It’s hotter nearly everywhere else right now than it is here in Florida. The flea market, shaped like a wheel, used to have air-conditioning in the hub, but it’s hard times, and now there are only fans. I suspect it was over 100 degrees in some of the “spokes.” Beside Mr. Shoemaker, we met a young man who propagates and sells plumeria (Their slogan is “Just Smell It.”) We also met a couple who sell deliciously scented soaps. One of my companions liked the chocolate coconut soap, so I jotted that down on the back of the soapmakers’ business card. The woman told me she doesn’t recommend the basil eucalyptus scented soap as a bath soap because it makes her “private bits tingle.” If you are on my Christmas list, you may get one of their soaps, but not basil eucalyptus, unless you request it, of course.

I bought an oil portrait of a darkly handsome man for $2.00. Some of us were disturbed by the skull in the background. I paid too much for an antique leather-bound album for cartes de visite with no cartes and in poor condition, because it had a printed card from Bazar Bel Bacha, Casablanca, “vous offre une selection d’objets d’art marocain” tucked inside, along with a tiny fan-shaped calling card with the name Fred A. Dorn engraved on it. I also bought a leather carrying case full of mismatched playing cards, some of which have an advert for “La Cage” at the Riviera in Las Vegas, featuring Frank Marino as Joan Rivers.

Is it co-workers or cow-orkers?

Are you skeptical or are you dubious?

She’s a nice girl but I think she has Tourette’s.

Maybe dark matter is what black holes poop after they’ve digested matter.

I took a detour to Git but now it’s time to get back to Go.

You should get Roku.

You know everything I know, so don’t ask me any more questions.

To be continued….

Friend or Foe: Corvidae

Mr. and Mrs. J. are Native Americans. When they tell me they’re heading out to gather blueberries, or going fishing, or going to a pow-wow, I want to go too, but I would never ask. Once they invited me over for an iced tea. The walls were hung with Native art, the rooms arranged with things collected over the years and things inherited. Everything had a story, just the way I like it. A breakfront in the dining room held a collection of keepsakes and family photos. One of those photos planted itself in my skull. It was an old black and white snapshot of a tipi. Mrs. J. said the tipi was her grandparents’ home on the reservation. It stood next to the frame house where Mrs. J. grew up. Her grandparents refused to live in a house, she told me. They stuck with the tipi to the end.

I saw a real tipi at the Plains Indian Museum in Cody, Wyoming. It was larger than I expected. The hide was translucent, so if there were a fire inside, the tipi would glow in the dark.

Daughter, slamming her book closed: I don’t like this book at all. She assumes we are all victims. That’s just not right. We’re not ALL victims. I’M not a victim!
Mother: Are you going to finish the book?
Daughter: I think I’ll just skim it. I don’t agree with her so I don’t want to use it.
Mother: What is the subject of your paper?
Daughter (who now begins to sprinkle her speech with Korean words and phrases, so this is all I could get): It will definitely be about the Korean diaspora, but it’s too big of a subject. I have to be more focused. Somehow I didn’t know there were Koreans scattered all over the world (laughs). I thought they were just here. I think I might concentrate on the Korean communities in the U.S. and in Russia, because there is such a disparity there. We’ve been prosperous in this country, but over there the communities are poor and they’ve been persecuted.

She had an Old Florida way of talking, a drawl, not syrupy like Paula Deen, but more hard-edged and low, like Tommy Lee Jones. That’s what I said….

She had been telling the previous shopper a story about her house. She continued with me.
“You know what I’m sayin? I paid $35,000 for my house, then that county fella come out and said it was worth $60,000, and made my taxes go up. I told him my house ain’t worth $60,000.”

“I know the feeling,” I said with a sigh. (I wasn’t really thinking about my own similar house issues. I was hot and tired.)

She picked up one of my items and examined it. “This looks like a kimono.”
It was. A set of two framed origami kimono made of chiyogami paper, mounted between glass, his and hers, $1.00 apiece. I’m a sucker for anything Japanese, even cheesy tourist art.

She continued, “The mammas have the babies on their backs and wear the kimono over the babies so they stay warm.”
My thought: what century?

“Once I saw a mamma in a kimono with a baby on her back. That baby’s head was back like this.”
She threw her head back so she was looking straight up at the ceiling.
“It was pourin rain, and that baby was sound asleep, and that mamma just went about her business.”
She shook her head as she wrapped up my $2.00 sale. “It just kept on sleepin!”

I said, “Where was that?”
“In Japan. I lived there when I was little. Have a good day, darlin.”

I’m obsessed with this image: the Japanese mother with the sleeping baby on her back, the rain falling on the delicate closed eyelids. It’s an unwritten haiku, a scene from Kurosawa. It’s a little beauty offered by a stranger at Goodwill. It’s a memory accepted from a stranger and made my own. I bow to the mother and baby, I bow to the rain, I bow to the Cracker storyteller.

I used vintage postage stamps from around the world to create green man phi. I combined a traditional symbol of regeneration with Marquardt’s Phi (golden ratio) mask, to make a heroic Green Man. He is strong but also a little vain, judging by his hair and mustache.

I used vintage cancelled postage stamps from Poland, United States, Hungary, Equatorial Guinea, German Democratic Republic, Spain, Germany, and others. For the Green Man’s dapper comb-over and extravagant mustache I used orchid leaves from stamps issued by Republic of Guinea. The card is a standard trading card size, 2.5 x 3.5, so he is quite small.

Green man didn’t last long on etsy. Someone bought him within hours of posting.