We All Deserve Treats

A pep talk and a lazy walk.

Hi friends.

Let’s start today with a simple pep talk for writing through complicated times.

Today you will fight for your writing. You will fight through all your distractions. This is your brain you are fighting for here, and your creativity, and your feelings, which desperately need to be expressed. Fuck your distractions. You will fight for your writing lives.

OK?

OK.

A friend came to town and we barely had time to see each other so I offered to drive him to the airport. He is tall, well over six feet, and slender and has a friendly face and is smart, smart, smart. I wanted enough time to have a civilized exchange with him, to take a walk and have a coffee. So he changed his flight to a few hours later, and then I drove uptown and picked him up.

We walked around on Magazine Street for a while and then went to French Truck to have a coffee, where they gave us a glass of soda water on the side. We caught up on all our projects and he offered me some advice I could or could not take although he was emphatic about it at the time. Before we left he got change from the cashier, four quarters for a dollar. I asked him what that was about and he said, “Oh, people always ask me for help with their bags at the airport because I’m so tall, but I have a bad back and I shouldn’t be lifting their bags. So I’ve started bringing change with me so they can get a cart instead.”

An incredible response. To be prepared in advance so as to soften the blow of saying no to a stranger.

Then we wended in and out of vintage stores for a while. I was looking for a footstool that could sit next to my reading chair, and on the footstool I would put my morning coffee or maybe the stack of books I am currently reading. I have been looking for one for more than a year, ever since I moved into the new house. I even bought a stool online knowing that it was not the right stool but just so I could have one in my possession and try it out, and then as soon as it showed up I put it in a different room entirely. Wrong stool, I thought. But I’ll find a use for it.

Anyway, we did not find a stool.

I tried on a fur coat instead because I have always thought I had Russian mob wife blood running through me and in fact I looked amazing in it. I was wearing a yellow dress and it was kind of auburn colored and I just got blonde highlights in my hair and I’m a little tan now, too, so it was a good color on me. It was not soft though, the fur. Then I saw it was made of Nutria, which absolutely grossed me out, because Nutria are so rat-like in real life. I mean the whole act of making fur is gross and cruel, obviously, but in the moment I tried on that coat I saw myself as a character in a story. The kind of woman who wore a fur. But even as a character: not Nutria.

The next vintage shop we went to was more of a marketplace, a series of stalls rented out by different people, most of them unmanned. Lots of tchotchkes. Some New Orleans memorabilia. Dresses from the 1960s. Glassware. Zero stools. The stool will probably come to me in a few years, just show up somehow in my life, I just have to give into that. (I’m really just writing this letter so that when I do get the stool I can point to this letter and say, “Remember when I was looking for a stool? Well I found one!”)

Halfway through the shop, an older woman, maybe in her seventies, eyed me and my friend as we walked through the stalls, then stopped me. “Excuse me, may I borrow him for a moment?” She pointed to a shelf. “To reach that hat for me?” She meant my friend, she wanted his help. She didn’t want to approach him directly; she sought permission from the (perceived) female partner to ask for a physical service.

She pointed at a wide cream-colored hat covered in delicate pink fake flowers and a big bow. A church hat. Not that I have spent much time in churches (Jew), but I do live in New Orleans in a neighborhood with three churches in an eight-block radius, so I know a church hat when I see it.

She wanted to see how much the hat cost, so my friend plucked it from the top shelf and handed it to her. One-hundred dollars: too much. It really was so high up that it felt abandoned or forgotten. I wish the stall owner had been there, ready to make her a deal, and there was a man upfront who managed the entire shop who we probably could have asked. But I think the hundred dollars was so far beyond what she had expected that it had rounded the corner to offensive. I could see it on her face. She had loved it enough to ask a stranger to ask another stranger to show it to her, but then suddenly that hat was not worth her time.

I would have bought it for her—an impulse buy for a stranger—but she was right. It wasn’t a good price.

My friend put the hat back high up on the shelf. It was interesting to see how people judged him by his body, its particular usefulness in a situation. An easy win for him, to reach that hat and please someone else. No quarters necessary.

Later I bought him a cookie because I thought he deserved a treat.

We all deserve treats.

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.