Loose Leaf Notes

1. Joe looking for the mayonnaise jar buried in the back of the fridge for me: “You’re better looking but I’m better at looking.”

2. Alice or Dorothy?

3. I’d really like to tour THIS abandoned clown house.

4. Me to Joe at the beach: “Don’t think about sharks. Don’t think about the chickens home alone. Don’t think about the drive home. Is there anything else we shouldn’t think about? Joe: Yes, but I don’t want to think about it.

5. Cooking breakfast in the hotel room, Joe calls me the hot plate gourmet.

6. I brought a beach book, but so far mostly I’ve just been reading menus in search of fried clams, but I think that’s a New England thing. -More from The Sea Side of Things HERE. 

7. I’ve been reading Sally Mann’s memoir, Hold Still, one of the best books I’ve ever read. Mann is best known for her photo series “Immediate Family” in which she chronicles her children growing up on their farm in a series of intimate shots, some of which show the children nude, which were controversial. Although I enjoy her writing on growing up in the ‘60s, her life as an artist and the wild turns her story takes, like a murder suicide mystery in the family, I have been especially interested and moved by her chapters on growing up in a segregated south and being raised by a black nanny/maid, Gee-Gee, who she loved. “How could I not have wondered? How could I not have asked? That’s the mystery of it—our blindness and our silence,” she writes after describing how Gee-Gee had to wait in the car while they ate at Howard Johnson while on vacation (they did bring her a sandwich) and how Gee-Gee couldn’t use the same bathroom as they did.

8. While I was dancing at the Surf Ballroom in Hull, Massachusetts, Sally Mann was buying desert boots in Hingham at Talbots, a few miles from where I grew up. Mann lives in Lexington Virginia, about an hour and ½ from me. Her mother was from Boston, MA and her grandmother (a descendant of president Adams) was born in Braintree, MA. She went to Hollins College in Roanoke.

9. Moon Ink: A scratch of light / marks the sky’s / western shoulder / like a night tattoo / of unfinished moon

10. In 2008 I wrote this in a 13 Thursday list:  I have an imaginary green shamrock tattoo somewhere on my body but haven’t imagined where yet.

11. Stained glass windows in church was my first psychedelic.

12.“Seeing is believing, but feeling is the truth.” – Robert Fuller

13. How many children do you see in the first photo above?

___________Thirteen Thursday