Queen of Hearts

This past weekend Jeff took me to a special store called Queen of Hearts. Sounds like the perfect store for Bad Alice, doesn’t it? And it is.

Queen of Hearts is an antique store that houses staged displays from different dealers. Oh my God, I wanted to just roll around in the glory of it all. There were wonderful pieces of furniture, some of them as-is and some of them gussied up in interesting ways. One section had cookie jars. One gentleman specialized in vintage license plates. There were more cigar boxes than any Pinterest crafter could ever want.

But it was generally the small things that caught my eye, like the set of pink mixing bowls with the strawberry motif, and the casserole dishes - you know the ones - with little flowers. Most of them flooded me with a sense of nostalgia. A spinning wheel like the one in my paternal grandfather’s house. A butter churn like the one I found in my maternal grandparents’ basement. A straw purse with hideous flowers like one my mom had. Old Butterick patterns. Jeff even found some books on record, pulling out by chance one that contained Black Beauty with, of all things, my first name written on it in marker.

By that time I was beginning to feel a bit teary eyed. I missed my parents. I remembered my mom cutting out fabric on the kitchen table - she never pinned but instead weighted the pattern pieces with table knives. She had an old fruitcake tin filled with buttons (I still have those buttons) and an old Whitman’s Sampler box filled with thread, some of it so old it was on wooden spools. I remembered my dad’s old cigar boxes filled with arrowheads. In storage there are two old, heavy black typewriters much nicer than the ones I saw on display. Soon a chain of associations led me further afield. When Abby was little my dad found a huge lot of Matchbox cars at a flea market and gave them to her. Whenever I open the cabinet where I keep our spices, I smell the same timeless scent I smelled in our spice cabinet growing up, and I’ve stashed my mom’s recipe box there. In one section of the store I found a few old thermoses, the kind with the glass interiors that always broke. How many times I went to drink my lunch milk and found shards floating on top. Whatever happened, I wondered, to the metal Laugh-in lunchbox I used in first grade, with a paper name tag held in place by grubby scotch tape curling up at the edges?

Oh, I wanted to buy so many things, as if I could somehow recapture the best moments of my childhood and carry them with me when I left the store. Instead we left with a set of sundae glasses, something my family never owned, and surprised the girls with ice cream and fudge sauce.

I Can't Stop Feeling This Feeling I've Got

Hi everyone, time for musical association. This is being done imperfectly because although these videos say they allow sharing on Blogger, the moment you try to put them into a post, you get an "embedding disabled" message. That sucks, folks. Are you listening Parlaphone and Mercury? It sucks a big one. So, you may see an image, but you'll have to go over to YouTube to actually watch it. Because, you know, that makes such a big fucking difference somehow. *shakes fist at idiotic music labels*

Ahem.

It began with this tune by Razorlight tapping itself out in my head. Sounds like England to me. England has a bright, happy melody. I first heard this song in a British soap opera, and it stuck like a burr, perhaps because the storyline is about making a decision of the heart. Even though it isn’t that old, the song makes me think of the England of Summer 1989, when I lived there for a few months. Gainsborough clouds, pints of lager, lots of cigarettes. Love. First love. Exuberant, ebullient, gossamer.




When I was in England that summer, I bought a print of Waterhouse’s Lady of Shallot. I love the Pre-Raphaelites, that strange nostalgic, opiate tinged Victorian extravaganza, and this video looks like a Pre-Raphaelite painting come to life. Also, you might have noticed that I love Alice in Wonderland.



Thinking about Florence reminded me of another artist I had heard of and meant to investigate: Bat for Lashes. Why that name, I wonder? Florence and Bat both have a flair for the dramatic that I appreciate. And they’re pretty. I would totally stutter and blush if either said anything to me. I’m such a school girl.



So that's it, folks. Go buy their music, attend their concerts, fantasize about them naked. Maybe not that. It's up to you.

I always wanted to be somebody

I'm having one of those "What have I done with my life?" interludes. And then I ask myself, "What will I be when I grow up?" Oh damn, I am grown up.

As I mentioned before, it kind of freaks me out that I can now say "twenty-five years ago" and know that I was fully sentient at that date. "A quarter of a century ago, when I was in high school, before the advent of ATMs, DVDs and personal computers . . . when the woolly mammoth still roamed the earth. I've spent a lot of time trying to grow up, and I'm not so sure about the results.

I've never had a lot of ambition. I didn't so much navigate as float along wherever the current took me. Well, let me qualify that, I tended to buck the current, but that just meant that eventually I drifted off in some other, less mainstream direction for a while. Still, I had some ideas about who I was and what kind of life I would have. It turns out they were all off base.

For instance, I thought I was gay. I was pretty certain about that for a while. I also loathed the very idea of marriage, which seemed like such an outmoded institution. I couldn't figure out why that needed to be imported into homosexual unions. I was agnostic. Sure, I loved beautiful cathedrals and Christian art and so on, but if anything could destroy my faith, it was your average Christian. So, of course, I hated organized religion, which seemed to have organized for the sole purpose of putting republicans in office and ranting about abortion and sodomy. I was certain, beyond certain, that I would never have children. I didn't like them. I didn't get all moony when someone showed up with a baby. I didn't think they were cute, or the epitome of innocence, or any of that. I didn't understand people got all woolly-brained over them. I was fairly certain that I would always live in New York City, maybe Chicago or San Francisco at a stretch. I wasn't provincial enough to think that the world outside of NYC was not worth noticing--I just couldn't imagine living without the brownstones and Central Park, the theater and opera and the Village.

And here I am, straight, married with children, a Christian living in the same state where I grew up.

My previous self is practically a stranger. She doesn't really feel like home, but the current self feels like a default, a garment I happened across and it fit, but it isn't my style and it doesn't do a thing for me. Sadly, I am not myself around, well, pretty much anyone here outside of Dear Husband. I'm always being careful what I say at work, pretending that I'm just as pious and conservative and Reformed as they are. I don't know many other people here, so I tend to assume the mask of parenthood appropriate to my environment. Just your neighborhood mom here, listening to the local Christian radio station and standing behind good old fashioned family values. I'm not sure what happened to my more brash and defiant self. The protester. The one who dressed exactly as she wished, who liked to shock, to provoke, to push the envelope. I guess I still question everything. I just keep it on the down-low. I'm still restless. And you know, 42 years of being restless is kind of exhausting.