Mercury Mystery

Published in 1935, found among other treasures in a box on 10th Avenue. Seems promising, it begins "When I opened my eyes I was sure they were going to fall out of my head and start rolling across the floor like a couple of marbles. The pillow felt as if it had been cooked in butter. I looked at the time. It was only eight o'clock, and I knew that if I could sleep four or fives hours more I might get over the notion I was going to die. But my head was full of worms, those mean little gnawing worms that you can hear gnawing their way through a tree-trunk or through your head when you've been drinking as much as we had drunk the night before. We had had everything, all the way from Scotch to Pernod and back with way stations of Amer Picon and, for no valid reason, some Danziger Goldwasser."

I came across a section that reflects our noble town "'I remembered there was a fellow in Brooklyn got taken to the hospital one night. Someone had shot him in the rear end. He claimed he had been standing on a street corner minding his own business when a car came along and somebody stuck a rod out of it and shot this guy in the hinie.' Danny put back the last of the suits. "We'll we'd about made up our minds that somebody had mistaken this poor dope for somebody else when we thought to look at his pants. There wasn't any bullet-hole in them. So he must have gone out to stand on that street corner, minding his own business, without any pants on. Or maybe he'd been minding somebody else's business when he got shot, without any pants on."

Later the characters get crafty. "Danny poured the plaster of Paris into a hollow he had made in the robe out of my car. Then he took some water and made a paste. He poured this plaster of Paris into the foot-tracks that he had hardened with shellac on the clay of the beach. When he had finished he had a set of little plaster feet, all clear and fine, with the wrinkled and bunions showing on them. Then he picked them up one by one, picking up the feet as if he had been God."


A pillow cooked in butter? Who could ask for more in a mystery?? But there IS more in the The Hangover Murders I gather, or it wouldn't have become the basis for the 1935 film Remember Last Night.

Composite

Rounding the block -I suppose I should say "squaring it" - we came across these sunflowers guerrilla-planted in a fallow tree pit where 10th Avenue dead ends into a small plaza at 18th St, before the drop off into the Prospect Expressway, the river of cars whose roaring engines make the public enclave a site of restlessness and avoidance.

The sunflowers in the vacant square don't have ears and seem to thrive. Like many similar blossoms, they aren't actually single flowers but a collection of hundreds of flowers that evolved to grow as a unit, so each petal is a remnant of one flower, and pairs with an anther and pistil and eventually seed taking their places among the Fibonacci ranks within the central orb.

It numbs the mind to consider the process by which the individual flowers wove themselves into one radiant banquet for numerous creatures, pollen and nectar appetizers served to the insect kingdom, oil and nutrient-rich seeds the entree, graciously benefiting birds and others, a few crucial seeds falling to the wayside. How many thousands of years did it take to orchestrate such harmonic alignment, and who or what pulled the strings?

Friday Night Revelers

I saw more teens on the streets of Windsor Terrace than I've seen all year up to this point. Walking home along 10th Avenue after coming from Manhattan I saw one group huddled on a stoop talking about sports, shortly after a triad, a bit younger, fitting comfortably on the limestone steps. Across from them someone was having a party in the top floor of the house on the corner of Sherman and 10th. What sounded like live saxophone flooded the street through the open windows, and in the front window I saw a man's hand sliding up and down the frets of his stand up bass.

I can't remember the last time I saw so much life happening in the neighborhood. Well, I guess that was Halloween. But Halloween has its intense aggenda and regimentation. On a night like last night it seemed that, although no one was in costume, there was more to discover.