Dead Letter Department #29

(did you miss dead letter department #28? read about great blue herons & our good friend Poirot here!))

weather report

Apparently I have tiny veins. Literally nothing else about my person is tiny, or even medium sized, so I was quite surprised to discover this new revelation early this morning while the nice person trying to stick me with an enormous needle palpated various locations on my arms with an increasingly distressed expression before finally summoning the second person working at the lab who turned out to be the expert on extracting juices from the non-juicy. “Did you drink any water?” she asked, and I said, “No, I’m supposed to be fasting,” realizing only as I was saying it that fasting would not have prevented me from having a sensible glass of water before heaving my bleary-eyed way over to the clinic. “They’re rolling around like little deflated balloons in there,” she told me, which is not an image of my own body that is going to leave me soon.

“Next time I’ll have some water first,” I said somewhat feebly, as she stuck me for the second time, finally managing to puncture one of those sad balloons. I got coffee afterwards (almost like water, right?), to reward myself for a Health Task, something I can only complete if I’m running a sort of complicated self-con that includes a prize afterwards, like I’m a particularly difficult child who will only put their shoes on if you give them a piece of candy. I would love to be trodding forward in adult life with stoicism & discipline, but honestly a little bribery is sometimes the only thing that works.

I haven’t been getting coffee out as much, partially because that shit is expensive & I need to go to the dentist sometime soon (I’m taking suggestions on appropriate rewards to get myself through that no doubt horrifying experience) & partially because my stalking of the neighborhood Buy Nothing group finally resulted in the ultimate prize: an espresso machine. I scooped it up off of a porch a few blocks away, delighted to find it gleamingly clean & with all parts still intact, & I’ve been teaching myself to make cappuccinos. It’s been a bit of a hit or miss project, mostly because I haven’t actually looked up how to do it, instead relying on trial & error & the verbal expertise of various ex-barista friends. Everyone used to work at Starbucks but me, I guess. The milk steaming/foaming process is viscerally satisfying—little clouds of hot steam, piles of froth—& the shots of espresso are surprisingly pretty. “It’s supposed to look like a Guinness,” my friend to me, “three layers in every shot.”

Sometimes I go a bit overboard, & I’m choosing to blame it on differing foaming potential in the kinds of milk I’ve been trying rather than the hypnotic bubble of the steam.

When the power went out the other day, I wrapped up & went over to check on my neighbor across the street to make sure she had enough candles. She had, in fact, no candles, just a small flashlight upended inside a lampshade, so I left her with a big pillar and a lighter, but not before her teensy dog ascended the couch to come see me. She lets me hold him when I see them in the neighborhood, but I imagine being very small & getting periodically thrust into the arms of the weirdo across the street might be kind of distressing, so I wasn’t sure we were actually buddies until he raced across the upholstery to come lean against me in the most companionable manner, sticking his tiny head in my hoodie pocket to see if there was anything in there he might be interested in. I still have patches on one of my regular wear hoodies from where my old dog nibbled out the fabric in search of treats, a little red fleece reminder of his chaotic enthusiasm for pretty much everything.

It was strange stepping out onto the completely dark street. I could see headlights on the nearby arterial road, & the candles flicking in neighbors’ windows, but it was just me out there with the round, bouncing orb of my flashlight leading me back to the garden gate.

Here, for you, visual evidence of the most encouraging thing I’ve seen lately: proof of spring on the red-leafed plum tree in the front yard that coughs up a few pale fruits every few years but mostly exists for its own rooted reasons, granting those of us in its immediate proximity the vision of a veil of pink blooms. The flowers arrive early in springtime, cling on for a couple of lovely weeks & then drop all over the driveway in a gorgeous mess, ensuring that I’m trailing petals wherever I drive.

In a similar vein, the daffodils are almost here--in sunnier places in the city I’ve seen a few, but my yard is so shaded they haven’t quite arrived. But when they do, this is going to be me:

reading room

I’m trying to read Cry to Heaven, which I thought I dimly remembered from my aforementioned & extremely formative Anne Rice phase in my late teens, but it turns out part of my brain remembers it much more clearly. I keep running across little phrases that spark whole sense memories of reading it, of just how important her world was to me, how much I loved it, & all of the (in retrospect) important ideas about writing & gender & love that I picked up there. It’s great but it’s so heavy with the past that I’m taking it pretty slowly, so I’m also getting a start on Thomas Page McBee’s Amateur, about being a beginner in both masculinity & boxing.

There’s also a towering stack of New Yorkers about to achieve sentience if I don’t start clearing some of them out. I enjoy the magazine but the arrival of it, weekly, in my mailbox sometimes feels like the inevitable, excruciating march of time whacking me over the head—another one already? Didn’t I just get one? This profile of Celine Sciamma by Elif Batuman from a recent issue, if you haven’t used up your free limit yet (or if you haven’t discovered it in your own towering stack), is wonderful. Portrait of a Lady on Fire was the last movie I saw in the theatre before the pandemic, so it holds a sort of reverential place in my memory, but it was also extraordinary on its own, a love story that refused to fall into what we expect love stories to be. Here’s a snippet to entice you:

“When I saw “Portrait,” it felt like an answer to questions I’d been thinking about for years. In 2016, when I was thirty-eight, I met my partner, who is a woman. It was my first nonheterosexual relationship, and it resulted in a series of changes to my views not just of gender but also of genre (a word that, in French, conveniently covers both). For the first time, I realized the extent to which my ideas about womanly comportment—about the visual and auditory effects you were supposed to produce when you were, say, having sex, or driving a car, or writing a novel—came from movies. Such behavior, which had felt appropriate and legible in the presence of a real or an imagined man, now felt fake and insane.”

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