Dead Letter Department #79

weather report

I am not a Christmas person—for reasons too long to get into here, probably—but one of my best friends is, so every year she gets to pick a holiday activity for us to do together. She doesn’t always take me up on it, but this year we drove down to Molbak’s in Woodinville, through a positively torrential landscape, into a very nearly full parking lot, and spent a couple of delightful hours wandering around their enormous greenhouse. The outside lot was full of cut and living trees, so it was very much like walking around a forest in which each tree had been planted for pleasing fullness and symmetry, and the whole world smelled like fresh pine.

The inside, with the rain drumming hard on the plastic roof, was full of astonishing indoor plants, holiday decorations & a surprising number of tiny dogs in sweaters. I saw poinsettia types I didn’t even know existed, an array of charming babies in little outfits with animal ears, & lusted over various terrariums I have neither the skill nor the space to care for, though I would like to convince myself that I do. There’s a cafe, too, inside the greenhouse, so we had Beecher’s grilled cheese sandwiches while sitting under the arching vines and listening to the indoor stream trickling away. I felt like I had wandered into a human-sized terrarium myself, a little pocket-world.

That was Saturday well spent, and Sunday I got up early enough to have the entire beach to myself on my walk, a rare pleasure, and one I enjoyed in all of its misting, mid-December glory. There was the usual vast array of ducks, the high-pitched whistle of the eagles who nest there alerting each other to various bits of eagle business, and tumbling at my feet with that steady, rhythmic roll, keeping the pebbles jostling together, the cold grey water.

The culvert on the south side of the beach, where the stream dries up completely in the summer, was rushing hard, carrying rainwater down from the roads above, and I had to jump it to keep walking, which always makes me feel intrepid until I end up with damp socks.

The work weeks have been rather crammed, and will continue to be through December. My side job slows down drastically at the end of the month when all of the salaried people with paid vacation time starting taking huge chunks of time off. I’ve been resolved to fit as many paying hours in before that happens so that it doesn’t feel like quite so much of a scrape at the end of the year, which is exactly when it would be nice to have a little extra cash.

It’s also, of course, the time of year I start thinking about the nightmare of freelance taxes, and just how much of the little I’ve earned has to be cycled over to pay that bill, which can be easy to forget in the day-to-day of things.

reading room

Long time Dead Letter reader & friend M. recommended The House in the Cerulean Sea, by T.J. Klune for Gay & Beautiful Book Club, which struck all the right notes for me: a mid-career man who thinks he’s accommodated himself to the smallness of his life suddenly being thrust into a different world, a middle-aged love story, a believably despoiled fantasy world, but one with hope. As M. predicted, I cried through about the last 40 pages, but in the most satisfying way. M. & I talked afterwards about how much we both like stories where the main character might encounter magic, & life-changing abilities, but they don’t have Super Special powers themselves—not a chosen one, not a world-maker, just a guy doing his best. If you need your heart warmed in a way that is not at all cheesy, I definitely recommend it.

one good thing

I realized the night before that last Sunday would be the final day of the Renegade Edo & Paris: Japanese Prints & Toulouse Lautrec show, so I flung myself into the car that morning so I didn’t miss it. I hadn’t been to the Seattle Asian Art Museum since the remodel, & it’s spectacular: a gorgeous art deco building set up high, away from the bustle of downtown, in Volunteer Park. I sort of wanted to lie down in the atrium & listen to the fountain for a while, but instead I largely beat the crowds to the exhibit, wandering past black velvet curtains to look at the shocking scale of Toulouse Lautrec’s posters, and the incredible detail of the woodblock prints.

The posters of this era are one of those things I felt both over-exposed to & under-informed about: a thousand repros of the famous Chat Noir advertisement hanging on various bar walls, but I’d somehow never really looked at it before. The scale was so different on the posters than I expected: they were enormous, and I could actually imagine how they would have looked pasted to the side of a building, eye-catching, almost shockingly appealing, attracting a crowd, & the brevity of the line used to convey the performers kind of blew my mind. It made me imagine going to the shows the posters were for, or following the artists to their studios, what it would have been like in those crowds watching the can-can dancers.

I’m not at all well informed about art movements, but the museum did a wonderful job highlighting the similarities in the work from France & Japan, and showing how perspectives & motifs were getting passed back & forth between the artists & the cultures.

I only had time for a quick spin through the permanent collection, but I was happy to see some old friends.

Coming off the hill, I tried to stop at a local cafe for a snack but the whole place was wall-to-wall, so I ended up skittering out again & stopping at a Panera on the highway, which was actually delicious.

Thank you for reading. If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may you have the time & energy to take yourself to the last day of the show after all.