Campfire Girls

I never got to be a Girl Scout. Mom said no, and rightly so. I just wanted to join for the field trips. I really didn't care about badges and service and selling cookies and all that. I wouldn't have like it and she knew it. Smart, Mom.

So I never got to sit around the campfire, making S'mores and doing whatever else it is the girls do around the campfire.

That's OK. Now that I'm a grownup, I get to do the campfire gig with Girl Friends, and I'll gladly trade the badges for wine and home-made marshmallows and a lovely firepit on a cool February night in western Maryland.

The Lake Pointe Inn is a two-hour drive from Pittsburgh and the perfect spot for a girls getaway.

Shiny coins

A few years ago, three girlfriends and I went to Paris for a week.

It was a fabulous trip, made all the more so because we had traveled together before. We are comfortable as a group or setting off solo and catching up later. As it happened, we spent a lot of time together on this trip and had lots of "Oooh! shiny!" moments.

One of our group is insatiably curious and incredibly smart. When something catches her eye she stops to examine and wonder. Often we would be wandering only to realize Carol was one or two blocks behind us, engrossed in her latest "Oooh! shiny!"

I thought about that today after finishing an essay by Hanif Kureishi, published in the New York Times on Feb. 19. The headline, underneath an illustration showing, inside, children in a grey-toned classroom and outside, a wave of brightly colored birds and fish, read:

"The Art of Distraction
A flighty mind might be going somewhere. Is our focus on focus misguided?"

The thrust is that distraction, especially, but not exclusively, among children is not a problem, but rather a problem-solving tool. A way for a mind focusing too intently to wander, explore and solve the problem subconsciously, using other neural pathways.

Kureishi especially points to the strait-jacketing influence of Ritalin therapy on children. It forces them to focus, but on what? A boring classroom? A rote-memorization test? Perhaps the solution to the "My child can't focus" problem isn't medication, but parental embrace of curiosity and as Kureishi puts it, "flights of fancy."

Of course, I'm the unmarried marriage counselor here, having no kids of my own. But I do have a mind that tells me every day, when I am faced with a work problem or personal stressor, to push away from the desk and go outside for coffee, to walk to the gym or just upstairs and back down again.

That push-away usually gets the problem solved. And if it doesn't, I've been distracted enough to look at it with a fresh eye. Or I've seen something neat that made my brain say "Oooh! shiny!" Another coin tucked into my cranial treasure chest.

That is why Carol is so amazing. She saves every shiny coin she sees. And they all come in handy one day or another.

For the other side of Kureishi's coin, KJ Dell'Antonia.

The picture is of an entry in the annual Art Prize competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Our foursome went there in October to celebrate Carol's birthday.

Mid Century, My Love

I grew up in a mid-century modern family. Plenty of sibs, mobility, cool parents with adventurous sensibilities.

So no wonder that the mid-century modern style is my style. I have my parents' teak dining room table and chairs, purchased for about $100 in 1963 or so at the Army post exchange in Orleans. An Eames-style chair and ottoman

Blenko glassware from my mom and grandmother and the nice antique shop at Trax Farms in Finleyville.

A teak hutch from a store in the North Hills. A pretty tulip chair from Craigslist.

I'm kind of an accumulator... which is not a problem with glassware, but the furniture starts to take up space. Hmmm.

Cincy has a cool show and I think it would be neat for Pittsburgh to have one, too.

Fashion week

Here in Pittsburgh, every week is fashion week. And, mostly, the fashion is bad.

Seriously. If you are Downtown, Monday through Sunday, you will see very oversized bad baggy pants.

Also, lots of white tennis shoes.

There will be dangerously overstfuffed backpacks.

Yards, yards and more yards of jeans, fake-faded, fake-torn, fake-wrinkled; basically fake. Oh and they will be hanging down. Know what I mean?

Also, lots of sweatpants. Throw in a few hoodies.

Occasionally, a nice coat and shoes.

Today, I ran errands in a pair of jeans, tennis shoes, grey long sleeved top, silk scarf and tailored black cashmere gloves. For dinner with my husband, I upgraded to a dark gray skirt, matching light gray knit top nylons and pumps. Nice, right? Not too fancy.

Except at dinner at a very nice steakhouse, we were the best-dressed. Even the wait staff was better clad than their customers.

I wonder: Is it worth taking my time to do something nice if someone else has the same opportunity and just says "F--k it. I can't be bothered"?

Let me reflect a moment.


Reflecting.


Still reflecting



So, yeah.

I am never, ever, going to walk into a nice steakhouse in jeans an tennies and act like its OK. Not happening.

After we left the good food-ugly clientele restaurant, we walked past the skaters at the PPG Ice Rink Downtown.

And right here, thank you New York Times, street photography of FW,

My retirement stove

One day, some day, I may retire.

I'm not worried about keeping busy then, because there are so many things now that I want to do that I don't have time to do. Which is interesting because once upon a time, I worked, kept a house, exercised, watched TV, traveled, took pottery classes and found all sorts of time to do many things that I wanted to do. How does it happen that as time goes by (faster and faster) there is less and less time to do the things we want to do?

I wish I knew. But there you go. I feel squeezed.

A friend at work was waxing eloquent this week about wanting to do nothing but paint, and yet, he just can't squeeze it in. He was embarrassed about over-sharing, but I completely understood. I felt like saying "Just take 15 minutes!" but how could I? I'm not even organized to take 15 minutes for something.

A weekend or so ago, my husband and I dropped off a bunch of stuff at Construction Junction, where we saw an awesome old Chambers stove. I don't have the expertise to do stove restoration, but I love the idea of having time for a project like that. Of having time to learn how to do something like that.

But maybe one day, some day, I'll have time for a retirement stove.

Or for spending more time paying attention to cool things like this wall design at Anthropologie. Smashed cans. How cool is that?

Meanwhile, to Ellen & Virginia: Thanks for dinner and for many more years of friendship. (Think what we'll do when we retire!)

Life/Paper

Slow day at work. The end of my shift found me cleaning out shelves and desk drawers of accumulated trinkets, pill boxes, paper clipping devices, etc, ect, etcetera.

One of the more interesting things I cleared was a folder from the newspaper's photo morgue (which long ago lost some of its most valuable files, like the Bill Mazeroski folder, to late night thievery).

Can't remember why I had pulled this file; all I can say is that every time I venture into those dusty stacks, I get sidetracked by one life in a folder or another. Also, there is sneezing. Lots of sneezing.

The envelope labels often read like this:
Mrs. Jones: Accused of killing husband with hacksaw
xxxxtown: Fire kills 3 people and 8 horses
Gertrude Michael: Actress

The photo files (the older ones are bigger and clearly were labeled with a Courier font typewriter) document all kinds of crime, tragedy and daily life in general from the early 20th Century through about the mid 90s, when digital photography killed off dark rooms and developed film.

The file still sitting on my desk was full of images of a forgotten actress named Gertrude Michael, from Talladega, Ala., whose flame burned out fairly quickly. She died at 53. Can't remember what I was looking for when I stumbled across her. She's back in her dusty spot now in the morgue, a life compressed to a stack of faded images. (Side note: When I was a tween in the late 60s, I spent a week in Talladega with my cousin Kim and her sister and sister's husband in Talladega. Jim was an ob-gyn. I remember a beautiful lakefront A-frame, watching "Let's Make a Deal" and a country club visit that included some sort of sweet cocktail that bartenders hate to make. There was moonshine, too. Payment for Jim's services from the local folks. Miss Michael came from an interesting place.)

The picture is of a pop-up kind of life. And look, there's a paper, too! From a temporary storefront art installation on 6th Street, Downtown, called Fraley's Robot Repair. I'm a big fan.