antimacassar
Sep. 7th, 2019 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/315DutT
dude and i went out for ice cream this evening. there’s a great little ice cream joint, very hipster, just down the block from the Catholic school where Dude attended elementary school as a kid, and also the church his family attended, now shut down. tucked in that same neighborhood is also the Catholic girls’ high school, now shut down, that his sister attended (and he took one math class there, and learned a lot about being the only boy in an entire school, namely how to keep his fuckin mouth shut, which is one of the traits I admire in him) and also a convent full of cloistered nuns (his dad, a contractor, did some construction work in the convent and they literally made the workmen wear bells so the nuns knew to avoid them so as not to break their cloistered solitude; Dude was an altar server and occasionally served Masses at the convent and from his angle he could see through the grate to where the cloistered nuns were attending the same service, and said it was all super normal to him as a kid but looking back it’s like wtf was that).
Anyhow. Apart from all the Catholicism, it’s a modest little suburb of little houses quite close together with niceish yards and modest lifestyles etc.
Driving along, it’s near dusk and cloudy so lights are on, and as we paused at a stop sign I had a view into a living room where four wing-backed armchairs were clustered quite close together, and they all had matching crocheted antimacassars– those little doily things that go on the headrest?
and the word antimacassar floated through my brain, and lodged firmly in what I absolutely knew was the second line of a limerick. I said the word a number of times, and expressed my sudden desire to possess one– where does one find one? i’d have to make one. i don’t own a chair that could really accommodate one. we must redecorate.
And meanwhile my brain was churning away at this memory, this well-buried something, it was a slightly racy but very old limerick, it was definitely in a book of my grandmother’s, there were pen and ink illustrations, and suddenly, before we’d even pulled up to our driveway, I blurted out, entire
A delightful young lady at Vassar
is knitting an antimacassar
to lure her professor
to love and caress her
and possibly even to pass her
I am quite sure it was in the New Yorker but I could not tell you what decade.
Judicious Googling tells me I got the first line wrong but apart from that my memory is astonishingly correct, given that my grandmother died fifteen years ago and the era during which i would have been reading old New Yorker compilations in her living room in Lansingburgh is even longer ago.
I wonder who ended up with that book…
Weird what the brain holds onto.
dude and i went out for ice cream this evening. there’s a great little ice cream joint, very hipster, just down the block from the Catholic school where Dude attended elementary school as a kid, and also the church his family attended, now shut down. tucked in that same neighborhood is also the Catholic girls’ high school, now shut down, that his sister attended (and he took one math class there, and learned a lot about being the only boy in an entire school, namely how to keep his fuckin mouth shut, which is one of the traits I admire in him) and also a convent full of cloistered nuns (his dad, a contractor, did some construction work in the convent and they literally made the workmen wear bells so the nuns knew to avoid them so as not to break their cloistered solitude; Dude was an altar server and occasionally served Masses at the convent and from his angle he could see through the grate to where the cloistered nuns were attending the same service, and said it was all super normal to him as a kid but looking back it’s like wtf was that).
Anyhow. Apart from all the Catholicism, it’s a modest little suburb of little houses quite close together with niceish yards and modest lifestyles etc.
Driving along, it’s near dusk and cloudy so lights are on, and as we paused at a stop sign I had a view into a living room where four wing-backed armchairs were clustered quite close together, and they all had matching crocheted antimacassars– those little doily things that go on the headrest?
and the word antimacassar floated through my brain, and lodged firmly in what I absolutely knew was the second line of a limerick. I said the word a number of times, and expressed my sudden desire to possess one– where does one find one? i’d have to make one. i don’t own a chair that could really accommodate one. we must redecorate.
And meanwhile my brain was churning away at this memory, this well-buried something, it was a slightly racy but very old limerick, it was definitely in a book of my grandmother’s, there were pen and ink illustrations, and suddenly, before we’d even pulled up to our driveway, I blurted out, entire
A delightful young lady at Vassar
is knitting an antimacassar
to lure her professor
to love and caress her
and possibly even to pass her
I am quite sure it was in the New Yorker but I could not tell you what decade.
Judicious Googling tells me I got the first line wrong but apart from that my memory is astonishingly correct, given that my grandmother died fifteen years ago and the era during which i would have been reading old New Yorker compilations in her living room in Lansingburgh is even longer ago.
I wonder who ended up with that book…
Weird what the brain holds onto.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-08 12:37 am (UTC)Every time I hear about doilies, I become gripped with the urge to make one. I made a few at some point years ago. Though, okay, I mostly used worsted yarn, which provides a gauge to make shawls rather than dainty doilies. Still works. :)
But yeah. Now I want to make a doily. Or three. Argh. Wonder if I can get the good doily yarn here.