the dirty dozen {twelve things i brought home from a week with family in northern california}
01 three sets of baby teeth
02 a handmade quilt with a smattering of blood stains
03 three frozen burritos
04 mushroom jerky*
05 a jay feather
06 a wooden feather
07 a lighthouse passport
08 like seventeen oyster shells
09 frankenstein in baghdad (h/t @ point reyes books)
10 signs preceding the end of the world (ditto)
11 a bunch of berlin's hair
12 renewed appreciation for mark knopfler
*not as toothsome as far west fungi's, but legit.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 what do you pick up when you're away from home?
02 what should i do with these teeth? (i have two sets of wisdom teeth, too.)
03 what if we just forgot about term limits in california?
03.05.18
given how frequently we travel, it's more than a little surprising that saturday night's was our first-ever eleventh-hour flight-cancellation adventure. we'd been playing chicken with jetblue since friday night, when we got news of the nor'easter's effect on new york city: it wasn't really chicken, though, as all of the weekend's flights back home from the dominican republic were sold out. if we'd tried to book something else, we'd have gotten home on...who even knows? i'm flying out to california in two days. we had fancy tickets for the brooklyn museum's david bowie is show yesterday. our ride from the northern coast down to santo domingo was long gone, and even if guaguas ferried folks cross-country and through the mountains after midnight on the weekend—even though i grew up fixated on romancing the stone and dream of sharing a bus with a shitload of chickens one day (chickens are the theme of this travel hiccup, apparently)—trying to get back to our friends' place would pretty clearly have been a terrible idea.
the heroes and rogues of our little version of the hunger games revealed themselves pretty early. a tall, projectile-sweating guy with a silent-film-villain moustache and a brooks brothers polo started ranting in the afternoon bag drop line when a staffer asked him the same questions he'd eventually have to answer on the immigration form in his hand. "what is my OCCUPATION? where do i LIVE? this is a VIOLATION!" his sprinklerhead rotated over to us. "how do YOU feel about the thousand and one questions?" i offered a limp bouquet of shrugs. "i OWN a HOUSE HERE!" his father spat, because of course he was staying at his dad's house. the woman behind me wept quietly; she'd come back to bury her mother and would be fired from the job she was due to start on monday if she didn't get to new york.
the airline dispensed fibs and distractions every hour or so: the pilot has some paperwork he didn't fill out, here are sixteen-dollar vouchers for the restaurant which must not be used for booze, half of you can board and the other half can come along in a moment, just you wait. at midnight my phone informed me that the flight was no more, and the plane egested its passengers. we all galloped down to the baggage claim, past passport control—stamped out of the dominican republic hours earlier, we were in no country at all for the night—and back in line to fight for nonexistent empty seats on other flights. joe and i shrugged at each other and wandered off into the remaining darkness.
the heroes and rogues of our little version of the hunger games revealed themselves pretty early. a tall, projectile-sweating guy with a silent-film-villain moustache and a brooks brothers polo started ranting in the afternoon bag drop line when a staffer asked him the same questions he'd eventually have to answer on the immigration form in his hand. "what is my OCCUPATION? where do i LIVE? this is a VIOLATION!" his sprinklerhead rotated over to us. "how do YOU feel about the thousand and one questions?" i offered a limp bouquet of shrugs. "i OWN a HOUSE HERE!" his father spat, because of course he was staying at his dad's house. the woman behind me wept quietly; she'd come back to bury her mother and would be fired from the job she was due to start on monday if she didn't get to new york.
the airline dispensed fibs and distractions every hour or so: the pilot has some paperwork he didn't fill out, here are sixteen-dollar vouchers for the restaurant which must not be used for booze, half of you can board and the other half can come along in a moment, just you wait. at midnight my phone informed me that the flight was no more, and the plane egested its passengers. we all galloped down to the baggage claim, past passport control—stamped out of the dominican republic hours earlier, we were in no country at all for the night—and back in line to fight for nonexistent empty seats on other flights. joe and i shrugged at each other and wandered off into the remaining darkness.
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