dimly recalling work

In 1990, days before I graduated community college with an AA in Commercial Art, a counselor told me there was a company interested in me (for which I should have thanked the counselor, in hindsight), so I went over and interviewed and was hired before I was even out on the street. For the next fifteen (or sixteen) years, I had an almost scary sort of job security in a relatively family-like environment of co-workers and bosses I saw every day. I worked for a garden center, but not in it-- the corporate office was on the other side of the parking lot, and the garden center (the flagship center of a small chain, in Hampton, Virginia) was handy but not compulsory.

I was to learn QuarkXPress and Illustrator (no Photoshop yet, but a couple of years of diligent scrounging netted a limited version of it that came with a scanner, and it had an upgrade path I was eventually able to persuade them to fund) and turn out ads and literature for these three (or so, over the years) stores, as well as all the signage. I thought about a classmate at my school who was really a good artist, but in a sort of death slump resulting from our teacher's "lose a letter grade for every day late" policy, and I thought about how much work it looked like and then I actually opened my mouth and said "This is really a job for two. There's a guy at the school you could probably hire for the signs," and darn if I didn't end up working next to him for most of a decade, before his obvious abilities got him recruited away for more money at one of the newspapers we dealt with.

My boss often said that the owner of the company was a visionary, and he seemed to be. I later came to believe she was the visionary, and he was smart enough to go along with most of her ideas. Bit by bit, she got us the hardware and software and supplies to keep the customer's attention on our products. And we delivered! The newspaper ads I made for them are painful to look upon now, but we generated business. The customer newsletter had a circulation around 35,000, and we had a return rate on our coupons that got double-takes from our media reps. The newsletter went from a monochrome trifold to a full-color tabloid, and I designed a web page that got us eyeballs (with strict procedures to keep the thing fresh each time someone went to look at it). I got to play with a lot of swell equipment, once the chief could see how much it brought back to us.

There were exciting times. I asked my boss to prioritize the numerous piles of paper on my desk, and she said "This one is first priority. So is this one. This one here is only second priority, but it has the earliest deadline so you'll have to do it first." We threw festivals that required dozens (and more every year) of vendors to set up booths, with publications for each. 

Though I wasn't the sign maker, I somehow spent enough time making signs to have learned a few things. We had metal shelves of equipment and supplies, and I loved having all the different colors of paper stock to choose from. Many of the signs went outside, displayed in sun and rain and waterings, and I learned the mysteries of laminating-- how one tiny flaw will suck water into a sign like a sponge, making it ugly and contorted. Lamination was one of our triumphs. We started out with a machine that could laminate letter-size paper in pre-cut plastic envelopes you ran through it. This led to such a demand that we expanded to a monster of a machine (with its own monstrous problems), and we could feed monster-size sheets through that, and agonize over whether a banner went in too crooked to make it.

I sometimes ended up running the thing for a while, and when I was at my peak, I'd hear the voices of the Three Easily Impressed Extras, exclaiming:

"See! He LAMINATES!"

"Aiieee! He laminates like a beast! A beast of LAMINATION!"

"(makes religious gesture) Never have these eyes of mine beheld such laminating!"

I learned things about handouts and how best to defend them against the inevitable moisture plants need-- we ended up with sheltered racks, and reformatted everything to 5.5" x 8.5", because larger things bend sooner.

I went to an expo with Pat (my boss and friend) and we admired a padding machine which cost a couple hundred dollars. "We can make one of these," I said. When I got back to the office, I drew a design and gave it to the handyman with an explanation, and he brought it back SLIGHTLY IMPROVED, even! It was some pieces of wood screwed together, and we made pads with it for years!

We learned about our worst enemy: The Sun. Red printing was a big thing for us, as nothing catches eyeballs like the *Judicious* use of an eye-catching color. The thing was, though, that red anything faded faster than black anything, or even blue. We could see it in our signs and banners. I could see it in the bumper sticker of a truck I used to see in the employee lot, in red and blue (on white), showing a flag and defiantly promising THESE COLORS WON'T RUN. Knowing what I knew about red, I smiled knowingly each time I looked at that lonely little field of stars that had been a US flag, and wondered if the makers of the sticker or its users would ever notice that they now said THESE COLORS    RUN!

I learned a lot about photocopying and color printing, too. It was particularly educational when black areas in printing were physically sliding right off the paper. (I used the information I got from that to reconstruct a gravestone photo in Massachusetts later on.)

I learned that I didn't care much for coffee, and cigarette smell got old as dirt even before I'd spent one year across the hall from the breakroom. The number of employees we had meant each of us cleaned the thing for a month, and now all coffee smells like grounds to me. We fought ants.

And now it's all over with, gone with the wind, its players scattered, and the red parts faded by the sun. The Hampton location-- the original, the main location-- no longer exists and is probably crappy self-storage warehouses by now, like everything else in the area was striving to become when I left. Last time I heard from someone there was some kind of LinkdIn scam which I ignored, from a name that was like the AI version of someone I'd worked with (though I got a nice reception once when I called to get some info-- Georgia was still answering the front phone).

Anyway, it was nice to remember all the paper stock and whatnot. Pat let me use the big Xerox copier/printer as much as I liked, provided I brought in a ream of paper now and then, and I used the hell out of that, printing sheet music on punched paper for my traveling books. The drive to and from eventually became practice for taking pictures from a moving car. For a year after we moved, I still was doing some things like the web page and newsletter remotely while my replacement got oriented. That's how big the job became: I had a couple days of training. Now I'm old, and I think I wouldn't mind maybe a half day in the office once a week or so, just for the social aspect, but if I must be retired, OH WELL.

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king of the butterflies

In grade school, there was a regular ritual for the Monarch butterflies. Sixth graders cruised the ditches and roadsides for milkweed plants, looking for the signs. Eventually, there'd be chrysalises in the classroom that would be taken home to hatch at someone's house. I may have gone through this twice, once for the Cub Scouts. It's all fuzzy.

Less fuzzy is the sight of a couple of accidents: Linda's little brother or sister (several to choose from) got too curious about the chrysalises and disturbed them, and the result was a couple of unfinished butterflies, stretching their hopeless wings in doomed futility, trying to do the thing they knew how to do. 

A couple of years after that, my family was out in the van, a half mile or so from home on the road to the landfill, and we were suddenly engulfed by Monarchs. They swarmed and surrounded the vehicle, brushing lightly against the window, each for its fraction of a second of wing beating before being replaced by an identical specimen of the concept of Monarch butterfly. It lasted half a minute or more, with no view outside (Mom pulled off right away, and it was a quiet stretch), just the wings.

When Sarah was about six, we visited a butterfly place. We walked around, surrounded by brightly colored fluttering patterns that sometimes landed on one of us. We attended a talk on raptors with a bird rescuer. We left with a Monarch chrysalis on a twig, and took it home to hatch.

Now, some time before this Sarah was collecting acorns from the trees that overhung our back yard, and sometimes there were tiny yellow bugs in them, barely big enough to register as caterpillars, and after being annoyed that they were in her acorns, she collected them and put a couple of them in a jar with a twig and some leaves and expected them, as kids will, to form pupas and become butterflies. And one day, the surviving cocoon hatched out and we took it to the porch where it tried its wings and left on a breeze. Sarah was a little sad it wasn't a butterfly, but I was amazed and delighted that it made it all the way.

And so did our Monarch. After the requisite time, it burst out and we took it to the front porch where it posed for a bit on the edge of its container before fluttering upward into, I thought, one of the tall trees that neighbored our tiny lot. Once again, it made it.

I see so few butterflies now. They don't even have to be Monarchs. I rejoice in any and all, moths too. I'd be so happy if the lightning bugs came back here again. And now US Wildlife has announced that our Monarchs-- the paragon of butterflies-- are added to the list of threatened species in this country.

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Propriety

Without haste or care,
Winds lightly deal our piled leaves
Back to their own yards.
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revelation

Yellow. Orange. Red.
At the sun's silent signal,
The green mask slides off.
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today's report

The North Wind, laughing
At soft pink buds that believed
Its lying zephyrs.

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Kip's Wonderful World of Color presents:

PAINT THE BIRDS

Paint the birds, tuppence a can
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a can
"Paint the birds," that's what she says
While wings make rainbows above in the sky

In Saint Paul's shadows, the colorless statues
Of famously suffering saints
Look on in wonder, their eyebrows ascending
To see how she peddles her paints.

Though the cans are tiny and cheap
Listen- Listen- She's making a heap!
"Paint the birds, tuppence a can
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a can!"

Sparrows and pigeons, despondent and jumpy
All grey as the smoke from the coal
Unloved and stepped on, depressing and dumpy,
Bright colors could perk up their soul.

"Buy a can, buy one for your kid.
Two full ounces, a brush in the lid.
Paint the birds, tuppence a can.
Long last! Dries fast! Tuppence a can!"
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Christmas stuffing

 I finally got the cards started. The cards themselves are fully realized, corporeally existing, bearing individual proofs, visible to me, of the haste and trauma of their creation. "Thouth" jumped out at me first, the sign of not having time for a round of having the sisters look at it for me once. There's a small "f" that's partly obscured by the signatures (now ten or twelve years old). I hope I'm the only one who "notices" that the photos weren't really optimized this year. I just went with them the way they were, RGB, not CMYK. Not resized to the printed pixel. Just let it go as is, merry Christmas.

The labels exist, part of the same marathon session at Fedex (formerly Kinko's, copy shop of my single years), coping with recalcitrant machines and NOT adding to the burden of the two women doing all the work. They knew I was there and always came when they could, and I am genuinely grateful and told the one who checked me out that it had been easier than I was expecting. (I didn't mention that I almost got there the first time and couldn't find a mask in the car and went home for one.)

The postage exists. I waited in pleasant silence. Was there no background music at all? It was just a guy getting through a stack of packages and flats to go out, weighing each or whatever. I didn't watch him. There was one other guy in there, waiting quietly far in the rear, maybe pondering the steel gated area where lines wait for service during non-Sunday hours. I enjoyed that part. The envelopes were already home, left over from other years.

So I'm stuffing the envelopes first, manila-colored 6" x 9" ones. I'm very pleased to see that these are self-sealing, so I won't have to moisten any sponges this year. My first dry card day. There are three empty labels at the end, showing where I deleted an address for someone who'd died this year, and for whom no one else remains to open a card. My end-of-the-year reel of people who I've exchanged jokes with, run into here and there, gone to their house. Rest in peace, Howard. You were always smiling, and I think you always got a raw deal. Rest in peace, Terry. I was sad when Mary went, and now I'm sad again. Rest in peace, Dad. I remember you.

And here's a label for my oldest friend, by which I mean the human I'm not related to who I've known the longest. I met and played with him when I was almost three, and the last time I saw him was 1990 or earlier, and I remember when he was impressed that I knew Photoshop (he's a painter and digital artist) his annual cards have been a triumph of impossible photorealism for years, but I haven't gotten one in a while. Three years? Five years? I don't know how many years things are. I consider peeling the label off and discarding it, or writing a note. I expect I'll just send a card and hope for a Hallmark moment.

Back to the envelopes.

 

ps: Holy cow, I already have a label that says "christmas holiday death." 

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A Defeated Supervillain Clarifies

Listen, I'm a villain, sure,
I've done a few bad things
Killed pizza guys I should've tipped,
Gave girls exploding rings.
I've tortured friends to steal their stuff
And enemies for fun.
But please, don't say I kicked a dog
Cause that's not how I run.

It's true I ran fake charities
To profit off of death
And my polluting factories
Were also selling meth.
I bought your representative
With loot from quacks I flog
But I swear on my mother's grave
I wouldn't hurt a dog!

The explanation's no big deal,
I simply tried to go
From my desk to the oubliette
Where I had stashed my foe
I turned en route to choose a laser
From several in the crypt
The dog was underneath a chair.
My foot just sort of slipped.

Anyway, that's all it was,
I misstepped. Kind of dark.
I didn't know the guy was there
Until I heard him bark.
And now, I know, I'll have to pay
For my crime-laden slog
But be fair when you tell my tale:
I did not kick the dog.

The Big Tent

I've been watching The Mickey Mouse Club for the last couple of days, having stumbled on two six-hour tapes of half-hour editions of the show from the Disney Channel, recorded in 1998. This is a windfall, because the DVD I bought only has about a week of shows from the first week of the first season, cut to oddly different lengths. Disney+ also has the exact same sad, disappointing little package. This is much better. I'm hearing a pair of sisters from Los Angeles singing an upbeat harmony number right now. That's not in the set.

I have no idea when these were originally broadcast, but I think these are the same 1960s cuts we used to watch in the later rerun days of the show. There's some jumping around, but we get a lot of Spin & Marty continuity. The Spin & Marty show dominates, in fact, taking up half or more of each episode. Since each starts with the same theme song followed with a measured daily schtick, there's only time for one act before the serial starts. At the end, the credits seem to reflect each show's contents, which is why I'm guessing they're the 60s rerun. They look like an optical credit roll.

What interested me most after a while was the opening segment that goes by each and every time a show starts. Mickey is tossed on a hoop like firemen catch falling kids with, and celebrated by a cast that consists of Ranger Woodlore, Four Bears (one of whom would be Hubert), Horace Horsecollar, Clarabelle Cow, Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck, Huey, Dewey, Louie, Goofy, The Three Pigs, Black Pete (aka Peg Leg Pete), and The Big Bad Wolf.

I noticed Pete first, and it's nice to see the company villain allowed to join in the fun, and there's the Wolf as well, cheerfully working that hoop with Mickey in it. But wait. I'd seen the longer version of the opening, and something felt off. I dug it out. It's three minutes long and starts with built-in callouts to the sponsor. Suitable for an hour-long show, maybe! The fanfare is familiar, but then we have some different bits. Pete smiles in a star-shaped cameo early on! The Wolf, on the other hand, is seen tied up, for frogmarching and ritual humiliation in the triumphal Mickey Mouse Club parade! 

The minute-long version is in there too, though, and even in this earliest opener, we have the hoop finale with Pete and Big Bad as cheerful voluntary participants. They have it both ways! I hope B.B. is getting extra pay for being tied up and kicked. That's simple stunt work, right? All cartoon characters can do it, and it pays the bills, and then everybody goes to the cookout. Well, not Ferdinand--ha ha!

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Never Thought This Could Happen To Me

I knew at the time it happened that this was unusual, but as it recedes into the past, I still can't help being impressed at the sheer unlikeliness of it all. 

 

I came home from working at University of Houston one PM to find that someone had nailed a door up over the front window of our two-bedroom ground floor apartment. It turned out that this was because the front window had been breached. It turned out to turn out that we'd been robbed.

By the time I entered the story, the police had already been there. As it will turn out, they already knew who did it, and where they were likely to find them. Then they found them and brought them in. This is because our apartments, about a city block away from The Astrodome, were all on an electronic security system (which I accidentally tripped at least once). Our criminals didn't set it off when they broke in the front window to enter, but in order to easily carry our color TV out, they had to open the door, setting off the alarm.

The alarm, in turn, alerted the security guy for the apartment complex, a policeman under any name, he lived rent-free in return for willingness to check things out. He heard the alarm, saw the act conclude, and followed the perps enough to bring in a description and license.

The police, as they told me later, had been watching the criminals (a couple? oh, details) for a while, and when they "caught" the "squeal" as we savvy folk say, they asked the pair's preferred pawnbroker to kindly let them know when they came in with the stuff, and they did, and the cops took them in.

It stood this way for a while. We waited to hear back. We were anxious to have our new TV, which we'd purchased at Target only weeks before, instead of the tiny black and white portable that my sister had imparted to me in the 70s, which was too insignificant to steal. When we realized we would need to prove ownership, I went back to Target and found that the serial number was recorded in a registry they had to keep for thirty days, and since I asked on Day Thirty, they gave it to me so I could prove it was our TV. 

I called and asked if there was something I needed to do, since I wasn't hearing back. Oh, yeah, they said, come on in and get your set. Perhaps that's when I went and got the number. Anyway, I went in, and was treated to the glory of the vast property room (rooms, really) of the Houston PD. The guy who brought me down watched me pick out my comparatively humble set and gestured back at what seemed like three caverns full of consumer bounty: "Any of this other stuff yours?" he asked. Which is why I have all these projection TVs and yachts and things, if you've wondered.

But there it is. Our apartment was violated. They had the crooks before I got home and found out. They got the goods. They got us our TV back. If I'd called sooner, we'd have had it back sooner. There were never any echoes or repurcussions. 

I know! Hard to believe, right?

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Neighbors

One year, early on in our time here, I took Sarah trick-or-treating through the neighborhood. A block from our house, almost parallel with it, was a house that was being rented to a Chinese family. This was their first Halloween in the neighborhood, maybe their first ever, and they were in compliance with the needs of the holiday, having chosen a treat, which they were handing out to costumed kids at the door. These were fruits, the size of a big gumball, wrapped in clear plastic.

To my horror, they were all over the ground, starting just steps from the doorway.

My neighbors were coming to the door, saying their bit, receiving the candy, and then dumping it on the ground. It was thicker than crab apples under the lawn mower.

I took mine, thanked them, and ate it on the spot, for all the difference it made. I never saw any of them around after that, and someone else has lived in the house for quite some time.

My neighbors. I'm still disgusted.

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On The Set

"You don't need an invisible god threatening you with Hell to live a moral life." I said on a social network. "You only have to believe, as I have since youth, that you are the star of your own TV show. Now, if you will pardon me, I have to sing my background music."

As usual, it was true. When I was four and traipsing around the block (and in later days, to neighboring ones), I was The No. Because why not. Somewhere in there, I remember drawing a flashlight on a tiny chalkboard, with "THE" in front of it, and this was a logo for The Flashlight, but I never was The Flashlight, you see. I was The No, and I hum-sung the theme, roughly to the tune of the chorus of The Erie Canal (14 tons).

The No
Is a comin', comin', comin',
The No
Is a comin' to your town
You can always tell your neighbor
You can always tell your friend
That the No's moving pictures
Are never gonna end.

Or maybe aren't a-comin' to an end. I had alternate versions, which is another story. Not sure what The No's essential nature was, apart from being mine. Not sure what The No did, apart from walking around whilst pondering how good I must look from the camera's point of view.

I also did Magic Man one time, for the duration of one iconic pose. Got the shot? One and done! Classic.

Uncle Don vocalized wherever he went. There's a photo of him in a stroller with his mouth joyfully wide to its greatest circle, and he told me "I was probably singing. Maw said I was always singing a little tuneless son, happy as anything." Similar, but not a theme song. Not a TV show (or, considering the exact wording of the song, an endless series of motion pictures*).

Scoff if you will, but it keeps me on the straight and narrow. In keeping with the times, there's barely a shred of the theme music (though it's alluded to frequently when Our Hero goes over or near the ubiquitous Erie Canal, for instance), and the camera work is fashionably wobbly. Once in a while, another character is featured prominently. This never used to happen!

Hey, I know what! Maybe our shows could do a guest thing. Nothing big, just maybe a quick cameo. Those are great for ratings.

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* I remember pretending once, at that age, in that particular yard, that I'd just invented motion pictures, by putting a bunch of slides on a turntable (tangent to the rim) and shining a light through. Even then, I knew that wouldn't quite work, but I also knew on some level that we were kids playing a game, and it wasn't going to have to stand up to scrutiny from the Royal Academy. 

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No Mow I

It's not that I hate to mow the lawn. I do. But I also think it's better to let the stuff grow. We have all this heat, and it was dry for a while, and I didn't want to cut off grass that was shading grass. We shouldn't have these crewcut turf lawns, acre on acre, that can only be serviced by bands of roving lawn guys with no mufflers. Let it grow longer. Let it seed itself. Let different colors of blooms contend.

The back part of the yard is slowly being returned to conditional ferality. With no cross-yard traffic from up the hill, it's less critical to keep a path mowed. I'd hoped that the fireflies might make a comeback here, like the year or two back there when I could see them IN MY OWN YARD. I've left undergrowth to grow under. I've shut off my lights--but that's a drop in a bucket of endlessly illuminated nocturnal existence. The fireflies don't stand a chance, even if the people I live among were to never pour another drop of RoundUp on their pool-table lawns ever again.

Noise is the side-product of it all. If I mow my lawn on Monday, the lawn guys might arrive before I'm done, or they may wait a whole hour before they descend to mow the two yards alongside ours and one of the ones across the street--same service, all three, and I think they HQ in a former firehouse, playing Euchre while they wait for the bell and sliding down a pole to race over here and run their motors. (Actually, I think one of them lives next door, based on the sound of the motor of his pickup, which he starts every morning before eight, and runs for ten minutes or so before getting back into it and pointedly revving it a few times, then he motors off. To the firehouse I mentioned before, which is v. important to my story.)

a day off Twitter

The day is best started in the company of a dog, preferably Murray, who meets the world with fortitude and humor. Be like the dog. Sniff things.

Moving forward with tech plans for the Knickerbocker Ensemble of Rochester (me and Karen and Tony). The mic stand, which would have been the perfect solution, turns out to have been made for a different model of Ultimate keyboard stand, but now I know, so we'll be approaching with Plan A again, a stand and a boom and a mic and an amp so we can stop borrowing Greg's setup, and so we'll have a mic that can get right up to my vocal apparatus for the two or three numbers I sing.

Murray is all, like "Hey, remember that great walk we just took? Good times, man."

Just scored 80 points at "Classic Words" with WIBBLES. I feel powerful.

Some time we'll find out whether the candy shop in Escanaba will let us bring in a jar to fill with Jelly Bellies, so that when I sort them by color, they stay sorted for at least a while.

Passing time in an acceptable fashion now, mostly by playing through a somewhat detailed WIZARD OF OZ anniversay folio, with the entire Munchkinland sequence spelled out for me. Note to self: "If I Were King of the Forest" is about my favorite number in musicals. It's right up there with "Frank Mills."

Murray and I walked again, first around the house (I dealt with the bunny 'hiding' on the hillside by turning us away for half a minute, and it luckily absquatulated.) and then around the block, where I smiled at hearing voices wherever we went--the neighbor behind, new family at 1, then a mom and two young sons. Murray startled the older one by trying to run beside him, and then a car was coming, so conversation resumed when everybody was there. I explained that Murray likes to run when he sees someone else run, because he likes to play. Alexander, the younger of the two, said he'd like to invite Murray to his upcoming birthday party, and he could play games. Not sure that'll happen, but the sweetest thing I've heard today. His mom mentioned my name as they were leaving, so Murray and I are not unknown to folks. Then I got involved in a text message as dogs were hailing us from various places, and we walked a couple of houses before I suddenly realized I'd made the ultimate faux pas in simply walking away from something instead of bagging it. We retraced our steps and I corrected the error. The dogs barked.

added to as the spirit or dog moved me. huge thanks to the five page views!

Hospice Dad

 

Comforted by bed, blankets, and morphine,
He dreams of ninety-eight years.
From cabins to tents to farms to town,
Mastering piano as a performer,
Supporting a family on a musician's pocket
And an entitled sportsman's distractions.
When he wrote of his memories, some time back,
He didn't mention any of us. We were in his life
But we didn't do much to speak of.

In perpetual not-quite-retirement,
Building boats, he found his milieu.
He was popular, part of the conversation.
Then the strokes started subtracting him,
Shock by shock, never finishing the job.
He came back from it each time
Always diminished but still unreeling,
Still unwinding, years of string, floss, threads of past events,
Loosed and spun away from the shrinking core
Until his final bit flakes off on a breeze
And he goes from being more here than gone
To being more gone than here,
Remembered by the ones he forgot.
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