The resignation in Bonnie Raitt’s voice as she sings those words and, "if you don't...can’t make your heart feel something it won’t..." causes me to ask how long does it take each of us to learn that lesson. A friend has quoted Kurt Vonnegut for years, his expression about, "...tap dancing and farting," and we reach a point when, clearly, that is all we’re doing. There is no pay-off.
What holds true for romantic or familial love is just as valid in this world of mixed media artists, a universe, really, densely populated with such a diversity of styles, talent without limit, energy and invention and, I think it could be called determination. In my small boat I cruise the waterways of blogland, one stop sending me on to the next, that one leading me to a new resource; frequently enchanted, feeling what is very akin to relief that there isn’t discretionary income close at hand or there could be trouble. But I do wonder as every day my little journey takes me to destinations I can only describe as fabulous - you may think you’ve seen it, whatever it may be, but are there surprises ahead, and how. Can we possibly know when we’ve reached the top?
And with this abundance it becomes clear, at least in my version of processing information, that not everyone is going to be everyone else’s new favorite thing. There are stars in this universe, the status is easily quantifiable by comments or sales or visitors and by the richness of content, generosity of spirit in sharing ideas and information and stunning visual support. A comparison (odious, at best) that comes to mind is the actual world contains Paris, France, and Dinuba, California. And I know, I can hear, the thought - "Well Paris, duh?" And yet...Dinuba (pronounced Die-new-bah, accent on "new") was where my grandparents had their farm, my grandmother’s paint-by-numbers landscapes on the walls, each of which was papered in a different pattern, as was the ceiling in several rooms.
After more than 60 years Dinuba is still peaches and everything heavenly that can be made from them; it is breakfasts in the not-quite-dawn which include biscuits and gravy; it is collecting the eggs, picnics among the redwoods, learning to shoot the BB-gun, riding into "town" while having to stand in the back of their Ford coupe, praying my mom won't actually make me a dress out of the feed sacks Grandma saved for her.
We put our art and our hearts up on these (I still wish we could agree upon a word of greater fluidity or grace or some recognizable aesthetic) blogs and at least a part of us wants people to find them and love them and by extension, us. And that has never been, nor will it ever be as far as my imagination can stretch, the reason to do anything. To be found, praised or purchased is to feel ourselves catapulted into the dance of joy. It is a challenge to write the words that demand to be expressed, to draw and color the goofy or cheerful eccentrics who have somehow selected our hand out of all the others to bring them to life. And life as I experience it is work. It is showing up as best we can, allowing ourselves to be a conduit for greater visions presented with a unique flair, and letting go of the rest. Bonnie Raitt sang in a way that told us she knew the words were true. What the song didn’t tell us was that we had to be happy about it.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
Dream Sequence
Not-quite apropos of nothing, a couple jobs in my (as they used to call it) checkered past, were in the employ of a man who went on to be a story editor, then an Emmy nominee for writing an episode of MOONLIGHTING, shot in black-and-white, called "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice." One of our shared agencies served several entertainment unions from an office on Hollywood Boulevard, in the very building where Raymond Chandler had set his private investigator, Philip Marlowe, in practice. So we are already waltzing along the edges of dreams, riding factual elevators with the screaming mad woman and wheeling my baby boy along the streets in his stroller, down at eye level with the gleaners, discovering he can say, "Hi," and thus beginning many a conversation with thrifty salvagers of abandoned cigarette butts.
There are dreams from which I awake with such an acute sense of loss when I discover the visions of the preceding moments were, alas, not real, that I weep. There are dreams which inform me, visitations without the seance circle, that someone who has been gone for years is happy to report all is well. Some dreams employ a play on words, things which sound the same but are spelled differently and I manage to catch the little joke. The dreams, unlike that one from MOONLIGHTING, are always filled with color, pattern, texture and dialogue. Since I have spent much of my life writing (but only in my head) all the words I wanted other people to say, there is an easy pleasure to the sleeping dramas in which the only thing that is required of me is showing up; everything else has been taken care of.
In the past years, close to 40, the casting has held some surprises, usually when the mind ropes in some famous faces and poses them in my frequently architecturally-rich stories. Often the dreams hold no clear meaning; at times I think they are a way the mind shows off, putting on little plays as Bobby McClay and I did when we were in the first or second grade. We also believed we could dig a hole to China and build a rocket that would actually fly. Mostly we jumped off his back porch, catching hold of the poles which held up the roof, and swinging around; we ate apricots when they ripened and once had a rock-throwing fight between our yards. I was the one who broke a window.
Christmas calls me to watch MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, primarily to hear Judy Garland sing "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" to Margaret O'Brien whose character resides in that enviable child space where waking and sleeping dreams are really not separate. Her buried dolls, her comic/tragic songs, the snow people, her Halloween prank and its cover-up, are recognizable as the blurry territory of wish and imagination. At what I can only call my advanced age, I still hold title to some real estate there. Too many years were spent in daydreams (escapism would be the more accurate term) and it is not difficult to return, the greatest difference being that now I don't have to go there; I don't need a place to hide. But sometimes there is joy in allowing my brain its dervish dance, a brief visit to an altered state where I can call up the dream visitors I choose, have those self-scripted conversations and find a sort of resolution or a few glowing moments with those who have left these shores, or me, to take paths where I am not invited to follow.
There are dreams from which I awake with such an acute sense of loss when I discover the visions of the preceding moments were, alas, not real, that I weep. There are dreams which inform me, visitations without the seance circle, that someone who has been gone for years is happy to report all is well. Some dreams employ a play on words, things which sound the same but are spelled differently and I manage to catch the little joke. The dreams, unlike that one from MOONLIGHTING, are always filled with color, pattern, texture and dialogue. Since I have spent much of my life writing (but only in my head) all the words I wanted other people to say, there is an easy pleasure to the sleeping dramas in which the only thing that is required of me is showing up; everything else has been taken care of.
In the past years, close to 40, the casting has held some surprises, usually when the mind ropes in some famous faces and poses them in my frequently architecturally-rich stories. Often the dreams hold no clear meaning; at times I think they are a way the mind shows off, putting on little plays as Bobby McClay and I did when we were in the first or second grade. We also believed we could dig a hole to China and build a rocket that would actually fly. Mostly we jumped off his back porch, catching hold of the poles which held up the roof, and swinging around; we ate apricots when they ripened and once had a rock-throwing fight between our yards. I was the one who broke a window.
Christmas calls me to watch MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, primarily to hear Judy Garland sing "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" to Margaret O'Brien whose character resides in that enviable child space where waking and sleeping dreams are really not separate. Her buried dolls, her comic/tragic songs, the snow people, her Halloween prank and its cover-up, are recognizable as the blurry territory of wish and imagination. At what I can only call my advanced age, I still hold title to some real estate there. Too many years were spent in daydreams (escapism would be the more accurate term) and it is not difficult to return, the greatest difference being that now I don't have to go there; I don't need a place to hide. But sometimes there is joy in allowing my brain its dervish dance, a brief visit to an altered state where I can call up the dream visitors I choose, have those self-scripted conversations and find a sort of resolution or a few glowing moments with those who have left these shores, or me, to take paths where I am not invited to follow.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Out West
Today I moved the CD player from beneath a table and behind lumpy containers of Christmas wrapping accessories to the top of a table beside my bed. To celebrate this emergence I dug back through music, overlooked or misplaced, to find Nanci Griffith's "Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back To Bountiful)" on which she and many pals of the folk persuasion (of which I am an unrepentant fan since teen years) celebrate classic, traditional songs of the genre.
Many of the selections, like "Desperadoes Waiting for a Train" and "Darcy Farrow" not only conjure visions of our country as it was but paint for me scenes known mostly from film but partly from life, perhaps some from dreams.
Portions of my childhood were spent in the shared backseat of a series of Ford stationwagons, trying, as were both of them, not to have any human contact with my brother or sister, pulled entirely into myself, body and mind. I can hear my sister shriek, "Mike's shirt is touching me," and see the hand reach around the driver's seat and begin swatting blindly with a bunch of maps or newspapers to make us shut the hell up.
These journeys were sometimes called vacations, though I suspect there was always a business aspect, for mostly they were embarked upon to fill the columns our father wrote for various regional travel magazines. He shot his own photos, did on-the-spot interviews, collected history through research - this was way before computers, probably before electric typewriters - and compiled information on highway conditions, tourist destinations and anything one might want for a recreational drive around the less-traveled roads of California.
Something in me responds to aspects of the American western migration, especially when it involves mining. Our first visit to the Mother Lode, land where gold was discovered in 1849 which started a world-wide frenzy to find a treasure-filled spot of earth or stream, felt for me like returning home. I cannot say just what it is in those rolling hills or visions of panning the waters, ghost towns and their names, that resonate for me but the response carries over to movies that edge on that sort of life, like MC CABE AND MRS. MILLER, even THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (both of which are made all the more atmospheric by their music, the first by Leonard Cohen, the second by Nick Cave). I have almost stopped puzzling over a connection that can't be reincarnation or cellular memory, at least I don't think so, but must be more alligned with what lived in the hearts of those seekers and dreamers, those with the vision of, as Cohen writes, "...the hand so high and wild you'll never have to deal another." I have never felt that I possessed an adventurous soul but it seems I must share the impossible visions, pipe dreams even, with the foolish and daring from stories real or invented.
So I listened to Nanci Griffith, songs filled with longing and lament, wonder at how it could have gone so wrong in spite of such good intentions. I was left with more melancholy that I wanted to handle this afternoon, so chose, instead, to write about it. Perhaps all our experiences are mystical, we only mistake them for ordinary since processing them seems beyond our skill.
Many of the selections, like "Desperadoes Waiting for a Train" and "Darcy Farrow" not only conjure visions of our country as it was but paint for me scenes known mostly from film but partly from life, perhaps some from dreams.
Portions of my childhood were spent in the shared backseat of a series of Ford stationwagons, trying, as were both of them, not to have any human contact with my brother or sister, pulled entirely into myself, body and mind. I can hear my sister shriek, "Mike's shirt is touching me," and see the hand reach around the driver's seat and begin swatting blindly with a bunch of maps or newspapers to make us shut the hell up.
These journeys were sometimes called vacations, though I suspect there was always a business aspect, for mostly they were embarked upon to fill the columns our father wrote for various regional travel magazines. He shot his own photos, did on-the-spot interviews, collected history through research - this was way before computers, probably before electric typewriters - and compiled information on highway conditions, tourist destinations and anything one might want for a recreational drive around the less-traveled roads of California.
Something in me responds to aspects of the American western migration, especially when it involves mining. Our first visit to the Mother Lode, land where gold was discovered in 1849 which started a world-wide frenzy to find a treasure-filled spot of earth or stream, felt for me like returning home. I cannot say just what it is in those rolling hills or visions of panning the waters, ghost towns and their names, that resonate for me but the response carries over to movies that edge on that sort of life, like MC CABE AND MRS. MILLER, even THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (both of which are made all the more atmospheric by their music, the first by Leonard Cohen, the second by Nick Cave). I have almost stopped puzzling over a connection that can't be reincarnation or cellular memory, at least I don't think so, but must be more alligned with what lived in the hearts of those seekers and dreamers, those with the vision of, as Cohen writes, "...the hand so high and wild you'll never have to deal another." I have never felt that I possessed an adventurous soul but it seems I must share the impossible visions, pipe dreams even, with the foolish and daring from stories real or invented.
So I listened to Nanci Griffith, songs filled with longing and lament, wonder at how it could have gone so wrong in spite of such good intentions. I was left with more melancholy that I wanted to handle this afternoon, so chose, instead, to write about it. Perhaps all our experiences are mystical, we only mistake them for ordinary since processing them seems beyond our skill.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Paper bag ornaments
Three of the Suspects stamped onto a blank paper bag, colored, cut out fronts and backs, glued together in increments, stuffed with very small pieces of polyester fiberfil, glued the rest of the way closed (Aleen's Tacky Glue works well) and there you are. Glue a loop of ribbon, yard, twine, whatever to hang on the tree or decorate a package. Merry, merry.Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Let it go
In 1948 I moved with my mother and father from her parents' light-filled and substantially-built Pasadena home on a block-deep lot near a drugstore, Chinese restaurant and coffee shop with malts, to a new subdivision in Baldwin Park. My brother was born later that year.
Harlan Street had no trees, no sidewalks, no lawns, no fences. At one end of the block was a working dairy - cows and all - and at the other the hard and dusty scrub land that reminded everyone Southern California was simply a desert in disguise. Nearby was a gravel pit with the trucks that came to carry the gravel away, and a drive-in movie where the program changed a couple times a week.
We were late-comers to the tract, those already settled having arrived seemingly as soon as the paint dried. While at age three I was young, I was a very good listener and heard the gossip the neighbors shared about each other with my very young mother. Compared with Pasadena where she had grown up, it must have seemed an outpost - Fort Apache from some western - and the smudgepots from nearby orange groves left us with sooty nostrils when we awoke on cold mornings.
The greatest attraction for me - the only attraction - in our backyard was the clothesline, two metal uprights with rows of rope strung between. My dearest cloth doll, named Checkersocks, was frequently pinned there as she dried, having been washed following - probably - being dragged through the Baldwin Park dirt that passed for a yard day after day. I remember sitting under the dripping doll, talking to her, waiting for her to be ready to play again.
It was the absence of fences, and the fact that our little neighborhood had been, not that long ago, just like the land around it, that inspired me to make friends with the tumbleweeds. I can't say the friendship went in both directions; I captured them, kept them around for a while, then turned them loose. Since they blew through our yard and every other yard in the region, stopped only by the houses, I began to catch them and tie them to the clothesline pole with the leftover rope. I gathered them in bush-sized, prickly bouquets and would talk to them as I did to my doll. We had a cocker spaniel named Ginger who only barked and jumped on me and they made better company; at least I had some control over them. Ginger never stopped jumping on me and finally "went away" which I assumed to mean back to the people who had given her to us. It was many years and a few dogs later that I caught on to that old parents' tale about sending Fred or Duke or Lobo to live with a nice family who had more space.
Eventually I would free the tumbleweeds, picturing a windy day so they could really make a break for it, then begin to collect a new batch. What I don't remember is how I managed to wrangle such dry, sharp and hostile relics and how I arrived at the place of considering them friends. When released, they raced west, eventually piling up along the chain-link that surrounded the power lines.
Lawns and fences did come to Harlan Street, about the time I started kindergarten, walking to school past the dairy and a road full of squashed frogs whose swampy home had been built over with two-bedroom stucco. As more families arrived, they had to add a second session of kindergarten and a bus carried me past the frog bodies but the sense of waking nightmare never quite left. When my brother was still less than a year old, we moved back to Pasadena for the smudge pots made him ill and the doctor said he couldn't live in such a place.
What caused me to think of Baldwin Park and my strange collection of skeletal, botanical friends was a conversation this morning, a suggestion that perhaps I might be able to let sad and unwelcome thoughts pass through my mind rather than allowing them to pitch their tents and suck the joy out of all I used to love about Christmas - the lights, the music, making cards and gifts, surprising my son, cooking. I saw myself stubbornly, but intentionally, grabbing hold of something that was meant to breeze on past and binding it fast in a place where it didn't belong. I acknowledged that I might find a way to observe the arrival of the tumbling thoughts and the feelings they brought without giving them energy and floor space. I imagined that I could nod at their passing, know they were just part of the territory and let them go.
Harlan Street had no trees, no sidewalks, no lawns, no fences. At one end of the block was a working dairy - cows and all - and at the other the hard and dusty scrub land that reminded everyone Southern California was simply a desert in disguise. Nearby was a gravel pit with the trucks that came to carry the gravel away, and a drive-in movie where the program changed a couple times a week.
We were late-comers to the tract, those already settled having arrived seemingly as soon as the paint dried. While at age three I was young, I was a very good listener and heard the gossip the neighbors shared about each other with my very young mother. Compared with Pasadena where she had grown up, it must have seemed an outpost - Fort Apache from some western - and the smudgepots from nearby orange groves left us with sooty nostrils when we awoke on cold mornings.
The greatest attraction for me - the only attraction - in our backyard was the clothesline, two metal uprights with rows of rope strung between. My dearest cloth doll, named Checkersocks, was frequently pinned there as she dried, having been washed following - probably - being dragged through the Baldwin Park dirt that passed for a yard day after day. I remember sitting under the dripping doll, talking to her, waiting for her to be ready to play again.
It was the absence of fences, and the fact that our little neighborhood had been, not that long ago, just like the land around it, that inspired me to make friends with the tumbleweeds. I can't say the friendship went in both directions; I captured them, kept them around for a while, then turned them loose. Since they blew through our yard and every other yard in the region, stopped only by the houses, I began to catch them and tie them to the clothesline pole with the leftover rope. I gathered them in bush-sized, prickly bouquets and would talk to them as I did to my doll. We had a cocker spaniel named Ginger who only barked and jumped on me and they made better company; at least I had some control over them. Ginger never stopped jumping on me and finally "went away" which I assumed to mean back to the people who had given her to us. It was many years and a few dogs later that I caught on to that old parents' tale about sending Fred or Duke or Lobo to live with a nice family who had more space.
Eventually I would free the tumbleweeds, picturing a windy day so they could really make a break for it, then begin to collect a new batch. What I don't remember is how I managed to wrangle such dry, sharp and hostile relics and how I arrived at the place of considering them friends. When released, they raced west, eventually piling up along the chain-link that surrounded the power lines.
Lawns and fences did come to Harlan Street, about the time I started kindergarten, walking to school past the dairy and a road full of squashed frogs whose swampy home had been built over with two-bedroom stucco. As more families arrived, they had to add a second session of kindergarten and a bus carried me past the frog bodies but the sense of waking nightmare never quite left. When my brother was still less than a year old, we moved back to Pasadena for the smudge pots made him ill and the doctor said he couldn't live in such a place.
What caused me to think of Baldwin Park and my strange collection of skeletal, botanical friends was a conversation this morning, a suggestion that perhaps I might be able to let sad and unwelcome thoughts pass through my mind rather than allowing them to pitch their tents and suck the joy out of all I used to love about Christmas - the lights, the music, making cards and gifts, surprising my son, cooking. I saw myself stubbornly, but intentionally, grabbing hold of something that was meant to breeze on past and binding it fast in a place where it didn't belong. I acknowledged that I might find a way to observe the arrival of the tumbling thoughts and the feelings they brought without giving them energy and floor space. I imagined that I could nod at their passing, know they were just part of the territory and let them go.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
A brief tutorial
The new stamp collection, The Un-Usual Suspects, appeared in the late summer. They were created to be all-purpose, utility characters. But we have moved into the Christmas season and their distinct oddness does not exactly connect them to any particular holiday, certainly not Christmas. So I prepared samples for one of the manufacturer's newsletters, with detailed instructions, which may be found at the link below, following ordering instructions for the stamp sets. The sets are also available from Stamp Your Heart Out in Claremont, CA (909) 621-4363.
http://stampington.com/html/unusual_suspects.html
http://stampington.com/html/unusual_suspects.html
Monday, November 17, 2008
The Absurd Is Always With Us
As a Girl Scout leader for more years that she wished, my mother sometimes sought inspiration for troop projects from sources other than her own imagination. One such aid was a magazine called "Pack O' Fun" and her subscription seemed to run for years. I know it was still arriving when I was a teenager and she had long-since abdicated her woven-newspaper mats and paper bag puppets duties to a woman we all knew was a real Girl Scout leader, someone who could construct shelter in the wilderness, glare us into having mayonnaise on our sandwichs even though it made us gag, and remain unflappable when cornered by a flash flood or forest fire.
When I find myself in situations that feel like one of the infrequent funny episodes of THE X-FILES, I can draw a line of the bizarre back to "Pack O' Fun" and the issue, must have been March, which suggested leprechaun sacks of gold as party favors...made from used tea bags glamoured up with spray paint and glitter. I was and have been happy and willing to recycle and find creative uses for discards but this went too far. Forever after, any family party plans included at least a mention of "Pack O' Fun" and that particular extreme of thrift.
Which brings me to my point - the fact that identifying the absurd is a skill handier than knowing how to spot poison oak. We all find ourselves, some much more often than others, in circumstances when the bubble in our personal level tips steeply to one end. This presents different choices, but the only one I can think of is laughing. Maybe not in the moment, maybe not on the spot, but certainly inside where our most wise and philosphical self has just noticed we've been swallowed whole by someone's vast, lunatic episode, disguised as normal behavior and rational thought. I willingly own that a used tea bag party favor rates pretty far down the list of human folly but it is a simple, clear example.
There was the landlord whose ad I called about as we were preparing to move, nearly 7 years ago. Our rented house had been sold and, having experienced one harrowing fire-and-evacuation scenario, we'd been thinking for some time of moving into the flatlands. When I called about the rental I said we were still twitchy at the sound of helicopters and sirens and thought life outside the red flag zone would be more peaceful. "Yes," said the landlord, "but how do you feel about snakes?" Turns out his property was even further up the mountain than our present location and, by his innocent-seeming yet telling question, we knew this was not the place for us. My son and I imagined a patio landscaped like a serpent amphitheater or the writhing ground beneath Indiana Jones as he dropped in to discover the Lost Ark. And we shuddered. Some are reptile people, some are not. Now any time we are presented with a hard sell of something that holds zero appeal, we ask each other, "How do you feel about snakes?"
During that same search, we found a pleasant-seeming cottage - on a flat street - with a large back yard, ringed by avocado trees which surrounded a raised square cement platform roughly half again the size of the house which we decided must be a landing pad for the mother ship. As the realtor had simply given us the keys and sent us out to look on our own, there was no one to ask but sometimes weirdness just shrieks to let you know it's there.
The absurd dwells among us and the sooner we can recognize its sundry disguises, the quicker we can get to stepping on down the street or remembering that we left the iron on or the kettle boiling and need to get home, get off the phone or call for back-up. Some of us are magnets for the bizarre. My father was one, thanks to his daily newspaper column which led readers to believe, perhaps not incorrectly, that he was a kindred spirit in their diverse searches for whatever Truth Is Out There. My mind remains open about things which we truly cannot explain but I'm very clear about snakes as houseguests and can still spot a used tea bag, gilded or not, across a crowded room.
When I find myself in situations that feel like one of the infrequent funny episodes of THE X-FILES, I can draw a line of the bizarre back to "Pack O' Fun" and the issue, must have been March, which suggested leprechaun sacks of gold as party favors...made from used tea bags glamoured up with spray paint and glitter. I was and have been happy and willing to recycle and find creative uses for discards but this went too far. Forever after, any family party plans included at least a mention of "Pack O' Fun" and that particular extreme of thrift.
Which brings me to my point - the fact that identifying the absurd is a skill handier than knowing how to spot poison oak. We all find ourselves, some much more often than others, in circumstances when the bubble in our personal level tips steeply to one end. This presents different choices, but the only one I can think of is laughing. Maybe not in the moment, maybe not on the spot, but certainly inside where our most wise and philosphical self has just noticed we've been swallowed whole by someone's vast, lunatic episode, disguised as normal behavior and rational thought. I willingly own that a used tea bag party favor rates pretty far down the list of human folly but it is a simple, clear example.
There was the landlord whose ad I called about as we were preparing to move, nearly 7 years ago. Our rented house had been sold and, having experienced one harrowing fire-and-evacuation scenario, we'd been thinking for some time of moving into the flatlands. When I called about the rental I said we were still twitchy at the sound of helicopters and sirens and thought life outside the red flag zone would be more peaceful. "Yes," said the landlord, "but how do you feel about snakes?" Turns out his property was even further up the mountain than our present location and, by his innocent-seeming yet telling question, we knew this was not the place for us. My son and I imagined a patio landscaped like a serpent amphitheater or the writhing ground beneath Indiana Jones as he dropped in to discover the Lost Ark. And we shuddered. Some are reptile people, some are not. Now any time we are presented with a hard sell of something that holds zero appeal, we ask each other, "How do you feel about snakes?"
During that same search, we found a pleasant-seeming cottage - on a flat street - with a large back yard, ringed by avocado trees which surrounded a raised square cement platform roughly half again the size of the house which we decided must be a landing pad for the mother ship. As the realtor had simply given us the keys and sent us out to look on our own, there was no one to ask but sometimes weirdness just shrieks to let you know it's there.
The absurd dwells among us and the sooner we can recognize its sundry disguises, the quicker we can get to stepping on down the street or remembering that we left the iron on or the kettle boiling and need to get home, get off the phone or call for back-up. Some of us are magnets for the bizarre. My father was one, thanks to his daily newspaper column which led readers to believe, perhaps not incorrectly, that he was a kindred spirit in their diverse searches for whatever Truth Is Out There. My mind remains open about things which we truly cannot explain but I'm very clear about snakes as houseguests and can still spot a used tea bag, gilded or not, across a crowded room.
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