NovySan sent this out as an accompaniment to my blog post about our trip to Ireland. I’m reposting it here so that Julia can read it.

“The trip was filled with wonderful people, odd sychronicities, and good Craic. (Craic is the Irish term for good conversation, good times, hanging with friends, etc. Not Crack Cocaine.

“One story sums it up best for me. It occurred during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Dublin. We had been invited to participate, rather than spectate, and found ourselves dressed in tie dye, faces painted, pushing a 400 pound sound system up and down the hills of Dublin. (I know, Dublin SEEMS flat. It’s not.) As a set of grandstands approached, I noticed I was having a little trouble walking. My stride seemed clipped. We were halted in front of the grandstand and I found out why I was having trouble walking. My costume pants had worked their way down past my hips, and just at that moment, they dropped to my ankles. Quickly grabbing my pants and frantically pulling them up, I noticed not 5 feet to my left, a seated chap in a green robe, with a very impressive gold necklace around his shoulders, a woman seated next to him, and a police officer with an ornate gold mace staring directly at me.

“Yes, my pants had fallen to my ankles 5 feet directly in front of the
Lord Mayor of Dublin.

“After this I had no trouble smiling for the crowd as I giggled the rest of the parade route. It was only at the end when I told our host what had happened that he informed me that the woman seated next to the Lord Mayor, was in fact, THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND.

“So that was my St Patrick’s Day. How was yours?

“Sliante!”

Tags: Guest Post, Ireland, NovySan, Pants

Skinny Legs and All took us to Burning Man and back, then lay neglected, if not forsaken, on the headboard (like a paperback shell in a dusty cave). Somewhere between Temple City and Nevada Landing, though, the Fifth Veil has fallen. Vegas lights the sky with empty promises; the sodium glow of the streetlamps is the gilt on this Temple. Sometime before dawn, the Seventh Veil will float to the floor on the other side of the Utah border, and we’ll be more than halfway home.

Tags: Books, Burning Man, Love, MoBlog, Tom Robbins

It was a red-letter page from the Book of Luke that caught my eye, lying flat on the table where the wind had teased it from the spine of an old King James. I closed the Bible around it and picked up another small, leather-bound book to weight it down. Daily Journal, 1928 was embossed on the cover in gold.

I was hooked.

The writer’s name was Margaret, and she lived in the Bay Area from sometime in the ’20s through the ’60s, if not later. Most of the entries were quite brief, and many concerned the weather. “Fine today,” she wrote. “Clear by 10 AM.” But in between the weather reports, there were these fascinating glimpses of a doubtlessly fashionable woman who traveled a great deal and valued her family and friends. “Took ship for Vancouver yesterday. Had a two-hour stop in Victoria.” And she loved to entertain. “Had the office girls to dinner. My color scheme was yellow and green, even to the refreshments.”

Yellow and green.

I wish I knew what she’d served.

At the back of the book, where space was helpfully provided for “Cash Accounts,” she’d recorded her daily expenditures. She spent more on clothing than food. Her income was there, too, but I didn’t notice whether she’d said how she made her money.

In a box nearby, there were more diaries, all in the same handwriting. Some had come from gas stations, or been bonus gifts with other purchases. One, marked “1950″ on the cover in gold, she’d used from 1962 to 1964, carefully labeling the multiple entries under each pre-printed date with the year she’d written each one. More weather observations, more notes of trips she’d taken, and in one, the intriguing entry, “Spoke to Aunt Mary. She has decided she would rather undertake her European excursion alone.”

A bold woman, Aunt Mary. Or maybe she’d just rather not travel with someone who matches her canapes to her tablecloths.

In the end, though, I imagined that stack of diaries collecting even more dust on one of my already-overflowing shelves and I walked away. Mikl-Em bought some Mission bookends (not Mission-style, as I initially thought – miniature porcelain missions with little paths leading up to them), NovySan picked up a great yellow-velvet hat with matching veil for his daughter, and I held on to a vivid image of a yellow and green refreshments table and an Aunt who’d rather tour Europe alone.

Tags: Alameda, Ephemera, Flea Market, Mikl-Em, San Francisco, Shopping, Who Were These People Anyway?