Blog Entry
my day, backwards, or, all the good and bad in a lovely heap.
August 18, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
At the end of July, my Executive Director retired, simultaneously firing one of her four employees. Another gave her two weeks’ notice shortly after. The new ED and I have spent the past three weeks learning our new roles while doing the work of five. Meanwhile, my mom and brother have just returned to Buffalo from Oregon; while they look for apartment(s), my brother sleeps on a second mattress in my room, my mom on the futon. Meanwhile, summer has finally arrived, bringing oppressive heat and humidity. This is how a “great day” plays out in that context.
With fans running in both corners of the living room, my mom, brother and I watched an episode of Boston Legal tonight, ignoring the piles of clothing, books, shoes and luggage my mom has desperately tried to stash away since they moved in last week. No matter how hard she works, the piles don’t seem to shrink, and my brother and I find drinking and socializing a lot more rewarding than putting stuff away.
Before that, my mom and I argued about nachos, the kitchen counter and air-drying laundry.
Before that, my mom brought us down those controversial nachos while my brother and I sat on the picnic table discussing our zombie movie project. I started the whole thing by saying, “We were just about to come up, before the zombies, I mean mosquitoes, attack.”
Before that, all three of us visited an apartment for rent about three houses down from the house my brother lived in before deciding to leave Buffalo in June. A two bedroom they could share, the apartment had spacious rooms, tall windows and an updated kitchen. But my brother quoted Funny Bones, saying he thought the landlord, a slender young architect who lived with his fiancee upstairs, “smelled French,” which is Davisese for, “He’s weird in an unquantifiable way I may or may not be justified in holding against him, but will anyway.” See the movie for more information, she said with a smile.
Before that, my boss and I visited a Boys & Girls Club, to discuss a dance program we’re holding in one of their clubs. I tried not to project my own terror of forced socialization on the children I saw reading magazines and playing games on laminated tables under florescent bulbs. The woman we spoke with was proud of their new ability to feed every child, in every club, a snack and dinner. She showed us their kitchen, full of industrial-sized cans of spaghetti sauce and Campbell’s soup, and I told her that was cool.
Before climbing in the car, my boss and I joked with Reverend Armand of the Episcopal church where we rent office space. He had just printed business cards on his office printer, we had just received freshly designed cards from a commercial printer. Ours were way prettier. Armand is a fellow Seattlelite who won my heart last week when I found him in the foyer, on his hands and knees, scraping paint from a large panel. He explained that a Holocaust survivor had recently done a series of paintings called “Jesus through the eyes of a Jew,” that the nearby Jewish Community Center had refused to exhibit. Armand had promptly invited him to show his work at his church. The panel was for the exhibit. “It sounded like radical welcoming to me,” Armand said with a gleeful laugh, scraping away.
My boss and I were just as gleeful about the business cards; they represented radical welcoming of a different kind. Our nonprofit’s mission is to provide school students with arts experience they wouldn’t ordinarily have. In the words of my boss, that arts experience had, for the twelve years of her predecessor’s traditionalist leadership, consisted of “white men with guitars.” Buffalo is not a white town, nor is it a folk-music-listening town. My boss and I have brainstormed for weeks on ways to recruit younger and more diverse people to our organization. Our new yellow and orange cards, replacing the sterile blue-and-white design of yesterday, beautifully symbolized those efforts.
Before that, I met Candi for breakfast, sitting outside on the first cool morning we’d had in two weeks, enjoying a souvlaki chicken breakfast and a cup of tea. We compared notes on the Brooks & Dunn concert we’d seen last weekend, the difference between men who wear boots to church and men who wear Cons to the bookstore, and how much we were overeating. The bees circled low over her plateful of syrup and my jam-slathered toast, and I didn’t even question that I had gotten up early to hang out with someone at a Greek diner in Buffalo. What else would I be doing?
And before that, I dreamed about my dad, friends in New York, and a spiral staircase in Grand Central Station that would only let you climb so far uptown, before you found yourself going down again.
Call me crazy, but I feel like it was a pretty good day, all in all.
Comment by Lynnette.
That was cool, just like a ‘Lost’ episode! I think most days in Buffalo are pretty much the same whether viewed from front to back or back to front. It’s this surreal quality that gives Buffalo its charm. Think of it as not ever having to mind whether you’re coming or going.