The curious case of the $10 mystery

Bleary-eyed from hours of lilypad-leaping online, I was just about to close the laptop when i noticed a FB post from Narrative Urge, the curious spirit behind the delicious communal riddle known as the $10 art mystery:

♥ A Lost Boy on Ponce waits for rescue now
This rhyme by Frederica is meant to tell you how
Paging Charles McNair! 980 on the door
Find it find it find it please, the Bob-A-Lou on 44 ♥


My heart hopped.
I'd given up hoping one of the coveted envelopes (containing a $10 bill, a note and a snippet of prose from someone else, often an Atlanta writer) might land in my mailbox, since I'm practically invisible anymore compared to my successful writer pals Jessica Handler, Kate Sweeney, Gina Webb and Suzanne Van Atten – all of whom had either been sent a letter or had their work quoted in one.
But if I could figure out the clues ..... I could be part of the game too!
My inner Harriet the Spy purred to life. Hmmm. Ponce and Frederica? The library! It's at 980 Ponce de Leon. Charles McNair's brilliant novel "Land o' Goshen" has a club called the Bob-A-Lou!
Breathless, I threw on a ballcap and glasses and grabbed the keys. I could have walked there and back in 15 minutes but felt the pressure of time – the clues were already 20 minutes old!
Once there, I hurried back to the fiction stacks, scanned the shelves of Mc names for Charles and boom, I cradled his book in my hands. It fell open to Page 44, where a white envelope, folded in half, had been tucked between the pages.
Two words were written neatly in blue marker on the front – "for you" – just over the envelope window where Alexander Hamilton's sharply etched chin peeked through.
I stuffed the fat white square in my pocket and peered around to see if anyone was watching. Maybe Narrative Urge herself was here, waiting to see who solved the riddle?
If she was, I couldn't tell –  so I raced back home to open envelope #77.
It contained the hand-written letter I'd seen quoted before:
"Thank you for opening the envelope. The money is real. This is not an ad campaign or marketing ploy. It's an art project. Please use the hints and find us!" Signed Henri Rechatin, Oct. 5, 1966. A purple marker squiggle set off the lines "a site to see: haiku for you" and "robotic cranes dance in singapore. in taiwan appears tornadoes!"
Little black hearts enclosing tinier magenta ones opened and closed the missive.
My literary snippet – "Right, I'm classically trained. And I draw on that, but also I rebel against it, when I think it's important to tell the story" – turned out to be from an interview with Atlanta music legend Bill Taft, whose mournful horn solos helped lodge Smoke's "Another Reason to Fast" in my car's cassette player for months after it came out in 1995.
I spread the pieces out and studied them, surfed the Web to get up to speed on the unfolding story, took a few pictures.
"Follow your narrative urge!" exhorts the mystery sender in looping blue marker script across the bottom of the envelope.
Which made me wonder if this puzzle wasn't screaming so much to be solved as joined.

The whole delicious adventure made me want to round up as many participants as possible over drinks, line the literary snippets up, end to end – and see what kind of new story we could make from the mystery bits.

Walked around downtown today, marveling at the hotel atriums (hyatt, marriott marquis), chancing upon a fabulous parade (courtesy of the atlanta football classic, this year featuring the lock-tight marching 100 from famu) and wandering up and down much-loved streets from my newspaper days past. was grateful the healey building's light-kissed atrium, as lovely as ever, wasn't all locked up for the weekend.

Muffled shouts in the courtyard drew me to the window. Two guys wrestled a bulky object wrapped in blue mover's quilts and rope. They'd move it a few inches, set it down and reconsider. It took 10 minutes to get whatever it was to the bottom of the stairs. I was tempted to open the door to get a better look, but decided it might be smarter to keep my still-pajama'd self inside my own apartment and let the nice men do their work. That hallway is tight enough if you're just carting up boxes of books. They weren't arguing – their voices were more thoughtful, though I couldn't make out the words. Was the weight of the thing what slowed them down – or just figuring out how to navigate the 8 steps up to the landing and the 8 steps after? And then I remembered: A week earlier, the new neighbors had shown up early one morning. Having driven all night from New York City, they were in a hurry to unload the rental car and turn it in before they'd be charged for another day. Their realtor – who had the only key – was nowhere to be found. So they emptied all they'd crammed into the car onto that corner of the courtyard nearest their entrance. A pile of guitar cases, rolled-up carpets, boxes – and a fat-bellied black case we soon learned held an antique oud – spread across the walkway as if it had fallen from the sky. They'd just been hired by different colleges to teach music, said he – tall, with dark curls and deep laugh lines. He made conversation while she – petite, sun-colored hair – sped off to return the car. Guitar was his specialty; piano was hers. "But we won't make much noise," he said with a laugh, as if to ward off potential complaints. We begged him to reconsider. The moving-in would happen in stages, he said. Last to arrive would be his wife's piano. When it arrived, I was a thin wooden door away from all the excitement. But not, it turned out, without a view. Though I've yet to see the piano without its thick layer of blue quilt, it sounds from here as if it couldn't be happier.

kodachrome

the paul simon song i knew by heart -- but the slide film was a mystery to me.
i was deep into black-and-white photography in the '70s, the mysteries of the darkroom, the magic of images appearing from the white photo paper like spirits from another world.
the smells, the machines, the hardware drew me into seeing the world's shades of gray.
so seeing the rich color of my husband's family's collection of slide films was a delicious shock.
the pictures his father had taken over the years -- birthdays, holidays, annual camping trips -- were not just well-composed; they looked as if they'd been shot yesterday.
it seemed impossible they'd frozen time so perfectly.
terry knew the images by heart, since part of his family's tradition was regular home movie nights, sometimes silent films with popcorn and ragtime music, other times they relived the past by watching slide shows of their younger selves.
to me, they were a revelation.
it wasn't just the scenes i loved so much, the forever-young faces. it was the whole story of what the pictures meant. one in particular i especially love. it's terry at 1 or so, at the beach with his young, beautiful parents.
he wrote about it today on his Tumblr blog, on which he records the images his own eye captures, and occasionally tells a story. today's was one i loved so much i had to repost.

http://thebonaventuretapes.tumblr.com/

If you walk slow enough.....

...you'll often stumble upon delightful worlds, just a little off the beaten path. like the backyard greenhouse business of jack herman mitchell. Story: http://patch.com/A-jsxj

oy!

apologies to all seven readers (i cherish you, each and every one!) for being away from this blog for so long. i created it just to See What One Was -- and then realized that like any living thing, it needs to be fed.
oops! bad blog mommy! : (
so the good news my lack of wordage here means the wordage offstage has been happening apace, flowing like a good (stuttery, but constant) river, and therefore i can't -- as a writer who hopes (don't we all?) to someday Leave Something Behind -- be too mad about that.
nevertheless, i miss the idea of my delightful seven blessed readers, who signed up to hear What I Might Have To Say (and i type that in full knowledge of the fact that i have been (kindly) prodded to consider that perhaps i overuse the capital letter thing for emphasis. o twell. sue me!
but i digress.
aside from wanting to re-jump into the pool of cyberconversation, i just wanted to note that i LOVED this whole rant:
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/qmoone/2011/06/mr-naipaul-and-becoming-a-writer/
and regret like the dickens that i ever let a former books editor insert a VSN reference into the LEDE of a book review that had nothing to do with him.
what can i say? i was young, impressionable, and stupidly swayed by males who seemed to know what they were doing.
thank heavens i'm old enough to know better.

on realness

the older i get, the more i appreciate the friends who endure.
who allow you to pick up where you left off.
who think the best of you first, not the worst.
who love you anyway.
i just came back from visiting one i've known since we were 15, when we shared some laugh in biology class. tho neither of us can remember exactly what it was, we knew we'd found a kindred spirit.
we saw each other through trying times -- my broken heart, her housefire.
when it gutted the tiny apartment she shared with her mom, she moved in with us during our junior year.
it was only 6 months, but gave us the chance to live like real sisters and gave her a look at life inside our home, warts and all.
after she moved out, we'd lose touch and reconnect as life pulled us in different directions. each time, we picked up where we left off, no one blaming the other for the lapse, both just grateful for the lines that held us still.
when she got sick last year, our conversations grew more regular. we visited in august and spent a long weekend remembering and laughing and telling each other stories about the life adventures we hadn't shared.
eight months later, we got to celebrate her successful surgery.
cancer didn't take her out, as doctors had suggested it might, but gave her yet another chance to show anyone who didn't already know that she's made of stronger stuff than most.
i haven't even downloaded the photos from this trip, but she's so much on my mind today i had to try to write about her anyway.
all the corny quotes about friendship don't come close. it's not just gratitude for the ways our teenage selves live on in each other's eyes and stories, and the ways my parents live on through her.
it's also a bone-deep reassurance that some of what i thought i knew to be true back then really was.
i'm so grateful that one of the loves i thought would last forever actually did.

Mr. Imagination rises again

The renowned visionary artist who first captivated his Chicago hometown by turning castoffs like industrial sandstone and bottlecaps into fantastical creations stopped making art for months after a 2008 fire leveled the life he thought he'd made.
In 2009, Gregory "Mr. Imagination" Warmack left Pennsylvania and moved to Atlanta.
Grieving for all he'd lost – decades of art he'd made or collected; books, photos and historical documents; his beloved dog Pharoah and a family of cats – sapped the energy he'd once used to bring new life to old things.
In his hands, spent paintbrushes and mops had become shaggy-haired kings or creatures; mountains of bottlecaps found new life in giant thrones, sculptures – even clothes. Wire screen turned into dresses, faces rose up from cement and putty.
What was real didn't die, it just came back in different forms.
Turns out, living in Atlanta has been good medicine. Mr. I's friends rallied, he found a new home, time passed. Once he got his hands moving again, the work flowed. Some bubbled up from new places, like birds carved from salvaged wood. Some stayed rooted in the old, like scorched pieces he's reconfigured, repaired or left as they were.
This time, the life he's reclaimed is his own.

http://www.accessatlanta.com/AccessAtlanta-sharing_/visual-arts-preview-mr-826795.html
http://www.barbaraarcher.com/

such a deal

so i'd had a lovely walk in the old suburban neighborhood where a friend lives. it's 30 minutes by car to get there, but worth it for all the birds, traffic-free hills and patches of woods.
when i got back home, it was misting, not quite raining. no need for the umbrella. but somehow my arms were full anyway as i exited the car, so i slammed the door with my foot.
from the second-story porch next door, a woman with dark hair waved, smiling as if we were old friends. in her arms was a tiny white dog, smaller than my cat.
i waved back.
"nice dog," i say, loud enough to carry.
"free to good home," she yells back.
at first i'm wondering why a dog needs four names. then i get it.
"don't think my cat would much care for that," i say, pausing at the sidewalk.
"oh she loves cats," the woman says. "we have three."
"tempting," i say. "but i think we're good with just the one cat right now."
she shrugs, still smiling.
"i'm joy," she says. "this is celine," she points to a girl who's maybe 20, "and he's robbie." a toddler crawls on the clay tiles in his diaper and t-shirt.
i say my name twice before she gets it. i think about asking if they're cold out there without jackets.
we smile at one another, nod the way you do when you're not sure what to say next, and go our separate ways.

catching up on where i've been

so i'm back in the world of quick turnaround newspaper stories – snapshot journalism. the kind of thing where a conversation becomes a window to a life or calling and the challenge (and joy) comes from seeing how quickly you can translate it to the page.
this is what i loved most about my last three years at the ajc, when i worked out of the gwinnett bureau.
sometimes i'd have so much fun immersing myself in one or another of the county's fascinating towns, i'd wonder what it would be like to actually live there, instead of driving up for the day and pretending.
picturing a crashpad under the trees, just small enough for a bed and desk and hotplate, i imagined being able to watch a place go to sleep and wake up, to hear its particular cast of birds and smell its particular flavor of morning.
can you ever really know a place, i wondered, without living in it?
now i get to find out.
committing to a weekly column – wherein i'm never sure what will be next but i'm on the hook for it anyway – is a big part of the charm.
here are links to a few. the first is about painter rocio rodriguez, whose terrific show at barbara archer gallery in inman park has been extended through feb. 5.

http://vahi.patch.com/articles/local-artist-brings-her-art-back-home

http://vahi.patch.com/articles/rescuing-the-rescuers-2

http://www.reporternewspapers.net/2010/12/30/churchs-divorce-recovery-group-helps-singles-learn-loss/