Posts by anne@toot.cat
(DIR) Post #ATMDLPTNQXxu8JJq4W by anne@toot.cat
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In 1999 to 2000 I was going through a very rough patch in my life. In the span of a few years, I'd gotten married, lost a parent, birthed a child, gotten divorced, changed careers, and relocated 3,000 miles away from everything and everyone I knew. What with the state of things, I didn't get to see Galaxy Quest when it was first released. Finally, on a day I was feeling particularly low, and shortly before the movie left the theaters, I canceled work and took myself out to a midday matinée.I was the *only* person in a vast theater, of a size that no one builds anymore, sitting and waiting for the lights to go down. At one point, I turned and peered up at the projectionist's booth. I saw a shadowy figure moving back and forth behind the window, bending and straightening. This was in the days before automated, digital films. The Phantom Menace had been released digitally in 1999, but the equipment to show such films was extremely expensive and most theaters hadn't converted yet; "projectionist" was still a real job.While I was looking, the figure paused, strode to the window and peered back at me, then disappeared quickly.I turned back around and continued to fidget and ponder the misfit pieces of my life.At the top of the aisle behind me, the theater door swung open and banged loudly on the wall. The projectionist strode down the aisle toward me, a tall barrel-shaped man with a thick beard and glasses. My first thought was that the matinee was canceled due to low turnout, and I'd be getting a refund. Just as I'd resigned myself to that, the marching projectionist shouted out in a booming voice, "WELCOME to your PRIVATE viewing oooooooof GALAXY QUEST!!!" He stopped in front of my row, and I saw that he had an *armload* of STUFF. One by one, he began presenting each thing to me, and as the pile in his arms dwindled, the one in my lap grew."As our SPECIAL VIP Galaxy Quest GUEST today, YOU are entitled to...""- A commemorative t-shirt!""- A poster suitable for framing!""- A limited edition refrigerator magnet!""- A button to pin to your lapel!"The list and the shwag went on. With every ridiculous item, I laughed harder and harder, until there were tears leaking out of the corners of my eyes.Then he bowed and shouted, "WE HOPE YOU ENJOY THE SHOW!" and turned on his heel to march back up the aisle and out the exit door.Alas, of all the shwag only the magnet has stood the test of time. But the humor and kindness of the unknown projectionist lives on.#storytelling #GalaxyQuest
(DIR) Post #AeyYiv2w1YqUTKtPwe by anne@toot.cat
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Up earlier than the rest of the household this #Caturday, I was rewarded with a solid 15-minute viewing of a bobcat exploring our property. I first spied them out back, hopping over and on the rustic garden fence that hugs the lilac bushes. They crouched for a while under the lilacs, all squinty-eyed and meatloafed. Just a regular kitty, you know? But economy-sized and with a comically short tail. Then they sauntered over to a decaying log pile next to the barn, where they hunkered down and flicked that tail stub, waiting for an unsuspecting mouse perhaps. No luck, so they walked back toward the meadow, hugging the front of the barn, where I had the best view of them. So floofy! Such big paws! Beautiful striped markings, and spots on the backs of the ears!Walking on the crusty snow of the meadow, they paused, curled into a hunchbacked crouch, then sprang in the air and slammed their giant paws down on the snow. Aw, too bad—the snow was frozen solid. A lucky day for the likely vole cowering underneath. Finally deciding to try their luck elsewhere, they walked away across the meadow, headed for the woods between us and our next door neighbor. Bye bye bobcat. Better luck next time.#storytelling
(DIR) Post #AeyYiw1CPV3FUF5XsW by anne@toot.cat
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#Today I stopped by our area’s one and only Trader Joe's to buy new shopping bags. Y'see, I had a huge collection of bags that were stolen recently. Well, less stolen than opportunistically liberated after I accidentally left them in a parking lot shopping cart. When I returned an hour later, the bags were gone and no one had turned them in to the grocery store's Lost & Found.Some of those bags were 15, maybe 20 years old, so the loss was less a violation and more a nostalgia trigger. A reminder of my life as a busy parent of three young children, of a life lived on two coasts and in vastly different climes. A reminder of a time when my own mother was still alive—and my next oldest brother as well. I thought of road trips and sleepovers, where a bag was as good as a suitcase. Lazy sunny times on the beach, shaking pebbles and sand out of them at the end of the day.I hadn't realized that every time I went grocery shopping, I was slinging my past by a handle through the present, collecting food to nourish the future.The Trader Joe's cashier remarked on my purchase, and I explained that my bags had been stolen. He commiserated with me, which felt nice. I commented that perhaps they were taken by an unhoused person; perhaps they needed the bags more than me. "If so, then I'm happy to buy more. You just never know where people are at or what they need."We talked about local car thefts, the opioid crisis, of wealth inequality. The cashier told me that the store manager never tries to stop shoplifters. They have some "regulars" that they recognize, but the manager would rather take the loss than cause further harm to anyone. The staff is completely onboard with that.The cashier packed up the few other groceries I'd purchased along with the bags: green tea, a dozen eggs, some pumpkin seeds, a pot of mustard. We wished each other well and said our goodbyes.The new bags are stiff and fold sharply, and I've yet to remove the price tags. I'll probably stop in to get a few more at some point. For now, these will do, and I'm off to a good start filling them with new memories, new hooks thrown into my personal timeline. Hooks no more permanent than the last, but comforting at least.#storytelling
(DIR) Post #AeyYiwyOrOPGRqmp9c by anne@toot.cat
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It was one of those midnights, where I tossed and turned. After a few hours I gave up, stomped down two flights of stairs to the basement, and threw myself on the big orange couch in front of the TV. The basement is an open space, half media and gaming, half craft and builder space, with shelves of supplies and my husband’s workbench in the corner. @dwenius is a fisherman, and he likes to build rods and tie flies.I was sitting there, grumpily surfing streaming services, when my dad stopped by for a visit.Two things you should know: one, my father has been dead since 1995 and two, I don’t believe in ghosts.Of course I will tell you I don’t believe in ghosts and then in the same breath say I grew up in a haunted house. There's simply no other way to describe it.It was a drafty old Victorian farmhouse, tucked under a shady ridge in rural Vermont. In addition to being generally chilly and damp throughout, there was one room that was always significantly colder than every other; didn’t matter the time of day, time of year. It was a spare bedroom and my mother used it as a sewing room and as an overnight guest room for visitors. Funny in retrospect, but honestly you could sleep there just fine at night. But if you tried to take a nap during the day? You’d wake out of a sound sleep—terrified, in a cold sweat, heart pounding—with no memory of what you’d been dreaming about.The attic was inexplicably noisy. From the hallway below, we would heard boards creaking overhead from the weight of footsteps, or storage boxes sliding across the floor. The attic door—which had both an upper and lower latch on it—always drifted open. Latch it tight before bed, and it would be cracked open an inch in the morning.At night, when my brothers and I were in our beds, a swirling cloud of multi-colored pinpoint lights would come flowing into each of our rooms in succession, float over the bed, then bunch up and swirl back out the door and on to the next room. We never felt frightened by this. It was as if the house were tucking us in at night and keeping us safe.So you can understand how, at 3:17 in the morning, it surprised me not at all to see a lemony aura hovering across the basement from me. Nor did I think it strange that I immediately knew it was my father.As quickly as I knew it was him, I was just as suddenly awash in grief. A grief I hadn’t felt in years, decades even. I said softly, “Hi, Dad.” Tears welled up and——Grief crying is different. Other kinds of tears, they trickle down your face. But grief? Grief FLOODS your eyes. Your nose runs. Your mouth fills with saliva. Your body sweats.As I wept, he floated in the corner of the craft space, by my husband’s workbench. Dad seemed to be turning, looking, saying, “What is this? Whose is this?” and I realized with a shock that he’d died before any of my current life had come to be. After my first marriage, before my second, before any of my kids were born. I had so much to tell him. Too much for words!Instead, in a long silent burst, my life of the past 24 years rose up and poured out of me with even greater force than my tears: images and sounds, births, deaths, jobs, houses, husbands… until at last I was empty, the river had run dry.At the end of all that, he only wanted to know one thing: was I okay?A question I hadn’t thought to ask myself for a long time. Maybe not since being hit by a car while walking in a crosswalk two years earlier. Not in all the long months of putting myself back together both physically and emotionally. Yet I found myself answering immediately without any thought at all. “Yeah Dad, I’m okay.“I’m really okay.”And for the first time in two years, I finally knew that I was.We stayed like that a while, me sitting on the couch, him existing in the space by the workbench. Then I saw him shift and rotate slightly again, and a memory from him washed over me, a return on the flood I’d unleashed:The two of us out fishing together in his boat on the lake at dusk. As the light faded we pulled in the down riggers, switched off the motor and sat back. We drifted and watched the Milky Way surge into brilliance overhead, listening to the gentle slap of water against the hull. I was in my late teens and struggling mightily with——with being a young adult, with the chasm between my desires in life on the one hand, and everything I didn’t know about the world and living in it on the other. I had said, “Dad, I just don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I should do!” And in reply he’d said the kindest possible thing to me, in the kindest possible way. “Oh babe, I don’t know what you should do, either.”And so I turned to this shimmering presence off to my right and said, “Dad, I still don’t know what to do, or what I want, or what I should be.”I felt him smile, laugh a little and say, “It’s okay. You don’t have to. I love you.”“I love you too, Dad.” We sat in peaceable silence for a while, all the tears and the memories settled, and then he slowly faded away.I don't believe in ghosts.#ghosts #haunted #halloween
(DIR) Post #AgmEDpYAAk7V4MuSwa by anne@toot.cat
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I'd seen the last partial eclipse, and while it was fun and interesting, I truly wondered what all the fuss was, regarding a total eclipse. A total eclipse is like a partial eclipse, just more of the same... right?Three minutes of totality was hardly enough time to process what I was seeing, hearing, feeling. From my human-on-a-planet perspective, I experience myself as moving very fast, and the planet as frozen in place. Even the moon and the sun seem sluggish in their movements compared to the speed with which I walk. But as the moon and sun crossed paths and slipped in and then out of totality, I was aware in a visceral way of just how fast these celestial bodies move through space. It was electrifying.It was also, literally, dizzying. In the gray light just before totality, several of our small group experienced vertigo. It felt like some odd combination of morning sickness and the sudden drop when you're in an elevator going down. The sort where if you move your eyes too quickly from side to side, you're likely to get queasy or the world will suddenly tilt at a very wrong angle.At first, I thought it was just me. But when I awkwardly blurted out, "Vertigo!" several other folks nodded in wordless agreement.The gulls over the water went mad, shrieking and pinwheeling. The frogs in the creek joined in the chorus. I like to imagine they felt it, too.Another sensation as the light and color dimmed was the chill from the temperature dropping rapidly. It went from a beautiful sunny day, 60 or 65 degrees, down to 45 or 50. I started in my shirtsleeves; close to totality I had to run inside and get a coat! My nose and fingers turned to ice.Milliseconds before full coverage, I saw pink flashes around the edge of the sun! Even with my viewing glasses on!Then – in an instant the sun was gone, replaced by a glowing, sparking ring in the sky. We all yelled and cheered and clapped our hands together. I felt a chill down my spine that had nothing to do with the chill in the air. There's no doubt, some ancient part of my DNA knows that it is completely wrong to steal the sun and that my very survival depends on its light and warmth.I ripped my glasses off to gaze long and lovingly, directly at the sun for the first time in my life! I could see a solar prominence, a pink loop of fire, a loop of plasma so big that it was visible to my bare naked eyes from eighty three million miles away.I remembered that I had brought binoculars outside, and so I snatched them up, held them to my face, and gasped. No wonder the sun has been worshipped as a god. I wanted nothing more than to spend all three minutes looking through the binoculars, but I also desperately wanted everyone else to see what I was seeing. I shrieked, "Look! Here! You have to look through the binoculars! Look and pass them around! Quick! It's unbelievable!" and probably other mad frantic exclamations, as I shoved them into the hands of the person next to me. "Hurry!"Once I'd handed off the binoculars, I took a moment to look around. It was a difficult choice to have to make. I mean, I've seen the landscape around where we live. I see it every day – but never during an eclipse. And I might never get to see the sun like this again. Which to look at?I'd never seen the landscape – or the rest of the sky for that matter – quite like this. Everything immediately around me drained of color yet perfectly visible. The horizon on all sides glowing golden and blue, as if it were sunrise or sunset 360° around us. The sky above turned violet-gray. High atmospheric clouds shimmering like fish scales against it. A sprinkling of stars, and the planet Venus. The faces of my comrades slack with wonder.I wished in the moment that it could last for hours.When even the tiniest sliver of sun re-emerged, even that barest hint of Sol instantly swept away the eery gloom and lit the whole world back up. We all shouted, as loudly as when the sun had disappeared, and reflexively turned our faces away to shield our eyes.#storytelling #eclipse #vermont
(DIR) Post #B6za16z6F4GHTgT3VQ by anne@toot.cat
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@tomstafford