With a name like Potash, it has to be good.

Jeff asks for a colored pencil.

”Do you want orange or green?” I ask, rummaging through the drawer that holds compasses, cell phone chargers, and 1/4” scale house plan templates, in addition to numerous semi-functional writing implements.

He picks green, and proceeds to draw indecipherable markings on the pages of a book called Stikky Stock Charts. When he picked up the book at Barnes & Noble, I assumed the word “stikky” had some arcane link to stock chart interpretation, but in fact it is merely the name for a brand of books--like The Idiot’s Guide to [whatever makes you feel idiotic.] There’s the Stikky Guide to Trees, the Stikky Guide to Rock Formations, and very possibly the Stikky Guide to Scraping Gum off Your Shoe.

Jeff is trying to learn how to interpret recent performance stock graphs, and thusly buy and sell prudently. He’s taken an interest in anything that is both doing well (according to the chart gurus,) and has an unglamourous, and unlikely niche, such as scouring powders for subway tunnels, or commercial ash-tray sand embossers. I must confess, he did rather well with his small pot in the course of a week with a company that makes oil-drilling equipment. He then sold it on cue as advised by one of his book authors. Then floundering about the question of how to reinvest, he rejected an early favorite with a name that sounded like Bigfoot’s hearth-sweepings, and instead--with my backing--settled on Apple. For now. With luck I won’t be the only one waiting to make my move when they release the new Leopard operating system in October.

Due in small part to uncertainty, and large part to the capriciousness of a faulty memory, Jeff will assuredly announce a wish to sell Apple before I think the plan has had time to work. But I do serve, fortunately or not, as the gatekeeper here. We review the steps for logging onto the stock-trading website daily, but it is, for him, an utterly unacquirable skill. In truth, it would worry me if he could do it himself. I seem to have broken him of the habit of phoning the company headquarters every time--because it’s resulted, more than once, in their resetting his password to something new of his choosing which he invariably can’t remember when I go to help him the next day.

“Hey Gabe-O!” I say. (I’ve just noticed it’s 10 pm.) “I KNOW” he bellows. “Make sure you...” I say. “I KNOW” he bellows. “Brush your...” I say. “I KNOW” he bellows. “And wear rubber bands,” I say.

No Robin Hood

Today we sat in the window seats at Yin Yankee Café, eating a Panang Tofu noodle bowl and a tahini chicken wrap for lunch. A young man strode into view--clean cut, in a t-shirt and shorts. If anything, you’d have expected him to accessorize himself with a lacrosse stick, or maybe an iPod. But as he sat on the bench on the sidewalk in front of Yin Yankee, what he pulled out was a pipe. A regular old smoking pipe with a curvy stem, and a pipe cleaner to start things off. He sat on the bench, the whole time we ate lunch, casually puffing away while reading Moby Dick. He also had a Langenscheidt pocket dictionary. I recognized its yellow vinyl cover, and the way the center front edge of the white pages gets smudged to a dull gray with frequent use, just like my Langenscheidt French and Spanish dictionaries. So what language, I wondered, in addition to reading Moby Dick and smoking a pipe, might the kid be studying? When we left, I peeked over his shoulder. It was just an English dictionary.

As for Annapolis--Yin Yankee and everything else--it will be fine to just visit downtown for now. My urge to flee has subsided for the moment. I keep thinking of Olivia, as a toddler. Here is what would happen when she fell down and scraped her knee: She’d run shrieking in the opposite direction--away from the house, away from me or anyone else who might provide comfort. And I’m seeing myself in that vignette. Stress or pain=urge to flee. Run away from the dang bad thing, bad place, bad whatever it is. Maybe it doesn’t hurt over there. Funny--after 3 undergraduate schools and a couple decades of childrearing, you’d have thought I would have lost that impulse, but evidently I did not. Still, and fortunately, the itch has subsided and I’m able to view here as okay.

Drat. I’m ready to watch Robin Hood--the Errol Flynn version--and Netflix had to have it sent from Cleveland instead of locally. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be eccentric. It’ll be here Thursday.

Tights & other tuffstuff

A peppy saleslady came to the door today.

“You’ll remember me from last year! I bring the TuffStuff", she said, pulling an unidentifiable spray bottle out of an unidentifiable pouch.

”Actually, I don’t,” I replied honestly.

”That’s ok,” she continued, without missing a beat as she segued into a demo of how she could scribble blue ink onto her washcloth, then spray it clean with nothing more than TuffStuff and a toothbrush.

Of course I should have run in to fetch my washcloth and my ink--just to remove any possible sleight of hand that may have been occurring. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to waste her time. I especially didn’t want to waste my time.

She persisted.

”What’s your most difficult cleaning job?” she demanded.

Naturally I thought of the right answer two minutes after we parted company.

Blood, of course. We try to keep the salespeople on the front porch...but sometimes you get this awful splattering...

But instead I tried, as tactfully and pleasantly as possible to explain that I just didn’t buy my products door to door.

”Why not?” she demanded peppily, in her valiant but futile effort to keep the lines of communication open. And I can’t even remember what I replied, but I went in grumbling about fire-bombing the “Keep the Customer Feeling Like a Clod School of Peppiness.”

Last night I watched the ending two-thirds of Captain Blood on Turner Classic Movies. Errol Flynn sure was pretty. I was especially impressed with Captain Blood’s way of dispatching the sleazy Captain Lavasseur without mussing his pretty hair. I wasn’t worried about Lavasseur’s cheveux, as I was too impressed about his abysmal french accent to mind his hair.

Now there is no getting around it. I must put Robin Hood in my Netflix queue to see if Errol always looks pretty in tights, and if Olivia deHavilland always looks like a cute little muffin-face.

Specs

I picked up my “progressive lens” glasses today. At my optometry appointment last week the optometrist, who was roughly 14, told me that 45 is the “magic age” in Severna Park--meaning that even though “progressive lens” really means bifocals, at least I have lots of company.

Jeff said, “You look straight out of the 50’s,” and I said, “Well...that’s good. I always wanted to look like Mary Sue Higginshaw, the ‘smart girl’ in your junior high math class.” Although, to be fair, I’m Mary Sue with a little mileage on her. Although, to be really fair, Mary Sue managed to have that middle-aged air even at twelve, so maybe I’m not that far off.

My observations about the specs so far: They’re trying to cram way too many corrections into a couple little lenses. In particular, the part that's supposed to fix my astigmatisms tends to make everything I look at go from square to rhombus with a slight turn of the head. It’s a trip. The techician lady said “your eyes have to learn all over again. Fine. I hope my eyes are smarter than the rest of my head, if not as smart as Mary Sue.
I wonder though...would I have been just as well off with homemade pipe cleaner glasses?

Bryn Mawr College. July. Those are the magic parameters. So to speak. Yes...for one week in July, Tannen’s Magic (some outfit in NY...no connection to Biff as far as I know) holds its magic camp for 11 to 20 year olds on the campus of beautiful Bryn Mawr, and Gabe is actually interested. Not that I really thought he wouldn’t be now that he’s in the mode of ambushing random people to show them card tricks. Every conversation this week, on the ride home from carpool has been about how easy David (one of the other riders) is to hypnotize. Apparently several kids at school are too. I’m waiting for the call: “Would you please ask Gabe to stop hypnotizing everyone during social studies?”

But this means 2 good things: 1)Gabe doesn’t watch anime all day that week, and 2)Jeff and I can go somewhere. I’m thinking about Maine. Maybe Acadia. Maybe a quick trip to Nova Scotia. It’s a small segment from the middle of our 2 week honeymoon in 1984. I may skip L.L.Bean this go-round. And I will insist the snobby lady at the Asticou Inn in Northeast Harbor acknowledge my presence instead of addressing the pair of us as “Mr. Clement.” “Please show Mr. Clement his room. Please take Mr. Clement’s bag.” I’m not sure where I got the invisibility cloak that day. Maybe this time, if I wear my Mary Sue Higginshaw glasses, she’ll pay attention to me.