the hypothetical wren

Cold, grey, muddy and dank: that’s how I would describe the weather in GJ this week. It’s overcast enough to make it depressing around here, but none of these clouds produce enough snow or rain to make it feel like a real winter, a fun winter. Right now, the rest of the state is on snow alert. The news is filled with the sorts of things that local newscasts excel at: reporters posing in front of snowbanks, live reports on the lines at the airport, special “highway cams” showing viewers just how crappy road conditions are on the interstate. Yet, we have none of that here. We got enough snow to make the grass wet and the shoulders on the side of the road muddy. After a small flurry of white, winter in GJ has returned to its customary dull shale brown.

The above photo was taken at the café at Borders. It was raining outside, so no one was out on the patio except for birds and a few martyred smokers. It’s not a particularly scenic patio, anyway, so there are usually not a lot of people out there. As you can see, it is adjacent to a large parking lot, giving it a repellent ambiance, filled with honking, exhaust, and the sounds of doors slamming.

I do like the way the silver aluminum furniture looks, when contrasted to the grey sky above. I like the fact that I’m taking this inside even better – outside is cold and wet, while inside, I have a cup of coffee and a newish issue of Dwell to read. I needed to get out of the house, since I was spending my morning watching the Weather Channel and reruns of The Real World: Denver. [1] Where to go? Borders.

This goes nicely with something I’ve been planning to write about since I got here. Each year, when I visit, I make this mental list of Things That Aren’t Here Anymore. The first year I lived in ABQ, Sundrop Grocery went out of business. Last year, it was the alfalfa field close to my dad’s house, upon which a subdivision was being built. This year’s list is dominated by the printed word. In the last entry, I wrote about the disappearance of the Salvation Army’s bin of free books, but that’s not all that is no longer here.

The magazine exchange at the downtown public library has disappeared, a casualty of their current remodeling job. The magazine exchange was a rack at the front of the library, near the checkout counter, where people could drop off magazines and catalogs they no longer wanted, and pick up those that others had brought in. It was an easy way to recycle the endless stream of periodicals that I got in the mail, and it allowed me to get magazines that I wanted to read, but I had no desire (or ability) to spend money on. When I was in high school, I picked up umpteen copies of the New Yorker there, starting the on-again, off-again NYer reading and subscription pattern I follow to this day. When I moved back to GJ in the early 2000s, the magazine exchange was a handy way to stock up on magazines, since I can read them very quickly, and then provided a place for them to go after I was finished with them, other than my bathroom floor or a box in the garage. I was not its only patron, either. Vast portions of the rest of the library would be completely empty, yet there would often be a line at the magazine exchange: old ladies pawing through back issues of Prevention or that Oprah magazine, someone dropping off a neatly bundled stack of Sporting Life or Duck Hunter, which looked incongruous next to the stray New York Review of Books that occasionally showed up.

Given its popularity, it’s odd that the magazine exchange has gone away. Of course, much about the library’s remodel seems odd. The books, which once took up two floors, are now all crammed into one floor, and a large space that was once for books is now full of computers. It’s trying to position itself as an exciting multimedia center instead of a traditional library, and it seems like the number of books has shrunk, along with the space devoted to them. The library has to make do with the space that it has, given that Mesa County residents have rejected bonds to build a new library several times. Claims were made that few people used the library, so why spend all that money to benefit just a few? I wonder if the remodel is an attempt to make the library appealing to people who don’t use the library, rather than benefiting regular patrons.

[1] I had no idea this show was even still on, but there it was, on the TV. It’s disconcerting viewing, since it mainly seems to be about drinking a lot, hooking up with your housemates as soon as possible, and being a huge asshole. Given the part of Denver that they’re in, that actually seems appropriate. What is more dismaying is how dull the city comes across as, since all they do is drink and fight. You don’t get a good sense of the city itself in the show (which I’m sure is not one of the goals at all, here), no matter how many shots of the D&F Tower are included. This shouldn’t be surprising, since Denver is not a particularly picturesque city. What makes it a nice place to live in doesn’t show up well on TV. It’s not the sort of city you show off to your friends, or brag about living in. Its pleasures are much more quiet, much more private: the sorts of things that you see when you take a long walk or explore the neighborhood you live in. It’s very similar to ABQ in that sense. Both are very comfortable, livable places, but also the sorts of cities tourists stop off in briefly on their way to somewhere else. People are never particularly jealous that you live there and they do not, but that’s okay. There’s a lot of small things that make living in both cities worthwhile.

Posts have been slow here lately, due to a corresponding slowness in my dad’s internet connection. I use dialup at home, but it’s young and spry in comparison to what I have here. Plus, when the ground is wet, as it has been lately, there’s a lot of static on the line, compounding the connection problems. I miss being around countless places that offer free wireless Internet — here, they’re scarce, and even those places that have it don’t really advertise this fact.

Regardless, there are still plenty of ways to fill the time. Yesterday, I went to thrift and antique stores with my aunt.

GJ has one of the sorriest collections of thrift stores I have ever seen, even in comparably sized cities. I don’t know if people here just never give anything away, or it all goes onto the yard-sale circuit, or what. You can go months and months without finding anything remarkable or useful at any of the local thrift stores. When a find is unearthed, it should be marveled at like the rare treat it is.

There used to be a decent one in Clifton, but it closed sometime in the last few years, and its building now houses a store that sells used hotel furniture. The thrift store in Fruita isn’t bad, but the drive out there is long, and their hours are unpredictable. So we had to make do with the motley assortment close to home.

My aunt was looking for shoes to sell on eBay; I was looking for anything interesting, preferably the sort of interesting that fits well into carryon luggage. In the end, I bought a gray skirt, which I’m still not sure about, and my aunt bought a couple of pairs of shoes. That’s all out of the five stores we visited – not an impressive haul at all.

One of the thrift stores we went to hasn’t changed a bit since the last time I was in there, three years ago. There actually may be things there that were also present in 2003. This store never has special sales to clear our merchandise, so it just gets more and more cluttered with each batch of donations. You can’t really find anything, and if you do find something interesting, it’s inevitably marked with a sign that reads “NOT FOR SALE.” There are a lot of things that aren’t for sale there. Some of them are store fixtures, which makes sense, at least. The rest are just random items, taken off the market for unknown reasons. Are they things the employees want to buy? Are they priceless artifacts? Nobody knows.

The one highlight of GJ thrift stores used to be the bin of free books at the Salvation Army. The woman who put the books out would place anything that she didn’t think would sell in the bin. These were usually the things I wanted (old textbooks with interesting illustrations, anything that looked “academic”), so I usually cleaned up in the free-book bin. I would have bought these things anyway, since the price of books there rarely cracks 50 cents, but, still: big box of free books. Anyway, it no longer exists.

We also went to an antique/secondhand store, on the highway, near the river, which held more promise. Here, I found the above object, a 1940s Kodak Brownie Six-16 camera. My aunt bought it for me for my birthday, even though that’s not until the middle of next month. There are many old cameras I admire for their shape and design, and even though I can’t buy film for this camera anymore (and even if I could, the lenses are scratched enough to make picture-taking difficult), I enjoy it a lot as an object. I especially like the typography on the front plate, and the simple art-deco-esque line decorations on the front. Now, to see if I can get it home safely in my luggage.

Christmas was good. Christmas was fine. I am pleased to have the day over with, but I can report that I had a fairly pleasant holiday this year. I expect less and less out of Christmas each year, and I find that this actually improves the day. I’m not anticipating a lot, so I don’t get disappointed if Something Specific doesn’t happen, and I can just take things as they come.

My family has always been a bunch of Christmas Eve celebrators, probably because no one in the family likes to get up early, and no one is particularly sociable pre-coffee. So we just open up everything the night before — this saves a lot of effort on Christmas day. The festivities were at my aunt’s house, which is not really the right size for eleven people. However, the diminutive size of her living room made the pile of presents look particularly large. My cousins and I remarked that said pile looked much larger than those we remembered as children. J. told everyone that we wanted reparations for the discrepancy between presents then and now.

Christmas day involved a trip to see my extremely old grandmother, who complained at my dad and I for two hours, and then dinner at home. This year, we cooked rib roast, mashed potatoes, and an extremely rich cauliflower gratin. The gratin’s ingredients included two cups of cheese and two cups of half-and-half, which I combined to cover a mere two and a half cups of cauliflower florets. Viva white foods. My dad and I also drank an entire bottle of a local merlot — Colorado wines seem to be getting better by the year.

On the day after Christmas, I drove to Palisade, an adjacent town, to take some pictures. It’s a small fruit-and-wine-growing town on the east end of the valley. Because it’s still a rural area, Palisade represents to many people The Way Things Used to Be, Before All These People Showed Up. It’s compact in size, full of old houses, and largely devoid of chain businesses (except for the gas station), unlike much of the rest of the valley. Ironically, these qualities have attracted people to the town, people seeking to recreate what life used to be like in Fruitvale or Fruita, which endangers the old-school feel of Palisade. Besides photos, I went to Palisade because there’s a pretty good bakery there (closed on December 26) and a decent diner (ditto). The day was a lesson in the virtues of calling ahead.

The above picture was taken at the tiny Palisade post office, where the post-office boxes haven’t been updated for some time.

The Pea Green Store, located on Highway 348 between Olathe and Delta, Colorado. We stopped here on the way back to GJ on Christmas Day. Pea Green is a tiny blip in the road, surrounded by cornfields and cattle. The town has a community center, a cemetary, and this store. There’s not much inside — soda, beer, snacks, and several Pea Green souvenirs. Black postcards with the legend, “Pea Green, Colorado at Night.” Bumper stickers such as “Give Peas a Chance.” Nobody needs to go through Pea Green to get anywhere — you just end up there for some reason.

There is nothing so fleeting as a pile of nicely wrapped Christmas presents. As of 7 p.m. last night, this wrapping paper was toast. It was balled up and crammed in a bag, along with its other wrapping-paper cousins, doomed for the trash. I like buying presents, of course, but I like wrapping them even more. The inside of the presents are more important than the outside, though, and the recipients of these boxes enjoyed their gifts.

Merry Christmas and assorted other greetings to all that read this. I hope your day is full of good memories, good food, and good presents.