memories | The Gad About Town

My Surreal Life

Posted on March 21, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

A young woman and a child, a toddler young enough for a stroller but old enough to walk alongside it, entered the elevator my friend and I were already on. The doors shut, and the child looked at me, looked me square in the eyes, and said, “Hi, Mark.” Precisely enunciated. Distinctly direct.

Now, Mark happens to be my name. I had never seen the woman, or boy, before. My friend looked at me and I suppose he saw a shocked look come over my face. When we got off the elevator—not at our floor, but the next available, because I was spooked—he asked, “Do you know them?”

“No. That was random. Did that kid say my name?”

“Yeah. Definitely. As if he was about to tell you something important.”
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A Nickname-less Life

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

One can not, or ought not, nickname oneself. This is not a hard-and-fast social rule, but it is similar to the unspoken rule about not declaring oneself humble. The person who volunteers that he or she is humble often is not. An exception comes when the humble person is speaking self-deprecatingly.

Every once in a while, I have desired a cool nickname, a moniker that precedes me wherever I roam. “Lefty” is a great nickname—Steve Carlton and Phil Mickelson both carry that name with distinction, but I am right-handed. No one goes by the name “Righty.” “Write-y”? No. No one needs a nickname that is a pun, a rhyme no less, and would always need a follow-up explanation: “‘Cause he calls himself a writer, get it?”
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Through a Screen Door

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

A heavy rain drowns each raindrop; a light rain, like the kind I saw in the woods out behind my house when I was a child, a light rain striking the leaves and branches of trees, further slowing their impact, that rain produces the strongest petrichor of all, the one that renders me into an seven-year-old noticing the world for the first time.

The lightest of rain after the driest of spells leads to the most argillaceous petrichor, which is the kind that humans smell as relief, the thought that things will start growing again.—”Petrichor,” Jan. 26, 2015

We called it “The Woods.” Well, I did. Sometimes, I referred to it as a “forest,” which it most certainly was not. Our backyard ended at a line of trees and dross beneath them; the lightly manicured, suburban lawn did not grow beyond that line, despite my teen-aged lawn mowing efforts to expand the lawn by clearing the dead leaves and branches away. That tight boundary made The Woods appear all the more elemental and foreign.
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