Boston

How To Plan For The Next 14 Months

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I have signed five Boston leases in my life, and each July I promise myself this September will be different.

We will start looking now. We will only sign for the perfect place. It will be a fun, well thought-out, reasonable process, with things like budget constraints, laundry access, kitchen size, bicycle storage and outdoor recreation figured into the equation. (Also, when we do move, we will be so on top of things! I’m talking crisp, new cardboard boxes, labeled on multiple sides! I’m talking trips to the Goodwill and considerate battery disposal!)

And somehow, every August is the same.

Riiiing! Ring Riiiinnnng!

“Hello?”

“[Current/future] [Roommate]! It’s Adrianne. I just [found the place I think we’re looking for] [got a call from our land(lord)(lady)]. Are we in for a year? They want [us to sign today] [-ed us to sign two months ago].”

“Jesus!”

“So, yeah. Should I forge your signature, or what?”

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Minneapolis/St. Paul

A Clandestine Nighttime Location, Downtown

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Maria and Steve’s pre-wedding shindig was at the church across the street from the Walker Museum, and afterwards Jurvis and I snuck down to the best place in the world. I really don’t think this ever closes at night.

We ran into five drunk teenagers on our way in, but otherwise had the place to ourselves.

Unfortunately, two minutes later it began raining. Violently. We wrapped my camera in his shirt and ran.

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Minneapolis/St. Paul, Poetry

Minnetonka Blvd

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How could we bear to live here then;

These large green lawns spilling into curbs, winding roads
the flatness of it all
strip malls, Kohl’s, DSW
mailboxes at the end of each driveway
some with a little painted bird

Sweet mother of God I am 26 years old and
Hairphernalia is still here!
Best Cleaners still here
Ax Man Surplus and Eric The Bike Maaaaan and
Beek’s pizza —

We’d wander here when school got out and
maybe even order something, if we were feeling rich, I’d
play with my hair
like I’d seen girls do in the movies.

I stood outside that Elks Lodge the night I dyed
my hair platinum, he would see me
standing there, grinning love in a Penzoil boy’s t-shirt

and it was over, he didn’t like blondes.

The swamp where we used to play
and the woods where we built our treehouse, dragged
the slab of concrete for a table has been
paved over, now

Houses with roofs bigger than ours
stuck into new lawns like
mailboxes

and the neon pink house with brown trim has been
repainted:

a more agreeable beige.

Across from the unpink house the road to Johanna’s
has a new wooden fence, which at first makes me suspect
I never knew her at all,
she never existed

and then I get lost trying to find my first job at the two dollar theater, but when
I turn the corner and it’s there! I cry
oh
I miss you

we are betrayers! how could we
have left this place

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Road Trip

Flea Market Finds

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Jurvis and I visited his family in Connecticut this weekend, and when other plans fell through (ocean! summer homes! sunburns!), I went with his sister and parents to the weekend Moosup flea market. It was the second flea market I’d ever been to; also, the first in around ten years.

First score: the Agfa Optima Compura.

It was listed as twenty dollars. I have haggled just once before in my life at the age of twelve; this event was unsuccessful in lowering the price of a rusted tin lunch box, but was very nearly successful in causing me to flee the city in shame. I put on a determined face.

Agfa Optima Compur sm
Oh hello new friend. (Larger.)

“. . . I would give you fifteen dollars for this,” I said. (Best to keep it simple.)

“Okay!” they said.

Little Faces
The wee, Chris-Ware-like faces are my favorite part. (Larger.)

The bad news is, it may or may not function as a camera. The good news is, I found out what the “magic release button” does (that’s literally the technical term), and I want one, everywhere.

Second score: some book by John Updike I apparently should have heard of. Fifty cents. (I can’t believe I didn’t try to talk her down from that. I was on a roll! I’ll give you forty!)

Of The Farm
This is probably like that Sting song (Larger.)

It was nestled in a box of bodice-rippers. I think someone was tricked into reading something good.

Other things flea markets can offer you: the complete collection of The Babysitters’ Club books, a Rice Krispie Treat maker, porcelain teddy bears in top hats, ancient televisions, decorative mirrors, somebody else’s robe, pizza.

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Minneapolis/St. Paul

This Is How I Would Find True Love

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That summer, one of the exhibits at the sculpture garden was a palace of steel beams and translucent bead curtains. At night, they lit the beads from below so that the whole structure shimmered like costume jewelry.

My mother’s theory was that the man I met there was married. That’s why he stopped calling. He was tall and blonde and blue-eyed with meticulously ironed shirts, and our first date, after this meeting, was on the Fourth of July. In the first few minutes of our first date we realized we didn’t have any bug spray, so we stopped by a skyscraper in downtown Minneapolis and he placed his index finger in front of a sensor; that’s when the elevator shot us up to the eighteenth floor.

“I just work for a company that happens to makes bug spray,” he said, handing me a bottle with a gleaming smile. “OFF?” I read. “Seriously? What do you do for –” “We should go,” he said, ushering me back into the elevator. Wooosh.

Later we’d meet up at my parents’ house and walked to the Interlachen Country Club in a giant rowdy caravan of relatives and kids. He’d play leap-frog with the children and drape a crisp linen jacket over my shoulders. When we laid our heads onto the velvet green of the golf course, fireworks burst overhead like violent magnolias. That was our first date.

Don’t we sound rich?

Rich and beautiful?

I usually wore boys’ t-shirts (size medium, from the Goodwill) in those days, but that night I wore a pale blue skirt with pink flowers and a sweet-buttoned cardigan.

“He’s very handsome,” everyone said slyly. “Where’d you find this guy?”

“Oh, you know. In the sculpture garden at midnight,” I replied.

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