Saturday, May 16, 2009

A Date To Prom



Hi everyone! Here's the start of a new something or other I've started (maybe a novel?!). Love the comments from this week -- I'm thinking of a post to address all of them. Happy Saturday!


I like words that sound alike but mean different things -- take weak and week. One is a judgment, a word I misspelled in a grade school spelling bee and still have trouble with to this day and week, an increment of time, something you’re glad to be at the end of, finished, done. I lost the spelling bee to Calvin Anderson and years later, living in Detroit, I got interviewed by an FBI agent about his fitness for service and mostly if he was gay. Where did my judgment go? I knew what I knew and yet I fell back on the old Mineral Wells standby, He had a date to prom.

The FBI agent asked if we had a dining room table, the we being me and N, my much older boyfriend at the time. I don’t need to tell you how that ended, not with any, we’re done, let’s be friends speech. More like lingering allergies. From the start, we were a car with the engine light on. We did not have a table of any kind, the only furniture being two couches my friend Andrew gave me. The couches were a little worse for the wear because of frequent visits from our landlord’s cat, Muscles, a fat kitty who loved to claw. The landlords lived in the flat below and filled their place with strange objects that she referred to as “satirical” art. She showed them to me once, truly hideous things, and said that people over forty found them disturbing and often wanted to cry when they saw them because people over forty feared death. This is how you learn to talk, I suppose, if you have gone to the Chicago Institute of Art and now are stuck teaching rich little brats at an elite prep school in Detroit. I pointed out that N was forty-five and she said she never would have guessed which was a lie. N looked all of his age and then some, never having a met a bottle of sunscreen or moisturizer he liked. She told me that she and her husband had been shocked by my arrival, that they hadn’t expected me to be so peppy, a euphemism for our twenty year age difference.

7 comments:

boneman said...

Well, it should make for an interesting book.
Though I have problems with the description you chose.
A weak week, if one wished it to be over once took.
Me? I'de much rather still be sniffing the rose.

"What rose?" you undoubtably ask
not remembering a rose taken to task.

Ah, but you did, though memory might not serve me that well.
I thought that 'rose' was thje most prolific of sounds, tell....

there's the flower
the verb to move a boat,
the verb of two people fighting (maybe more)
there's rising, and also the religious miracle from the dead,
and even lobster guttings from under its body tore.

Perhaps a bit more, too
but as I already told you,
two years shy of sixty has affected my brain.
Either that, or perhaps watelogged from too much rain.

d=))

Charles Gramlich said...

Interesting, but a bit early for me to tell how things are going with this piece. Satirical art. I take that to mean not art.

Scott said...

Michelle,

I had a friend who went to the art school in Chicago...she said even though it was an art school, you still had to have a number of paintings of ducks in water to get noticed...her work is decidedly not that kind of art. That's the Midwest for you.

I liked this piece...it'd be interesting to see more .

Hope you have a good weekend...talk to ya later!

the walking man said...

I wonder how the FBI man would have done with his judgement of me? I didn't even go to prom...or graduation either, come to think of it.

Anonymous said...

AH, I MISSED THE SENIOR PROM BECAUSE MY BOY FRIEND SKIPPED SCHOOL, WENT TO NEW JERSEY WITH THE GUYS TO GET BEER. HIS DAD FOUND OUT ABOUT IT, THE SCHOOL CALLED SINCE SO MANY KIDS HAD SKIPPED THAT DAY. MY BOYFRIEND LIED TO HIS FATHER AND THAT IS WHEN HE GOT WALLOPED AND GROUNDED FOR THE WEEK. I CRIED. MY GOWN HUNG ON A HANGAR UNWORN.

Lana Gramlich said...

Interesting thus far.

Ironically I was the best speller in our school. I ended up being exempt from college-level English courses because I truly believed the grown ups who assured me that English was important. Unfortunately it turned out to be just another of many lies they were peddling. The grown ups in my life were such LIARS!

Anonymous said...

Raze and Raise