Flowers and Owls

 

For lunch I had falafel, but the man at the place I have been to twice before, the handsome one with the fine black moustache and the light eyes, did not look at me today, did not ask me warmly how the falafel was, did not give me a piece of free baklava, as he did before, third time perhaps is not the charm, but I sat in the light pouring in golden at my table and read poetry, Erou by Maya Phillips. Then I went to the Dunkin next door to redeem a free drink, a big tea with lots of cream, since I was resolved that the rest of today after the hospital would be my day, a day for me. In the Dunkin, the thing to remember, that odd couple who came in, who I could not figure out, the short, plump, shabbily dressed middle-aged woman, and the tall, thin, well-dressed and very strange young man with her, he did not speak, but she did, he had unusual mannerisms and a somewhat cadaverous face, and he kept looking at me intently, turning around as he waited in line with her, looking at me long past the moment of polite interest, I wondered what their story was.

 

To the Walgreens, they moved my prescription to another location, so I will get it later, but I did get a Saint Clare seven day candle and a glass Virgin of Guadalupe votive candle holder, though I am not a Catholic, and a $15 Starbucks gift card for myself, and I waited in line holding these, in my mind, specifically connected items thinking of feminine divinity, about hodgepodge faith and witchery and knowledge and reverence, of making do with meaning where meaning can be found, of mothers, serpents, saints, the sea, of prayer, of offering, of love. 

 

In line ahead of me was a man with two children in school uniforms, a boy of about nine with two ostentatious chains around his neck, silver and gold, one looked like it had some kind of goon head pendant, and the other looked like a Thor’s hammer, and then a girl of perhaps eight with brightly colored beads in her hair. The man was talking to another man in line, I heard him say something like, “We don’t need to fight right now. We’re in chill out mode.” The boy repeated, “Chill out mode.” But the girl said in a soft, contradictory tone, “We’re savages.” And her father said, “Savage! Where’d you learn that?” I couldn’t hear her answer, but as the men kept talking, I heard her say, “Savage, savage,” to herself, with her own secret little-girl pleasure that I recognized and admired. 

 

Walking past an apartment building, I saw a line of bare shrubs with the tags still attached and I looked at what they said: dwarf burning bush. I loved this name, this line of bare, wintry burning bushes, a mundane message from God all arranged here in a nice ordinary fashion, and I bent to take a photo of one of the tags. A man passing pushing a pram (pardon the Britishism, I couldn’t resist the alliteration) looked at me with curiosity and grinned at me and I loved him a bit (every day out and about in the world is a matter of how many times I will fall in love and with whom), and he was heading the direction I was going, and I walked behind him, and admired the baby, all wrapped up against the cold, just its perfect, plump face showing, such red cheeks, particularly darling. 

 

To the library, breaking with my half-hearted resolution not to check out books to have around while I’m possibly recuperating, to be spared the bother of returning them, I said, fuck it, if I want library books, I shall have them, and there is a reading game I want to play in February, and some groups on Goodreads I’m half thinking of participating in the group read with, and while being inside in the bleakest month of the year, perhaps with an incision to mind, makes the perfect conditions for knocking out the books. Looked for Our Mutual Friend (though I wasn’t sure I wanted to tackle it, but I wanted to look), it was not on the shelf where it ought to have been, neither was Iza’s Ballad by Magda Szabó. Ms Ice Sandwich still isn’t anywhere to be found, either. There was a copy of The Enchanted April, but it was a big, ugly, poorly formatted CreateSpace version, and my aesthetic sense recoiled - the better version is at a branch out of my usual turf, and I probably won’t request it. I did get two of my intended titles, The Key by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and Romancer Erector by Diane Williams. As I walked about, I saw a young man, handsome in the way I usually don’t like, maybe mid-twenties with bone structure generally considered of the good sort and the right amount of cinematic scruff, the sort of fellow who would never have looked twice at me once upon a time, sitting slumped and comfortable as can be in his body, reading a fat book with a giant red swastika on the cover, I saw him look at me, and smile pointedly, and again, later, another look - I could not determine if the book was a tawdry thriller, or a reasonably serious work of nonfiction, which I reckon would be the two major possibilities with that sort of cover. I walked around in case the questionable figure would make a questionable move, I looked at shelves, and that’s how I came to my unintended title, a big book of stories by Clarice Lispector, an author I’ve meant to read for some time but haven’t gotten round to, and I saw it and grabbed it and looked through it and came to a story called Obsession and knew I needed it though I didn’t need it, and added it with a sigh to my little stack of books I’d meant to never get. I’d been a couple days prior, and got Junji Ito’s adaptation of No Longer Human which I could not resist when I looked it up on the catalog for whatever godforsaken reason, and then also a couple books of spontaneously noticed poetry.

 

Then to the Starbucks to meet with the boy, I ordered him and myself a matcha latte, and I read Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and waited for him, and we walked home and I told him about my wickedness, my dozen little moments of note in the day, kissed him at street corners, and now I am here, writing this, and will eat some leftover lasagna in a moment or two. I had a good day, a day for myself.