Monday, September 07, 2009

We are in Iowa City! A little unsettled—it’s a long, possibly unbloggable story—but by Wednesday we should be in a house, and so this morning we went to a flea market, to see if we could buy things for it. Alas, I missed the 1940s USO puppet theater by seconds—it said VICTORY at the top, and oh, I feel its loss—but I had a funny thought when I wandered around. When I left IC in the summer of 2009, I got rid of nearly everything. Rachel Pastan was nice enough to let the one good piece of furniture I’d inherited from a relative hitch a ride to the East Coast on her moving truck, but I decided to ride trains for three weeks and so anything that didn’t fit in my suitcase, I gave away. This included a fairly extensive collection of 1950s china jaguars—lamps, planters, etc. I saw one that looked familiar today. I tried to catch its eye, like a bad date from my youth. You look the same, I thought, and I felt it think back, Really? Because you’ve changed.

3 comments:

AJ said...

Welcome to Iowa City! We moved back to Iowa City from China recently and had to buy all new house stuff. Our favorite secondhand places were Stuff Etc. (Coralville branch is better), Artifacts and Decorum on Market and Gilbert, and Houseworks, now on Stevens Drive. Good luck!

Unknown said...

By way of introduction, let me mention that I am RI'07. Flipping through the summer issue of Radcliffe Quarterly, I was blown away by the excerpt from "Let your heart become iron"! Such beautiful writing! I googled you and was led to your blog. Is your book really titled "Here's Your Hat What Is Your Hury"? Or is that an embarrassing typo by a brilliant authoress?

Elizabeth McCracken said...

Thanks AJ!Mark at Decorum is a pal of mine, and I love his stuff.

& thank you very much, A.--I corrected the typo. I must have looked at the missing R 1,000 times.