Dress: A couple years ago, there was a period of my life when I kept trying to go to Target for some item or another. It was probably a bathmat. I would head out around workday’s end, sometimes taking the longest possible way if the weather were nice and I could pretend that Jordan Lake was as serene and pristine seeming as it looked from the bridge above during pink skied twilight, and not, the likely snakey, possibly leech-y vat of toxic algae and E. Coli it can be.
And I would get to Target and decide that I wanted to stop somewhere else like Nordstrom Rack or Sephora or the hand soap aisle at Home Goods (it’s calming to me), and then someone would call and say, Do you want to meet for a drink? I’m headed to the bar now. And because I’m an extrovert and almost incapable of saying “no” to a friend, especially a friend offering up something to do, and you never know what might happen and in general, I’d rather regret doing the thing than not doing the thing, so I’d hustle back to downtown Carrboro, and Target would be skipped once again.
I think this went on for about two months during which time I learned one of life’s great lessons. You can be sitting, lonely and bored, around the house waiting for someone to call forever, but as soon as you make plans to replace your bathmat, by God, fortune is going to come a-knocking, or at least your librarian friends who might want to have a beer at the Orange County Social Club and talk about the madness of the Supreme Court, dystopian feminist novels, and/or the continued tyranny of tiered ruffles.
Anyway, I bought this dress, along with a blouse, and a couple other likely unnecessary items on one of those futile Target missions when I never made it to Target. I ended up for wearing it on a semi-monthly Brooklyn best friend visit when we went out to a possible mob-front/craft cocktail/dive bar in an old garage in Bed-Stuy. It was April and very cold inside that bar. They ran all the power, including a couple of anemic space heaters running off a hollering, gas-powered generator in the middle of the “bar room” (there was a splintery wooden bench and a few folding chairs). I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to run generators indoors, especially ones that belch enough fumes to be considered a chemical weapon in some quarters, but, you know, we made the best of it and none of us died of asphyxiation. On the whole, it was a very fun night, and I looked pretty cute, I think, and what I mostly want to say is that if I’d bought that bathmat instead, who knows how things might have turned out differently.
Sweater: It’s a black cardigan, in itself, not very interesting, I bought it on George Street in Edinburgh, because as I was sitting at a sauna in a spa at Charlotte Square, watching two tipsy twenty-something wedding guests canoodle and holler sweet nothings at each other in what to my American ears sounded like borderline Dick Van Dyke-level fake Cockney, I got worried about not having enough warm clothes to take to the highlands the next day, so I got dressed in a hurry and ran up the block while my best friend was finishing a treatment. I bought two sweaters both of which were more expensive than I intended and neither one of which ended up being the what I actually needed to keep warm in the Highlands (that would have been a hat, which I also ended up paying too much money for, at a castle gift shop a couple of days later. Like all cold weather hats, it made me look like a thumb, but it helped me navigate the early morning Isle of Skye unbested by North Atlantic Chill[1] ).
When I checked out, the saleswoman asked if I was mumbled Eric mumble Adia mumble amily mumble. And if so, was I intown for the mumbled Bringledearsideton mumbled? I asked her to repeat. She had a very quiet, breathy voice with lots of swallowed syllables. She was very nice. I felt impolite asking her to repeat herself again, so I did what I usually do in those situations and just smiled and nodded.
Her eyes lit up. She called over another saleswoman. The other woman preceded to ask me if I knew Martin and whether he was still married to Rebecca, and if my mother was Martin’s sister, because her sister had been to university with Martin’s sister. I nodded a lot. By answering no questions directly, I think I admitted to being the daughter of a Toronto restauranteur with roots in Aberdeen. I maybe said I’d see them later at a cocktail. I got out of the store before I committed actual fraud out of embarrassment/politeness and scurried back to the hotel.
Bracelet: Like most American women, I spent the afternoon/evening of June 24, 2022 in a state of shock/fury/sadness/panic. I couldn’t figure out which literal or proverbial barricades I might take to so I went to the bar to ask my friends. We drank and shouted (but committed no actual civil disobedience) until almost 1am when I remembered I was supposed to get up early the next morning and meet another friend at Hillsborough History Day.
Mine was hangover that settled in like a thick fog. I drove up Old 86 feeling my soul leave my body. I broke my shoe on the way to the farmer’s market and hobbled around through a graveyard tour, past a couple of redcoats mustering beside a Volkswagen Reproductive rights were organized in front of the Colonial Era Courthouse, just past a bunch of people in historical costume making boiling something over an open fire. It very hot, and quite surreal, but strangely lovely in that way way that unexpected things can be.
We stopped at a vintage jewelry shop on Churton Street, where they had about a million things I wanted, but I settled for this thick striped bangle. Because it looked great with the orange sundress I wore that day. Because it kind of reminded me of “Beetlejuice.” Because you always need souvenirs to mark an occasion that surprises you.
The Outfit: It was busy work day. A friend came by with an excellent bottle of wine and we ate a bunch of grapes and brie, which is maybe girl dinner. I’m concerned about this potential Brie extinction. It’s keeping me up at night. Certainly if we can put a man on the moon, we can figure out to keep my beloved triple-crème, cave-ripened cheeses alive.
I spent some time that night thinking about a conversation I had at the conference with an editor friend. We spoke about books that had inspired us to write when we were teenagers. This is a different category, I think, than favorite books, or even influential books. These are the books that make us believe we can or that maybe our voice has some value in the world. I could probably write more about this (maybe I will), but that night, last of the conference, we discussed Jill McCorkle, a North Carolina writer, whose first two novels The Cheeleader and July 7th had a pretty big impact on us both when we were young. I’d read a lot of southern fiction by the time I was sixteen, and had figured if I wanted to be a writer, I might be doomed by my geography to writing about dead mules, local grotesques, and extravagant housefires. Those early Jill McCorkle books (as well as Ferris Beach, which does—spoiler alert—also feature a housefire) helped me understand that I could write about people in the south that hailed from a world that was actually recognizable as my own.
Dress: London Times, Nordstrom Rack, 2022
Sweater: Jigsaw, Edinburgh, 2022
Bracelet: Carlisle & Linny, Hillsborough, 2022
Earrings: Peel Gallery, Carrboro, 2021
Boots: Dr. Martens, 2022
[1] We would ultimately be bested by the slipperiness of North Atlantic mud, ps. I want to be ashamed about this, but I am not. And it’s here where I would like to tip a hat to whatever geniuses in Scotland figured out that they should put a coffee counters at popular trailheads. I have to say, as a US-based hiker, the ability to get a nice cortado and maybe a sparkling Italian mineral water on the way back to the car is a massive improvement over the lukewarm backwash in your Nalgene bottle and whatever trail mix your buddy has squirreled away in his fleece pocket. America, we can do better.
Tiny Commotions 