Conor + 12 Smiles + D.St Edits (ie, not studying for history)
NEW CONOR OBERST ALBUM coming on May 5th. That's 67 days, i think? I'm excited.
ANYWAY.
Apparently some lady wrote a book that was jut a gigantic list of dozens and dozens of things that made her smile. I thought that was kind of sweet. Sometimes i like smiling more than laughing. That sounds strange coming out of my mouth. But a good smile is warm and sunny and wholesome feeling. It's like a picnic for you lips? Haha. That made no sense. Anyway. 12 Smiles.
1. Upstate New York: old barns, silos, too-long grass falling over your legs in the wind, cornfields, apple trees, grape-vines, fireflies, violets, cows, crows... all of it. :]
2. Books.
3. Wonka Brand Candy.
4. Sweaters.
5. Dried Blueberries.
6. Gingham. Anything Gingham. And vintage florals. Heck, anything with a pattern.
7. Gunky Brass Jewlry.
8. Broken Alarm Clocks.
9. When, at about 4:00, the sun is just starting to set, and it lights up everything from behind. The way the fuzz on people's hair looks like a halo. That's my favorite.
10. Those little baby two-note chords. I don't even know what they're called, but i absoloutely love them, haha.
11. Vignettes.
12. Sandals. And Boats. I love the water.
Oohhh my, that was idealistic. But i've been feeling cheesy lately, and i've been enjoying it. :]
More from Dearborn Street... I haven't written anything in a while so i just went nutzo and changed everything. It makes no sense, and is a total work in progress. haha- as always.
It’s 1945. This is The House on Dearborn Street in it’s heyday.
I’m fifteen years old. I’m sitting in my bedroom and staring at the ceiling and wishing that I don’t have to be fifteen years old and didn’t have to move to Indiana.
My parents are having a party downstairs. They are playing an ugly old song through a record player and wearing fancy shoes that make clicking sounds on the floor when they dance.
I pull a pillow over my head and moan in disgust.
“Pssst!” My brother whispers, “Joyce!” He‘s two rooms over, but the walls are so thin in this place that if it gets quiet enough- I bet you could hear a pin drop from the other side of the floor. “Joyce, what time is it?”
“Got no clue.”
“It can’t be much longer can it?”
“I sure hope not.” I force a stage-whisper from the back of my throat and replace my pillow over my head. “I have to get to sleep!” I gurgle into the fabric. There was no way I was listening to this all night.
I flipped on the lamp in my bedroom, and squinted as dusty yellow light coated the room. The knickknacks on my dresser were plastered with shadows. Shiny black pendant- new and plastic barely discernable from tiny toy elephant. A pile of sequins and a needle, unfinished embroidery. Teddy bear, Raggedy Anne, - remnants of my childhood, my life in Louisiana. And my untouched journal. My fingers lace over the red fabric that wraps it’s bindings, tiny woodland flowers embroidered into it’s skin, a sunny yellow ribbon tied in a bow to hold it shut. Kathryn handed it to me on my last day there- “Everyone wrote something for you” she said. I threw my suitcase into the Ford, avoiding eye contact. “We left you some blank pages. Maybe you’ll send us something?”
I smiled through the fog of tears, “Yeah, maybe someday.”
I hated goodbyes. I just wanted to get out of there. I tucked the notebook into my massive pocket, and pulled myself into the backseat. I waved from the window and watched the way the hills rolled, straight through Tennessee. I watched the buildings sprout from the dirt once we hit the Ohio border, and skidded through muddy Illinois with my hands under my knees, waiting. Until we walked up the front porch. It was fantastic, the house. It was gorgeous. Seemed like it was painted fourteen colors, but it wasn’t home. Shudders on the windows, thick wooden floorboards, light pouring in like it was mid- July, in September. The hallways were stuffy like a closet, the railing on the stairway was smooth and curved to the shape of someone else’s hands. I felt small walking through the titanic doorways, felt younger, felt out of place.
***
Five year old Maria was sitting on the steps of the house on Dearborn street when I saw her for the first time. She was a skippy girl with big black eyes and tiny red lips that crumpled like tissue paper when she spoke. She kicked her black mary-janes against the wooden steps and watched the light blue paint flake off in chunks.
“1...2...3...” She said, ramming her foot to the panels with each count:
“4...5...6.” She listened to her heels hit the hollow steps and giggles. It was a Tuesday morning and she was waiting for the bus. She had a backpack on her back and a lunch in a lunchbox and she was wearing a shirt that she’d just bought that Sunday.
“I like the collar,” she had said to her mother, as she walked her to my house (her bus stop) “It makes me think of a princess dress.”
Her mother smiled, and swung their held hands before she knocked on my door. The door didn’t have much solid to knock on, and still doesn’t. Just a peeling wooden frame and a sunken pillow of meshed wire.
“Mrs. Clearborn!” She screamed, “It’s Stacy. I called you this morning about my daughter?” She tapped her toes to the welcome mat with a trill of anxiety. “Mrs. Clearborn?” She’d asked as I pulled the stop from the door, and felt my fingers falter over the handle of the deadbolt. I cracked the door just wide enough that she could see my face through the opening. My nose took the brunt of the stream of October air sliding through the crack in the doorway. It smelled like chai tea and dirt. I coughed, and nodded:
“Yes.”
“Stacy Brierley. I talked to you this morning. And, you know my husband?”
“Cameron?” I smiled a dry kind of smile and pushed the door open wider.
She nodded, grasping for the ends of her long hair, hoping to hold it from the wind. “You said that you could watch my daughter for a while?” Her face twisted in a knot. I could have been able to tell her whole story, just from that face.
“Of course, honey!”
“There she is.” She pushed her hair out of her eyes and pointed to little Maria, who was sitting on the steps and swinging her feet. “I’m so sorry, I just…I need some help.”
“Mmhhmm.” I turned to the pile of shoes near the door, and picked the matted pink slippers with the holes in the bottoms, and slid them over my feet.
“So you’re good to watch her? Just until the school bus comes? I promise, it won’t be more than fifteen minutes. And she’s just so small-” She looked over to Maria, little pink bow tied to the bun on the back of her head, and playing with the seam on the bottoms of sleeves. “I just can’t bear to leave her.” She looked up, anxious- like she was crossing her fingers in her head.
“I told you last night, I’d be happy to help!” I smiled and told her to move fast and get to work. Not to be late.
She grinned back, an anxious grin, and I told her that everything was going to be alright. I watched as she gave her daughter a nervous hug and walked away. I bet she looked back about five times before she broke into a hurried jog.
“Mrs. Clearborn!” Maria screamed, her tiny voice puncturing the breeze like a pin.
“Yes, Honey.”
“What did my mom tell you?” She was still sitting on the steps, hunched over and looking at the buttons on her cuffs, and I was still all the way at the door, hunched over and struggling with my slippers.
“She wanted to make sure that I watch you before you go to school.”
“Oh.” She kept her head down, staring at her hands.
I propped the door with a brick, and waddled a few old-lady-waddles towards Maria. Her face jumbled up the same way her mother’s had before- all panic and worry and misgiving. She didn’t say another word, her eyes bulged so wide. “Did you know that I knew your father when he was your age?” I pulled the words out of my mouth like you pull a petal off of a flower. A little too much care, a little too much deliberation.
“No. I didn’t.” Her lips folded in on themselves and she twisted them around on her face.
“I can tell you a story about him.”
“I… I don’t think so.” she said, voice small and quivering.
“Why not?”
“I don’t really like stories.”
“What? I don’t think I’ve ever met a girl your age that didn’t like a good story.”
Her nose twitched like she had a secret. “I just… don’t like them.” She turned around, and started up with the swinging her feet. I shuffled my way into the house, and watched till the bus drove up in all it’s mustard-yellow mystery, and then pulled away.
* * *
My ears hut something awful. Marlene hadn’t warned me her house was being renovated house next door was being renovated. I wouldn’t have heard the knock on my door for all the banging and clanging outside, but I happened to be watching Maria that morning, and the bus was running late- as it often did.
“I have you down as a Mrs. Clearborn. Is that correct?” The young man held his nose to the clipboard in his hand, and mechanically slid a pencil behind his left ear. The sun fell through the crack in the door as I opened it just barely wide enough to see out
“I’m not having any work done on the house,”
“Oh, no. I’m not with the crew. Marlene and Jim decided to vacation during the renovation. I’m a house sitter.” He raised his eyes from the clipboard, and squinted at me with some kind of malcontent. Did he want me to open the door all the way? What was wrong? “Your neighbors wanted me to check in with you, to be sure that you were alright and doing fine.”
“Well, except for the noise, I’m alright and doing fine. Can I ask you a question?” I pushed the door open just slightly, hoping his eyebrows would unfurl with the movement.
“Sure can.” He spoke like a businessman: confident, one hand at his side, the other clasped to the clipboard. And no word spoken with out a smile.
“How long is this all going to take?”
“Well, I was talking to the guys- the crew up t here, and they were describing it a little to me. They think of it as an art- construction like surgery. Except with houses, and…” From all the hammering and sawing that was going on, it might as well have been a double bypass with complications.
I burst in- “How long is it going to take?”
The expression on his face went dull. “About two weeks, more or less.”
“Fantastic,” I mumbled, and gently pressed the door closed.
I stumbled into the living room, frustrated with the pity. But I had a new favorite window. I hadn’t noticed this one for years, not until I came back from college, in my twenties. It’s behind the kitchen, on the wall, half-facing the street, half facing the house next door. The breeze comes in perfect when I open it, and there is nothing like smell of the fall. Nothing in the world. Some days I hate it. I open my window and for some reason I’m so frustrated with the breeze. But other days, It hangs itself just so over the still air- the perfect garnish with all it’s sweet, oaky flavors. It makes me want to swallow it whole. I found that when I don’t have much to do, I liked to look out the window. Fall is especially nice. The leaves are all fragile and worn like fabric, and the sun-shine ran through them with a sort of cantaloupe-glow. It breathes life into the matte cornflower blue walls.
The windows are some creaky old wooden things. The paint flecks off of them and falls into the room. I’ve got a decent pile brewing under this one from all the times I’ve opened it these last few days. I suspect with the peeling paint and all that, this place looks like a bit of a haunted mansion from the outsides. Like bats should come screeching out of the windows and doors at night. And me, the cranky old owner of the haunted house. Me, who stays cooped up in my third story bedroom and watches the world pass by from above. With my little pen in hand, my little journal on the crooked window ledge.
I wondered what the kids thought of me. The little ones. I would have given me a fright when I was their age. I would’ve dared my brother to run up to the house and knock on the door, and hide behind the bushes until I came down, bickering and mumbling my old-person way. And I would have laughed when I closed the door and screamed toward the bushes: “Damn Kids! Get off the lawn!”
But I would scream that. I promised to myself that I would never become “that old lady”. Even though, in a right, there was no stopping that.
* * *
She spoke in squashed sentences with her hands clasped in a knot.
.
Click to viewANYWAY.
Apparently some lady wrote a book that was jut a gigantic list of dozens and dozens of things that made her smile. I thought that was kind of sweet. Sometimes i like smiling more than laughing. That sounds strange coming out of my mouth. But a good smile is warm and sunny and wholesome feeling. It's like a picnic for you lips? Haha. That made no sense. Anyway. 12 Smiles.
1. Upstate New York: old barns, silos, too-long grass falling over your legs in the wind, cornfields, apple trees, grape-vines, fireflies, violets, cows, crows... all of it. :]
2. Books.
3. Wonka Brand Candy.
4. Sweaters.
5. Dried Blueberries.
6. Gingham. Anything Gingham. And vintage florals. Heck, anything with a pattern.
7. Gunky Brass Jewlry.
8. Broken Alarm Clocks.
9. When, at about 4:00, the sun is just starting to set, and it lights up everything from behind. The way the fuzz on people's hair looks like a halo. That's my favorite.
10. Those little baby two-note chords. I don't even know what they're called, but i absoloutely love them, haha.
11. Vignettes.
12. Sandals. And Boats. I love the water.
Oohhh my, that was idealistic. But i've been feeling cheesy lately, and i've been enjoying it. :]
More from Dearborn Street... I haven't written anything in a while so i just went nutzo and changed everything. It makes no sense, and is a total work in progress. haha- as always.
It’s 1945. This is The House on Dearborn Street in it’s heyday.
I’m fifteen years old. I’m sitting in my bedroom and staring at the ceiling and wishing that I don’t have to be fifteen years old and didn’t have to move to Indiana.
My parents are having a party downstairs. They are playing an ugly old song through a record player and wearing fancy shoes that make clicking sounds on the floor when they dance.
I pull a pillow over my head and moan in disgust.
“Pssst!” My brother whispers, “Joyce!” He‘s two rooms over, but the walls are so thin in this place that if it gets quiet enough- I bet you could hear a pin drop from the other side of the floor. “Joyce, what time is it?”
“Got no clue.”
“It can’t be much longer can it?”
“I sure hope not.” I force a stage-whisper from the back of my throat and replace my pillow over my head. “I have to get to sleep!” I gurgle into the fabric. There was no way I was listening to this all night.
I flipped on the lamp in my bedroom, and squinted as dusty yellow light coated the room. The knickknacks on my dresser were plastered with shadows. Shiny black pendant- new and plastic barely discernable from tiny toy elephant. A pile of sequins and a needle, unfinished embroidery. Teddy bear, Raggedy Anne, - remnants of my childhood, my life in Louisiana. And my untouched journal. My fingers lace over the red fabric that wraps it’s bindings, tiny woodland flowers embroidered into it’s skin, a sunny yellow ribbon tied in a bow to hold it shut. Kathryn handed it to me on my last day there- “Everyone wrote something for you” she said. I threw my suitcase into the Ford, avoiding eye contact. “We left you some blank pages. Maybe you’ll send us something?”
I smiled through the fog of tears, “Yeah, maybe someday.”
I hated goodbyes. I just wanted to get out of there. I tucked the notebook into my massive pocket, and pulled myself into the backseat. I waved from the window and watched the way the hills rolled, straight through Tennessee. I watched the buildings sprout from the dirt once we hit the Ohio border, and skidded through muddy Illinois with my hands under my knees, waiting. Until we walked up the front porch. It was fantastic, the house. It was gorgeous. Seemed like it was painted fourteen colors, but it wasn’t home. Shudders on the windows, thick wooden floorboards, light pouring in like it was mid- July, in September. The hallways were stuffy like a closet, the railing on the stairway was smooth and curved to the shape of someone else’s hands. I felt small walking through the titanic doorways, felt younger, felt out of place.
***
Five year old Maria was sitting on the steps of the house on Dearborn street when I saw her for the first time. She was a skippy girl with big black eyes and tiny red lips that crumpled like tissue paper when she spoke. She kicked her black mary-janes against the wooden steps and watched the light blue paint flake off in chunks.
“1...2...3...” She said, ramming her foot to the panels with each count:
“4...5...6.” She listened to her heels hit the hollow steps and giggles. It was a Tuesday morning and she was waiting for the bus. She had a backpack on her back and a lunch in a lunchbox and she was wearing a shirt that she’d just bought that Sunday.
“I like the collar,” she had said to her mother, as she walked her to my house (her bus stop) “It makes me think of a princess dress.”
Her mother smiled, and swung their held hands before she knocked on my door. The door didn’t have much solid to knock on, and still doesn’t. Just a peeling wooden frame and a sunken pillow of meshed wire.
“Mrs. Clearborn!” She screamed, “It’s Stacy. I called you this morning about my daughter?” She tapped her toes to the welcome mat with a trill of anxiety. “Mrs. Clearborn?” She’d asked as I pulled the stop from the door, and felt my fingers falter over the handle of the deadbolt. I cracked the door just wide enough that she could see my face through the opening. My nose took the brunt of the stream of October air sliding through the crack in the doorway. It smelled like chai tea and dirt. I coughed, and nodded:
“Yes.”
“Stacy Brierley. I talked to you this morning. And, you know my husband?”
“Cameron?” I smiled a dry kind of smile and pushed the door open wider.
She nodded, grasping for the ends of her long hair, hoping to hold it from the wind. “You said that you could watch my daughter for a while?” Her face twisted in a knot. I could have been able to tell her whole story, just from that face.
“Of course, honey!”
“There she is.” She pushed her hair out of her eyes and pointed to little Maria, who was sitting on the steps and swinging her feet. “I’m so sorry, I just…I need some help.”
“Mmhhmm.” I turned to the pile of shoes near the door, and picked the matted pink slippers with the holes in the bottoms, and slid them over my feet.
“So you’re good to watch her? Just until the school bus comes? I promise, it won’t be more than fifteen minutes. And she’s just so small-” She looked over to Maria, little pink bow tied to the bun on the back of her head, and playing with the seam on the bottoms of sleeves. “I just can’t bear to leave her.” She looked up, anxious- like she was crossing her fingers in her head.
“I told you last night, I’d be happy to help!” I smiled and told her to move fast and get to work. Not to be late.
She grinned back, an anxious grin, and I told her that everything was going to be alright. I watched as she gave her daughter a nervous hug and walked away. I bet she looked back about five times before she broke into a hurried jog.
“Mrs. Clearborn!” Maria screamed, her tiny voice puncturing the breeze like a pin.
“Yes, Honey.”
“What did my mom tell you?” She was still sitting on the steps, hunched over and looking at the buttons on her cuffs, and I was still all the way at the door, hunched over and struggling with my slippers.
“She wanted to make sure that I watch you before you go to school.”
“Oh.” She kept her head down, staring at her hands.
I propped the door with a brick, and waddled a few old-lady-waddles towards Maria. Her face jumbled up the same way her mother’s had before- all panic and worry and misgiving. She didn’t say another word, her eyes bulged so wide. “Did you know that I knew your father when he was your age?” I pulled the words out of my mouth like you pull a petal off of a flower. A little too much care, a little too much deliberation.
“No. I didn’t.” Her lips folded in on themselves and she twisted them around on her face.
“I can tell you a story about him.”
“I… I don’t think so.” she said, voice small and quivering.
“Why not?”
“I don’t really like stories.”
“What? I don’t think I’ve ever met a girl your age that didn’t like a good story.”
Her nose twitched like she had a secret. “I just… don’t like them.” She turned around, and started up with the swinging her feet. I shuffled my way into the house, and watched till the bus drove up in all it’s mustard-yellow mystery, and then pulled away.
* * *
My ears hut something awful. Marlene hadn’t warned me her house was being renovated house next door was being renovated. I wouldn’t have heard the knock on my door for all the banging and clanging outside, but I happened to be watching Maria that morning, and the bus was running late- as it often did.
“I have you down as a Mrs. Clearborn. Is that correct?” The young man held his nose to the clipboard in his hand, and mechanically slid a pencil behind his left ear. The sun fell through the crack in the door as I opened it just barely wide enough to see out
“I’m not having any work done on the house,”
“Oh, no. I’m not with the crew. Marlene and Jim decided to vacation during the renovation. I’m a house sitter.” He raised his eyes from the clipboard, and squinted at me with some kind of malcontent. Did he want me to open the door all the way? What was wrong? “Your neighbors wanted me to check in with you, to be sure that you were alright and doing fine.”
“Well, except for the noise, I’m alright and doing fine. Can I ask you a question?” I pushed the door open just slightly, hoping his eyebrows would unfurl with the movement.
“Sure can.” He spoke like a businessman: confident, one hand at his side, the other clasped to the clipboard. And no word spoken with out a smile.
“How long is this all going to take?”
“Well, I was talking to the guys- the crew up t here, and they were describing it a little to me. They think of it as an art- construction like surgery. Except with houses, and…” From all the hammering and sawing that was going on, it might as well have been a double bypass with complications.
I burst in- “How long is it going to take?”
The expression on his face went dull. “About two weeks, more or less.”
“Fantastic,” I mumbled, and gently pressed the door closed.
I stumbled into the living room, frustrated with the pity. But I had a new favorite window. I hadn’t noticed this one for years, not until I came back from college, in my twenties. It’s behind the kitchen, on the wall, half-facing the street, half facing the house next door. The breeze comes in perfect when I open it, and there is nothing like smell of the fall. Nothing in the world. Some days I hate it. I open my window and for some reason I’m so frustrated with the breeze. But other days, It hangs itself just so over the still air- the perfect garnish with all it’s sweet, oaky flavors. It makes me want to swallow it whole. I found that when I don’t have much to do, I liked to look out the window. Fall is especially nice. The leaves are all fragile and worn like fabric, and the sun-shine ran through them with a sort of cantaloupe-glow. It breathes life into the matte cornflower blue walls.
The windows are some creaky old wooden things. The paint flecks off of them and falls into the room. I’ve got a decent pile brewing under this one from all the times I’ve opened it these last few days. I suspect with the peeling paint and all that, this place looks like a bit of a haunted mansion from the outsides. Like bats should come screeching out of the windows and doors at night. And me, the cranky old owner of the haunted house. Me, who stays cooped up in my third story bedroom and watches the world pass by from above. With my little pen in hand, my little journal on the crooked window ledge.
I wondered what the kids thought of me. The little ones. I would have given me a fright when I was their age. I would’ve dared my brother to run up to the house and knock on the door, and hide behind the bushes until I came down, bickering and mumbling my old-person way. And I would have laughed when I closed the door and screamed toward the bushes: “Damn Kids! Get off the lawn!”
But I would scream that. I promised to myself that I would never become “that old lady”. Even though, in a right, there was no stopping that.
* * *
She spoke in squashed sentences with her hands clasped in a knot.
.