Freezing Time: 7/13/2015 6:15pm
The Moment When I Was Walking Along the Lake and Talking to My Son on the Phone
water taken from Lake Michigan, placed in baggie, frozen in ice cube tray
Freezing Time: 8/04/2015 10:00pm
The Moment When My Daughter and I Were Drinking Tea Together on the Night Before She Left for College
tea taken from her glass, placed in baggie, frozen in ice cube tray
SCIENCE
THE RAINBOW EXPERIMENT
1. Look up at the sky.
2. Do you see a rainbow? If so, snap a photo.
3. Now text Rainbow.
You will then be prompted to send the photo.
4. Your rainbow and its location will be posted on the Live Rainbow Feed at textbookamykr.com.
5. Rainbow posts will remain live for one day. So at any given moment, we will be able to see where in the world there are rainbows.
6. After the one day, each rainbow will be moved to the Permanent Archive of Beautiful Ephemera.
THE PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR EXPERIMENT
1. Fall and stay in love.
2. Remain loyal.
3. Sometime later, hire a private investigator who specializes in infidelity work. Hire this private investigator over the phone; do not meet in person.
4. Email photos of your beloved to the private investigator.
5. Tell the private investigator that you know for certain that your beloved will be with the “other person” at such and such a time at such and such a place, and that you want photos.
6. Arrive at that place, at that time, with your beloved.
7. This place might be your favorite restaurant. Or a park bench. Or even just your home.
8. Wherever it is, make sure the two of you are easily visible to the private investigator (who will be staked out nearby—maybe across the street, or hiding in a bush). If you are at a restaurant, for example, sit at a window table. If at home, maybe hold hands on your front porch, or embrace one another by a large window.
9. The private investigator will proceed to take long-lens, black-and-white photographs of the two (of you).
10. When you receive the photos, frame them for your home.
11. Title the series Caught in the Act of Monogamy.
THE PIÑATA EXPERIMENT
1. Procure a candy-filled piñata.
2. Hang this candy-filled piñata in a tree near a baseball field.
3. Affix a brief clarifying note next to the piñata that says, Yes, this is for you.
4. Sit back and wait for some baseball players (or Little Leaguers) to discover the piñata.
5. See how long it takes them to realize, Hey, the perfect item for whacking this thing open is in our possession! and watch as they gleefully have at it.
THE SHORT, COLLECTIVE BIOGRAPHY EXPERIMENT*
1. Gather between six and twelve people around a table, ideally over dinner.
2. The group can consist of good friends, individuals you are meeting for the first time, or any combination thereof.
3. Someone happily agrees to be a notetaker.
4. Through conversation, endeavor to find a collection of autobiographical statements that are equally true for each and every member of the group.
5. While it may begin with one person tossing out questions (“Does everyone like flannel?”), soon enough everyone will be chiming in, energy will escalate, and questions will bounce around in pinball fashion.
6. Maybe you will do this for 30 minutes. Maybe for a couple of hours. You’ll know when to wrap it up.
7. Assemble your statements.
8. Call it your Short, Collective Biography.
FIG. 1 The Short, Collective Biography of Diane Bond, Emily RK Chester, Teri Cicurel, Jim Clark, Ann Kim, Krista Varsbergs, and Amy K.R. Created over dinner on Saturday night, August 15, 2015. Imagine it read by all seven people in unison.
Click http://bit.ly/29DoOwT to see a larger version of this text
THE COUCH EXPERIMENT
1. Start a family.
2. On a lazy Sunday morning shortly after your first child is born, take a family photo on the couch.
3. Put this first photo, and all subsequent photos, in a small album labeled Couch Pictures.
4. Repeat one or two Sundays a year, or whenever you happen to think of it.
5. When your children are preteens, there will be some nonsense complaints about doing the Couch Picture. Pay no attention. Proceed as normal.
6. Observe how one day you have an album full of Couch Pictures.
7. On the first Sunday after your last child leaves for college, take a Couch Picture with your mate, just the two of you.
8. When it occurs to you that removing the c from the word couch is more like it, do not actually label it as such. Proceed as normal.
THE APRIL 29TH EXPERIMENT
1. On 4/29 at 4:29pm, text someone I love you. This is what I would like for my birthday each year.
MIDTERM ESSAY
MIDTERM ESSAY
AMY KROUSE ROSENTHAL
If it is wonderful, splendid, remarkable—a view outside a window, a lit-up fountain at night, that fig-chorizo appetizer—I am compelled to seek some sort of saturation point, to listen/stare/savor on a loop, to greedily keep at it until I’ve absorbed, absconded with, and drained it of all its magic. Invariably, I will have to move on before I have had enough. My first word was more. It may very well be my last.
***
About my midlife crisis. I did not get a sports car (staying with minivan). I did not run off with the ski instructor (staying with mate). I did not go on a cruise (staying at home).
But here is what I did get: weepy, chronically weepy.
I wouldn’t describe the origin of my tears as Boo-hoo, I’m so old, but more, Oh my, here I am, living, and I would like to keep on living, preferably perpetually.
I would like to avoid, for as long as humanly possible, being pronounced dead and just keep being pronounced AY-mee KROWSS ROH-zihn-THAHL. I would like to say to that tomorrowless day (the one day that coyly begins like any other but then ends—so nonchalantly! so dismissively! so boorishly!—without me in it), STAY AWAY!
But even if I were crowned life-expectantly average by an optimistic actuary, the hourglass is now, at most, half empty.
And so it was, everything around me had a bittersweet sheen to it; moments were dramatically stamped FLEETING and TRANSIENT as I roamed about. A simple exchange between my son and me, for example, felt epic in its beauty and poignancy; all that happened was that he tapped on his bedroom window, I looked up at him from the sidewalk below, and he waved.
I choked up at a Park District ice-skating show when the girls did their synchronized straddle leaps just as Irene Cara screams FAME! Something about the sincerity of it all: the matching polyester costumes and well-rehearsed jump in the air; the song itself, a mighty combination of touching and kitsch. And I didn’t even have a kid in the show.
I didn’t exactly have a midlife crisis. I had a midlife cry-bliss.
If one is generously contracted 80 years, that amounts to 29,220 days on Earth. Playing that out, how many more times then, really, do I get to look at a tree? 12,395? There has to be an exact number. Let’s just say it is 12,395. Absolutely, that is a lot, but it is not infinite, and anything less than infinite seems too measly a number and is not satisfactory. Also, I would like to stare at my kids a few million more times. I could stare at them a few million more times easy.
Tell me:
How many more times do I get to cut an apple?
How many more times will I put on my shoes? Kiss my mother? Use an ATM?
How many more
times do I get to toss the salad and ask How much longer ’til the chicken’s ready? as Jason pokes at it on the grill? How many more times do I get to lift my head from the pillow to see what time it is? Run inside after getting drenched in the rain? Look for the Ping-Pong ball? Check my email? Text <3 to the kids? Catch a whiff of jasmine? Use a straw?
***
I have this vivid pictorial memory of being 9 years old, sitting on the sidewalk by my house and thinking, There is nothing special about what I am doing right now, but I want to remember this moment, perfectly intact, for the rest of my life.
I no longer remember the fine print of it—like what I was wearing, where my siblings were, if there were worms on the sidewalk—but I have a carefully preserved recollection of the certainty of my mission, of sitting there on that suburban subdivision sidewalk, feeling adamant about carrying the moment with me into old age. I swear I feel like I could just plop down on the curb next to that girl, she seems so close.
Hi there, 9-year-old me. Can you believe it? Here I am, that middle-aged me you imagined. And here we are together. And here is that moment, just like you wanted.
Yes. And what about the very old and very gray 80-year-old us? Is she coming?
I believe so. I hope so. Let’s sit and wait. I have a feeling she will be here in no time.
ROMANCE LANGUAGE
CHARACTERS
Ana
Ana’s mother Fran
Ana’s best friend Peter
Ana’s paternal grandmother Gram
Ana’s dead father Frank
PRESENT TENSE
Ana & Peter:
14 years old
best friends since kindergarten
Ana calls him Re-Pete:
because he stutters
She also calls him Petep:
so they can both have
palindromic names
Gram has always called him
Sweet Pete:
because he is
PAST TENSE
In kindergarten, Fran nicknamed the two of
them Ampersand
On account of them having met in a sandbox
On account of them always
being together
PAST TENSE
Frank was an architect
He died unexpectedly and instantly from a
brain aneurysm
Ana was 12
Frank was 42
People who didn’t know Frank well
said he died in the prime of his life
People who knew him would
never say that
Frank always said
Every day is the prime of your life
PRESENT TENSE
Ana and Gram are having lunch at their
favorite sushi place
They are sipping miso soup,
talking about Frank
As they often do, they begin doodling
anagrams on their napkins
They enjoy referring to themselves as
AnaGram
Gram writes: I’m sad
Ana’s anagram response: Is mad
Ana writes: Miss you so much
They play around with this for a while
Gram puts a dash of soy sauce in both of their
miso soups
She shows Ana her anagram response:
us = miso soy chum
They clink bowls
PRESENT TENSE
Ana has a dream about her dead father
In the dream she runs into him at their
favorite deli
She can’t believe it—
he’s not dead after all
He clarifies that he is indeed dead but was
allowed to come back for a single day
Ana is ecstatic but panicked—
she feels they’re wasting time at the deli
She insists they hurry home
Her father first wants to eat a
sandwich together
In this way it can just be a
regular day
Ana starts crying
You lied to me!
You said you would love me forever & always,
but you died!
The deli-counter man calls his number
27!
Instead of giving the deli-counter man
the paper ticket, her father puts it in Ana’s hand
This ticket is for you, Ana.
It says everything.
He kisses her hand holding the 27 ticket
Ana wakes up
She is still crying
PRESENT TENSE
Ana shares “the 27 dream” with her mother
She shares the dream with Pete
She shares the dream with Gram
She begins having “the 27 dream” regularly
PAST TENSE
Ana and Pete were in 5th grade
Classmates were teasing Pete at recess about his
stuttering
Ana stood up for him
Back in class later,
they learned about Venn diagrams
Pete passed Ana a note
It was a Venn diagram
In the left circle he wrote
th-th-thank
In the right circle he wrote
y-y-y-you
In the overlapping center he wrote
from your best friend
She tacked this “sweet Venn thank-you” on her bedroom wall
It has been there ever since
PAST TENSE
Frank and 7-year-old Ana sat at
the dining room table
They were looking at architectural drawings for
their new dream house
Ana asked why it was taking so long to build
the house
Frank told her a year was actually rather fast
He showed her a photo of a house that took
22 years to build
It was the Taj Mahal
He told her the (true) story of the 17th-century
emperor whose beloved wife died
The emperor became despondent and had a
palace built to match the size of his grief
The story upset Ana
Frank made up a happier epilogue:
He told her that after the Taj Mahal was
completed, the emperor fell in love again!
The first time the emperor kissed his new love
it was at sunset in front of the palace
The moment they kissed it was as if lightning
struck his heart
He immediately knew their love
was everlasting
Ever since, through the ages, couples from all
over the world have journeyed to the Taj Mahal
They kiss at sunset
If lightning strikes their hearts,
they know their love is everlasting
Frank concluded the tale by sharing the
“famous poem” (made up on the spot)
about this legend:
Kiss under a dimming sun
In front of the Taj Mahal
And if thy heart lights up
Yours is the truest love of all
PAST TENSE
It was the night Fran and Frank first met
They were at a party
Hi, I’m Fran.
Fran is it? Well, that’s cool.
And why is that cool?
Because based on our names alone,
it seems I complete you.
He reached to shake her hand:
Hello, Fran,
I’m Fr
ank.
PAST TENSE
Frank handed Fran a ring
It was cobalt
Even more than gold, cobalt is the element of
enduring strength
FUTURE TENSE
Ana & Pete will decipher “the 27 dream”
They will discover that the ampersand was
originally the 27th letter in the English alphabet
They will discover that the atomic number
of cobalt is 27
They will discover there are 27 bones
in the human hand
They will discover that the largest prime
number ever calculated is 17,425,170 digits
long; those digits add up to 27
They will discover an anagram for
twenty seven = sweet Venn ty
(sweet Venn thank-you)
They will discover that there are two major
cities on earth with a latitude of 27 degrees:
Tampa, Florida
Agra, India
Tampa, Florida—
the place in the world where lightning strikes most
Agra, India—
home to the Taj Mahal
FUTURE PERFECT
Ana and Pete will have turned 27
They will have ventured to Agra, India
They will have stood in front of the Taj Mahal
under a dimming sun
Pete will have taken a cobalt ring from his pocket