I’ve never been the kind of person who was impressed by big things.
I remember going to the Grand Canyon in my late teens and thinking, uh, huh. hmm. nice.
I am far more interested in minutiae: The origin of the hat belonging to an old man on the subway platform (Ecuador, it turns out, makes Panama Hats; go figure), perfectly cooked Eggplant Parmesan (Cooks Illustrated’s recipe, hands down. Time consuming, but worth it), the life story of my cab driver (when a man tells you he escaped Sudan by walking, at night, all the way to the coast of Egypt, it’s hard to decide on an appropriate tip).
I like regular people and their stories. Recently, my grandmother mentioned that her mother always thought that she had married beneath herself, but that every day at 4 o’clock, she would still sit down in front of her vanity mirror, take off her makeup and reapply it so that she looked fresh when her husband came home.
Of course, my grandmother is so casual about this kind of thing (she lived through the Depression; had eight kids; survived cancer, her husband’s Alzheimer’s, and her son-in-law’s death on 9/11–this was an insignificant memory as far as she was concerned). But this little peek into another person’s inner life is the kind of thing that interests me the most. I wonder about my great-grandmother: What was she thinking every day as she sat with Ponds Cold Cream on her left and a deep red lipstick on her right?
So here, this blog, is a place to put some of those thoughts down. I often feel that telling a story aloud can ruin it somehow. It needs punctuation and visual aids!
Well, here it will have both.
Sewing a costume, washing little hands, and buttering toast doesn’t sound very big.
Until you hear the whole story.
