Okay
If others’ favorite word for opening a thought, or a paragraph, sentence or session is “Well” or “So” then mine, I’ve noticed, is “OK.” Or to regularize it “Okay” and I have to pay attention to stop it, or at least minimize before it becomes grating. The history of OK, who would have known but at last the story can be told, is revealed in the delancey.com piece for yesterday, 5/9/14:
Okay (see?) here’s where I’m coming from. Years ago I had a wonderful parishioner named Pearl who was, for me, one of God's original characters. Pearl had been raised on an island, the daughter of the lighthouse keeper. She loved things of nature, gardening vegetables, every animal. She knew about ministry because with Mamie she always made the rounds of the nursing home Sundays after church. She liked dill pickles with her spaghetti. In Pearl's yard were chickens, seems to me there were ducks and geese. Dogs, goats and cats. She dearly loved goats, who likely had been companions as pets and for milk, and perhaps meat, all her growing up years on the island. So, her large garden tiny farmyard in town always included a goat. Until the day she, about ninety by then, was bending over weeding in her garden and the billygoat did the classic act of every comic strip billygoat and butted her in the place where billygoats butt people, which may be where we get the word butt, tossing her tumbling. Probably by now even Apalachicola has ordinances against keeping livestock in town, I don’t know.
This isn’t about Pearl’s goats. It’s about her love affair with QVC, the online shopping channel, which then, late 80s and early 90s, was the TV shopping channel. Never a day went by that a delivery van didn’t pull up in front of Pearl’s house at least once, more often twice or more, to deliver a package that she had ordered on QVC. (Have I blogged about this before? Sorry ‘bout that).
Looking round her living room, I once asked, “Pearl, why do you buy all this stuff?” She wagged her head and wrung her hands gleefully, “I just love getting presents.”
One purchase takes me to my point for this morning. It must have been about 1990 or '91. Our church was having a huge yard sale in Gorrie Square out in front of the church. Everybody in the parish brought loads of stuff to sell. Pearl bragged that she was bringing a grandfather clock in a wooden case. I visualized the finest. Then she said she had won it on QVC. Sixty nine dollars shipping, but the clock was free. I was standing there when her son in law said, “You paid for it, mama.”
The clock was a little round jobby-do running on a battery. About four inches diameter, it was popped into a round hole in a case about five feet tall and nine inches wide. The case was made of pressed wood-type-product, the pieces glued together and stained oak brown. It was wood in the sense that Velveeta is fox-cheese (I might do Greek, but I don't do French where they elegantly spell it faux), a food-type-product. Caroline's mother once put a slice of Velveeta in her sandwich to take to school and when Caroline got home she asked her mom, "What was that plastic thing in my sandwich?" Uh oh, digressing again.
Every time I order a book from Amazon I think about Pearl and the grandfather clock. The other day I said I might order Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow if I could get a used one on Amazon dot com for a penny. I did. From an Amazon supplier, it was a penny plus their $3.99 shipping. As a member of Amazon Prime I could have got a good used one shipped free, but it was $4.00 and I'm not paying that much. Look, I got mine for only a penny.
Yesterday a friend so intrigued me discussing Where Rivers Change Direction (Mark Spragg) that I went right to Amazon. All the copies marked $.01 were either in acceptable condition, which means trashed, or good with comments about a torn cover, marked pages, well read. I splurged and ordered a like new copy for only fifteen cents. Plus $3.99 S&H.
Rivers sounds like my kind of book with short individual essay chapters, like Roger Ebert’s Life Itself: A Memoir. I'm hoping to find touch my heart nostalgia pieces throughout like in Ebert’s book, which I loved so much I stretched it out for weeks, weeks, weeks.
The other one, Gravity’s Rainbow, someone reviewed as “bonecrushingly dense, compulsively elaborate, silly, obscene, funny, tragic, pastoral, historical, philosophical, poetic, grindingly dull, inspired, horrific, cold, bloated, beached and blasted.[Pynchon's] novel is in this sense a work of paranoid genius, a magnificent necropolis that will take its place amidst the grand detritus of our culture.” I figure WTH, it couldn’t be any worse than Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children. We’ll see.
OK, if I don’t like Pynchon, WTH, I only paid a penny for it.
TW