Dead Letter Department #139

weather report

Last week the power went out right as the light was fading, leaving the whole neighborhood immersed in that deep blue feeling, like sitting at the bottom of an antique jar. I went out to look down the street & make sure it wasn’t just the house & could see all the little bobbing flashes at other windows as people found their candles and flashlights, setting the houses into a softer glow. Power outages are so much smoother here than they used to be, what with being able to get text updates about when it’s expected back on, though I did feel it was rather rude of the grid to come roaring back to life right as I completed what my college friend C used to refer to as a whore’s bath, when the shower would have been available five minutes later.

(I remember this so clearly, calling her to see if she wanted to come meet us somewhere & her saying, in her high, very pretty voice, “I just have to take a whore’s bath first,” which meant, I gathered eventually, washing off the most crucial areas in front of the sink instead of getting into the shower—timely, water-efficient, and like many things about this friend—her habits, her writing discipline, her vintage wardrobe—oddly glamorous. She was ahead of the rest of us in some ways, saw more clearly the bubble that surrounded us at school, and what came after.)

Now of course with what’s happening in Gary I feel even luckier that the outage was so short.

It’s already burned off, but this morning I woke to a full wall of grey mist outside the window, a very fallish feeling for late August, especially with the dogwood already gone sere, and it prompted me to put on full length pants instead of the increasingly disreputable basketball shorts I’ve been leaning on all through the warm season. I want to be looking forward to fall and I’m not yet, but I hope I’ll get there.

The stone fruit has remained obscenely good. I took my mom to Joe’s Garden, which I always kind of forget about, a really wonderful urban farm & farmstand, so she could get her allotment of sweet corn. (Side note, am I the only one who finds corn on the cob just too much bother? I never make it for myself.) They had big beautiful heirloom tomatoes, which I made into stand alone caprese, just a thick slab of perfect tomato, a tear of fresh mozzarella, a leaf of basil, dusted with that fancy-ass sea salt and finished with balsamic & olive oil, eaten rather like a sandwich. They had beautiful purple pluots, and a very pretty onion that will go into the dinner recipe J sent me, the best nectarines I’ve had all season.

Also on the subject of fruit, Trader Joe’s had little bags of rambutan for like four dollars. It looked spiky and intriguing, but I hesitated, because grocery costs are ridiculous, and did I really want to be stuck with a bag of something I had no use or taste for? But then I remembered a blogger in the long ago days who set her resolution one year to be eating as many new kinds of fruit as possible. It’s still a beautiful resolution in my mind, so far from the dull beige of mandatory self-improvement.

So I bought the rambutan, and if, like me, you have not had one before, I’m happy to report that they’re delicious—little spiky balls, like a softer horse chestnut, that you slice open to discover the meat of the fruit, a soft, sweet, impossibly juicy morsel surrounding a big seed. I am sure there are dozens of ways to prepare them, but I’ve been eating them just like that, right out of the fridge.

in other reading

I’m taking a little break from Vorkosigans so J and I can be going at approximately the same speed, and also because I was in real danger of simply horfing down the last few books and then facing the tragedy of no more—although there could still be more, I suppose, should she choose to dive back into the series. I don’t know how plausible that is, since I haven’t gotten to the end yet.

In the meantime, I read Martha Wells’ Platform Decay, always a pleasure to be reuntied with my beloved Murderbot, Stotan! by Chris Crutcher, which is a wonderful YA book and took me back to a time when I absolutely lived off of book recommendations from my friend B, who originally introduced me to Crutcher, and then spent a chunk of the last part of the week in Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion, about which more later, I think, once I can order my thoughts on it.

Now I’m about halfway through Light From Uncommon Stars, which is simply speeding by. J told me to read this one, and at first I wasn’t sure it was going to catch—there are demons & alien & prodigy violinists & trans runaways all smashed together, which almost seemed like it wouldn’t quite work, but it does, so well that I have to make myself put it down.

Speaking of J, I completely forgot to credit her for the Bujold thoughts in DLD#137, a most egregious oversight, which makes this, I think, the first official DLD citation correction! That was all her, and I simply have not stopped thinking about the concept since then.

in love with strangers

I was sitting on a bench at the park during my mom’s mid-walk rest break, when two middle-aged cyclists passed rather quickly, presenting me with a sonically perfect snippet, which I will reproduce for you here.

“And then he told Kelsey that she should stay later at the party because Roscoe was going to do the worm.”

Reader, I was ready to follow them down the street. Did Roscoe do the worm? Did Kelsey stay long enough to see it, or will she forever regret her early abandonment of the party? Could there be a more perfect name for someone doing the worm at a party than Roscoe? How had this information come to them? I’ll never know, but I would like you to rest easy in the idea that somewhere, even as you read this, Roscoe may be readying himself to do the worm again.

More soon, and in the meantime may you occasionally find yourself at the kind of party where such a thing is possible.