Pushcart

When building up and letting go are simultaneous activities.

On Delancey Street, when my parents were young, peddlers sold hot chick peas and roasted chestnuts from pushcarts. Neighbors gathered and schmoozed in the theater of street life. The way Times Square used to be, a crossroads where every kind of person met every other kind of person understood to be in a social class or to have a sexuality, people with every kind of skin color and accent talked in bars—before Times Square became acceptable to nobody interesting.

In 1986, Gardner saw Paris for the first time, and he wanted to feel the city in his body, so the first day we pushed off on foot from St. Germain, walked north to Les Halles, east to République, northwest to Montmartre, south to Opéra, west to Étoile along the Champs-Elysées, south to Avenue Marceau, east again through the seventh arrondissement, and back to our starting point. We walked for 16 hours, covering 20 miles, and along the way ate roast beef, goat cheese, oysters, apple tartes, raspberries, chocolate mousse, a Greek sandwich stuffed with lamb, and at midnight a loaf of walnut bread, bought at Le Drugstore, the only place open at the time.

We ate on the street the way our primate ancestor found a femur bone on the savanna to suck out the marrow and keep moving. Our primate ancestor was not faster than her predators, but she could outlast them on the run. That was her super power.

Right now, outside our house, there’s a sign on a wooden easel that says, “Stumps for sale, $10 each.” Also for sale is a covered dish with a lobster on the lid I found along a road in South Bristol, Maine. There are fancy mugs, with pictures of different breeds of dogs on them, I picked up on Warren Street when a shop selling pet supplies was closing its doors. Yesterday at a Zoom gathering, a reader asked how I found subjects for the posts, and I got an image in my mind of a crow, picking up shiny objects in its beak. My Substack is a pushcart.

A nest Richard found and we gave to a friend.

The other day on Warren Street, we passed a store front with pages of writing taped to the windows. The pages told a story about a life coming undone and building up again. Inside the windows were books, clothes, kitchen items, and objects of beauty you couldn’t be sure what they were. Richard wondered if it was an art installation—the store, the story, and the items for sale as props. Even if it was a story was from a person’s life, it was also an art project.

In the story taped to the windows, the woman was ending a marriage to a man. It wasn’t clear if she was leaving him or he had left her. Either way, her mood wasn’t one of blame. She didn’t think she had been tricked. She felt she had tricked herself, and I thought that was always the best story to tell, the way we fall in love until we fall out of love or are pushed out of love. Is it possible to be pushed out of love? The story was about falling in love.

A few days later, when we returned to the store, the storyteller was giving things away rather than selling them. She said, “Take anything you want, and leave me a text message.” Her phone number was stuck to the floor on a posit note. She was small and gave off a fragile vibe that made me feel tender towards her and also aware I should allow her privacy to take last looks at the sand castle she’d built. On the floor were the clothes she was giving away, a carnival of shadows. I took a long gray t-shirt and black Nike running tights, and when I got home, I put them on. I’m wearing them now.

Richard said, “You look different.” I said, “I was wearing your hat, and my hair got flattened.” I fluffed it up. When Richard was a young child, after his mother had dental surgery, he thought she’d been replaced by a pod person or a replicant. It turns out to be a type of delusion called Capgras syndrome. I said, “Don’t go thinking I’ve been replaced.” He said, “Okay,” in his charming English way that means you have no idea what he’s really thinking. Do we ever know what anyone is really thinking?

So far, my sale has raised $28.50. This confirms something is happening between strangers and my objects. Something I don’t see. The sale is on the honor system, and people leave cash in a little jar. Richard says, “You’re willing to spend a fortune on a new roof without batting an eyelash, at the same time you have an easel in front of our house.” He means, what must people think of you. He doesn’t mean, what must people think of us, because even a person who has never met me and never will meet me knows deeply in their heart this display of cast-offs beside a fading, rain-spattered sign could only be the work of Laurie and never in a million years of Richard.

He says, “I will pay you fifty dollars every day not to put out the stuff.” I say, “What fun would that be? No discoveries, no mysteries, no images of people digging in their pockets to find crumpled bills they forgot were there?” He doesn’t know what to say to this, so he doesn’t say anything.

I’m encouraged by my sale as well as by the ads I place on Facebook marketplace because more people than I ever imagined have bought our beautiful stumps, cut evenly on both sides by our friend Bill, master of the chainsaw. Each stump makes a perfect little side table beside a lawn chair, or it makes a pedestal for a garden sculpture or a plant.

Last night we were to dinner at the home of a woman who had bought three of our stumps. She plans to create a stumperie, like several Richard has built in our back garden. Stumperies are Victorian garden features, where twisty, baroque-looking  stumps lean together and become a base for ferns and moss. The woman who bought our stumps is an artist, and I’d forgotten we’d met her until suddenly her invitation arrived, and there she was last night, with her beautiful face and the gorgeous meal of salmon and salad she’d prepared for us and several other friends. We sat outside in the warm summer air, and all the time we were with the group, I thought about the unplanned lean toward you of curious strangers.  

How does the culture of the pushcart produce a language? The same way as memory—which is not a recording of the past but a remnant you carry around. If you apply the scratch test, for example, to Freud, or Marx, or Wittgenstein, or Lillian Hellman, or Gertrude Stein, or Hannah Arendt, does some aroma of the pushcart waft up?

Why do people open their windows at the sound of the pushcart calling out “Rag and bone?” or “Keuf meine heise arbis” (buy my hot chick peas)? In a flash, people are down on the street. In another flash, the street is filled with their voices and the barriers that otherwise divide people have come down.

BIZ

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Prompty People

The prompt is: write a list of lists.

Try it and post your piece on “Notes.”

Here is one by

Richard Toon

—that is also a complete and concise autobiography.

A List of Lists

Times I lost my wallet, despaired, and then found it again.

People I told, “I love you” and meant it completely.

Times I played the type-1 diabetic card.

Times I experienced ghosts, but continued not to believe in them.

Times I experienced buyer’s remorse.

Experiences in which I felt real fear.

Things I learned from my mother, under the subcategories of True and False.

Circumstances where someone wanted to have sex with me and I didn’t realize it until they told me later.

Times my mouth was filled with sand or dirt.

Circumstances where someone thought I didn’t realize they were insulting me, but I did.

Times I was an accomplice in a crime.

People who squeezed my hand too tightly when I shook theirs.

Shoes I really liked.

Experiences of trying to believe something and failing.

Important papers I threw away and wished I’d kept.

Books I read three or more times.

Times I rented a boat.

Times I ran after my brother and he turned me away.

A prompt from Satan in the form of a short video:

https://www.facebook.com/675913979/videos/1219393555906758/

Love Lies Bleeding (Max)

Katy M. O'Brian and Kristen Stewart.

Well, I kinda loved it in all its b-movie grunge. It's the Hulk meets Kristen—please wash your hair and you can't give a bad line reading—Stewart. I love her laconic, loopy blankness. You can see the thought bubbles above her head wondering how did I become a movie star although I'm not complaining because the pay is good and people can't get enough of me. Katy M. O'Brian plays her body builder girlfriend, who is also a testosterone pumped murderer.

The women are afraid all the time. Afraid of men for good reason. That's the interesting thing about the film. No matter how independent and physically powerful they become, they are made to know they can be squashed like bugs under many many heels.

You wonder if it's going to be another Thelma and Louise, with no way out for the violent heroes. That's the difference between 1991 and now. In 2024, amor vincit omnia. The women have the great butch swagger of we don't see men except they're everywhere and nagging us all the time. And these women have a truck.

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What I want to point out is how much this adds to everyone's creativity—certainly to mine. Support and connectedness make you work harder, make you want to produce more pleasure for the people who read you. I have not experienced anything quite like this before. And the fresh air of Kamala’s campaign is helping us all enjoy life more.

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