They drove around on weekends. The woman didn’t have much to say, but she seemed to like the girl and adventure. So, every weekend, after church, sometimes they dropped Dona Manuela off or sometimes she stayed. They all drove around, looking at expensive houses and land and lives they would never have.
Her current obsessions were photography, especially photography of the 20th Century. She was also getting into the music of each of the eras (The Woman was especially helpful for this) The earliest recordings of Jazz Age Jazz (1920’s), Bing Crosby Depression Crooners (1930’s) Big Band WWII (1940’s) Doo-Wop and Elvis Rock & Roll (1950’s) LA Surfers & Hippie Woodstock Music (1960’s) Gordon Lightfoot, Vietnam, Nixon Music (1970’s) New York City Punk Music (1980’s) Grunge & “Dust of the Berlin Wall Falling” Bands (1990’s) 9/11 Decade (2000’s)
Being 9, she had no knowledge of the 1970’s. For that matter, the 1960’s and the early 1980’s blurred into that time period for her as well.
From the pictures she was looking at from the Woman’s childhood, she had some sense that it was an extended rainy weekend. The photos had a funny, grainy texture. More shadowy, more hazy than the life she saw in front of her right now. Maybe it was the drugs, and everyone was under a constant haze of pot smoke. Maybe that’s why the pictures were so full of muted colors. Like someone had set the entire decade to an Instagram filter of “sad, hippy-dippy”
The 1980’s in New York were black and white. Lou Reed, CBGB, Andy Warhol’s bad blonde wig; the streets were very dirty and there were the kind of drugs that made you angry and assertive and made you sing off-key.
It was a different black&white from before JFK was shot and the earliest Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Cameras hadn’t perfected their focus, lenses were made by humans, not computers, so there was always room for “Art”.
Pictures from the 1990’s, when she was a *YOUNG* blossoming woman, high school and college, the edges were shaper and crisper. The light was fluorescent, making everything look bright, but not friendly. She knew it was the Age of Nirvana. Grunge Rock was just coming in to its own and everyone dressed in rags and did the kind of drugs that gave them circles under their eyes and made them actively kill themselves. (Like her brother?)
The houses around Walden Pond were another way to get into the Time Machine. Houses she was used to had triangles. A bunch of rooms on the ground floor, and 2 bedrooms on the top floor. Even her dollhouses were like this. Windows on the top floor peeked out from underneath triangles and bits of stale wood which were originally the flavor of gingerbread.
But she knew the shapes of Lincoln and Concord. There was more land to each of the houses. The kids there had more lawn, and also more woods near their house to get lost in. Maybe their woods even came with a pond or two. Sometimes, there were giant sculptures to climb, made of rock or stone, solid enough to swing from or stand on.
The houses were squares and rectangles. Roofs flat enough to walk on (even if there was no doorway onto the roof. Basketballs would get caught up there and never roll back by gravity. There were whole graveyards of lost balls and toys and flying machines, never to be retrieved.
She knew these houses were built in the 1960’s and 1970’s. On rainy day weekends, everything lush and green and soggy. She imagined the carpenters nailing all the wet boards together; the trees dripping the heavy dew, rain rollign down the leaves and landing on the white painters’ caps of the workers. But when the sun did come out, they’d be smiling.
640, Nov 17
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