5-Revelations Frolic

Clare Dudman, The Keeper of Snails, has tagged me with a meme asking for five things “that people don’t know about you.” I am doing it because Clare asked, and only because Clare asked! So there, Clare, have a care (or a pear, or—enough!)

1. My blood relatives all believe and frequently have reason to say that I magnetically attract crazy people who want to be my best friends. This has been going on for many years and has become a family cliché. (If you are my friend, worry not; you might not be one of the crazy ones. If you are, I love you anyway.)

2. When I was small, I ate mostly raw food—beans, black eye peas, okra, lady peas, green peas, green peanuts (being a proper Southerner, I also liked them boiled), potatoes, turnips, carrots. My skin had a beautiful orangey flush, and my nose was the little nub of a carrot. I now eat most anything. In fact, I’ve had curried antelope in the past week. How many people can say that, I wonder? I still, however, can be caught raiding the uncooked food, and my children like raw green beans and peas.

3. I also never, ever, ever drank milk as a child and may not have any bones.

4. The five people in my immediate family write fiction of various sorts (3 commit poetry!), all but little N, who is probably doomed to write in the future when he is not so little. My daughter went to Alpha this summer. The others tend to keep their scribblings a secret.

5. As a child, I could not bear tags in clothing, or any stiffness around collars, or harsh seams. I still cut the tags out of my clothes or else saw them into frayed half-moon shapes. This may be related to the potpourri of neurological weirdness in my family line, but let’s not go there, okay?

Somehow this whole meme feels familiar, though it is said to be new.

Perhaps I have done it before. And given precisely the same answers. Or weirdly similar answers. Or entirely different ones. The antelope part is definitely new, though I have now eaten antelope in so many different ways that it is beginning to seem quite ordinary, despite its pleasant tang—as of mesquite and bitter herbs.

Perhaps it is merely a passing sense of déjà vu, the sign of infinitesimal small strokes in the brain.

Or perhaps confession is just one of my recurring nightmares.

And here is the mandatory meme-plug: "PLEASE LEAVE THE FOLLOWING IN ALL ‘PEOPLE COLLECTION’ POSTS Remember that it isn’t always the sensational stuff that writers are looking for, it can just as easily be something that you take for granted like having raised twins or knowing how to grow beetroot. Mind you, if you know how to fly a helicopter or have worked as a film extra, do feel free to let the rest of us know about it ."

People Collection. Strange.

Two people I tagged have turned up with responses: "How about The Grove Palace, inhabited by one of my writing seminar students from a week at NCCAT in 2005? She hasn’t been posting, so perhaps this would inspire her… And Jarvenpa, who is a poet/bookseller beleaguered by bears and fire and wandering folk in the wilds of northern California. She’s probably digging out from a mudslide right now." All else is silence.

Oh, 6:
I file my books backward, because I’m tired of Y being down in the right-hand corner with the dust bunnies.

Credit: That picture is out of date, snagged off the SciFiction site. That's why it has the little corner missing. The hair is, all on its own, going curlier, and I requested to see the weirdest eye glasses in New Hartford and promptly bought them. Alas, the boondocks are dull--they are merely burgundy semi cat-eyes with cream and green trim. Next time I get my zany eye frippery in NYC.