Plumbers, Miracle Babies

2 enormous men dwarfed the kitchen today, they snaked the drain and cleared out before I realized I wanted to sneak pictures of them. One was tall and thin with broad shoulders and long legs, a thick leather back support belt around his narrow middle. The other was about 6 and a half feet and thick around the waist, with the rounded cheeks of a toddler. Narry a butt crack in sight, just mounds of graciousness, skill, and sound judgement. I have a feeling they are Obama supporters. They fixed the leak in the water filter, the clogged drain and flooded dishwasher, and then were gone in the blink of an eye.

At the school yard I spoke with Dorothy, her puffs of white hair crowning her head. It turns out that Dorothy has a twin sister named Dorothy, and a brother that didn't survive. They were named by the North Carolina nurse that helped deliver them from their dead mother's womb in 1936, and somehow the Dorothys, each weighing under a pound, were placed in incubators and removed 9 days later in stable health. They were too small too touch, so they had to be carried around on pillows.

They were adopted by a woman, a friend of the family, who sounded affectionate and supported Dorothy in speaking up about things that didn't seem right to her. This got her in trouble with her biological grandfather, who answered her defiance with his cane. Her revenge was to pelt him with Chinaberries, flung from her hands, but which he thought had fallen on him from trees.

You know what I loved so much? That paintings of the doll by Joanne Mcfarland which were on display at her Gowanus studio over the weekend. She loves to paint this doll that she has, and I love so much to look at it.