Urp Redux

Finished off the “dinner special” and the BBQ Protein Tidbits for lunch today and sunk into a food coma that lasted a good two hours (perhaps much longer considering I only had room for a bowl of cereal for dinner). I thought vegan food was supposed to be healthy? Light, even? The tidbits (yes, that’s really what they’re called, and no, I’m not sure what they’re made of, although I’d guess seitan) get a little soggy overnight, but it hardly matters since they are but a vehicle for the barbeque sauce.

Protein-free tidbits:

- the exploding noises made by my toilet seem to have been related to the new sidewalk out front (which presumably involved shutting off the water at some point), and have since disappeared.

- in the past few days, Monte has not only vomited green feathers, but also retrieved, chewed, and puked up the rubber straps of my swim goggles. When I say “retrieved,” I mean that I stowed the goggles deep inside my gym bag and then on the top shelf of my closet, and he fucking found them and brought them to me. In bed. Twice. Also, Clarabelle chewed up a cat toy and consequently shat out pink ribbon. Cats, or small, furry goats? You decide.

- I’ve never been a multi-book kinda girl; I can only ever read one at a time. I never really understand the people who claim to have two (or more!) books going on at once. If I’m engrossed in a book, those pages are my alternate reality for as long as the author keeps my interest. They’re real places, these book-worlds, and I can’t easily move from one to another. But I picked up a copy of Blue Baillett’s The Wright 3 the other day and started thumbing through the first pages. (I read her excellent Chasing Vermeer a few years ago; she writes something like mysteries for the 9-12 set. They’re more puzzle or riddle than mystery, light-hearted and fun stories with a twist, and they take place in Hyde Park.) I’ve been reading Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife during my 40 minutes of Metra each day; the book opens with legendary Ojibwa twins beading furiously, one trying to outdo the other, one light, one dark. The magical realism sparkles as brightly and sinks as deep and dark as the twins’ beadwork. That is to say, I’m hooked; I’m beaded into the story just like all the other characters.

So it’s unusual that instead of setting The Wright 3 aside for later, I’ve begun reading it at night. But there’s no experience quite like reading a book that takes place in a neighborhood you know well. The book-landscape is richer and deeper when you can close the book but stay–literally–right there. The Wright 3 is a kids’ book–a fun read, nothing like the all-embracing pull of The Antelope Wife. But, like the fictional schoolchildren Calder, Petra, and Tommy, I walk down 57th Street and look in the giveaway box outside Powell’s, breathe in the yeasty smell outside Medici Bakery, try to make sense of the layers of the Robie House. In a way, I’m more engrossed in the book than I might normally have been, because I’m looking over the characters’ shoulders. I even caught myself on my walk home from the Metra this afternoon peering in the gates of the Robie House and wondering where Tommy had been poking around. But that also makes it easier to have two books open simultaneously; I guess I can read them both at once because the landscape of The Wright 3 is my everyday landscape.