Things that are free
Among them, thoughts
A while back, my doctor called to report a compression fracture in my spine. It showed up by accident in an X-ray for something else. He asked if I had fallen. I said, “Yes, five years ago.” We were moving into our house, and I was pulling our mattress along the hall, going backwards, unaware there was a step. I flew into the air, landing on my back.
When the doctor called, I wondered what other things in me were broken I didn’t know about. The other day on the phone, a friend said she went to a party, and at the party was a group of women she had always wanted to be close to, something like that, and once again they didn’t scooch over to make room for her, and her heart sank. She said, “I will never understand what I want from these women.” I said, “I don’t know how to live, either.”
When Marianne Faithful died, Richard came up to tell me. I said, “I know. It’s sad.” He said, “She was the same age as you.” I said, “Does that mean I'm next?” He said, “No, it means she was first.” I thought to myself, we're all next.
I said, “I so enjoy disliking Sally, the way she turned me into a customer for her friend George instead of introducing me to the great artist.” I wish I could enjoy the disappointments of people I resent longer than I do. Maybe I think I’ve caused them.
Richard said, “I think resentment isn't something you want to give up easily. It's the pain that keeps on giving.” I said, “Do you think our meeting of minds on resentment is part of the marriage dividend?” He said, “Yes.”
Yesterday on Warren Street, I picked up some hunks of granite to use in our garden. The hunks are scraps left on the side of the street. The sidewalk renovation is spectacular. The workers are creating the yellow brick road.
Richard and I sat on our bench opposite The Spotty Dog bar and bookstore. The store is in a building that had once been a firehouse, hence the name spotty dog—after Dalmatians and fire houses.
Richard was reminded of the Granite Shoe Factory, located in Mount Sorrel in Leicestershire. He said Druids climbed the mountain. As soon as you mention Druids, your thoughts fly to Stonehenge, the way your thoughts fly to Dalmatians when you think of a firehouse.
Richard said, “No one knows how the stones were moved into a circle or how any heavy stones were moved, I mean the engineering, like the Pyramids and the Easter Island heads. They just make up theories.”
I said, “What if the Druids were fucking with everyone. A few of the honchos and honchas in hoods got together and said, ‘Let’s create a weird circle of boulders and make people in the future think it had meaning. They’ll never be able to figure it out. It’ll be great to imagine them scratching their heads and acting solemn on our behalf. It will be our joke forever, or until, you know, the universe picks up momentum in its drift toward expansion’.”
Richard said, “Or aliens arranged the rocks, the way they came from wherever to jumpstart humanity with the monolith. Come to think of it, wasn’t it made of granite?”
I said, “I think it was made of granite for 2001, but in reality, when the aliens visited Earth, they probably used rock from their own planet. They were fucking with future humans, too, in their way.”
Richard said, “Do you want me to carry the granite?” I said, “Yes.” When I’d picked up the hunks—offered to me by the workers!—he was standing across the street, in case people thought we were together.
Dalmatians are firehouse mascots because, in the past, they were "coach dogs," running alongside horse-drawn fire engines to clear the way. They are fast and can run long distances without tiring. They also like horses a lot.
Richard and I met when I was sixty. What if we’d never crossed paths? What if poodles could run as long and as fast as Dalmatians? What if the aliens hadn’t jumpstarted humanity? Most things said about aging are wrong. Life does not shrink back. The meat does not fall away from the bone. You do not stand there, saying goodbye and watching your hopes recede. The thing people say about looking back at the highway of a life, yes, that I am doing.
As a kid, I wasn’t trained to do anything. Parents let you out to run like a Dalmatian (or a poodle), and if you came back, they gave you food. No one was that concerned about my future because they had decided whatever I would need in life I would figure out how to get it. I love my parents for most of the time forgetting to tell me how to live.
The generation of Richard and me, we had it easier than the generations after us to enter the world and try to change it. We went to school without debt. I went to school without debt because my father—who had left school after the ninth grade to go on the road as a traveling salesman—because my father had saved for the tuition. Richard, because the Labour government in England sent kids who couldn’t afford school to university for free. Rents where we wanted to live were cheap. We met so little resistance, comparatively, in doing what we wanted with our lives.
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Streaming Now
The trick of Secrets We Keep—a Danish thriller on Netflix—is that its camera is focused on rich white people, while all the time the series cares about the women made marginal in this society: Filipino au pair workers and a black detective, who doggedly pursues the murder of an au pair named Ruby. There are red herrings in the plot and a relationship between two white women that makes no sense, but there is a fascinating triumph in the show's interest not in the people who own and run things but in the people who know how the world works because they aren't seen.
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on Saturday June 28 from 3 to 4 EST. To RSVP, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. Steven, , and I will ping thoughts and questions in a freewheeling way about VOICE.I love Steven's writing voice, which is speaking on the page. How to write-talk is a way to think about the focus of the Zoom.
Among the topics will be accent (Richard says no one in England sounds like him anymore), the geographical place where your voice comes from, social class, and words you love that can sound to some readers like hostile provocations.
You are invited as always to send ahead question and to ask questions at the live event. Steven has also launched a brilliant new stack called Travel Stories Paired with Tinned Fish. The link is at his name above.
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Lynx
Today’s link is to a piece I wrote for the brilliant and beautiful film platform Galerie.com. It’s about the Michael Haneke film The Piano Teacher (2001)—also Psycho, the Kennedy assassination, and first shocks. https://www.galerie.com/read/shock-value
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From “Eyes on this,” the latest post by
In trying to visualize how my cyborg body interacts with my mind, my old habit of sketching philosophical ideas not only comes in handy but also mirrors the icons and symbols of my surrounding technologies. Take my Bluetooth devices, for example. My insulin pump is on a Bluetooth signal, so is the sensor, my glucometer, and other diabetic-related apps on my phone and laptop. All these connect to the house’s Wi-fi router. They are all linking and sharing information about my body. There are symbols on all my devices, showing they use Bluetooth. The symbol is a combination of the Old Norse runes for the letters “H” and “B,” the initials for King Harold Bluetooth who in the 10th-century united warring Danish tribes into a single kingdom. This stood for the way Bluetooth technologies unite communication protocols. A group of Scandinavians reputedly adopted it on a pub crawl in Toronto.
‘he was standing across the street, in case people thought we were together’ Laugh from over here.
Love this so much... "As a kid, I wasn’t trained to do anything. Parents let you out to run like a Dalmatian (or a poodle), and if you came back, they gave you food. No one was that concerned about my future because they had decided whatever I would need in life I would figure out how to get it. I love my parents for most of the time forgetting to tell me how to live."... and I relate! I can't seem to replicate the same experience for my 10 year old kid...but, that said, I. moved back to my hometown in Indiana recently from NY and sometimes he rides off on his bike and I say, come home when it's time, around dark, and he always does, with an adventure to talk about.