On the road and loving it...

We are in Port Townsend, Washington, sitting at Point Hudson RV Park, which is right on the water and within five minutes' walk of my favourite bookstore, William James, Bookseller. I went in there this afternoon and picked up a copy of Barbara Kingsolver's Homeland and Other Stories. I thought that was very controlled of me. I generally have trouble getting out of there with fewer than five books. I've found the secret. I didn't look beyond the sale shelf near the front door -- but I'm regretting that now. We've had a lovely time here, catching up on news with Angel May and Angel Spouse, enjoying Port Townsend as always, but we will be leaving tomorrow morning, headed for the other side of Port Angeles -- to visit Roger and Chantal, old friends that we met in Mexico.

Yesterday  I went into a bookstore called Imprints. I bought a birthday card for my sister and a copy of Anne of Green Gables for my great-niece. I asked directions to the post office. The proprietor pointed me to a shop called the Purple Heron, down at the other end of the main street, where there is a little postal outlet.  I walked down there, confirmed that they could mail my packages, and asked for the padded envelopes I would need.  Unfortunately, the young lady at the counter told me, they had run out of the envelopes. I should keep on walking to Don's Pharmacy, where I could buy them.  So off I went -- but I stopped, halfway out the door. I think I said that I would find a place to sit and inscribe the book with my fountain pen, and then I would buy the envelopes and come back. Before I could get the door closed, the young lady said,

"Excuse me, but what's a fountain pen?"



Oh, dear. I felt immensely old.

I went back to the counter, pulled the pen out of my purse, and showed it to her. I gave her a brief history of the fountain pen, beginning with the quill. I told her that a fountain pen's nib forms itself to the handwriting style of its user. I showed her how to fill the pen.  She was enthralled. "I have to have one of those," she said. So I wrote down the URL for xFountain Pens. I made to leave again, but again I hesitated at the door. "Oh," I said, "I should tell you that it can be difficult to fill the pen directly from the ink bottle. You might want to use something like an egg cup as an inkwell. That makes it much easier."  I looked at her, and even before she spoke, I knew just what she was going to say.

"What's an egg cup?"

"I have been intimate with fish."

No. Not I. Joe Rosenblatt. At least, that's what he said last night at WordStorm in Nanaimo -- and who am I to argue? He certainly got my attention.

Yesterday was to have been a day off -- my Saturday, as it were -- but I ended up working for four hours anyway, then zipping straight down to Acme Foods for WordStorm. I had been looking forward to it for weeks, and nothing was going to keep me away. I ordered and ate dinner, then went downstairs to take one of maybe three chairs that remained empty -- and those were extra straight-backed chairs that someone had brought down from the restaurant to contain the overflow audience. In the end, some people listened to the evening's performances from the stairway. That was a treat in itself, to see a "standing room only" crowd for a poetry reading.

Joe wasn't the first reader of the evening. First there came eight poets/writers who read short samples of their work (as I did a few months ago) -- then the Lightning Readers came forward, more experienced, published folk all -- to entertain us. Kamal Parmar read from her new book of poetry, Fleeting Shadows. Kevin Roberts read from his novel, She'll Be Right.

The surprise treat of the night was a performance by Kendall Patrick, a singer-songwriter from Ladysmith, B.C. (just down the road a piece), and her friend Alex, who sang one of her own compositions as well. Alex never told us her last name, so I'm afraid I have no way of linking to her work. I understand that Kendall and Alex have a new CD coming out, entitled "See It Coming."

But I digress. Joe Rosenblatt. Delightful man that he is, he offered me his French fries at dinner. I declined, but it made me fond of him even before he started his performance. As I said, he started by saying "I have been intimate with fish," and proceeded to float from poem to poem, story to story, explaining along the way that you touch a fish when you take him out of the net, then you club him to death, then -- intimacy of all intimacies -- you eat him. He had his audience in the palm of his hand. From time to time I jotted down a line that struck me -- "My soul and I are now obese...I keep my feelings inside a sea urchin."

From fish,  Joe moved on to cats:  "I worship cats..." and off we went on another tangent -- I remember something about -- hollyhocks, was it? and a reference to "leafy lechery" -- "pellucid squid" and a cat speaking in fluent "Felinese, but in a dialect that was untranslatable..."  Then we ran out of time. "Can't I read some doggerel?" Joe asked. Our applause convinced the powers that were that yes, he could, so he began, but changed his mind and left the stage, and I was bereft.

I don't always understand what I'm hearing at these events, and sometimes I downright dislike it -- but there are moments when I feel as if I'm dancing in someone else's mind -- or someone else is dancing in mine. It's hard to tell.

A Little Whimsy on a Monday Afternoon

Today's Monday. Today's Monday. Monday is washing day -- and vacuuming day, and finding the long-lost surfaces in my home day. In the course of my housecleaning, I came across these silly socks.

They were a Christmas present. When I first saw them, I thought they were funny. Today, in need of a bit of amusement and a little warmth for my feet, I tried them on. Now, I must admit that the actual donning of these socks is no easy matter. Each toe must be squeezed into its own little glovey bit, and if you have curly little toes like mine (Only the little toes are curly, by the way. Most of my toes are perfectly normal. Really.)  -- if you have curly little toes like mine, the job is pretty labour-intensive.   However, once they're on, these silly socks are amazingly comfortable. I've been wearing them for several hours now while I performed my Monday drudgery -- and I'm seriously considering making them my Official Writing Socks. I suppose I should consider getting a few more pairs, too -- or I'll only be able to write once a week.

Back when I was studying at university, I had a pair of pants (I think they were cargo pants) in olive drab. I called them my Latin American Revolutionary Pants or, when when that was too much to say, my Che Guevara Pants. I wore them whenever I had an essay to write. I don't know what happened to those pants. I miss them, and I need them -- or at any rate, I need something in the way of vestments to help me settle into Writing Mode.

Do you wear something special when you write? Pajamas, maybe? Sweatpants and t-shirt? I'll bet there isn't a writer in the world who dresses up to write -- I mean, dresses in business clothes.  Dressing up as such, well, that's another matter. Somewhere, I have a gold ribbon Hallowe'en wig that I used for a while to inspire me.

Wow. I went looking for a picture to illustrate my Latin American Revolutionary Pants, and there they were. Hmmm.