What Sara Said

Nacelles are cubby-holes in planes or boats (Fr. small boats) and I ran into the word twice this week, don't remember ever seeing it before. Talk about getting side-tracked, goddamned Janitor Catalog comes in and I'm way out in left field somewhere, then to exacerbate the problem, an Archival Storage Catalog AND a Shipping Supplies Catalog. Fine day for them, though, because the carpet layers are in to finish the offices and the atmosphere is toxic with glue fumes AND they play AM radio, rock, fairly loud all day. I work downstairs and in the basement but the poor Deputy is driven to distraction. What Sara said, we were talking about a job Gina, Interior Designer for the engineering firm that did the structural consulting for the major museum conversion-from-bank, was next door at Covert's Furniture, matching some swatches, D and I were out back having a smoke, so we chatted with her (she has a terrible laugh, there should be courses in laughing, at any professional college, it was a required course at Janitor College, I developed a nice upper mid-western chuckle, innocent and self-deprecating) when she came out, seems she's designing a new interior for the local funeral parlor. We joked about that, but thought about it too, asked her if she was doing it Hawaiian Surfer or more like the Victorian Library (what I think of as Classic Funeral Parlor) that was more traditional. Later that day, we were having a smoke with Sara and recounted the conversation, Sara said -dead people are the perfect clients- she's an interior designer too, and a good one, I've designed and built a lot of houses, a lot of books, D's built custom furniture, we know what it's like working with a client, a dead client is perfect. We laugh so hard we sputter. This is the paradigm shift that is happening at the museum, where the Director and Janitor can share a laugh. I wish I'd gotten a beer and had a cigaret with her in her office, yesterday, after hours she closes her door and smokes in her office, but I wanted to get home and write, because I had this fucking Janitor Supply catalog in my back pocket, burning a hole. And I'm an egocentric bastard, generally, want to get home and write, I'll probably eat, get a few drinks, roll a few smokes, but my overriding motivation is to get to the keyboard, to tell you what I thought I saw. I love that, last night, ending with:

Three crows...

so perfectly what I meant, there they were again, at the bottom of the driveway, when I was switching into four-wheel-drive. I always stop, look carefully around, before I start up the hill, and the three crows were there, squawking, bouncing around in that crow dance, which is very like a chipmunk, somehow, erratic and off the beat.