psychic garage sale

A House on the Plains

Mama said that I was thenceforth to be her nephew, and to call her Aunt Dora. She said our fortune depended on her not having a son as old as eighteen who looked more like twenty. Say Aunt Dora, she said. I said it.  She was not satisfied.  She made me say it several times. She said I must say it believing she had taken me in since the death of her widowed brother, Horace. I said, I didn’t know you had a brother named Horace. Of course I don’t, she said with an amused glance at me. But it must be a good story if I could fool his son with it.

From Sweet Land Stories by E.L. Doctorow

I think about this book at least once a week. You can read the first story here.

The painting is called Miner’s Shack in the Mountains by Helen Forbes. Yes, I know it’s a mountain scene, I just liked it. Helen Forbes lived and painted by herself in a deserted hotel in Death Valley during the 1930’s.

Oracle of the foot

Through her kitchen’s rear window on Reservoir Street Lucinda could see, over the rooftop of a tire shop and against the background of shaggy palms, the high, rotating sign of the Foot Clinic. It depicted a cartoon foot with features and tiny limbs: one side a happy cared for foot, beaming and confident, white gloved hands jubilantly upraised, the other side a moaning, broken down foot, neglected and weary, grasping at crutches and with its big toe wreathed in bandages.

Lucinda’s view took in three quarters slice of the sign as it turned in its vigil over Sunset Boulevard: happy foot and sad foot suspended in dialogue forever. The two images presented not so much as a one-or-the-other choice as an eternal marriage of opposites, the emblem of some ancient foot based philosophical system. This was Lucinda’s oracle: one glance to pick out the sad or happy foot, and a coin was flipped, to legislate any decision she’d delegated to the foot god.

From You Don’t Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem