Twist and Shout

Twist and Shout
Life is never straight (Joey Kulkin photo)

Friday, July 4, 2014

The Pick-Up Artist


BENNINGTON -- Have a title for the book I'm making to celebrate Sadie's 8th birthday. It will be different than the books I made for Maisie's 5th ("Hi, Maisie!") and Addie's 10th ("Addie's Array of Love") in that Sadie's will be an adventure featuring pick-ups trucks. Yup, Sadie is turning into a pick-up truck girl. Yellow especially. A few weeks ago she and I Googled photos of pick-ups in various colors and styles, proper and funky. The ones she pointed to will be part of the adventure story. She's got a deep sense of humor, quirky. Dry and sly. Silly, too. Reminds me of someone else. Reminds me of me too: we're both middle kids.

The style of the book will be somewhat like Scott Sussman's "Mark and the Molecule Maker" -- I've bought Sadie all 3 of his books; "Silly the Seed" and "Weird the Beard" are the others. Scott and I roused about in BBYO for a few years. Sadie loves his books so that's all the inspiration I need.

Need to get started. 35 days and counting.

So I thought it would be dead silent in the gallery today. Yes, I opened. Then, in the middle of writing this, four folks walked in. Two of them came from Delaware. Told the woman "I was in Newark one night." "Did you have a good time?" "Actually I just stopped at the gas station because I needed directions." She laughed. Then I kept it going: "Kind of weird how in Delaware it's New-ARK and in Jersey it's Newurk." That's when he hubby chimed in and said that Delaware's Newark used to be two words, New Ark. "I can see that with the whole Biblical thing." His wife chimed in next: "You can always tell when someone is from Delaware by how they say New-ARK."

Then they left.

Moments later a woman approached me with leaf pottery dish. And here I thought it would be the deadest of days in the gallery. It's quite funny in one sense because we sell a lot of this potter's work -- his name is Hank, and he's from Cackalackey -- but one of these dishes hasn't sold for a year. And then one sells today. She's from P-A. I tell her I lived in Bucks for a few years. "Oh! I know Bucks County!" Then she mentioned New Hope and I said I used to go there all the time and asked if she ever heard of the Blue Tortilla. She had not. I told her about the Crazy Russian Girls across the street -- she's heard of that because someone else recommended the bakery -- and then I told her about the Blue Benn Diner and she was excited. She and her friend walked there. I should be the mayor of this town.

A man and woman in their late 50s or early 60s just walked in. He's wearing a cap with OREGON embroidered in yellow letters. And here I thought it would be a silent 4th in the gallery so that I could open boxes that arrived yesterday.


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