Monday, May 21, 2007

Shake your Money Maker

I have spent the last one hundred minutes coloring in red hearts and folding paper into threes. No, I haven't gone back to elementary school; I'm getting married! My thumbs shine with the hope of calluses; red marker blooms on my hands.

This was the moment when I was supposed to step back, take a deep breath, put water on for tea with a sigh and write about how marriage has always reminded me of something very childlike, of how I remember "marrying" Travis Laskey on the blacktop, of how, ultimately, maybe those childish wishes are closer to what we ultimately crave than all the hullabaloo we've conjured up since then.

But, no. Looks like that ain't happening. I have stepped back, and what I have seen is quite terrifying. Let me start from some place in the middle:

This afternoon I was at Kate's Paperie--the one in Soho--they're having a huge clearance sale because they're moving over to Spring Street. I see a whole stack of paper-by-the-pound, and it's beautiful, ecru with the faintest bits of blue-green confetti! Why hasn't anyone bought all this paper? I'm thinking. So I start counting out sheets, making up stacks of twenty-five. My friend, Olivia, walks over, and I get her to count it too. You sure you want this? she asks. It's beautiful, I say, does it not match?

She tells me it matches, and I come home, print out a hundred copies of so-glad-you-might-be-able-to-join-us-blah-blah-blah, and then as I'm folding number 100 after coloring 100 hearts, I realize the paper has bits of money in it! Torn up dollar bills! Perhaps the most obnoxious paper ever to waste a tree. Suddenly the name "money paper" makes sense; I had thought it was a metaphor!

So now, much the same as when I was in third grade, I will call the ER and ask for my mother (she's a doctor); she'll tell me it's okay, that everything's going to be just fine, and I'll lay in the blue glow of the television, wishing she was here.

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