And Another One Rides the Bus

Join me once again for a ride home from work…

Angela got on the bus as she did on most Thursday nights. She was usually pretty lively and fueled by whatever she’d had to drink that night. Sometimes she would sit across the aisle from me. Eventually she would lean toward me.

“I’ve just had a cocktail.” She would say the last word with such crispness that she seemed to snap it in two.

I would smile and she would confide. I remember little about her except that she worked at a hair salon.

This particular night she said nothing when she got on the bus and did not make eye contact. I greeted her and she nodded her head. Our bus driver, Bradley, a very voluble guy, didn’t notice anything as he was in the midst of a story about his life.

If something newsworthy happened—I remember a discussion about Columbine—he would offer opinions about that. However, Bradley’s favorite topics were himself and his apartment. He talked about decor, china patterns, carpets and drapes.

I am counterdomestic. Show me a swatch of material or a wallpaper sample and my eyes glaze over. The word armoire makes me sleepy. Etagere? I snore.

Bradley, enraptured by the vision of domestic comfort he was painting, failed to notice that his audience was silent. Even I, who have turned “Ummm” into a sound rich in meaning and nuance, felt unable to rise to the occasion.

I glanced at Angela. She looked enraged. As we were getting to her stop, Angela got shakily to her feet.

“BRADLEY!” she yelled. You talk about your rugs and your drapes and your china pattern and your Waterford crystal. You know somethin’? Nobody gives a [insert the expletive of your choice]”

Say amen, somebody!

I looked at Bradley. His eyes were wide and his face was as red as if he’d been slapped. Angela was already down the bus stairs and walking down the street.

Bradley’s features were crumpled up. He was shaking a little and his eyes were wet.

I am a firm believer that people piloting vehicles on the White Horse Pike should be in a state of focused serenity.

“Oh, Bradley. She was drunk,” I said. “When you see her next week she won’t remember it.”

He looked slightly calmer.

“She certainly didn’t mean it.” I lied in my warmest and most sincere voice.

He brightened, sniffed, and returned to being capable of driving safely.

The next Thursday Angela practically bounced onto the bus. We greeted each other. She had had a cocktail (or two).

Bradley said nothing. Angela and I chatted for a few minutes. Then Angela leaned toward Bradley.

“What’s the matter, Bradley? Cat got your tongue? What happened about those drapes you were gonna buy?”

© 2013 Stephanie Patterson

Revamping the Writing Space with Feng Shui

First of all let me acknowledge that I know how lucky I am to have an office. In other days, in a different house, I wrote in the kitchen, with a portable Underwood on my knees and a pot of spaghetti steaming on the stove. I have an office now in what was once the baby's room. (He will be thirty years old in a few months.) I have a dream of making my office a smooth-running machine for turning out deathless prose.

But my office has problems. The desk became so cluttered not long ago that I took to dragging my laptop downstairs and working on the dining room table. Then, since no one was working in there, I put stuff in the office that there wasn't room for anywhere else. A rack of disused clothing. Four or five bushels of unsorted documents, photographs, bills, DVDs, and mysterious machine parts.

The day I couldn't get the door open for the clutter I knew it was time.

One of the things about the office, which was once the baby's room, and then the teen-ager's room, was its location in the house, bagwa-wise. If you pay any attention at all to the tenets of Feng Shui you know that the northeast corner is the money corner. If you don't clear out the clutter and let the good chi flow smoothly you will be doomed to poverty. No wealth can flow your way. As proof of this, one time when I cleaned out the teen-ager's room and straightened it all up I won two hundred dollars in a football pool the following day. Things like that never happen to me. You may say, ha-ha, native superstition, but two hundred dollars is two hundred dollars.

In the belief that there must be something in it if the Chinese take it so seriously I went online and checked out what needed to be done with my office in order to sharpen up my writing career and attract money.

The Knowing Ones said, first of all, clear out the clutter.

I cleared out the clutter. Three bags of clothes have gone to St. Andrews' Thrift Shop. Five bushels of stuff have been sorted, identified, filed or discarded. You wouldn't believe some of the things I came across. Hey, there was a three-ounce bottle of cologne I brought back from Bouchercon in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2006. It still had half an ounce in it. I squirted it on myself. Nice smell.

Then they said, don't have your desk facing the door. But don't have it facing a wall, either. Well, the room is too small and the desk too big. Either it faces the wall or it faces the door. (You know I'm not turning my back to the door.) I opted for facing the door. If the bad energy gets all over me, so be it. I can always hang a crystal.

Then they said, put something like a mountain behind your desk, either a huge plant or a picture. Something. So I got a reproduction of an elegant old travel poster to hang up.

Then they said, put something in the money corner like a plant. That will attract money. And something purple. That will attract big, dignified money. I went to the florist and got this plant and a little purple pot to put it in. Right after that I found a dime in the street.

Then they said–and this is particularly important–make sure not to have anything blue, or watery, or metallic on your north wall, or all your fame will be quenched. Instead you want fire. Pictures of fire. Candles burning. Red. Orange. Hot stuff.

My whole office was painted blue. I figured this explained a lot about the way my writing career has been going, so I re-painted it a sort of greeny-yellow (that could be a fire color, depending on what's burning) and sent away for a poster of a Mexican volcano to hang on the north wall. And of course a candle. I light it on days when I feel that I have enough on the ball to remember to blow it out, because burning down the house will bring me more fame than I really need right now.

Kate Gallison