The Face of Delta
Sept 2008
Marty’s back from New York. He brought a couple trinkets for H.o.p., who was delighted.
There are two Skyteam symbols on the Delta toy, each ahead of the forward doors, but they end up looking like X eyes, like in a cartoon where a character is passed out cold.
I think the toy has been given a grin as well.
Marty returned just after the landlord had left.
“What’s that board doing there?” I asked as I escorted the landlord out the back door, pointing out a long old board, something like 8 feet by six inches, that was half clinging to the top of a high fence that separates the area behind our apartment building from the area behind the next apartment building, partly supported by the slender limbs of a tree just beyond that fence, looking like it had dropped out of the sky.
Sometimes I find things weird that others don’t find weird and vice versa. So I was a little reassured that my landlord was astonished as well and marveled over the board. He eventually guessed that a tenant in the next building had perhaps opted to pitch it over their apartment’s balcony rather than lugging it down to the trash.
Earlier, the landlord and I had discussed Palin. He’s Republican yet we are able to talk politics and joke about politics and be serious about politics sometimes. My landlord has had his criticisms of Republican policies and their outcomes and so I was surprised he likes Palin. He thinks she’s a smart one. I said she was an idiot. He said she spoke well. I said she did not speak well at all, that she and McCain were McFester jello brains, that her talk was all irrelevant mumbo jumbo essence of snake oil.
I suppose I could have been more constructive in my criticism?
I told him about the incident where I surprised myself by yelling out the car window in the direction of a truck with a McCain-Palin bumper sticker. I noted how I wasn’t seeing many McCain-Palin bumper stickers, then thought to amend that.
“Of course, you may have one on your truck, I don’t know,” I said.
“No,” the landlord said.
“She’s pretty,” he said of Palin. I said, yes. He said she had sold a lot of eyeglasses, he knew that.
I said that I’d read a couple weeks ago that hair salons across the country were booked with people getting the Palin hairdo.
“I didn’t notice, what hairdo is that?” he asked.
I told him it was a 60’s bouffant french twist in the style of Claudia Cardinale. “Oh, yes,” the landlord said, reflecting dreamily on Claudia Cardinale.
Marty doesn’t know I’m writing about the Palin discussion and comes up behind me and mentions that he heard all over the airports talk about McCain suspending his campaign and nothing positive about either McCain or Palin.
Marty now mentions to me that when he got home the landlord was out joking with one of the AT&T guys about this board in the back hanging in the trees and that it must belong to them and the AT&T guy had walked back and was marveling over the strange board.
I check my email now and find the Library of Congress congratulating me on having successfully created subscriber preferences so that I may now take advantage of e-mail updates offered by them. Strange thing is I didn’t visit and create any subscriber preferences for the Library of Congress. I mean, not that it’s a bad idea, they have some cool stuff on their website. But I didn’t visit the website any time recently and I didn’t subscribe to it today.
Whatever.
Anyway, there you go, I talked about Palin with a Republican and then we wandered outside and marveled over a strange board sitting in the trees like one of those “what’s wrong with this picture” puzzles.
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