Dead Letter Department #92

weather report

Since I last wrote, I have done the following:

1) Visited the Jaune Quick-to-See Smith exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum, which was astonishing. This picture opened the show, just outside the gallery, & I spent a long time in front of it contemplating 40,000 years.

It was near the end of the exhibition, so we went on a Friday to avoid being stuck in a crowd, but there were still a fair number of people there wandering through the galleries, including someone wearing an absolutely delicious perfume who sadly never got quite close enough for me to identify, although I would have loved to ask for the name of the scent.

Smith has lived in the Northwest (she’s a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation—we live on the Salish Sea here, if you’re not familiar with the region), Albuquerque & Montana, three regions I coincidentally have spent time in, which meant I could look at the petroglyph prints & think about the canyon hikes we used to do in grade school, or remember the enormous dome of blue sky in Montana while I admired the streaky paint on her maps.

I loved her paintings, especially the massive, three panel canvases of trade canoes filled with mythical figures, the cured & painted skins (which reminded me of Jeffrey Gibson’s beaded punching bags), & the sculptures: a skeleton of a canoe, filled with reproduced garbage; a robotic dancer, dangling from the wall, occasionally jingling as a tape deck played.

The collages I connected with less, though I think this is a personal wiring issue more than anything else, where my word-centered brain gets obsessed with finding & reading all the scraps of print, repatriating it to its original context, zooming out to try to appreciate the whole & then immediately getting snagged again, so that I never quite feel like I’ve taken in the piece.

Afterwards, I scooted through the galleries to visit Saint Augustine, who has been moved & sits now on a repainted wall, making a painting I’ve looked at dozens of times seem huge & shocking & fresh, & briefly stood in the Italian Room, which always lets me feel like a time traveler. I stopped in the museum gift store, of course, so those of you in the (Secret) Dead Letter Department may get an art postcard for your next mailing.

The museum is blocks away from Pike Place, home of Me Sum Pastry, where I loaded up with piles of dim sum, and managed to dodge about a million people taking selfies and videos of a busker duo playing accordion music while wearing rubber cat masks. I always think I’m going to hate going down there—the press of people can be incredible—but once it’s happening, I feel fine: just another little human particle floating along in the stream until I reach my destination, which in this case is the roped off line in front of Me Sum, where various people were dispatching their boyfriends to stand & wait while they sensibly found some shade.

I’m sure if I lived there, the constant tourists would make me crazy, but watching everyone beaming & carrying big bags of coffee & arguing over various Seattle-themed keychains is actually kind of charming, since I don’t have to spend long doing it.

2) I completely failed to see the aurora. The first night, I was exhausted, dragged my carcass out into the backyard to peer suspiciously up at the sky, & glimpsing nothing, went to bed, but the incredible photos I saw the next day of throngs of people out on Taylor Dock surrounded by bursts of color made me want to try again. First I went down to the park at the Bellwether, thinking it would be well-trafficked enough to not feel sketchy but also remote, and found that I was pointed entirely the wrong direction, so instead I tried various places on the edges of town: a field out on Cordata, several points north, and then got so thoroughly turned around that I somehow ended up in Ferndale without quite knowing how I got there.

Every time I saw so much as a bat or a distant plane trail, I froze and squinted, doing my best to see the trails of green in the sky, but eventually I had to admit defeat & head home. I think on the second night, the people with the best view were the ones up on Baker, camping far above the city lights.

3) I started replacing some of the plants that died in the cold snap last winter, & pruning back the devastation on the big hydrangea that has been gracing the front steps since before I moved into this house. Fall used to be the best time for planting around here, but I think that may be shifting with climate change & significantly colder winters. Something ate the buds right off the early lilies, but the other ones I planted are going strong, so there may yet be some blooms. I have another round planned at the garden center, but really I should be concentrating on weeding, since I cannot seem to beat back the buttercups.

4) Finally finished my notes on the pile of books I’d been waiting to get to, including D.V. by Diana Vreeland & Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, & rewarded myself with the Angel of the Crows, by Katherine Addison, which is so much lighter than the Goblin Emperor that it almost doesn’t feel like it’s by the same author, but I’m enjoying it thoroughly. A note in the back that I flipped to out of curiosity told me the book started as fanfic—wingfic, specifically, which explains some of the looseness & lightness, & it’s well worth the read.

one good thing

I was picking up sandwiches for my mom & I at Big Stick BBQ last weekend (if you’re local, the Rissa Sandwich is where it’s at: pulled pork, brie & jalapeño jelly). The owners were working, & they were so cheerful as the employees were clocking in, seeming genuinely happy to see everyone, which definitely doesn’t always happen in food service. While I was waiting, I got called ‘man’ about three times & ’sir’ once, & it didn’t even register to me until I was back in the car. I thought, as I was pulling back out into traffic, about the early days of transition, how I would jealously clutch any correct gendering to my chest, counting every incident up like evidence—& now I’m so rich in that experience, I don’t even always notice when it’s happening.

Thank you for reading, as always, and for those of you that are able to support the newsletter (very much including the brown envelope I got from my friend last week). You can always email me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com with your book recommendations, art exhibition thoughts, or pulled pork sandwich experiences. I’ll write you again soon, & in the meantime, may something that once seemed impossible become part of your everyday joys.