Author: Kathleen Fisher

Fancy Nancy and I always daydream about the shop we’ll have one day.  It will be full of vintage goodness that we’ve uncovered, cleaned up and made fresh.  It will smell lovely when you walk in, there will be music playing and you’ll be able to help yourself to a cup of coffee while you spend a few stolen moments away from the business of life.

It will look like this from the street and if it ever comes to be, I think I will have died and gone to heaven.

When you talk nice to them, they talk nice back……….

With Big Daddy out of town and large item pickup going on in the hood, I enlisted Boy Child to help me with some roadside shopping.  I live for this weekend and out of three children, he’s the only one who would be caught dead picking up stuff from the curb.  Lucky for me, his semester was over this week and since he’s moving into an apartment in August, I had my own little Jethro to heft our goods into the car.

Large item pickup is THE biggest holiday in town.  It is a chance to clean crap out of your garage and basement and then fill it again with other people’s cooler crap.  We struck out days ahead of time, cruising curbs.  Our early acquisitions included a rusty wagon that made me want to cry when I saw it cast away on the street, a mid-century cabinet for BC’s new apartment, a stash of frames, a plant stand and some wood boxes. 

By Friday afternoon, everything had ramped up and the curbs starting filling up.  My neighbor directed BC to 69th St. for chairs and me to 70th St. for fencing.  A friend called to say her neighbor just put stuff out and I needed to get to 64th St. ASAP for the good stuff.  Another neighbor called to say there was a door with my name on it on 72nd St.  Traffic was crazy here in Mayberry with scavengers hunting for retro/vintage stuff, metal and building materials.  Between perusing the curb, watching for parked cars and avoiding pickups, it got a little dangerous.

All afternoon I kept an eye on my neighbor’s curb because last year was the jackpot.  Sure enough, out it came and out I went.  I got a tour of the junk piled at the curb then a tour of the house and came home with an old trunk that they hadn’t even bothered to empty of an old wool blanket, photos and books.

It was a good haul and not to brag, but somebody must have been a good girl this year because Santa delivered.  Big time.

For the last two days, blogger has been shut down, so even though you could read the blog, I couldn’t access it to post anything, which is o.k. because I didn’t have anything to write.  However, after a day of digging through trash and thinking, thinking, thinking, next week looks to have a couple of good stories.

Enjoy the weekend.  It’s time for Happy Hour in KC.

After about the 10th night of sleeping like CRAP, I told Big Daddy that I was a mess – a physical, emotional, flailing, sleep-deprived, basket case.  No plans, no goals, no energy, no nothing.  Then I checked my email.

The Lucky Monkey Deal of the Day happened to be 50% off hair removal.  Sometimes, fortune falls into your lap for no reason at all and before you know it, your mood and upper lip start looking better.  Much better.

My first writing class in high school was with Mrs. Watts.  When she read about eating a cold piece of watermelon on a hot summer day, I said to myself hmmmm…..I want me some of that creative writing.  I loved her liked worshiped the ground she walked on.  She was fun, she was inspiring, she was the best class I had during those four years.

Maybe she taught this and I don’t remember or maybe I’m chronically stupid, but oh these commas make me craaaaaaaazy as in the loco.  I add them, read it over, delete them, put them back in.  I read my stuff out loud.  Did I pause?  Pause means comma, right?  It could also mean that I just remembered it’s 10:00 and I haven’t checked Garnet Hill’s Sale of the Day yet.  Big pause, quit writing, check out sale.  Sometimes, I read the paper and say hmmmmm……..I should put my commas there like they do.  And for awhile I do.  Then I forget, which happens when you make shit up as you go.  I’m perplexed. 

Perplexed?  Maybe I don’t need commas, after all.  Maybe I’m gonna get by on confidence, commitment and kick-ass vocab.

Mallie Bee has introduced me to poetry slams.  They’re interesting messages, often pretty enraging and I’m always blown away by the delivery.  I came across this one and she certainly nails our obsession with the outer layer………

Suppose you have a skin ailment that is annoying and after two trips to the doctor, two different prescription ointments and many home remedies, you still have an itchy patch on your shin that Will. Not. Go. Away.  Suppose summer is coming, you’re getting pissed and you decide to do some Dr. Googling and figure this out once and for all.  Suppose you come up with a variety of possible diagnosis but aren’t quite sure.

Suppose you hit images.

You will see a screen filled with oozing, pus-filled, bumpy, red, scaly skin that will cause you to jump out of your chair and knock your coffee over.  Then you will throw up a little lot in your mouth.

I love my mom for many things.  She is calm and cheerful, loves wine before dinner and Bailey’s before bed.   At eighty three years old, she never tells you how she’s feeling, how her bowels are performing or what her cholesterol is.  She once told a joke at the dinner table and laughed until she cried about a guy whose nuts were too high.  The look on my dad’s face was priceless, seeing as how he was spending a lot of money on Catholic school so his kids wouldn’t be exposed to talk of nuts. 

As a first grader, I was more than a little slow when it came to reading.  It was suggested that I repeat the 1st grade, but with a sister right behind me, my mom would have none of that.  I wasn’t aware of that at the time, but I did figure out that staying under the the radar was a good way to get through the school day.  The summer before 4th grade, my mom took me to the local library and enrolled me in the Vacation Reading Program.  Each time you read a book, the librarian would put a point next to your name for all to see.  For someone who couldn’t master reading, it seemed like a horrible idea until the day I discovered Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Big Woods and Plum Creek.

Back in those days, we only had one car that my dad took to work every day, so my mom was home all day taking care of kids.  Six kids.  I am sure there were a hundred other places she would have liked to have gone once my dad got home, but instead she took me to the library and pushed me over my reading hurdles.

Now I love words, think long and hard about the way I use them and write every day.  That I owe to my mom, who found a way for me to spend that summer on a little house on the prairie while just a stone’s throw from Chicago.

I’m probably one of the last woman in the country to read The Help.  I  never got around to it until I read an article about the author, Kathryn Stockett.  It took her a year and a half to write the first version.  Following that was five more years of writing and 60 rejections.  #61 was the charm, more than two millions copies have been sold and the movie is coming out this summer.

At my writers group, we often discuss what the secret is to getting published.  When I wrote an essay on gardening, I sent it to a free, local magazine and didn’t care if I’d make any money off of it as long as it had an audience.  They loved it and if I cut it in half they might consider it.   Half?  Might?  I was defeated.  I edited, changed and deleted some things, but not half of it and of all the things I’ve written, that one is still one of my favorites. 

This morning I woke up at 3:00 and tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn’t stop thinking about those black maids in Jackson, Mississippi during the civil rights movement and the skinny, white girl who dared to write their stories.  Before the birds even thought about chirping, I got up and opened the book that sixty other editors thought would never sell by a writer who refused to give up on her baby.