June 14, 2008

There are about a million sailboats on Lake Michigan today. Lifeguards are in their rowboats, kids are in the sand, dogs in the water. Families are in the park grilling corn and the smell is so good it breaks your heart.

Hamburger Mary's

We rode our bikes down to Andersonville for a date at Hamburger Mary's where I declared that I had finally put my teeth around the world's best turkey ruben. We also got our bill in a high heel.

Spanish

I've taken to Spanish classes on Thursday nights. After two hours of concentrating really, really hard, my brain is whopped. Audios.

Phone Call Idyll

by Henry Allen

I want to live in a town where the women wrinkle their eyes
and say "Mmmmmmm," a little sexy.
Like, a small town where it's a morning in early spring,
and things smell sweet and dead like cold sand
or a chewed-on pencil, and the wind twists the STOP signs,
and you don't have to go to work or school,
just drive around all morning, drive past the drugstore,
where the windows shake in terrific sunshine,
drive past sidelong dogs and startled birdbaths, drive
till all that stands between you and the horizon
is the drive-in movie where the sign says
SEE YOU IN THE SPRING! But it is spring.
You park in the gravel by a phone booth
that trembles in the wind. Inside, it smells
like canvas, or wet matches trying to burn in the glare
of smeary glass like a dog went crazy in here.
There's an old Christmas card on the metal floor.
There's your own breath planting fast clouds
on the black mouthpiece and things smell like teeth,
and things smell like a drawer full of firecrackers,
and the woman on the other end of the line
wrinkles her eyes a little sexy and says "Mmmmmmm."

Metropolis

A quick bike ride away, this coffee joint serves one of the best cups in town. And anyplace where you can hunker down next to piles of coffee beans is quite a lot like heaven.

Reflections

Laundry

We had a pile of laundry so big and so great that we almost lost Eric forever. But nothing turns laundry into a party like snacks and an Elvis record cranked up. Like magic, t-shirts get washed, socks get dried, and towels get folded.

Speaking of Elvis and towels, I went looking for my current favorite Elvis song "Love Me" on youtube to play along while you read my blog (why not add snacks and make it a party?) but found this clip from a concert that The King dialed in to one day. He is actually singing "Love Me" but it's extremely hard to tell. The back up singers are like "What the...?" Elvis is like "Where am I?" and the towel replacement dude is reminding himself, "I beat out 7,000 people for this job." The best part is that the audience doesn't seem to mind that Elvis doesn't know the words to one of his greatest hits or that he forgets that in order to be heard the microphone needs to be held to his mouth and not his ribs. They only mind if Elvis skips over them and hands one of his 400 sweat towels to the next person over. I can't believe that he didn't hand one to the cute granny. What a sham.