumbs.  There was more licking going on at Gloria’s than most people would be comfortable knowing about.

Raspberry Rhapsody, Toffee-Coffee Sandwich, Don’t Blink Meringue-topped Cherry Squares, Floodgates Brown Sugar Fudge Insinuations.  The names went on and on, some downright bizarre, some usefully descriptive, all well-known to and unashamedly asked for by regulars.  If one of the regular customers tried to point to a treat by way of ordering, rather than saying the full and sometimes silly name out loud, Gloria feigned a hearing problem.  She beamed with approval when a first-timer read the name from the card at the end of the tray, standing there smartly in its careful Copperplate hand (Gloria’s, of course) as though introducing thrice-removed royalty at the Viscount’s ball.  When she heard them spoken as she intended, Gloria could taste not only the finished treat as it rested on the bisque-colored enamel tray; she could taste each ingredient as it had been added to the mix.  Her palate was a genius at compartmentalization.

Billington’s Cove, the finely arched eyebrow of pebbly shore that lay just south of Greater West Elba,  faced slightly more south than west and thus was graced with warmer currents which often appeared as gemstone bright  aqua ribbons in the clear green water.  Those more tropical eddies delivered the fish bonanza which meant money in the bank for Cove-ites going back six or more generations.  It was not considered an “industry,” it had not been modernized with processing plants and the like.  It was catch:sell.  Catch:cook.  Catch:share.  Fish were currency in the Cove and surrounding communities.  Fish could be traded - and had been - for just about anything.  A fish-based economy could lead to taking them up, one at a time, as a means of self-defense or pungent aggression.  Gloria permitted time to study herself in the gold-leaf-framed ornamental mirror that reflected head and torso and smile as she chose or recalled a finned and meaty fellow who accentuated the pinkish-red of her abundant hair or contrasted handsomely with the hue of her frock.