Random notes: July 23, 2003
Credit: Bill Bamberger (interview)
Bus #663
The driver is compassionate. He waits at the stop for a balding Chinese man who is running at the bus like it was home plate. He wears glasses and a blue checked shirt. He sits on a bench seat across from the wheelchair lift.
A big wide-spaced-teeth smile flashes on the face of a woman wearing an ugly vest. It triangles and square and squiggles stitched on it in felt. This is something she could’ve made in third grade, had she had the proper equipment. She has thick eyebrows and thick arms.
Then there is a brown-haired girl on the right. Paled-skinned and wire fingers, she is reading “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.†I don’t understand the title of her book. Shouldn’t it catch you after you fall down? And, if it’s catching you, how can you also be falling?
This could be an error in my notes. Maybe it was. “The Spirit Catches you When You Fall Down.†That would make more sense.
But then, it would also make more sense to wear a respectable vest on the way to what I imagine must be some academic or administrative job.
The chapter is “Gold and Dross.†Dross is discarded, waste, or impure matter. Also the scum formed by oxidation on the surface of molten materials (like lava?). What a strange wiry-fingered girl this must be. She is pessimistic (you fall down) but also interested in science.
Wait, googling… ah, here:
(Turns out my fake-shorthand notes were accurate after all. Nice to know.)
It’s a sunny morning anchored in still, cool air. But even now the sun is hot, and it’s going to be a summer day, this one, for sure. Still and cool, yes, but clean, no. It smells city-y. Like a mixture of pollution smells that adds up to something more than just pollution.
“As they were selling it off, it was like they were tearing us apart inside and selling us off in pieces.”
Robert Riley, a factory worker more than thirty years
Most of work was spent looking up antique furniture serial numbers. It’s a good table, but not great. Built of walnut or oak by White Furniture of Mebane, N.C., a company that built furniture by hand for years. They stopped making it that way before this particular model, but it’s still nice to know. Like having a 1980s Mustang. Not as good as the older ones, but still in the same vicinity. Anyway, the factory closed in 1993(photos here and here), so it’s at least sort of an antique.
Left work shortly after one. Work continues on the Coffman lawn. They’ve now dug it up twice since the building opened at the beginning of the year. Apparently it’s a complicated lawn.
The day is warm. Not so hot like I thought it’d be. What a nice day.