FRIENDS
In Strange Places

Jennifer and I just came back to the city in a Bieber Bus full of strangers. We spent the weekend with people we once knew, but that was when we were different people. Now our friends are parents of smiling children, they own houses, run companies, can lots of apple pie filling. We’ve all changed and grown and become adults who think differently about how we fit in our worlds and what our worlds are.

We went to a flea market in Southern Ohio last weekend. It was full of white people selling Chinese things and making fudge for each other. Rows of consumerable knicknacks and collectable dustcatchers as far you could see. All my favorite brands of fun: Nascar, scented candles in interesting shapes, porcelain deer antlers with “Indian” beads, rings of pickled bologna. Harlan Barnhart would have liked the old tools here and there, but I have no eye for them. They just looked like sad pieces of junk to me. Sarah Palin had stopped by that small town last week and told the locals that she feels their pain: dead-end jobs that recently dead-ended, dead-beat dads that recently got a little bit deader down at the Manhattan Lounge. It’s a sad world of Vietnam Vets and methamphetamine. Zeb and Lisa and Josh and Terri are living right in the middle of it and trying to disrupt the toilet bowl spiral all around them. And that’s a good thing.

Shannon, my sister, and Rich just bought a house in the new buyer’s market. It’s a three-story antique mansion with floor-length mirrors and windows of filmy glass, slanting hardwood floors and heavy wrought iron doors in three layers of brick and ornate plaster. It looks like thousands of square feet of hard work, but if anyone can turn it into a treasure they can. It’s nice to have a museum in the family. I hope it can be brought back to life as a strange place in a very familiar world.