Thar She Blows

Just found this video of last Tuesday's waterspout. Tornadoes aren't so unusual around here, but these water-twisters are. Lake Conway is about five feet deep most of the time, so I figure up close this was probably a Moses-parting-the-Red-Sea moment.

So did it sling crappie and catfish for the whole three or so minutes, or did the waterspout lift it all aloft then set the whole business politely back down? The news said no one was injured and no damage reported, but surely someone driving down I-40 took a game fish in the windshield.

There has to be at least one good story out there.

Art for Art's Sake

A regular stop on our yearly Little Rock Writing Marathon is The River Market's ArtSpace on President Clinton Avenue. Aside from being an excellent place to write, it's also one of those galleries where I could easily mortgage my house and fill it with every single piece I see.

These paintings, for example. The artist is Megan Chapman, a blog acquaintance of mine who lives and paints in Fayetteville. These sorry cellphone shots don't do her work justice, so you'll need to visit her site to get a better look. She also has an Etsy shop where she sells smaller works on paper.

Imagine my surprise when, four days later, the River Market ArtSpace announced a sudden and permanent close. Something about a failure to renegotiate a lease. After twelve years, it's going to be a food joint or a - hell, I don't know - a souvenir shop for cheap presidential trinkets. What it won't be is a gallery featuring the finest local artists Arkansas offers.

Artists like Marc Hatfield. I went to kindergarten with Marc and scads of other professor's kids. His father taught art and is still creating - the walls of the building where I teach every day are covered with his work. His mother, one of the loveliest women I ever met, attempted to teach me French in college. The story of their lives is the stuff of novels.

Why does any of this history matter? Because a couple of years ago I wandered into the River Market ArtSpace and came face-to-wall with the visible attainment of Marc's kindergarten hopes. He wanted to be an artist when he grew up and there he was, canvas after canvas.

I spent the next hour in the basement of the Flying Saucer weeping into bar napkins and scribbling in my notebook. I was half tempted to barter my car for one of his paintings. If I hadn't given all those teachers from Yell county a ride, I might have done it.

So there's more to a gallery closing than hanging a sign and turning it into some burger joint. It's a personal loss for me and for all the writers I take to the River Market. Next year, we may get our passports in order and set sail for Hot Springs instead.

The Perfect Grandson Turns This Many

And what a party it was. The fun began at Jump Zone, where most of us were blinded by bright, enormous, inflated dinosaurs and superheroes - seriously, these things were easily two stories high. The Perfect Grandson, however, was not intimidated and ran like a boy possessed from one giant thing to another, jumping, sliding, throwing beach balls, screaming. A good fall and a bloody lip didn't slow him down at all. The minimum age for this kind of kid-stravaganza is two, and he was only just.

But keep that to yourself. If you so much as whisper "birthday party" in that joint the $8 entry blossoms into a cool $200. We were on the down-low for this one. It was a family play date.

Afterwards it was off to the great-grandparents for chicken and Spiderman cake and the real birthday shindig. After eating everything that wasn't nailed down, The Perfect Grandson opened all his presents, shot some hoops on his new basketball goal, and splashed around in the wading pool until he practically fell asleep in it. It was a Very Happy Birthday.

The whole party was the work of one single mama. She tripped the light fantastic on this one, baking and hand-decorating the Spidey-web cake and slinging herself down all those impossible blow-up slides at Jump Zone. She even mustered the energy to invite her father to the festivities, and made him behave. He's divorcing again, so that was no small feat.

The Perfect Grandson is two. He got Spiderman glow-in-the-dark Big Boy Underpants to mark the day and what comes next will be no small feat, either.

What comes next is three and four and ten and cars and girls and "don't tell me what to do, I'm a man." But keep that to yourself. She had bouts of mama-tears three or four times yesterday alone and it might be best to keep the rest of what's coming on the down-low as well.

Baby steps.

Miming the Dead

I saw a lot of things Friday during our Great Bear Writing Project scribbling marathon. This Michael Jackson mime was just one of them. He's been a fixture on President Clinton Avenue for some time, actually, and I remember seeing him dancing there last year. The point is, he wasn't making a fast dollar off of someone else's tragedy. He was going to work in the Little Rock River Market just as he has for at least a year now, maybe longer.

I wish I'd taken a picture of him before, because he's changed his appearance drastically. Not that my cheap-ass cell phone photo does him much justice anyway. A year ago this MJ mime was leaner, wore a black leather jacket, black pants, a white t-shirt, and one of those studded leather belts. The music on his boom box belted out "Billie Jean" and he danced silently in half white, half black face paint. He drew a crowd. He was good. I put a dollar in the bucket by his feet and he tipped his black fedora.

Like any good mime, he said nothing. His eyes were unsettling, though. He had a way of catching me looking at him, making me look at him, a playful, almost hyper-awareness something between mind-reading and telekinesis. There were moments as I stood there on the sidewalk watching him lock and lean that it seemed possible he was truly channeling Michael Jackson and Mr. Jackson was enjoying pulling off the hoax.

So he stuck with me. There are people like that who linger. I'm sure it happens to all of us.

Friday, there he was again. This time the mime had spray painted all his clothing silver. His face was also silver, except for the dark black circles around his eyes. It was almost 100 degrees on Friday at noon and the sun was a demon, but there he stood layered and painted without breaking a sweat.

This time there was no music coming from the boom box, and his movements were angular and brief. No dancing, really. When I came near, he offered penny candy and smiled when I refused. There were several of us on our way to find lunch so there was a moment of discussion while I dug in my purse for a dollar to leave in the bucket at his feet. There was a small clutch of onlookers watching the mime and he was mindful to keep moving, continue the show.


Each time I looked up, though, he was staring through me. His eyes were pained in that way quiet students agonize when they know the answers but can never summon the courage to make a voice. Not smiling against the pain, but beside it. He was so blindingly silver all over that it hurt to look back.

All through lunch I wondered what it felt like to hang your ambition on a suicide. Last year we didn't know about the intravenous drips and astronomical pill-popping, although we weren't surprised to find out. How did this kid find out when his mime-channel died? Was he on the street popping and locking to "The Way You Make Me Feel"? What did he do in that very afternoon, right there on the sidewalk in full persona? When someone told him, did he finally break character and speak?

Maybe he's just a regular guy who walks off at the end of the day, buys a pack of smokes out of the bucket-money, and picks up Taco Bell for dinner. Maybe he's a cad who beats his girlfriend or an identity-thieving con man. Maybe a frustrated actor trying to make it big in the wrong city. Who knows.

I just know there's a story there and he's not going to tell it, at least not to me, not in the street, not when he's Michael.

W.W.V.L.S? (What Would Vince Lombardi Say?)

I've put this off for a few days, what with the holiday and Michael Jackson's memorial service and all. If you think about it, this may have been Sarah Palin's exit strategy - resign as governor of Alaska while everyone's looking the other way with a sparkly white glove in one hand and a bottle rocket in the other.

While I'm perfectly comfortable seeing Sarah to the door, I'm afraid she's going to keep coming back up like one of those pop-up arcade games you hit with a rubber hammer. You know, the kind they have at Playworld. She was back in front of the cameras today, as a matter of fact. Waders and full make-up. You can't whine about the media and then invite them all to watch you fish.

My father has a lot of sayings, and while none of them has anything specifically to do with fishing, point guards, or the governorship of a large and sparsely populated state, they all center around Doing The Right Thing. That "thing" inevitably means finishing what you start.

"Winners never quit and quitters never win. " ~Vince Lombardi

So go do your thing, Sarah, whatever it is. Just remember that no amount of spin makes abdicating sworn responsibility any prettier. Too many folks are onto the Politics of Shiny Objects, and they're weary.

There. I'm done. Time to grab a burned leftover hot dog and watch Thriller one more time.

UPDATE: Here's Palin's resignation speech - Vanity Fair's "Edited Version." Priceless.

What This Country Needs is a Cheap Cigar Box

I know you remember these. Maybe your cigar box of choice wasn't Roi-Tan, but you had one. Maybe dozens. Was it a Swisher Sweets? Hav-A-Tampa?

I alternated between White Owl and Kind Edward cigar boxes for my more important collections at home. Rocks, mainly, but sometimes buttons or leaves, sometimes pecans and pokey sweet-gum balls. I remember finding a papery chrysalis once dangling from a forsythia bush. I opened the lid several dozen times a day fully expecting each time to unlock a grateful butterfly, but it never happened.

In late August I always had a fine collection of locust shells carefully picked from tree bark, screened doors, and other scratchy, irregular places. These were particularly prone to crushing in, say, the back pocket of your jeans, so a sturdy cigar box was essential. My neighborhood friends and I would travel in rangy packs like out-of-season Easter egg hunters, some of us with empty mayonnaise jars but most of us with cigar boxes. We could kill entire afternoons looking for locust shells and sticking their hooked little empty feet to our clothes and hair. After scaring my mother with them at dinner, they were always carefully placed back in the King Edwards box and spent the night under my bed.

I don't know what those kids with the mayonnaise jars did. Those were for lightning-bugs anyway.

The fancier boxes were fine for treasures, but Roi-Tan was was the box of choice in my school desk. Elegance. An air of serious sophistication. Everything about this maroon box said you cared about the pencils inside and that education itself was a somber, sacred event. No bug shells or glass buttons in this box, thank you, the Roi-Tan held cerebral tools.

Every single year before the first day of school, my dad would take me down to Rexall Drug to pick out the perfect cigar box. Timing was everything, because everyone got their cigar boxes at the Rexall and if your daddy was the sort who put things off, you could end up carrying fat pencils and an Elmer's paste bottle in something ridiculous like a paper sack. That was nothing short of social suicide and certainly no way to begin first grade. These were the days when "special" kids were carted off before the end of the opening day and never seen again.

Thinking back, I'm sure the missing children had little to do with paper sacks vs. cigar boxes, but times were different back then. Falling into school-supply lockstep for a month or so was calculated survival. It was dangerous to be quirky and we knew it.

So Roi-Tan it was.

My mother wrote my name on every single side of that cigar box, not that she needed to. By the end of the first week I'd written "Monda" a hundred times on it myself, trying out every single crayon I'd brought with me. Most of the boys used scissors to gouge their names into their cigar boxes, a practice I found equally violent and fascinating until a boy named Dale nearly cut off a finger doing it. He was whisked, bleeding, out of class and down the hall. When he returned the next day, he had stitches, round-edged scissors, and a swagger. I fell in love with him by recess.

I found this Roi-Tan cigar box at a Camden, Arkansas junk store for $2. It was worth every penny just to remember the locust shells and swaggering Dale.

...and THIS little piggy went...

Not long ago I told the harrowing story of The 90 Escaped Pigs on the Interstate. Thankfully, there's an update and a semi-happy ending.

The following is a KATV report which has gone fairly viral.

Little Rock - An 800-pound hog that survived on its own for a week after a truck flipped while on its way to a slaughterhouse has surfaced in a swimming pool at a home near the crash site.

LeAnn Baldy, whose house is only yards from Interstate 430, said Monday she noticed her pool was suddenly overflowing and then saw the immersed pig, which was having a drink in the pool.

About 90 hogs were in the trailer when it overturned where I-430 meets I-40, and about 60 survived. Officials said they thought the last of them had been caught.

Baldy says she found a farmer to take in the pig. A spokesman for Odom's Tennessee Pride says it can't use the hog in its sausage products because no one knows what the hog had been eating in its week on the lam.

Reading between the lines makes the math easy. Ninety hogs in the accident, minus thirty DOA, equals 60 hogs caught by local troopers "and others" that certainly made their way to the Odom's Tennessee Pride processing plant. I'm sure they're in the freezer by now. Or on your breakfast plate.

Wait. Let's make that 59 because at least one bought himself more time by laying low, drinking a little chlorine, rummaging around eating God only knows what, and in general making himself un-processable. Way to go, pool pig. I hope someone named you.

I'm no pig-hugger, but I do enjoy small justices and reprieves. This big boy appears to have both for now.

As for Ms. Baldy, she's probably got a few new snapshots for the family album. I'd love to see one of them. Especially the picture of how they removed the 800-pound escapee from her swimming pool.