So, I was strolling down San Pronto Boulevard right along the edge of the harbor where the shrimp boats tie up thinking about getting a job, because I like to travel and that costs money unless you are willing to take some pretty strange routes and make do with very little in the way of amenities, when all of sudden, out of the corner of my eye I spotted a sign. There was my name,up in lights, or so I could easily imagine. It was the old First Church of The Non Denominational Martyrs, closed up and looking a little forlorn since it was deconsecrated last summer, and all the sign really said was "For Rent", but I saw in my mind's eye a glimmering vision of what might come to pass, if I could scrounge up the cash to make it happen. As soon as I got home, I telephoned to inquire about leasing the place for the winter. The caretaker invited me over to look inside, and said the city's real estate agent had promised to stop by in about an hour anyway, so I took my digital camera and walked back over there, a distance of about two hundred yards. Mrs. Norton, who had been my second grade teacher at San Pronto PS239 about a hundred and five years ago (fear not- I didn't say anything as rude as that to her) met me at the door and as we chatted about old times, we went into the main room, where I was startled and delighted to find row upon row- several hundred at least- of slightly dusty but still very comfortable velvet covered theatre seats facing the altar. I asked Mrs. Norton why the Non-Denominationalists had gone out of business when the church so obviously must have been a lovely place to congregate. She laughed and said "Oh, Drifty! They didn't go out of business, they were bought up by Rupert Murdoch for several million dollars and incorporated into his Revival Televangelist Network. Some of the parishioners who traded their share of the sale price for RTN stock made out so well on the deal- because, as you probably know, that darned thing has just skyrocketed these past few months- that they were able to buy those two half-built mosques on the other side of town and start a new religion among the swamp farmers who live out that way. I hear Mr. Murdoch has them in mind for his second round of expansion, which is... " and here she whispered in a coy mock-dramatic way, which I found endearingly comic and damned sexy, for all her 88 years of age "rumored to be in the works for early next year." We looked at the altar foundation, which was a solid stone platform almost as wide as the whole church, with steps all around three sides and she showed me how to control the lights in the choir loft from behind the altar, using an electronic joystick and two or three of the kind of soft-clicking rotary knobs you find on expensive home stereo tuners, to select and adjust the light banks so as to sweep the whole church with a white spot, while simultaneously bathing various parts of the altar in candy-colored pools of soft light. I felt sure she had played with this set-up before, because of the way she deftly twirled the knobs from deep pink to tangerine to taffy blue, and raced the white spot around like, well, like a white spotlight. After a few minutes of this magic, Mrs. Norton started showing me around the offices and store rooms behind the altar. I didn't say anything to my old teacher, but I was already sure I was going to not only rent this place, but buy it, and as soon as possible, before somebody beat me to it. We tried the light switches in what I now knew were going to be the backstage dressing rooms, opened the back doors to see the private parking spots formerly reserved for the minister and staff, looked in at the furnace sitting quietly in its own tall room, which Mrs. Norton assured me was in perfect working order and only dormant to save money, and we were standing in the wood-paneled lobby admiring the scrollwork on the grand main doors when the city real-estate agent, a Mr. Gooden found us. (To Be Continued)

Ah, the weekend! Things have been pretty quiet around here today- my housemates went off to hunt wild mushrooms on the coast, so the dog and I sat around playing Scrabble® all afternoon. I think I won, but God alone knows what the dog’s opinion is. I suppose the dog knows, come to think of it, but I’m sure I don’t. I know she loves me because she’s a dog and dogs ARE love, and that’s good enough for me. I heard Molly Ivins on the radio during the last Scrabble® session- is it just me, or does she sound heavily drugged lately?

No, it’s not just you- she sounded kind of whacked, too. Seriously, though, Drifty- the woman died a week ago of breast cancer. –Ed

Yeah, thanks, Ed. That’s too bad- she was a funny lady. Keeping an open mind won’t be easy, of course, but I’m not going to let this great loss turn me against breasts. That’s a promise. Listen folks, I don’t hate Crocs®, and anyway I think that tempest in a teapot has finally boiled dry, but just in case… I don’t mind adding a little fuel to the fire- here’s one more reason to loathe those un-shoes: The nostril-like holes all over them sometimes catch and hold little bits of life-debris which remind you of something you wouldn’t want to leave hanging out of your nose. What do you do? Well, the offending bit of whatever must be picked out unless you want to take off the sandal and shake it. Today I picked at what I thought was a bit of fluff in a hole and BLAMMO! I yanked a thread out of one of my expensive merino wool ankle socks. Don’t know what I mean? It was a snag in the sock, which when tugged upon became a bigger snag, sort of a yarn hernia. So that’s why nobody should wear Crocs®. Had I been wearing real shoes, I never would have seen the snag. Or at least a Crocs® basher might argue so. I’m pretty sure some of you are thinking I’m an oaf (snicker!) of the lowest pedigree for wearing socks with my sandals, but I have no more respect for that line of fashion-fascism than I do for the anti-Crocs® fever. And by the way I don’t wear Crocs®- they cost too much. I wear the cheap copies. So hate me for that, too. I could live on a diet of hate and grapefruit. Man, I love grapefruit. Especially good grapefruit.

Drifty- the HR people Googled your particulars and all they could find on San Pronto was a book review for a collected poetry volume called Maraca, by Victor Hernandez Cruz, which cited these lines:

San pronto no se wis windos can el claus de la/ mañananana.

Well, they’re all monoglots over at HR, so they put it into BabelFish and got this back:

San not wis soon windos dog claus of the mañananana.

which didn’t help very much. Do you have any idea what this means? And where is San Pronto, anyway? That’s what they really want to know.

-Mgmt

Yeah, thanks, Mgmt. Nope, I have no idea. It’s poetry, so I’ll probably need to read the whole thing before I can begin to understand it. One can’t get anywhere by looking at a line or two in isolation, can one? I have the book in question on order from my local public library- that usually takes a week or so- and I’ll get back to you when I’ve read the poem and had a chance to digest it. In the meantime, tell HR to get stuffed- they don’t need to know anything about me since I’m not drawing any pay or other benefits. But I love a mystery, so I’ll take this on just for fun. I’ve done some checking around and this poet is apparently famous- along with some other Nuyorican poets for jumping back and forth between Spanish and English within one piece of work. I can understand that, since I’m a neorriqueño myself (well, technically a quarter-Rican), though I speak almost no Spanish, and it’s not even Puerto Rican Spanish, but the typical Bay Area Spanish that you have to know just to understand street names. Does that answer the part of your question about where San Pronto is? No? Well, it’s less than three statute miles from here, but worlds apart. You might say it’s a state of mind. As I was saying, some of my family speak a wild mixture of Spanish and English, so this sort of thing doesn’t freak me out- I just have to listen carefully to several people at once and ask a lot of questions if I want to know exactly what Tio Nestor is supposed to have said to the unprintable who sold him a broken pay phone sometime in the early 1970s. Anyway, there’s some semi-scholarly blather available on the whole dual-language-as-weapon-and-refuge thing here if you’re interested. I read four or five pages of it, and I’ll go back and finish when I have some of the poet’s work under my belt. OK, as for San pronto no se wis windos can el claus de la/ mañananana. … I don’t know, the world’s greatest microprocessor (the thing between my ears) can’t get its tentacles all the way around this, even in the pre-BabelFish configuration. I’ll wait for the book. Anyone else have thoughts on this? Drop us a note.