Comments on: Happenstance

By: Rita

Rita — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:33:25 +0000

Well….what did this teach you ?! Leik testehle ! You really do make the mundane a exciting event !

By: Henry

Henry — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:04:53 +0000

I loved your piece. There is something very delicious about the way you write. So vivid.

By: Katie

Katie — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:23:02 +0000

It’s a beautiful typewriter and well worth your anger, the ransom, and the procurement of the cord. YOU are a bit advanced, my dear.

By: CJ Higgins

CJ Higgins — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:09:12 +0000

We could probably get a cord and mail it to you if you want it bad enough…Just need a model #. I really liked this short story. If you hadn’t been angry you probably would have investigated the typewriter and saw the cord missing and therefore left it at the curb….When you saw it sitting there were you imagining “This is what I am going to write my first novel on”? So many of the great authors have an old typewriter they prefer to peck away their stories on. Keep up the good work, I am enjoying it…Love CJ

By: lens

lens — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:10:33 +0000

When I left Beirut for London in 2005 I left in kind of a mess and a hurry, and to make a long story short, the apartment flooded in my absence and had to be emptied. I came back after my course the next year to find that my favorite bookshelf (the one that’s covered with all the little fairy lights now), had been removed from the apartment and had disappeared. I was bitterly sad over it – not only was it a present, not only did I adore it, it was also a bookshelf from 1962 from the ACS library where I had first learned to love reading. Child me had probably trailed grubby hands along that very same bookcase searching for a Nancy Drew or Roald Dahl I hadn’t yet managed to consume.
By pure coincidence, I ended up finding an apartment in the same building that I lived in before – only now on the flood-free (but certainly not problem-free!) 6th floor. Walking home one day, I saw something familiar in the lobby of the Aramex building. I slipped inside, circled behind it, and sure enough on the back in the same familiar faded sharpie it said: American Community School Library 1962. I was ecstatic. The natour had apparently found it in the dumpster the year before and rescued it in the hopes of making a few thou off of it. I gladly paid him 20,000, then paid my natour an additional 10 thou to lug it up six flights of stairs, and it was probably the best 20 bucks I ever spent in my life, to get back something that was originally mine.
I guess the moral of the story is that sometimes you have to pay to get what’s yours.
I loved this blog post btw – so fluid and lucid, despite your anger.
xxxxx