stories

The slightest blip on the economic radar these days, and analysts trumpet the end of the recession. But down in the trenches, where the rest of us live, it's hard to tell the difference, says Dewey. Dewey runs a small metal fabrication shop in the industrial district (one of my favorite hangouts these days) and he's making steel mountings for my sculptures. His shop is fast, accurate and relatively inexpensive. The fast part, Dewey says, is because business, frankly, just isn't what it used to be.

Gambles, especially foolish, futile ones, always steal a part of my heart. Even among spiders--the natural mathematicians of the invertebrate world--the golden orbs are something special. Not only are the spiders themselves beautiful, all red-orange, gold, brown and black, but their webs are immaculate geometric visualizations. Theirs are the storybook webs of Halloween. They spin them between posts and trees and walls and rocks...and sometimes cars.

This is Tarzan. He's coming up on his 22nd birthday. Tarzan's been a fixture at my neighborhood petshop since kittenhood, greeting customers, doing a little product testing and keeping the owners company when business is slow.

The girl with angel wings cried, silent, fat tears that slipped down her cheeks and splashed on her pretty pink dress. She trudged just past me, plopped down on a bench and sighed.

It is--at last--a cool grey day in glassland, not quite raining but wanting to, sweet relief from the last month's desert heat. I'm on the way home from an afternoon of errand-running, partly to get things done but mostly to feel the back-to-normal, tad-too-chilly northwestern air moving through the open window of my car. I pull up to the light only halfway in the world; my brain's musing studio tasks and content projects while NPR drones in the background. The reporter mentions the Cash for Clunkers program, and I finally notice I'm behind a clunker.