Paper Trails

First of all, where did three of my new coral platies go? I bought four of them last weekend to fill in the tank with color, as the pleco is handsome, but looks like a garden stone with fins. The clown loaches are also bottom dwellers as are the two corys, so something small and orange to swim about the middle and upper levels of the aquarium was introduced. Platies breed, so two males and two females plopped themselves home.

Now, I figure, tell me if you know otherwise, that fish don't need fluorescent lighting much at all so during the week, the light stays off and the tank shadowy and darkish. Like in nature. Natural. I turn it on weekends to watch the show. This morning is when the missing three dinners were noticed. Huh. Who ate who? It wasn't the corys, who are smallish themselves. Loaches are meat eaters, and the clowns will clean a tank of snails lickity. But would they snag a silly little platy? Or three? I dunno. Before any new fish are added, I will put in more hiding places, more plastic seaweed stuff. Cripes. Nature. It's why I'm not watching Life on the Discovery Channel. Too many little babies and innocents getting eaten by bigger birds, sharks, seals, whatever. I am tired to the stars of watching babies get torn apart leg by wishbone while their eyes show terror. Hate it, shove your series.

So it goes. What motivated this post was the book found at the thrift store yesterday, a still-jacketed copy of The Joy of Cooking in excellent condition. Now, that is a lovely find in itself, but what I get a kick out of are the bits of notes jotted down on slips of paper left inside, used ticket stubs, receipts, headings from medical pads, notes written in pencil or ink. Bookmarks. But boy, what a story! And the older the book, the greater likelihood of ancient inscription.

A ticket stub from "Stop the World, I Want to Get Off" starring Anthony Newly from the 1960's was found in a book on shipping in the Great Lakes. So, who would read a layman's shipping book that would also use a live theater ticket stub as a bookmark? Had to be a true Buffalonian who remembered the days when this city was the Queen City of the Lakes before the Welland Canal was constructed, and yearned for those days. Ached. Ached for a busy city of sidewalks filled with people because the industry of shipping brought jobs and products for malting, brewing, toasting, and sifting. A city loaded with ballrooms and elaborate movie theaters with entryways of gilded meringues, ceiling-high mirrors, and lights that were circuited to blink in sequence, forming moving letters. Old Buffalo, New York.

I wonder if this book came from an older person, maybe a man, a man who had watched the ships come in. Did he scoop grain or work the inner harbor in a tug, guiding freighters to dock? And possess a ticket stub from a musical theater production? Other scraps of paper inside this book were a cleaner's stub for an Oriental rug, and a brief ingredients list for "boeuf daube". Whoever you were, your taste was impeccable. Smart, clever, I would have said married, but the grocery list leads me elsewhere. Sentimental. Active. Interested.

The cookbook I purchased yesterday has a religious bookmark with a verse from Chronicles 2, sponsored by Coral Ridge Ministries, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Also used as tabs were a photocopied play dough recipe, a slip from a pad advertising the diuretic Demadex, and a recipe for some sort of chili that called for a bottle of ketchup, written in red ink with a felt tip pen.

There is an inscription on the frontspiece that I shouldn't count as an informational bookmark, but it says, "Happy Mother's Day, 1983, Love, Steve, Anne, and Dyvan (I can't tell the cursive so it could be Dylan but looks more v-ish). A gift for Mom, this big old lunking cookbook. she used it, or tried to, for there are tiny spatters on the front edges, brown stuff. The jacket is in exceptional condition, and maybe was removed while the book was spread out on the counter. God knows how she could lug this monster around if arthritis was involved.

Imagine, a bottle of ketchup in chili. Sounds like a recipe from the days when putting a can of tomato soup in cake batter was hip. "You'll never guess the secret ingredient in this, family of the fifties." The new atomic age we were stressing through caused many many weird recipes to become real. "Mock apple pie" using Ritz crackers for the apples. "Chili-con-weenie". Anything that could be held in suspended animation in a crown of Jello. "Refrigerator dessert". Jesus. Mayonnaise, peaches, and lime jello with grated cabbage. Gack.

Mom the gift book receiver was game. She went to church, loved her grandchildren, visited Florida, and tried new recipes with safe, American (ketchup) ingredients. Family-focussed, probably Republican (the book is clean), thrifty (again the ketchup, but toss in the homemade play dough), and had a red pen that she was used to writing with, mayyybe for correcting papers? A teacher? A retired teacher?

Now, 1983 was twenty-seven years ago, so I am guessing that the book was passed on to the thrift shop as a cleaning out the household due to the final relinquishment of possessions. It's sad. I shop for clothing at thrift shops, always AmVets, and the nicest if not saddest pieces are the ones with adult name tags ironed into the neck seams. Sad, because that person has most likely died. Nice, because the sons and daughters of these nursing home folks buy the good stuff for Mom or Dad as one last way of saying I love you. What a complicated world. We do the best we can.

There are other notes saved from other books, I think it's a human way of communicating history, small important bits scratched onto paper for memory's sake, so we don't forget. Little do we know how readers of our passed on books relish these fragmented ends of paper as a shared road reflected backwards, a mirage of where we have been. People are wonderful. I do love them so.

Not much energy today, but there is a smell, a musty, not so freshwater smell I think is coming from a certain tank, probably based on fish, seven dollars and fifty cents worth of little orange fish that are now digested and floating in strands of goop. I am off to investigate, intrigued musings on paper to be put aside, and the big ol' plastic hose pulled out for siphoning. My neighbors apparently have a new karaoke machine with which they are taking turns listening to themselves make speeches. Thank heavens they don't speak English, or I would go nuts. As it is, I like the sound of Cuban platitudes, if only everything wasn't so emphatically shouted .

They have parties, loud and often, but bless them, everything is shut down at exactly eleven p.m. By that time I am off in the back, tucked in, out of the waking day. I will sleep nicely tonight, I have a solution for the whistling air vent that has been keeping me awake, having to do with maybe cotton gauze, maybe just a plain bit of cotton ball. Not so much as to block the thing, just want to wick away the beads of water which gather inside the vent, creating the whistling CPAP machine. I will be a teakettle no longer. Really, I should write a book.

Sleep well my beautiful ones, eat your vegetables, live long and tuck notes, handwritten is best, into your book that will then be set sail into the ocean, bringing messages to us others, bobbing from hand to hand like corked bottles in the waves. Whose shore will you land on? Whose dream will you enter? Ah, the fun. Sleep well, good night.