The Golden Spur

...so I have been writing nothing at all whatsoever and whatever I have been ill I have been sleeping I have been thinking about absolutely nothing, I haven't been dreaming (would I even know if I was? if I have, I have not been remembering) I am still working I am still sick I am still drinking McMenamin's mocoas and getting palpitations everytime I drink them, they are addictions that hotwire my heart I still read when I'm not sleeping I'm wide awake and not reading a lot I am not making sense of what I read I still read because therein lies the beauty of the world that and eating but I am eating very little mostly turkey leftovers from christmas dinner I haven't got around to the spaghetti sauce that Amanda and her husband Wes made me, they asked tonight at work, she is a housekeeper who cans, I called it tomato sauce and wes corrected me, he lashed out actually told me it was spaghetti sauce and I knew that, I guess the reason I called it tomato sauce was because I was considering using it for cannelloni nevertheless it will be messy like the serviette the swedish girl wore after the winter mushroom sloppy joe she had in the restaurant the other night, and this serviette looked like a truly fine example of abstract expressionism, autumnal browns and yellows, I turned to my colleague Kevin and said that dirty piece of linen would make a fortune on ebay, which alarmed Kevin for he saw that I meant what I said with great conviction and was already imagining a frame for it...

She materializes at the front desk at the best moment because it is always the best moment when she appears, she often steps behind the desk to talk to me, does she want to see my boots, I wonder, or does she want to show me hers, they are very nice, I don't compliment her, there are far too many nice things to say, so really where does one begin? She is a lightning rod of fierce originality, she has one outfit, equestrian blazer, scarlet to match her lipstick, cowboy shirt underneath, white with black piping, it is I am certain the outfit that Lee envisaged for suzie Jane in Hey Cowboy, she doesn't wash her hair, only conditions it, how did we even talk about this, perhaps it was I who needed to apologize for the state of my hair the last time she came in, it was lifeless and miserable, having just been washed by products clearly not up to the task, and did she wash her hair I may have asked boldly, I was confident I was having excellent hair on this particular encounter, but no comment from her about mine which was fine I was hardly fishing, our chatter was comically screwball, she wears a coonskin cap, then we talked about her lipstick, again how bold of me, I don't know how it went there so suddenly, she has blue eyes, she's 29, and talks Swedish after a few drinks, she drinks spirits, why she's ebullient, we talked lip balm, chapped lips, it is cold in Portland, Flagstaff had warm afternoons, it's been cold throughout the day and foggy,  she grew up here, it is her mother who is Swedish, everyone is wearing layers, I pressed the button for her cab and she gave me a Christmas present, a tiny pocketknife, an antique tied with a little red ribbon to a stick of sandalwood, it's wonderfully fragrant, we hugged and she repositioned us heart-to-heart and my world was spinning, what was I thinking I couldn't tell her I was leaving for georgia in a week her cab showed up I didn't even have her phone number I blew her a kiss and she was gone, home to her apartment on Christmas Day and then I woke up on boxing day feeling very ill after searching all over the house for Dawn Powell's The Golden Spur absolutely convinced that my sister-in-law had left with it and then managed to call off the search patrol at 8am the next morning when I discovered that it had fallen under my bed behind my brown carry-on.