King of the World

This tall, bald fella with glasses came into the Red Eye, set his coat and a tote down at an empty table and began fluttering about “helping.”

He took magazines from the rack on the wall and added them according to some random internal pattern to the tables in the rest of the shop. He put creamer packets in a neat row under the non-functioning payphone in the back room while having a conversation with no one at all through the dead receiver.

He arranged a fist full of straws on the bench by the phone. He went into the bathroom, pulled the liner out of the trash can, set it on the floor, flushed the toilet, locked and closed the door with himself on the outside to prevent anyone from messing about with anything. He randomly informed customers that the coffee was very good and there was plenty of it.About the time he pulled out the duct tape and began looking for a place to use it, the owner thought maybe he should go.

”Why?!, he yipped. "I’ve made myself very clear! I’m tired of being polite to you about this! Fine…I’ll go. You know where to find me. You know where I work. Why do I have to leave? You should be doing all this (with an expansive hand gesture)! It’s not my job to stock the shop! You can call the Chinese place around the corner! I’m busy! I’m in the phonebook, you can page me. There are pagers all over town. There are clocks all over town – you probably have one at home – and they watch you through them. I don’t need this! I’m going!”

So he was gone. Pushing determinedly off to the next obsessive compulsive crisis where only he could save the situation. I’m not sure about him: is he to be pitied because he doesn’t know he’s gone momentarily crazy, or does this make him king of the world?
SPM

Writing on the Wall

I got in trouble once as a child for writing on a wall. I am grown now and can write on walls as often as I like, but I still choose my moments carefully.
SPM

Flight to Chicago

She showed us all how our seatbelts worked and then the plane gathered speed and took leave of the ground. I looked out the window as we rose and watched as the snow-powdered fields, trees, farm houses and roads got smaller and more exquisite until – suddenly – they were gone.

The whole world was gone and life had become incredibly simple because, at that moment, it only mattered that I had remembered to pack my toothbrush and say, “I love you,” before I left home.
SPM

Still Snowing

SPM

In the Attic

515 MIllard SPM.

Detroit Scenes

Tina Holtz Grew up in Detroit and needed a large work of art (or series) for a challenging space in her home. After some conversation with her, this is what I came up with. Watercolor, paper, charcoal on paper. Mounted in a frame made of reclaimed moulding and hardware from buildings that will shortly not exist. Frame detailed with brushed on gilding. SPM.

Remembering Naggy

When I moved back to Michigan, I was unsure I would like living here and had no idea how to connect with anyone. Until I moved into an apartment in a chopped-up old Victorian house upstairs from Naggy. (Her mother named her Agnes, but Naggy told me the name just didn’t take.) We started with nods or "hello's," moved on to the weather, then came family, and, finally, we were friends.
Naggy was eighty-years-old, swore as she said her rosary, observed a Saturday Sabbath and owned a lovely 18th century Thai Buddah, "Just in case."

Christmas day was looking all lovely in white lace and diamonds that year when I shoveled the steps of my building and headed over to Naggy's with goodies. She never cooked, only baked, so I made all of her favorite real foods and packaged them in Gladware.
(I found the best present for a woman who knew everything: A highly inaccurate, but very entertaining, biography on Lucretia Borzia [sic.] published in 1852 and bound in tacky red leather with a gold-tooled death's head grinning unconcernedly from the cover.)

We sat down in her tiny front room (I want one just as interestingly cluttered when I grow up. She even has a plaque from a London taxi commemorating the time it got hit in the Blitz.) and had slurry-thick coffee only old and young fools of the bookish kind can stand.

Toward the end of the visit I asked how she was going to put in her day. She looked out the window a minute, turned to me and said she missed snow angels. I looked out the window a minute, turned to her and asked what she wanted to do about it.

Naggy waddled outside behind me bundled from ankle to neck in fur, wearing a hat made of several dead pheasants and a quantity of brown ribbon and REEKING of moth balls. We made snow angels. We made several. And we laughed hard the whole while and whooped to no end. It was one of the best Christmas mornings ever.