Sprints

Do three-minute sprints with each of the following topics:


Cantaloupe
My favorite fruit. I'm not usually a picky eater, but I'm a bit of a baby when it comes to seeds in my fruit. I can't do watermelon. Even seedless makes me nervous. A meticulously de-seeded and cut out of the rind without a speck of rind material and not the slightest bit turned (which makes it tastes suspiciously alcoholic) is a one of my favorite summer memories. Out on the porch of our old house on Roys Avenue, where I lived between the ages of five and nine, until we moved and everything changed and, in my memory, everything began to grow dark. Where my dad took care of us after school. He worked for the school district and got home before us. Gave us snacks of celery with peanut butter and raisins ("ants on a log"). We were allowed to watch half an hour of tv--usually Duck Tales and then were ordered to go out and play, to enjoy the sunshine. When we moved, our house was more expensive, the school district was less rough (less rough on me, which was why we moved) but the district was more expensive. We lived in a modest 60s split-level in a subdivision. Few cars passed. We played tennis in the street, roller skated at the nearby church parking lot, walked around after dark. Parents from other neighborhoods would bring their children to our neighborhood to safely trick or treat. The night before we moved, I sat on the hardwood floor and cried, cried for the change, cried for the house. My dad sat with me, looked a little teary himself and said, "It's been a good house." When we moved, my dad began work at a nursing home and was irritable all the time. His interminable sighing began and my mom hit menopause at 40 and started crying into her spaghetti at dinner and I started to look fondly back at Roys Avenue.


Cow
I have many black and white portraits of cows, taken by my brother a few years before he died. On the occasion of my college graduation, he gave me a card he had made, on which he had drawn a pen and ink sketch of flowers in a vase. I saved the card. The image is a surreal, a unique take on a standard still life. The inscription on the inside of the card said, "Remember me always, your loving brother." Even at the time, it was both cryptic and sweet. Something between an honest expression of genuine affection and a goodbye. He was the one who knew me best, who got a kick out of my incessant talking, my constantly shifting dreams/plans. He really loved me. Inside the card were a series of black and whites of cows he'd photographed in Wisconsin. The composition is striking, creating evocative portraits of black and white spotted cows with numbered tags hanging from their ears.

Breast
In sixth grade I overheard Cory S., the most beautiful boy in our class say disdainfully, "The only girls here who have any breasts are the fat ones." And I remember looking down and thinking, I do and I'm certainly not fat.
Then came college when they just kept growing and growing. And everyone--and I mean everyone, most everyone was Mennonite and related--had pear shapes. I realize that "pear shaped" evokes big thighs but no one had big thighs. As I remember it, most everyone was svelte. Small on top and a little bigger on the bottom, much like the artsier models I'd seen growing up. And there I was, giant on top, tiny on the bottom. And I felt as though I were simply too much. Just to scratch the surface on this issue, but the men at Goshen were egotistical and not particularly interested in girls. It's suspicious in retrospect, that most of them wanted simply to work on their pottery and spend time with each other, but at the time it was devastating. For me but for all of us. No one wanted to date us. We were lucky if we got someone to spend the night with us after heavy, heavy nights of drinking. When I tell my boyfriend Erik about this time in my life he says, "So, a single red-blooded male would have cleaned up at Goshen?" and I say, yes. Most definitely yes.


Window
Looking out my window now, at a quintessentially Pittsburgh scene. I live in a valley, a "hollow" ("holler"?) and look up at red, blue, green houses that with each street stretch higher and higher, ending at an ancient brick, Victorian style school building at the top of the hill. Two stories, all gables, with a long abandoned stove top emerging from the top of the building. We do not live on Mt. Washington. We live three block from "Mt. Washington" but our neighborhood is Duquesne Heights. And the contrast is noticeable. Tiny condos that sell for half a million dollars on Grandview Avenue. Three blocks down the hill, Duquesne Heights where the houses cost $60K. This is quintessentially Pittsburgh. Before Duquesne Heights, I lived in Friendship. A quiet neighborhood with towering single-family owned Victorian houses. Two blocks away, crossing Penn Avenue, was Garfield. A dangerous neighborhood with nuisance bars, few street lights, drug dealers every few blocks.

Urine
The worst public restroom I've ever used was in Havana. I spent nearly every night at what we called "The Pig Bar." It had no discernible name, but the image of a pink pig on the sign out front. I'd drink beer after peso-priced beer and have to visit the bathroom frequently. No toilet seat (common in Cuba), floor coated in urine, no toilet paper (very common in Cuba), and flushable only by quickly pouring a bucket full of water into the bowl, which would activate the flush mechanism. But there was no bucket, no sink, and as far as I could tell hadn't been flushed in days. But I continued to go there. The beer was cheap, it was outside, I could smoke half a pack of Romeo y Julieta cigarettes in peace and chat incessantly to my fellow students and sometimes Cuban students from the University of Havana.


Pillow
I was just eyeing a back pillow that I bought with an image in mind of me sitting up in bed and typing away at my laptop, poems, essays, stories. But now it serves as decoration and a place for my little brindle pitbull to lay his head while he stares out at the window.


Vanilla
Is startlingly expensive. I don't bake very often, but I do make peanut butter cookies from The More With Less Cookbook, a Mennonite staple, a book written in the 70s that presents recipes that use less of the world's resources. Definitely ahead of its time but does include a variety of hilarious anachronisms, including instructions to place hot casserole dishes on your asbestos pad, and to add lard, as though we all have lard hanging around, to a variety of dishes. The recipe requires vanilla. I made a recent trip to Foodland to buy some and was, as said earlier, startled by the price. But I bought it and all eaters of the cookies are grateful.