We are far from Florida, though we left a house back there. Landfall will occur in about 10 hours “but the exact landfall location is unclear due to possible wobbles in the hurricane’s path,” according to an update my mother-in-law sent us.
It is fallish in Kentucky and the sky is clear. The closer you get to the University of Kentucky campus, the more blue you see in outfits. This can help you sort out where you are if you find yourself mapless in Lexington.
One thing I’ve noticed about my dreams is that there’s never any weather.
This is an overhead picture of Cape Coral, not too far from where we lived in Fort Myers:
Seems like a bad idea. I sent this picture to Grace and wrote, “what were they thinking?” And she wrote back: “Paradise.”
One strange thing about a storm hitting somewhere you just left is that we still get warnings on our phones. Just now I got a text that a tornado was coming and to immediately take cover. So then I texted our friends who are hunkered down in Fort Myers, which is maybe a pointless or even tacky thing to do. They haven’t written back yet.
“Cone of uncertainty” feels like the dunce hat that it feels like you’re wearing if you are feeling anxious. Hurricanes bring up a lot of feelings.
I am teaching a fiction workshop to undergraduates this semester for the first time in a long while. People have a lot of theories about how a particular generation is like this, or like that. I don’t know. My main observation is they all seem very kind.
My son is two years old and talking a lot in a gravelly voice. If I eventually convince him to do something after much protest, he groans, “Fine,” in peeved resignation. If he gets upset, I tell him, “Keep calm, and…” And he says, “Carry on,” in the gravelly voice. But the response comes by reflex, it doesn’t always lead to calm. “Carry on,” he’ll snort in a fury, still utterly waylaid by the frustration of an ill-fitting Lego, etc.
I want to explain to him that this is the way it is, with Legos, and other stuff. The exact location is unclear due to possible wobbles in the path.
But it’s hard to explain things. It’s hard. This is one lesson of parenthood that no parent can quite keep ahold of.
Another lesson of parenthood is that you shouldn’t get frustrated with someone if they get scared. That one sticks more easily, I think.
In the car the other day, my son said, with some urgency, “Tickle me with champagne problems!” (Reader: please apply gravelly voice.) I figured that meant he wanted to hear “Champagne Problems,” the Taylor Swift song, so I put it on. He wiggled and wobbled in his car seat. I reached back and tickled the hairs on his head. He approved.
I asked an old friend of mine, who is also teaching a fiction workshop this semester, how or whether he teaches simile and metaphor to introductory students. “I don’t really talk much about simile or metaphor,” he told me. “I point to things in stories but generally suggest a Letting Things Be What They Are, and then Seeing What Happens. I know by the reaction I got from a colleague once that some people think this is fucked up and perhaps malpractice.”
In “Champagne Problems,” Taylor sings, “Your heart was glass, I dropped it.” There’s also something about a “tapestry.” The tapestry is, I guess, her ex-boyfriend’s life, and she shreds it by turning down his marriage proposal, but then later a new woman comes along and patches the tapestry up. Eventually, the speaker reckons, the boy will forget her champagne problems. The song has no reference to the weather.
It’s very funny when my son sings “champagne problems” in the gravelly voice, so we try to get a video recording of it, but it’s tricky. We point the camera at him, and we’re stage whispering say it and he smiles knowingly and he looks right into the camera and he says: “Poop.”
I enjoyed reading this.
*tickle me with Champaign problems*