It's raining again in Minneapolis today.

But this time with vigor.



And guess who forgot her umbrella altogether.

Umbrellas have existed in nearly the same form since 1000 B.C.

It's raining today in Minneapolis.

I've been writing all morning, and have gotten the desire to come down from my fifth floor apartment and go for a walk. I dive into bowels of my closet to search for my umbrella. It doesn't take long for me to emerge from its bottommost corner with the black, compacted device in my hands. The tags from TJ Maxx are still attached and I remove them before opening it's ribcage beneath the airy ceiling of the studio. I've never really been superstitious.

Back in February, Susan Orlean wrote a piece for the New Yorker about the umbrella and its prevailingly faulty design. I think of it as the smell of newly waterproofed nylon invades my nostrils. I collapse the device and hope the wind isn't strong this afternoon. Orlean is right, after all. Everyone knows the slightest wind can knock an umbrella inside out and even if it doesn't, there exists an updraft that wets the front of the thighs making anyone uncomfortable upon reaching his or her destination. And this afternoon, because I have no particular destination, should be especially damp.

Alexander in Art

"So he's a prisoner?" my Dad replied. "You don't eat meat for that reason, but you're going to cage him up anyway." I bought a betta last month, and this was my father's reaction.

"Dad, it was more like I saved him from Petsmart. He came in a container. It made me want to buy them all."
"That's my tree hugger..."
"Aren't you the one who always says, 'Fish are peaceful... Sometimes all you want to do when you're a college student is sit and look at fish'?"
"Well they are..." He paused. "So is he green?"
"Red."
"Does he have spots?"
"I wasn't so much into the speckled ones. They looked sort of ill."
"So now you're discriminating..."
"Dad!" I was exasperated.



Later on, as I sat down in the three and a half hour art class to which I'm obligated to attend on Wednesday nights, the Semi-Attractive Guy Who I Have Sat Next to for an entire month But Still Has No Name, said hello.

"How are you?"
"I'm well. I bought a fish today."

The beginning of class interrupted our conversation.

At its end, the Semi-Attractive Guy Who I Have Sat Next to for an entire month But Still Has No Name asked, "Goldfish?"
"Betta."
"Blue?"
"Red. I'm rather partial to the color."
"Well good luck with that, and have a good week," he replied before vacating the oversized classroom.



The following week, SAGWIHSNTBSHNN asked, "How's your fish?" before taking a sip of black tea. He always has black tea in class - and now that I consider it, often wears black.

"He's well - was sick yesterday morning, but is okay now."
"Does he have a name yet?" asked SAGWIHSNTBSHNN.
"No, but I was thinking about Liam Finn, who I've been listening to lately. But I can't so much appropriate a name. He kind of needs his own. I was then thinking Emerson or Wallace, but I'm not so fond of those either."
"Well now you're getting literary," said SAGWIHSNTBSHNN.
I opened my mouth to object in offense - and then realized he wouldn't know that about me. I mean, I still don't know his name nor have I figured out if he's gay. He's older and rather androgynous - not that those two are synonymous.

SAGWIHSNTBSHNN interrupted my thoughts. "There are a lot of British names there."
"Yeah, and I am pretty literary, but I was just thinking you wouldn't know that about me."
"All I know is that you have a a fish." SAGWIHSNTBSHNN continued, "But I think it's too late to name him now. He'll just have to be Fish."

I became slightly horrified by this idea, and then caught myself. My largest fear in adding a fish to the other live things in my apartment (e.g. my plants), was that I was going to become one of those crazy pet owners who get their dogs ready for bed as if they were their children and chastise them like they would understand the consequences of their actions. Though I don't know how you could do so with a fish, I'm sure those kind of people would find a loophole and sprint through it in record speed.

Class began, and our delightfully spacey professor dimmed the lights and fumbled with the apple laptop on the podium to start a video.

SAGWIHSNTBSHNN leaned over, "I always thought I'd choose John Vonnegut as an alter ego, you know, if I ever have to flee and change my name."
"Are you planning on fleeing anytime soon?" I asked, leaning over while keeping my eyes glued to the projector screen.
"Not unless I steal a lot of art." he said.
I whispered, "I've never considered a new name. I'll have to get back to you on that."

"So your fish..."
"My fish. I also thought about naming him Kitty, because I've always wanted a cat. Somehow that seemed wrong. He's kind of ridiculous actually. He lives in a one gallon fishbowl, but he thinks he's king of the world. He puffs up his fins and darts around. I mean, he attacks his food as if its not already dead. I put my face up to the bowl and he looks like he's ready to fight me. But I'm pretty sure I'd win. He's, only what, two inches long."
"Then how about Alexander?" answered SAGWIHSNTBSHNN. "I mean, if he thinks he's king of the world."

This wise man's not so wise.

I just found out I missed Liam Finn when he was here in Minneapolis in March.

Pisser.

So my literary nonfiction professor assigned a few blogs for our reading tomorrow, and, in addition, wanted us to bring a few postings from blogs we currently read. I figured that on the off chance any of the people in my class would somehow end up here, they should have something to read other than the rehashings of my newspaper column I occasionally post.






But after such an image, that I yes, constructed and shot with my own camera, they'll probably never return and/or think me some other kind of unmentionable crazy.

Seeing these outcomes are rather unfortunate for both my readers and me, perhaps I'll admit the entire event was an insouciant escapade and that I'd forgotten how heavy wet snow is.

The piano lady is no longer Mrs. Anderson

So after grocery shopping for the first time in three weeks, I came home to a typical e-mail from my mother.

As I'm a lucky kid whose parents still feed her, and because my so-called permanent residences typically change annually, my bills are send to my parents' address. Mom's always great about letting me know what kind of money I've spent.

It went something like this:

Hi Kelsey,

How was your day? I'm paying bills.

She then interjects that $24.99 is due to my credit card account.

And closes with:

Love,
Mom


But, it was her post script that prompted me to write:

The piano lady says hi! She's not Mrs. Anderson anymore.

My mother must have seen her in the dental office. With a father as a dentist and a mother a hygienist, I typically both brush and floss and receive greetings through the grapevine. But if she's not Mrs. Anderson, who is she?


Such a statement aptly jogs the memory: the soft hearted woman in whose basement I'd spent nearly all my childhood Monday afternoons is no longer the same. Unlike my mother's former teacher, she never hit my knuckles when I stuck a G instead of a C, and never reprimanded me when I'd blunder through a piece of music I'd obviously not practiced. When I started at six, I played by ear and learned staff lines and key signatures as an afterthought. I memorized and performed competition pieces and played a duet on Northrop's stage in an honors concert at eight. But by sixteen, I was enjoying her company during my hour long lessons more than I wanted to learn Bach's piceces in my Suzuki classics. She'd adjust her glasses beneath her salt and pepper hair as I painstakingly picked through a piece, before gently indicating it could use some work. But she never squirmed or stopped me; her patience was probably a direct gift from God. She drank warm, red juice from coffee mugs and loved her cats and her baby grand. She encouraged me to play more jazz and embellish the pieces on which I was working. And I did. I'd add new syncopation in a rift of eighth notes, fermatas as the bass line plunked away... It was the only thing I ever practiced in those last few years of lessons.

But it's amazing the kind of bubble that surrounds you as a child. You learn piano theories, while theories of love aren't holding true. Not that love has ever been scientific. As it turns out, gentle Mrs. Anderson had been verbally abused by her husband for years and finally broke away during the last. How do you enter someone's home 52 times in a year for ten years and have an indication of her pain? Perhaps you're allowed naivete when you're sixteen, but why should that be an excuse for tunnel vision?

From a work still in the works.

I just thought I would share a scene from a larger piece I'm currently working on about growing up Catholic.


From "Of Catechism and Crosses"

As a kid in the church, my involvement began with the children’s choir and vacation bible school, culminating in the fifth grade, when I was allowed to begin altar serving. For years I’d watched older kids bring the chalice and water and wine to the right place at the right time, and I was itching to climb the stairs and sit next to Fr. Ed on the altar. Even more, I was anticipating a look into the “back room” – the sacristy – where only servers, lectors and priests were privy.

The first mass I served was a cool morning in September, and like any other event in my life, the whole family – grandma included – had come. She warbled when she sang, and throughout my childhood managed enjoyably to bring her volume above everyone else in the church. I was pleased that I would hear her praises from a distance. The mass began like any other; five minutes before, I lit the candles and after the lector welcomed everyone and invited the congregation to “stand and greet those” around them, I pretentiously took the church’s steel cross out of its stand for the opening procession. I banged it on the doorframe of the sacristy and turned red, grateful that everyone was standing and only a few could see the scene. The song continued and I struggled to carry the cross up the aisle. At twenty-one I tower just past five feet, and as an eleven year old I was wrestling a giant with spaghetti for arms. The cross teetered forward and backward and I grit my teeth as I staggered up the stairs at the end of the song.

Placing the cross in its stand was like threading a needle. Its post was round but scarcely an inch in diameter. To support the rest of its heavy shape, its stand – a round tube just larger than the diameter of the cross – rose nearly a foot off the ground. With the cross's top towering over my head I stabbed at the stand and missed to the left, then clanked it too far forward. I had broken a sweat by the time I wiggled the cross back and forth and the friction of steel on steel met its post with support. The service began and I flawlessly held the gigantic book for the opening prayer; the lector read and the choir sang the responsorial psalm.

While my success had been limited up to this point, I had made a cardinal mistake as an altar server. The morning had been cool and I’d chosen a wool sweater to wear beneath my cassock. As the mass continued on, my insulating layers cooked like a crock pot. The intensity of the heat came in waves, and waves of nausea came with its intensity. My face was a lobster and my hands clams. I ran their sweaty surfaces down my thighs and slowed my breathing. Just relax, Kelsey. Get through the mass and you’ll be fine. You’re just nervous.

And then I was swept with the feeling you get just before you vomit. Your muscles drain themselves of power and you tend to shake like you’ve just run a marathon. Your mouth goes dry like you’ve swallowed soda crackers without water.

Was I going to ruin my years of anticipation as an altar server? Not if I could help it. I stood my ground and swallowed gingerly. And swallowed again. And closed my eyes.

As I perched on the bench next to Fr. Ed’s ornate chair and he delivered his homily, I kneaded my palms and then clenched my fists while the congregation took no apparent notice of my struggle that went something like this: The crackers, the marathon. The crackers, the marathon. Lobster face. Clams. Lobster face. Crackers. Clams. Marathon. Face. Clams. Crackers.

I couldn’t swallow.

But I couldn’t leave my post and abandon my responsibility. I was only eleven, and what was this going to say about slacking off and its relation to the rest of my life? Somebody still needed to symbolically pour the water over Fr. Ed’s hands before the consecration. And I knew how to do it and wasn’t going to leave him out to dry.

But I had a marathon in my muscles and clams in my hands and…



I lost the battle as my breakfast hit my shoes.

I ran to the Sacristy. My mother met me there as tears of stress from both vomiting and sadness squeezed between my eyelids. “I’ve ruined the mass!” I sobbed, “And there’s puke all over the carpet up there!”

Mom took me home and Dad stayed after mass to apply vinegar and water to the soiled, gray carpet of the altar. We dry-cleaned my white cassock, and I could never figure out how my mother was allowed to come back to the sacristy without permission.