pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A CLEAN WELL-LIGHTED PLACE Ernest Hemingway's short story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place describes an old man in a café, smoking. I probably read this story in 1985, so please forgive any inaccuracies, but what I remember is that Hemingway (whose suicide anniversary just passed) described how neatly this particular man smoked and this lone description left me with a very clear sense of the character and with a few new ideas for how to narrate my own stories more effectively. I sat in a café for much of the afternoon and edited, but broke out in a cold sweat this afternoon and realized that it was way past time to eat something. Before I broke out in a cold sweat, I was seated beside an attractive med. student who was doing Internet research on skin disorders and quietly sipping an iced chai. I glanced at her lovely legs several times but kept getting distracted by the hideous skin conditions on her screen. She received two phone calls this afternoon and went outside to talk both times—a polite future doctor who will no doubt knock before barging into her patients' rooms. An older woman sat to her left and pecked away on her ThinkPad—and, near as I can tell, never even paused to consider what she was writing. (Wish I could do that.) She was drinking a hot coffee, like me, and also sipped it quietly. The three of us quietly occupied a long bench where customers can plug in our laptops. A heavyset blonde woman was draped across from ThinkPad woman, her panted legs dangling over the chair arm as one arm dangled her iced latte over a blue sectional rug. And the owners' daughter was in a chair on the other side of the room, reading a Koontz novel. The five of us sat quietly for three or four hours, lost in our words. Then a large sweating man came in, slammed the door, and looked over at our occupied tables and electric sockets. Then he sighed loudly, slapped his laptop down at a table in the center of the room, then ordered an iced tea, which he proceeded to slurp v-e-r-y loudly. The volume on his iPod was also turned up so high that we could hear his music and, when he sat down, he immediately began tapping his feet to the beat of the music, and loudly. Leggy med. student and I looked up simultaneously several times after a particularly loud slurp and I rolled my eyes at her, which garnered a slight but lovely grin. And I was toying with the idea of pulling a rubberband out of my laptop bag and shooting it at his annoying-ass foot. But then I broke out in the aforementioned sweat and left . . . (probably means that he is plugged in at my table now and tapping away beside the med. student. I hope, for the other customers' sakes, that he has at least finished his tea now. Anyway, let's call that little description A Loud, Minimally-Lighted Place in honor of Hemingway. even though, according to the Chicago Manual of Style, I should not hyphenate minimally lighted. • Sadly, I haven't heard a peep from Filmgrrl and am worried that she can't come down after all. I know this was a long shot, but it makes me very sad, particularly because I had to give up so much of my vacation already and really hoped to still see her while she's on the East coast. I know her plane flies out of JFK on the tenth and that she wanted to take the bus down—which means two days of travel. And that's so much. So I doubt that I'll see her. Damn it. • Horrific nightmare last night. It started out with news stories about that soldier—she had a cool name like Cheyenne or Shoshone—who was captured in Iraq, and I worried in my dream, as I did in real life, that she was being gang-raped even as the news story about her capture filled American living rooms. Then Cheyenne/Shoshone morphed into my little sister, who joins the Army tomorrow, and all those helpless feelings I felt as a teenager when I wanted so badly to protect her and Lad from our ugly world and our disintegrating parents. I had no clue how to protect her innocence then and sat helplessly by knowing she was in danger. And how different is it today? Then my dream morphed into footage of Daniel Pearl and those hooded soldiers who were about to be beheaded making their last statements and shaking in terror. And then they morphed into my little sister and I woke up terrified and twisted in my sheets. And now I am so fucking angry that poverty drives the poor into the armed services, where they are considered dispensable while the sons and daughters of the senators and presidents and representatives who vote for our wars roll merrily along in their cushy internships and European vacations with their college funds intact and so many options that most of the people in my family—most especially my little sister—will never enjoy. Haven't been able to shake this feeling of foreboding today. • Finally and on a happier note, glory hallelujah, I finally finished that 1,200-page manuscript and plan to write a lengthy summary—most of my notes are on the manuscript itself, but do want to include a summary—and then hand the thing off to the biographer. She did a fine job and should have no trouble getting the book published—although I will give her a couple of good leads on potential publishers. Then I'll deposit her check for $2,000, pay my $580 home-warranty bill, and save the rest for the next plumbing emergency or dental appointment or whatever else I'll wind up spending it on. A lot of work, but that check is a nice cushion that I didn't have before. Okay. Time to call Glittergrrl to say farewell, since she'll be in boot camp this time tomorrow. Good fucking lawd! 9:00 p.m. - 2005-07-06 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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