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Little Lawyer and I spent an hour on the phone last night chatting, laughing, ostensibly working. He’s an FB “friend” so he must know I’m old enough to be his grandmother – literally, if I’d started at the age that most people breed in these parts. Nevertheless what we do on the phone can only be classified as flirting. If I were even ten years younger, I would seriously consider Mrs. Robinsoning him. But I think a woman of almost sixty does not think about getting it on with a man of not quite thirty, no matter how intense the mental attraction. Or maybe this is just the way people in their late twenties interact these days and he's not flirting at all.
Nov. 13th, 2010
LJ Idol Week 2: Deconstruction
Nov. 13th, 2010 07:33 pmThe Little Store sold hot sauce. Sound like a funny thing to sell? I suppose it was.
The idea for the Little Store came to me the day the price of oil first threatened to hit fifty dollars a barrel. My husband and I were standing in line at the post office, waiting to mail out a stack of resumes. My resumes. For various reasons in those days my husband assumed that his career consisted of managing mine.
I’d worked for a very successful company, where I’d made a shitload of money. I gave meeting. I took lunch. I sat across vast mahogany tables from movers and shakers for whom a million dollars was as insignificant a sum as the ten dollar bill with which I might tip a parking valet if (a) I was drunk and (b) I was feeling particularly magnanimous. The company’s office building gleamed over Wilshire Boulevard like a great glass castle from which a modernistic ogre might use fax, cell phone and satellite relay to manage his minions of corporate trolls.
But the division I’d worked for had been a stealth operation within those glass walls, perhaps fueled by the close personal friendship between the Big Muckety and my beautiful, charismatic female boss, perhaps not. It had provided few opportunities for networking. So when it closed – abruptly – I had no parachute and very few names in my Roladex. Hence the need for professional bulk mailings.
The post office line was forty feet long. To pass the time my husband and I began discussing the economics of hot sauce.
“Chipotle this, chipotle that,” I said. “It’s the new gelati, The next big thing in culinary trends. I give it five years.”
“Oh, longer than that,” said Ben. “People get addicted.”
“A small subset of users.”
“You mean the ninety percent of the world’s population that prefers spicy food?”
“What are you implying? That our standard of living is going to take such a roller coaster dive in the near future that refrigeration itself will be imperiled, that Americans will have to resort to berries to preserve their food? Upward mobility is all about the fast track towards bland.”
“Bland and legal highs,” said Ben. “You can get high off the stuff.”
“Well, then they’ll start to regulate it,” I said. “The FDA will step in. No, I’m telling you it’s a finite life cycle. We’d have to get in and out within four years.”
“Four years,” said Ben. By this point the line had snaked up to the big glass cabinets showcasing the hottest new stamps. Ben pawed the glass absently. “Is it wrong of me to think that Henry Mancini really doesn’t deserve his own stamp?”
“Moon River, baby,” I said. “Wider than a mile. We’re crossing it in style some day.”
“With a bottle of Dave’s Insanity in one hand and Blair’s Death Sauce in the other,” said Ben.
Yes, we really talked like that. Those characters on Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing that critics loved but always dismissed as too glib to be realistic? Nothin' on us. It was one of the things that drew me to my husband who to tell you the truth wasn’t much to look at, being balding, shorter than me and possessed of a gut that from certain angles made him look as though he’d swallowed a basketball. But he was a silver-tongued rascal, and we had that mental telepathy thing going. He had climbed inside my mind, and clothed himself in my archtypes. What can I say? I loved him.
The idea for the Little Store came to me the day the price of oil first threatened to hit fifty dollars a barrel. My husband and I were standing in line at the post office, waiting to mail out a stack of resumes. My resumes. For various reasons in those days my husband assumed that his career consisted of managing mine.
I’d worked for a very successful company, where I’d made a shitload of money. I gave meeting. I took lunch. I sat across vast mahogany tables from movers and shakers for whom a million dollars was as insignificant a sum as the ten dollar bill with which I might tip a parking valet if (a) I was drunk and (b) I was feeling particularly magnanimous. The company’s office building gleamed over Wilshire Boulevard like a great glass castle from which a modernistic ogre might use fax, cell phone and satellite relay to manage his minions of corporate trolls.
But the division I’d worked for had been a stealth operation within those glass walls, perhaps fueled by the close personal friendship between the Big Muckety and my beautiful, charismatic female boss, perhaps not. It had provided few opportunities for networking. So when it closed – abruptly – I had no parachute and very few names in my Roladex. Hence the need for professional bulk mailings.
The post office line was forty feet long. To pass the time my husband and I began discussing the economics of hot sauce.
“Chipotle this, chipotle that,” I said. “It’s the new gelati, The next big thing in culinary trends. I give it five years.”
“Oh, longer than that,” said Ben. “People get addicted.”
“A small subset of users.”
“You mean the ninety percent of the world’s population that prefers spicy food?”
“What are you implying? That our standard of living is going to take such a roller coaster dive in the near future that refrigeration itself will be imperiled, that Americans will have to resort to berries to preserve their food? Upward mobility is all about the fast track towards bland.”
“Bland and legal highs,” said Ben. “You can get high off the stuff.”
“Well, then they’ll start to regulate it,” I said. “The FDA will step in. No, I’m telling you it’s a finite life cycle. We’d have to get in and out within four years.”
“Four years,” said Ben. By this point the line had snaked up to the big glass cabinets showcasing the hottest new stamps. Ben pawed the glass absently. “Is it wrong of me to think that Henry Mancini really doesn’t deserve his own stamp?”
“Moon River, baby,” I said. “Wider than a mile. We’re crossing it in style some day.”
“With a bottle of Dave’s Insanity in one hand and Blair’s Death Sauce in the other,” said Ben.
Yes, we really talked like that. Those characters on Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing that critics loved but always dismissed as too glib to be realistic? Nothin' on us. It was one of the things that drew me to my husband who to tell you the truth wasn’t much to look at, being balding, shorter than me and possessed of a gut that from certain angles made him look as though he’d swallowed a basketball. But he was a silver-tongued rascal, and we had that mental telepathy thing going. He had climbed inside my mind, and clothed himself in my archtypes. What can I say? I loved him.