Ch. 3: Details, Details: The Basic Building Blocks

#1: Harper’s Index on a Personal Level

Number of unread books on my shelf: 24
Number of times I’ve felt a connection with a random stranger: 3
Number of times I’ve acted on it: 0
Number of fortune cookie fortunes I’ve saved: 2
Number of wedding dresses in my closet: 1
Number of times I’ve been married: 0
Average number of minutes after my mom gets upset with my brother that I get a phone call: 1
Chances that when I move I will throw away all my décor and redecorate my new place: 97 percent
Number of times I wash my hands a day: at least 50
Minutes that go by after I see an illness on a medical show before I diagnose myself with the same ailment and begin naming when I’ve experienced all the symptoms: less than 1
Number of short stories I’ve completed writing: 4
Number of short stories I’ve had published: 0
Chances that I’m going to vacuum and mop my floor after you leave if you wore your shoes in my house while you were here: 100 percent
Number of marriages I’ve been responsible for ending: 1
Number of times I’ve been in love: 2
Number of food concoctions I eat that other people would think were weird: 2
Number of times I’ve read Catcher in the Rye: 3
Number of times I’ve read The Great Gatsby: 5
Number of times I’ve seen The Breakfast Club: 10
Number of times I’ve renewed my faith in God: 3
Chances that something will happen that will make me lose trust in God and go back to questioning my faith: 100 percent
Chances I’ll rewrite something that I’m writing by hand if there is even the tinniest mistake or imperfection: 100 percent
Number of times that I usually end up rewriting something I’ve written by hand before I consider it perfect: 3
Number of articles of clothing that still have the tags on it: 5
Number of times I’ll eat leftovers: 1
Chances that I’ll write “your” instead of “you’re” and have to change it: 100 percent
Number of times I check my e-mail a day: 15
Number of people I consider to be my true friends: 3
Number of times I’ve been out of California: 6
Number of times a month I say, “I’ll start working out/eating healthier on Monday”: 4 (once a week)
Number of crosswords I attempt a week: 3
Number of crosswords I finished completely without help (including not Googling a clue): 2
Number of times I usually have to Google a clue on a crossword: 4
Number of glasses of wine I’ll usually have after opening the bottle: 2
Number of songs in my repertoire that I’ll belt into a hairbrush for my best friends’ amusement when he/she has had a bad day: 3
Chances that when I’ve had a bad day you’ll find me dancing and singing in my kitchen with a glass of wine: 100 percent
Bible versus I can recite off the top of my head: 0
Number of movie/t.v. quotes/lines from books I can recite off the top of my head: 10
Number of times I’ve voted for a President since turning 18: 0
Number of times I’ve voted for an American Idol contestant: 3
Number of ex’s: 2
Number of ex’s I’m still friends with: 0
Number of dirty laundry loads that are waiting to be washed in my laundry room right now: 8
Number of showers I take a day: 2
Number of towels I use a day (to take a shower): 4
Number of “celebrities” I’ve met: 4
Number of vacations I’ve been on: 10
Number of vacations I’ve actually come back from feeling relaxed: 0

#2: Render a Tree, Capture a Forest

“Blink and you’ll miss it,” is the line often used when referring to Jamestown, California, as it only stretches for three miles in every direction between the significantly larger neighboring towns. I’ve always found the remark a bit unfair. When I’m passing through, my eyes never seem to stop roaming. In the spring, they roll over hills lush with lime colored grass and bright orange poppies, robbed of their fertility by the paralyzing heat of summer, which leaves everything dry and prickly against bare, tan legs that run down a dirt path to a neighbor’s house to play. They reach up 300 feet to the tops of staggering pines that also shift between green and brittle brown depending on the season, and whose branches bend under the weight of the crisp, white blankets of snow the town sees once every five winters. They see the Mini-Mart where, in the summers, the high school boys fill up their parents’ boats to go fishing or to ride around the pretty, popular girls who sun themselves in faded, dingy bikinis and talk about the boys they’d rather be with. Almost every jacked up Chevy four-by-four— in charcoal gray or white—on the road has a boat on its trailer hitch come summertime. They slow traffic to 30 mph as they make their way to one of the three lakes that lap against various edges of the town. The sun glistens off their stone blue surfaces so intensely you have to slow your car as you go by so as not to drive off the road. What I don’t blink for in fear of missing is the cemetery. Not a single blade of grass grows on the red, dirt hill pimpled with headstones. Like all the pick-up trucks in town, they are either white or gray. The ones with a bit of sparkle in the stone and the ones with the glossy finish tell you whose family had pants with deep pockets. There is nothing about the way the graves are positioned that gives the impression there was a plan to where each hole was dug, as perfect strangers are often just a roll away from being bedmates. Like the town, the space is not big enough to hold the increasing population, and I often wonder how many feuding neighbors are seeing their Hatfield and McCoy melodrama play out in their afterlife. The day my mom brought my grandma’s ashes to be buried in her family’s plot, which sits on the far side of the cemetery, safe, for now, from crowding, the sky, thick with clouds the color of great gray brains, poured. “She doesn’t want to be buried with them,” my mom told me on the phone that night. I closed my eyes and imagined the dry, red dirt turning into thick clay, sweeping everything in the little town away.