So, I guess the fiction I read is usually genre fiction, the kind of stuff that can be easily pigeonholed - science fiction, mystery, alternate history, fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and what have you. I'm not sure where to slot this one - it's not really a genre piece, but it's not artsy and/or depressing enough to be literary fiction. Wikipedia lists something called realistic fiction -maybe that's what this is.
There is romance to found, but it isn't a romance novel; there's character growth, but it's not exactly a Bildungsroman. Actually, A Touch of Stardust pretty much reads like the first half of Kavalier & Clay, if a gender-swapped Sammy was a young Smith graduate from Fort Wayne, Indiana who wants to be a screenwriter and Joe was an assistant producer for David O. Selznick on Gone With the Wind.
The story spans a year, from December 1938 to December 1939, as the impresario Selznick guides his troubled masterpiece to completion and Europe edges closer to all-out war. Though the struggles of our protagonist Julie Crawford and her "colleague" Andy Weinstein, we encounter not just Selznick but famed screenwriters Frances Marion and Herbert Mankiewicz, gossip columnist Louella Parsons, GWTW actors Vivien Leigh, Leslie Howard, and Clark Gable, and, as the guiding light of the book, the "Profane Angel" Carole Lombard, whose irrepressible spirit becomes the energy driving the story.
If you squint, it looks a little like a glitzy show-business saga and it could easily be translated into a star-studded movie, but there's a core of authenticity to all the characters. What they really want and what they really need have nothing to do with movies or Hollywood, and their triumphs and failures have less to do with careers and fame and more to do with honesty and commitment. In the end, this is a novel about real people.
I guess I should make the obligatory mention of the strong, complex female protagonist we find in Julie and the inspiration Carole Lombard's life becomes, as interpreted by the author - but can't I just say that I really liked her/them/all that? Because I did.
So, it is a bit of a custom in Seattle for folks who are lightening their material load for whatever reason to just put stuff on the sidewalk with a "free" sign. This is done with all kinds of goods, from big pieces of furniture to small household effects, and Coco and I were not surprised to run across a small collection of artifacts stacked outside an apartment building as we walked to a nearby diner for breakfast. We're pretty much in a simplification mode ourselves and looked at the stuff more out of curiosity than desire, but there was one treasure mixed in with the old books, coffee mugs, and other domestic detritus:
Three beautiful, old-school portraits of Diana Ross, Florence Ballard, and Mary Wilson: The Supremes!
Each is a foot square and printed on fairly heavy parchment-type paper.
They are a little worn with some dog-ears, but clean and in pretty good shape overall.
The colors are still really vibrant, that's for sure.
A close look reveals that the portraits were album inserts, and a little
Googling indicates they are from a greatest hits album by the group.
By the presence of the masking tape on the back of the posters, I would
guess the original owner did not fully appreciate the suitability of the images
for framing.
But man, these are still pretty slick. I have been listening to a YouTube mega-mix while posting this, and the early sound of The Supremes is timeless. These portraits really evoke the era for me when "girl groups"could rule the charts.
Bonus fact: DJ (and Reverend) Walt "Baby" Love got his nickname from colleague Steve Lundy, who played The Supremes' "Baby Love" right before Walt came on air. "Baby Love" was a nickname I picked up at the Seattle Public Library in reference to that.
So, right about now is when this blog usually announces the current year's Summer Self- Improvement Scheme™, through which we would try to fill the 100 days between the last day of Spring quarter and the first day of fall quarter with uplifting, enlightening, or enriching activities that take place within somesort of clever structure.
This year was supposed to be a bit different: this was meant to be the announcement for not just a run-of-the-mill regimen, but for the launch of a new business: Trike Snacks - The Snacks You Buy from a Guy on a Trike!
You can probably tell by all the conditionals and qualifiers in the foregoing that that announcement is not forthcoming - at least not in this writing. And as Jaques said to the Duke, thereby hangs a tale.
For a long time, I have had a scheme involving taking a summer off from all teaching and campus responsibilities and doing something completely different. I didn't really want to work somewhere, but a part-time project sounded appealing. The idea that had gelled was getting a trike and riding up and down the Burke-Gilman Trail all summer selling power bars and energy drinks to the cyclists, runners, and walkers. The goal was not necessarily to make a lot of money - that I could much more easily make by teaching summer classes - but rather to try some entrepreneurship and use some different skills while getting exercise and enjoying the outdoors. Whenever I discussed the idea, people thought it was awesome. This year, I decided to actualize it.
First up was finding a suitable ride. I originally wanted a tadpole recumbent trike with a trailer, but for reasons both financial and logistical, I decided on a recumbent delta. I got a good rig at a great price from a nice military couple down in Tacoma, got it home (it barely fit in Sylvie the Scion!), and tricked it out with a cargo basket and some other goodies, including an umbrella. Cool beans all the way.
Then, while discussing the project at lunch with the titular Scott, he asked whether I had obtained any necessary permits. I told him I had to investigate what was necessary and that I would do it.
And the gap between word and deed has never been greater.
So, first, a City of Seattle Business License. Easy-peasy.
Then, research into the Seattle Department of Transportation Street Use Vending Permit. A little more difficult: there are permits for Sidewalk or Plaza Vending, Curb Space Vending, (including Designated Food-Vehicle Zone and Temporary Curb Space Activity), Stadium and Event Center Vending, and Mobile-Food Vending, and navigating the differences was difficult even for a seasoned bureaucrat like me - especially since they all seemed to be geared toward food trucks and not bicycle vendors. A trip to the municipal building helped clear things up: a guy told me that the permit I needed for the Burke-Gilman trail was Mobile-Food Vending (remember that, it will be important later), and gave me a checklist of steps and all the forms to fill out.
I found out that vending in city park required my completing a Seattle Parks and Recreation Concession Proposal. After whacking my way through the thorny undergrowth of this particular organization, I found that (a) I would need to file a proposal and pay for an Experimental Concession Agreement for each park I planned to sell in; (b) they only allowed one concession at a time for many of the parks and most of them were taken already; (c) they did not issue permits for the Burke-Gilman Trail at all; and (d) unbelievably, they asserted that every ice cream vendor I had ever seen in a city park had complied with these rules. Yeah, right.
Given that the Burke-Gilman trail website said that it was jointly administered by SDOT and Parks & Rec, I figured that if SDOT was willing to issue a permit, I was good to go regardless of what Parks & Rec said. I'd give up on the whole idea of selling in the parks adjacent to the trail (or go rogue a little bit).
To move forward with the SDOT permit, I needed to get a Costco Card. Getting the business card was easy - Costco just needed my business license - but they informed me I also needed a Washington State Department of Revenue Resellers Permit to buy goods for resale without paying sales tax. Good to know, and I got on it.
Before I could get the resellers permit, I needed to get a State of Washington Business License and the concomitant Unified Business Identifier number. That was easy, too; it just took a while, even doing it all online.
The reason for getting the Costco card so soon was to identify the specific products I was going to sell for the SDOT permit process. As it turned out, granola bars and coconut water seemed the best compromise between profitability and ethical practice. I needed to send the specific information to the King County Department of Health for an exemption from the health-permitting process. The Health Department folks were very helpful and forthcoming with this, providing an email I could attach with the application.
So, ducks were lined up in rows - all that was left to complete my checklist for SDOT was a Certificate of Liability Insurance. When I was in the commercial insurance business, additional-named-insured stuff like this cost about fifty bucks; more recently, Coco's business liability insurance was included in her massage therapist association annual dues of about two hundred bucks. Well, whatever the specific requirements of the city of Seattle are, after checking out various sources I found that the cost for this insurance came to about $900.
All of a sudden, I was thrust into a decision: do I want to start a serious business, or is this a part-time summer project? Nearly a grand just for insurance is a little too much capital investment for the short-season sideline business that I had envisioned Trike Snacks to be, and I am not sure I want to make this the kind of operation where I need to work too hard to make sure it pays for itself. And it wouldn't be easy to get in the black: back-of-the envelope calculations indicate that after all the required permitting fees and such, I'd have to make about 75 sales a day to break even. Not too big a hill for a committed business, but more dedication than I had planned on.
I contacted the city to look for options and found someone at SDOT who was actually eager to figure this out. She seemed to understand that my planned micro-business didn't quite entail what the Mobile-Food Vending Permit was developed to cover and said she would talk to the City Risk Manager to see if an exemption could be made for Trike Snacks and I could at least get some less costly insurance coverage.
Of course, every silver cloud has a burlap lining, and in the course of our communication my contact revealed that in fact SDOT does not issue permits for the Burke-Gilman Trail, ceding that authority to Parks & Rec (see, I told you that was important). She did, however, promise to bring it up with Parks & Rec at their next regular interdepartmental meeting and try to get another exemption for Trike Snacks.
So, here's the potential outcomes:
I have my fingers crossed waiting to hear from my city hall angel, but school's officially out, summer's officially here, and we're still not rolling yet.
So, Seattle is apparently experiencing its new normal: we've had sunny days and temperatures near or above eighty for a couple of weeks now - and it's not even official summer, much less Seattle's traditional start of summer, July 5. All this glorious weather means sandals and t-shirts at work and corn on the cob and watermelon on the patio, hot sidewalks and vigorous gardens, and that distinctive aroma of water evaporating from concrete that evokes summer like nothing else for a city boy like me.
As I have walked around my neighborhood this warm spring, that smell, and the feel of the heat in the air and the sweat under my hat, have spurred a very particular memory of a summer long ago and on the other end of the country, back when I was a kid in Brooklyn.
New York City summers are a type of monster all their own. While we know that "90 degrees and 90% humidity" is pretty much a myth (at least as far as North America is concerned), New York summers can get awful - hot, humid, sticky, and, when I was a kid in the sixties, stinky with smog. (I guess it's gotten a bit better in that respect, anyway). Of all the things about New York that I might have missed since heading west 37 years ago, summer has not made the list.
And yet I find myself thinking about one particular summer day every time the temperature rises. I guess I was 11 or 12, and my sister Norma Jean 13 or 14. We were babysitting our nephew Daniel, my other sister Linda's son, and he could not have been much more than one, certainly not more than two yet. I'm not sure why we were minding him: our mother was the usual caregiver when one was needed. But this time, it fell to me and my sister - or more likely to my sister, and I was just along for the ride.
We packed up Daniel in his baby carriage - I would call it a stroller but that would evoke the streamlined nylon and magnesium frame apparatus of today, not the massive, chromed contraption that we struggled with. Besides the baby, we piled it high with toys and baby food in little jars and our lunches packed in empty margarine tubs and new-fangled plastic baggies and a couple of cans of cheap soda that had been stored in the freezer so they would still be nice and cold when it came time to drink them.
We journeyed down to a park - I'm not sure which one, but I would guess McKinley Park. My sister lived on 65th Street and 15th Avenue in Bensonhurst, not far from Regina Pacis Church, and when I checked Google maps to refresh my decades-old memory for this post, this seems like the likely place; it's about a mile and half from the apartment my sister lived in then, and that feels about right.
(I also discovered that the block-wide empty concrete schoolyard where my brother-in-law Gene (Daniel's father) used to throw a spaldeen so far to exercise their crazy Irish Setter Brandy now has basketball courts and a playfield and huge inlay map of the U.S., but that's a different rumination.)
We must have spent most of that sunny summer morning and afternoon in the park - playing, and letting Daniel play, or nap, or whatever it is little kids do when you take them to a park. Norma Jean must have fed him - and probably ate some of the baby food herself, as that was a predilection of hers for a while that carried on to when she cared for her own child. We ate our baloney sandwiches and Wise potato chips and whatever else we had and drank our sodas and then played some more. And then, hot and sweaty and exhausted and out of provisions, it was time to head back.
The slog back to my sister's apartment was interminable. It may have only taken a half-hour or so, but my recollection is that it took forever and a half. The distance is nothing now - I walk a mile to the stop just to catch the bus to head to campus - but for two kids pushing an infant in a pre-war baby-buggy along the sidewalk and up and down curbs, it seemed like an overland trek. We were hot and tired and thirsty. Being kids, we were also penniless: there was going to be no stopping in at a deli or candy store along the way to buy a bottle of soda or a Yoo-hoo. There was no choice but stumble on, like Bruce Bennett in Sahara after his half-track breaks down.
I think I first noticed the smell: that distinctive aroma of water evaporating from concrete. Then I saw it: our salvation, a fire hydrant that was leaking. From that black and silver pillar, that appliance of wonder, ran a small but steady stream of water, forming a small puddle in the cracked sidewalk and a little stream running down the gutter, pushing in its current small bits of light, dry litter. I took one of the empty margarine tubs and held it under the stream; slowly, too slowly, it filled with clear, cold municipal water. I would like to think I gave it to Norma Jean to drink first, but whether that is fact or over-ethical memory, I soon enough had my own share.
It was the best drink I had ever tasted in my short life till then, and few things have tasted so good since.
We stayed at the hydrant for a few minutes, drinking and refilling our makeshift cups, sprinkling some water on sleeping Daniel. We were both as sure as only the moral certainty of youth can grant that had we not found this wellspring, we would have died before ever reaching Linda's apartment. Such a horror had barely been averted; but the day was saved. Refreshed, we completed our transit.
So, the beginning of summer for me is not merely the prelude to picnics and bike rides, swimming and barbecues, trips to the beach and badminton in the park. Every ray of sunshine glinting off my sunglasses, every degree of Fahrenheit over 80, every heat wave radiating from the bright gray sidewalk - each of these is a reminder of how simple our needs really are and how sweet it can be to fill them simply.
