In the hot dry heat of the summer of 2005, in a plateau desert town where tiny green bugs swarmed so thick sometimes you’d have to clean hundreds of bug bodies, smeared heavy with green slime, off your headlights before they’d work at night, I put pens in my hair.
I’d pile it up thick and messy, off my bare white shoulders, and wrap wide rubber bands the color of old folks flesh around it. It needed to be out of my face for the hours I spent poring over ink-smeared pages with a leaky red pen, looking up sometimes to push my black-rimmed glasses up my nose, crack a joke, have a drink. Eventually I’d stick a pen in that mess, and lose track of it. Find another one. Get back to work. Put it up there, too. Wander to a meeting, collect another pen and stow it in my hair as well.
Eventually there’d I’d be, a nymphet of the copy desk, the medusa of writing implements. Bare-armed and crowned with words. What a wonderful summer.
Lovely reminiscence–thanks. And (just by the way) this is what we do more and more with the years: we remember, or try to convey, not what happened but the texture of what happened, how it smelled, the pace at which time went by… welcome to Mondo Nostalgia, Sarah. We all end up here, with luck, and it ain’t so bad, especially with good company.
A lovely comment! Mondo Nostalgia is not so bad, so far. I think I got it early, I have a distinct memory of my cousin and my sister laughing hysterically at me as a 5-year-old who looked mistily off into the middle distance while talking about “the olden days.”