Thirteen (Or More?) Ways Of Looking At A Cassette

For a time in my life, my favorite poem was Wallace Steven's Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird.  It's still a favorite of mine.


Now, as far as I know, there aren't any blackbirds anywhere near where I live or work.  In fact, there weren't very many living beings outside today.  Nineteen inches of snow fell on Central Park from last night into this morning.  Cold gusts whipped the snow around,  and thunder echoed the flashes of lightning that pierced the heavy clouds.  Why any living being would choose to be outdoors in such conditions is beyond me.


So, being indoors on a day that Charlie and Max slept through, I started to see the toes of glaciers creeping along my walls where the paint ran.  (No,I'm not taking intoxicants of any sort. )  And rows of tiles become an Andy Warhol painting of kaleidoscopes.


Which leads me to wonder:  How many worlds can be seen from the back of a cassette?

Soo '70's

Seeing it snow again made me think of The Ice Storm.  I liked it, but I also remember thinking how the clothes, hairstyles and the things people did (Wife-swapping.  Key parties.  EST.) were sooo '70's.  I know: That decade included my puberty, adolescence and undergraduate years.


Now this is sooo '70's:

Not only is it from the '70's; it's English.  No one in the USA today would get away with making an ad like that.


And nobody would get away with making a bike like the Lambert.  Or, I should say, nobody would stay in business for even as long as Lambert did (just over a decade).  


Not only did they try to mass-produce high-performance bikes in England, they tried to keep their prices reasonable, perhaps a bit low--even for that time.  During the company's first few years, they made most of the components, as well as the brazed lugless cro-mo frame, in-house.  The components were the bike's undoing:  Most of them didn't hold up very well.  Worst of all was the so-called "Death Fork," which was one of the first production forks to be made of aluminum.  That piece was indicative of much else on the bike:  It was a possibly-good idea that wasn't executed very well, mainly because no one knew how it needed to be executed.


They offered a 21-pound road bike, which was about as light as you could get at that time, for $149.  They offered that same bike, plated with 24-karat gold for $279.


A price like that for gold?  Now that's soo '70's.

Coming Out of The Cold and Leaving

I can't stop thinking about him.


OK, this isn't going where you think it's going!  


The other morning, when I was doing my laundry, I saw him.  He was riding a department-store mountain bike in the snow that had fallen through the night.  If he wasn't homeless, he looked like he was less than a paycheck away from it.  Or, if I want to be more charitable or simply literary, I could say that he looks like a grizzly bear that just came out of detox.


Wherever he doesn't go on his bike, he walks.  He doesn't even take the subway or bus, he told me. I believe him:  I've seen him around the neighborhood before, but I'd never talked with him until the other day.


He asked me whether it would be OK to put his shoes in one of the dryers.  I don't work there, I explained, so I don't make the rules.  And, I told him, I didn't think the person in charge was anywhere in sight. 


So he put his shoes--more like sneakers, really--in one of the floor-level dryers.  And when it heated up, he propped his feet against the door.  "Can't get frostbite," he explained.


After I loaded one of the other dryers, I went around the corner for a cup of tea.  I offered to bring one back for him--or a hot chocolate, coffee, or whatever else he wanted.  "Oh, no thank you, Miss.  You're too kind."


When I returned to the laundromat, he and his bike were gone.