"I'm here about an accident," the police officer began.
"Whose accident?" asked my father. "None of us have had any accidents. Kent," he turned, "were you in an accident?"
"No sir," the police officer answered for me, "this is about witnessing an accident. I think it's your wife we need."
"What did you do this time?" my father asked my mother.
"This is pretty routine and shouldn't take more than a few minutes."
"Like the surveys in the grocery store?" I asked. "They always say that, and then it takes half an hour, but they give you some food samples at the end."
"I don't think we get any samples," my father said.
"Come in," said my mother, opening the screen door. "Would you like a cookie while we talk?"
"No thank you, ma'am. But do you have a table, like a kitchen table, where I could put my notebook down?"
We all wandered to the kitchen table. "This is about the accident this morning," the officer began.
"Were you in it?" my father asked my mother.
"I saw it," said my mother.
"No damage to our car?" my father continued.
"I saw it," my mother repeated. "The car next to me started up and gently drove into the car before it. We were all at a stoplight."
The officer's pen scribbled. "Were there any distractions, say an emergency vehicle? Was the light changing? Did the drivers say anything to each other? I mean, before the accident?"
"No, no, and no," said my mother.
"He needs more than that," said my father. "This is an official report. And a statement for the insurance companies."
"I'm sure they will all sort it out," said my mother. "Are you sure you would not like a cookie? Fresh. Chocolate chip. I baked them this evening."
"No thank you, ma'am," answered the officer. "So there was no apparent cause, like the first car did not move forward, and the second car did not think the light had changed or something?"
"Cars don't think," said my mother. "Drivers do. Or not. Sometimes I think it would be better if they let cars drive themselves; maybe cars would think better than drivers."
"Yes ma'am," murmured the police officer. "But what was the driver of the second car thinking when she let her car hit someone?"
"I knew it was a 'she,'" said my father.
"'What was she thinking?'" my mother repeated. "What do you mean, 'What was she thinking?' How am I supposed to know what she was thinking? I don’t know what goes on in people's minds. Do you know how impenetrable a mind is? Do you know how people can be thinking almost anything, that they like you, or hate you, or love you, or would like broccoli cheddar soup for supper, and none of that shows on the outside of their head?
"I don't know what my husband is thinking. I've been married to him for twenty-five years, and I have no idea what he is thinking. I never met this woman. She drove her car to the same stop light as I did. I never saw her before. How would I know what she was thinking?" My mother stopped, breathing hard.
"When they ask me, 'How long have you been married?' I say, 'Ten happy years. And out of twenty-five, that isn’t' bad,'" said my father. "Of course my wife doesn't like that answer. So I guess I should just say, 'Twenty-five years.'"
"What is truth?" asked my mother. "How do you know what truth is? Let alone know someone's thoughts."
“Of course she used to talk with me more," added my father to clarify his opinions.
"Truth is an abstract. There is a truth for each person," continued my mother. She waved her hand at Truth, somewhere beyond the ceiling.
The officer's pen remained above his paper, poised for its swan dive. "What I meant was," he interrupted, looking from one of my parents to the other, "What I meant was, did she say anything to indicate why she might have done that?"
"I don't talk to strangers," said my mother.
"She is a stranger," said my father.
The police officer capped his pen. "Thank you for your time," he said slowly, "I'll add this to the report, but I don't think the insurance company or the department will be contacting you again. It all seems pretty straightforward."
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Searching for X - excerpt
Recently, I remembered that I have never led a careful life. I will not begin now.
It was time to do the things he’d always wanted to see, do, be: the little things that made life. A sunset, a sunrise, a piece of pie and a cup of coffee. Watching people. If he could find enough of those little things that summed up life on the way, maybe he would also have found the right answer. If not, maybe it was what you did before you got there that counted.
The first day he didn’t drive far. He picked up some speed along the straight ways, dallied along the curves, pulled over a few time to sit watching traffic, deliberately thinking of nothing until he saw a set of tiny headlights, like hope coming toward him, become larger and brighter, and carry past him on a whish of sound. He’d blink, and go back to thinking of nothing. After a few hours on the road, always moving south, he stopped at one of the small Mississippi river towns. It wasn’t famous for the river; it was famous for the home made farm country pies. One of the things he had always wished he had done was to sit in a restaurant for hours, watching people come and go, a cup of smoking hot coffee and a piece of pie in front of him. There was never time, or the right restaurant handy. It was time to change the equation.
Farm country he would have called it, with local patrons were at their brown laminate tables, bent over the newspaper (most of them trucked in from the Twin Cities, he noted with quiet pride) or staring bleared ahead of them, forearms along the table. Their eyes were concentrating on yesterday’s news or today’s hopes. There were plenty of empty chairs and almost as many open tables. He asked politely for one at the wall, where he could see the view from across the restaurant.
“There isn’t much to see, just the street where people leave their cars,” the blonde and young waitress told him solemnly. It’s just a small town.”
She could have been one of his students, home for the day, picking up a little extra money by working her summer job, even though now it was fall.
“That’s okay. I like to lean against the wall while I sip my coffee. Just coffee, please.” And he had gotten what he wanted: a table for two, with nothing behind him except fake paneling and everything in front of him: tables, waitresses moving briskly among them, the smell of pancakes and sugar, sunrise turning the fog in the air translucent and the dust on the cars outside to pollen yellow. Time.
He came back to himself from a formless reverie about time and fog. The coffee, newspaper, breakfast group had left. The waitresses were mopping clean tables, setting out new paper mats, shifting the pies in their lighted cases. That was one reason he had turned the car here. If he was going to waste time over a piece of pie and a cup of coffee, it might as well be somewhere where they were known for their pies. Apple, apple with streusel crumb topping, banana cream, blueberry, cherry, chocolate cream, cranberry apple, currant, lemon meringue, peach, pecan, raspberry, rhubarb, strawberry. ‘Streusel crumb’ was a cheating name, for the tourists. Anyone from a German or Polish background knew that streusel was crumbs. But it was the pies, pies from generous farm kitchens, that were important. He looked up from consideration of the pie list, out the window. More cars, the early scouts for today’s stream of tourists, were moving into open spaces on the main street. Take one farm town where people knew how to cook, subtract three failed businesses factored into the reduced price of bulk milk, add the byproduct of traveler runoff from a highway, compound multiply by word of mouth. What did you have? A list of thirty-five kinds of pie (most of them indigenous) and enough rebuilt economy to keep the town’s women employed while their men either drank the coffee the women poured into restaurant cups or went back to the fields and barns, hoping for an upturn in the price of corn, wheat, milk, and beef. Pie. He studied the list, and tipped a smile toward one of the waitresses.
“And which will it be?” she asked, as she poured a coffee refill.
“Rhubarb, please.” His grandma used to make rhubarb pie in early spring, pink and green stalks bound in a yellow egg custard. Sticky, sour, and full of promise.
By the time he laid his fork across the smeared plate, the tables had refilled. The restaurant was sloshing in coffee, sugar, and noise. “Got to make Sioux Falls today.” And, “Remember Sasie, we want to see the Effinghams when we’re in Detroit.” Or, “Did you pack the camera? Do you think you could get a photo of us – maybe outside? Do you think they would let us take our plates out in front? Mehitabel would love to see this place.” “Mehitabel would love the pies. That woman never missed a meal in her life.” He sipped his coffee and watched people who didn’t know when they would run out of distance or time.
The restaurant traffic never slowed down after that. At one in the afternoon, hemmed in by the people who had been shifting their weight in the vestibule, watching for an empty table, he ordered a piece of lemon pie. “Not the meringue.”
The waitress frowned, her skirts still riding the air currents from her movements between the tables. “Not the meringue? That’s the only lemon we have.”
“Okay. How about banana cream?”
“That we can do.”
About half were round tables and the rest were square. The restaurant contains twenty-five round tables and sixteen square. If a round table seats four comfortably, as does the square, but if customers leave the square tables on the average of 2.3 minutes sooner than the round, and if the traffic flow can be assumed as constant for twelve hours of operation, with an increased 40% for the two-hour periods of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, how much of a financial advantage is it to replace the round tables with the square, assuming a 30% depreciation each year, with the initial cost of the round tables exceeding the square by 5%. Or was that .05? He frowned in concentration. Someone at a nearby table muttered about going to use the john.
There were five stalls and the requisite two urinals. On the women’s side it would be six stalls and a Kotex dispenser. Assuming a usage of 5 gallons per flush, and usage increase of 35% on the female side of the restrooms versus the male, at what point was it environmentally less costly to install porta potties, to be periodically emptied at the nearest large city, which was…Chicago? Rochester?
About three-thirty in the afternoon, when some of the tables had opened and the restaurant was quieter, he ordered a slice of apple pie (no streusel, just the regular crust, please) and a cup of tea. His stomach was wrinkled from coffee. His mind felt quieter, though. He ate the piece in tidy bites, saving its triangular point until last: the wish bite. Years ago when he had been a child, swinging his legs from a too-tall chair at the table, “I wish for another piece of pie,” was his grandfather’s line. What did he wish for? He pushed back his chair, left a generous tip for the waitress (his third, he smiled sadly: he had managed to hang on to his table through three shifts, two-thirds of a day’s traffic, and five trips to the restroom). Soon it would be the dinner group: round steak with mashed potatoes and field green beans; chicken smothered in cream gravy with baked potatoes and pickled beets. Supper meant people coming home, lights coming on in the houses, quiet before sleep. Supper meant: when are you heading home? He was close enough to the house in the Twin Cities that he could be back before midnight, far enough away it could not reach out and pull him in. He had made one decision this morning. But one decision was just the first in this chain, or the end link in the chain before. He could get out on the road and drive north for a few hours, his body jazzed with caffeine and his mind lulled by pie and memories. Or he could head south and west toward. Or he could make the decision tomorrow.
It was time to do the things he’d always wanted to see, do, be: the little things that made life. A sunset, a sunrise, a piece of pie and a cup of coffee. Watching people. If he could find enough of those little things that summed up life on the way, maybe he would also have found the right answer. If not, maybe it was what you did before you got there that counted.
The first day he didn’t drive far. He picked up some speed along the straight ways, dallied along the curves, pulled over a few time to sit watching traffic, deliberately thinking of nothing until he saw a set of tiny headlights, like hope coming toward him, become larger and brighter, and carry past him on a whish of sound. He’d blink, and go back to thinking of nothing. After a few hours on the road, always moving south, he stopped at one of the small Mississippi river towns. It wasn’t famous for the river; it was famous for the home made farm country pies. One of the things he had always wished he had done was to sit in a restaurant for hours, watching people come and go, a cup of smoking hot coffee and a piece of pie in front of him. There was never time, or the right restaurant handy. It was time to change the equation.
Farm country he would have called it, with local patrons were at their brown laminate tables, bent over the newspaper (most of them trucked in from the Twin Cities, he noted with quiet pride) or staring bleared ahead of them, forearms along the table. Their eyes were concentrating on yesterday’s news or today’s hopes. There were plenty of empty chairs and almost as many open tables. He asked politely for one at the wall, where he could see the view from across the restaurant.
“There isn’t much to see, just the street where people leave their cars,” the blonde and young waitress told him solemnly. It’s just a small town.”
She could have been one of his students, home for the day, picking up a little extra money by working her summer job, even though now it was fall.
“That’s okay. I like to lean against the wall while I sip my coffee. Just coffee, please.” And he had gotten what he wanted: a table for two, with nothing behind him except fake paneling and everything in front of him: tables, waitresses moving briskly among them, the smell of pancakes and sugar, sunrise turning the fog in the air translucent and the dust on the cars outside to pollen yellow. Time.
He came back to himself from a formless reverie about time and fog. The coffee, newspaper, breakfast group had left. The waitresses were mopping clean tables, setting out new paper mats, shifting the pies in their lighted cases. That was one reason he had turned the car here. If he was going to waste time over a piece of pie and a cup of coffee, it might as well be somewhere where they were known for their pies. Apple, apple with streusel crumb topping, banana cream, blueberry, cherry, chocolate cream, cranberry apple, currant, lemon meringue, peach, pecan, raspberry, rhubarb, strawberry. ‘Streusel crumb’ was a cheating name, for the tourists. Anyone from a German or Polish background knew that streusel was crumbs. But it was the pies, pies from generous farm kitchens, that were important. He looked up from consideration of the pie list, out the window. More cars, the early scouts for today’s stream of tourists, were moving into open spaces on the main street. Take one farm town where people knew how to cook, subtract three failed businesses factored into the reduced price of bulk milk, add the byproduct of traveler runoff from a highway, compound multiply by word of mouth. What did you have? A list of thirty-five kinds of pie (most of them indigenous) and enough rebuilt economy to keep the town’s women employed while their men either drank the coffee the women poured into restaurant cups or went back to the fields and barns, hoping for an upturn in the price of corn, wheat, milk, and beef. Pie. He studied the list, and tipped a smile toward one of the waitresses.
“And which will it be?” she asked, as she poured a coffee refill.
“Rhubarb, please.” His grandma used to make rhubarb pie in early spring, pink and green stalks bound in a yellow egg custard. Sticky, sour, and full of promise.
By the time he laid his fork across the smeared plate, the tables had refilled. The restaurant was sloshing in coffee, sugar, and noise. “Got to make Sioux Falls today.” And, “Remember Sasie, we want to see the Effinghams when we’re in Detroit.” Or, “Did you pack the camera? Do you think you could get a photo of us – maybe outside? Do you think they would let us take our plates out in front? Mehitabel would love to see this place.” “Mehitabel would love the pies. That woman never missed a meal in her life.” He sipped his coffee and watched people who didn’t know when they would run out of distance or time.
The restaurant traffic never slowed down after that. At one in the afternoon, hemmed in by the people who had been shifting their weight in the vestibule, watching for an empty table, he ordered a piece of lemon pie. “Not the meringue.”
The waitress frowned, her skirts still riding the air currents from her movements between the tables. “Not the meringue? That’s the only lemon we have.”
“Okay. How about banana cream?”
“That we can do.”
About half were round tables and the rest were square. The restaurant contains twenty-five round tables and sixteen square. If a round table seats four comfortably, as does the square, but if customers leave the square tables on the average of 2.3 minutes sooner than the round, and if the traffic flow can be assumed as constant for twelve hours of operation, with an increased 40% for the two-hour periods of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, how much of a financial advantage is it to replace the round tables with the square, assuming a 30% depreciation each year, with the initial cost of the round tables exceeding the square by 5%. Or was that .05? He frowned in concentration. Someone at a nearby table muttered about going to use the john.
There were five stalls and the requisite two urinals. On the women’s side it would be six stalls and a Kotex dispenser. Assuming a usage of 5 gallons per flush, and usage increase of 35% on the female side of the restrooms versus the male, at what point was it environmentally less costly to install porta potties, to be periodically emptied at the nearest large city, which was…Chicago? Rochester?
About three-thirty in the afternoon, when some of the tables had opened and the restaurant was quieter, he ordered a slice of apple pie (no streusel, just the regular crust, please) and a cup of tea. His stomach was wrinkled from coffee. His mind felt quieter, though. He ate the piece in tidy bites, saving its triangular point until last: the wish bite. Years ago when he had been a child, swinging his legs from a too-tall chair at the table, “I wish for another piece of pie,” was his grandfather’s line. What did he wish for? He pushed back his chair, left a generous tip for the waitress (his third, he smiled sadly: he had managed to hang on to his table through three shifts, two-thirds of a day’s traffic, and five trips to the restroom). Soon it would be the dinner group: round steak with mashed potatoes and field green beans; chicken smothered in cream gravy with baked potatoes and pickled beets. Supper meant people coming home, lights coming on in the houses, quiet before sleep. Supper meant: when are you heading home? He was close enough to the house in the Twin Cities that he could be back before midnight, far enough away it could not reach out and pull him in. He had made one decision this morning. But one decision was just the first in this chain, or the end link in the chain before. He could get out on the road and drive north for a few hours, his body jazzed with caffeine and his mind lulled by pie and memories. Or he could head south and west toward. Or he could make the decision tomorrow.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Dreams of Many Colored Glass - excerpt
Authenticity, condition-condition-condition, line and color. Fritz had been doing this for a long time. I was a neophyte, but as the auctions, the books, the stories, and the pop quizzes accumulated, I could feel my Louis Comfort knowledge building. It wasn’t always the easiest feeling, but there were compensations, bits of information that just fit, like a piece of glass into its slot.
Louis Comfort found out that the most boring glass was the purest. Taking out the impurities gave you window glass: nice to look through, useful because you didn’t notice it. Like people, I guess. What made the glass wasn’t the glass ingredients: silica sand, soda ash, potash, limestone, lead oxide, borax and boric acid. It was the stuff that could have gotten into the batch by daring or design: Iron oxide, manganese oxide, copper, gold, cobalt, coal. Fritz told me more than once that the Nash men had a magic room where they puttered with their secret formulas, banks of drawers of ingredients, not a few of them labeled “poison.”
It’s what made the glass impure that made it beautiful.
This theory failed to explain the grandkids, who also turned out to be 99% less than pure. Less than desirable I already knew, from the way Fish Eyes thinned her mouth when she mentioned them. One day I managed to extract more information.
“Tell me about the grandkids. Have they always been like this?” Oblivious to germs and flour, I had slung up against the counter where Fish Eyes was turning out pumpernickel bread dough.
“I wouldn’t know.”
I didn’t believe her. Fish Eyes could have been stirring her cauldron with a fingerbone, and she would have been right in character. “So they haven’t always been despicable,” I led her on.
She slung the dough with enough force to flatten it on the counter.
“What did they do? When did you first know about them?”
“They used to squash caterpillars so they could drive the Tonka trucks to their play hospital and pretend to sue the other driver.”
“I’m sorry, but all kids are mean to bugs. Then their consciences kick in, and they grow up to be kind adults.”
“These didn’t.”
“Okay, so what did they do that was so bad?”
“The day after they graduated out of law school, they got my granddaughter convinced that if she turned her trust fund into cash and gave it to them, they could double the money in two months.”
“Oh.”
“She gave it to them.”
“Oh.”
“When she needed some of the money for a down payment on a car go to work, they said they never heard of any trust fund, any money, or any company like the one they talked to her about.”
“Oh.”
“Fritz put back the money in her account. He doubled it.”
Illegal and scam artists Fish Eyes could testify to. Vandals and unscrupulous I was going to experience by myself.
Louis Comfort found out that the most boring glass was the purest. Taking out the impurities gave you window glass: nice to look through, useful because you didn’t notice it. Like people, I guess. What made the glass wasn’t the glass ingredients: silica sand, soda ash, potash, limestone, lead oxide, borax and boric acid. It was the stuff that could have gotten into the batch by daring or design: Iron oxide, manganese oxide, copper, gold, cobalt, coal. Fritz told me more than once that the Nash men had a magic room where they puttered with their secret formulas, banks of drawers of ingredients, not a few of them labeled “poison.”
It’s what made the glass impure that made it beautiful.
This theory failed to explain the grandkids, who also turned out to be 99% less than pure. Less than desirable I already knew, from the way Fish Eyes thinned her mouth when she mentioned them. One day I managed to extract more information.
“Tell me about the grandkids. Have they always been like this?” Oblivious to germs and flour, I had slung up against the counter where Fish Eyes was turning out pumpernickel bread dough.
“I wouldn’t know.”
I didn’t believe her. Fish Eyes could have been stirring her cauldron with a fingerbone, and she would have been right in character. “So they haven’t always been despicable,” I led her on.
She slung the dough with enough force to flatten it on the counter.
“What did they do? When did you first know about them?”
“They used to squash caterpillars so they could drive the Tonka trucks to their play hospital and pretend to sue the other driver.”
“I’m sorry, but all kids are mean to bugs. Then their consciences kick in, and they grow up to be kind adults.”
“These didn’t.”
“Okay, so what did they do that was so bad?”
“The day after they graduated out of law school, they got my granddaughter convinced that if she turned her trust fund into cash and gave it to them, they could double the money in two months.”
“Oh.”
“She gave it to them.”
“Oh.”
“When she needed some of the money for a down payment on a car go to work, they said they never heard of any trust fund, any money, or any company like the one they talked to her about.”
“Oh.”
“Fritz put back the money in her account. He doubled it.”
Illegal and scam artists Fish Eyes could testify to. Vandals and unscrupulous I was going to experience by myself.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Mirror me, mirror you
Mirrors are fascinating, as well as sometimes horrifying, depending on what we hope to see. Simple idea: clear glass with a reflective back. Yet we can lose ourselves in a mirror. Mirrors double the size of rooms. They are double rooms, showing us life opposite. There’s double the number of books and chairs and clutter and dust. There’s our double, too.
Mirrors change the rules: Alice fell into a mirror, and her world turned Wonderland upside down, even more than when she tumbled into that rabbit hole in her first trip. For a child, the room’s double reflected in a mirror can be a magical place where things are the same and yet not the same. The rooms we see in mirrors are mysterious, with even more hidden beyond their walls and windows.
We use the mirror to comb our hair, straighten our tie, and then suddenly one day when we look at the mirror: we see ourselves. We look into a mirror, searching for something as we reel from the shock of an event, and there in the silver rectangle confronting us, is someone who feels just the same as we do inside, someone whose look of bewilderment confirms our confusion. We look in the mirror to affirm the placement of our ego: and are instead troubled at what we see. We see what used to be us, the same image reflected back from the mirror for five or ten or twenty years, until a comment (“You’ve gone gray lately”) sends us back to the mirror with fresh eyes for another look. It’s not a coincidence that the potential scales on our eyes and the backs of mirrors both shine.
Mirrors reflect life events. How many people looked at themselves in this washroom mirror, on the way to class, to an interview, back to the school dance? How much of their experience, whether or anticipation or fear, still wriggles beneath its surface? If we could look into that experience, what the mirror has seen, what would we see and who would look back at us? Narcissus fell in love with himself; so do teenagers, when they’re not despairing at their reflections.
Mirrors let us scry, looking into the past or the future. We suspend our knowledge of what we will see, and look at what is there. The best mirrors for scrying are old ones, their silver clouded in places, perhaps splotched, maybe crazed (like the people looking into them) – but old mirrors hold old memories. Whose image has been reflected, whose image caught in the glass.
Mirrors mimic water, just as water mirrors the world: the perfect photo with trees above, and water-reflected trees at their feet. The sea and the sky are two blue plates mirroring each other, between which we live.
Like the moon, mirrors are mostly silver and reflect light. They’re not light sources, but they are the source of our frequent enlightenment.
There’s the mirror in the oven window (behind which we see bread baking or a roast simmering in juice); the mirror in the frame; the mirror which can be flat glass or beveled with that extra angle giving the reflection value and depth.
People mirror us back to ourselves, if we choose to notice. Sometimes we don’t want to see, and sometimes they don’t want to see what we project (or think we project) about them. Even so, how people treat us can be how they perceive we mirror ourselves.
There’s an awful (and awe-full) lot to find in mirrors.
Mirrors change the rules: Alice fell into a mirror, and her world turned Wonderland upside down, even more than when she tumbled into that rabbit hole in her first trip. For a child, the room’s double reflected in a mirror can be a magical place where things are the same and yet not the same. The rooms we see in mirrors are mysterious, with even more hidden beyond their walls and windows.
We use the mirror to comb our hair, straighten our tie, and then suddenly one day when we look at the mirror: we see ourselves. We look into a mirror, searching for something as we reel from the shock of an event, and there in the silver rectangle confronting us, is someone who feels just the same as we do inside, someone whose look of bewilderment confirms our confusion. We look in the mirror to affirm the placement of our ego: and are instead troubled at what we see. We see what used to be us, the same image reflected back from the mirror for five or ten or twenty years, until a comment (“You’ve gone gray lately”) sends us back to the mirror with fresh eyes for another look. It’s not a coincidence that the potential scales on our eyes and the backs of mirrors both shine.
Mirrors reflect life events. How many people looked at themselves in this washroom mirror, on the way to class, to an interview, back to the school dance? How much of their experience, whether or anticipation or fear, still wriggles beneath its surface? If we could look into that experience, what the mirror has seen, what would we see and who would look back at us? Narcissus fell in love with himself; so do teenagers, when they’re not despairing at their reflections.
Mirrors let us scry, looking into the past or the future. We suspend our knowledge of what we will see, and look at what is there. The best mirrors for scrying are old ones, their silver clouded in places, perhaps splotched, maybe crazed (like the people looking into them) – but old mirrors hold old memories. Whose image has been reflected, whose image caught in the glass.
Mirrors mimic water, just as water mirrors the world: the perfect photo with trees above, and water-reflected trees at their feet. The sea and the sky are two blue plates mirroring each other, between which we live.
Like the moon, mirrors are mostly silver and reflect light. They’re not light sources, but they are the source of our frequent enlightenment.
There’s the mirror in the oven window (behind which we see bread baking or a roast simmering in juice); the mirror in the frame; the mirror which can be flat glass or beveled with that extra angle giving the reflection value and depth.
People mirror us back to ourselves, if we choose to notice. Sometimes we don’t want to see, and sometimes they don’t want to see what we project (or think we project) about them. Even so, how people treat us can be how they perceive we mirror ourselves.
There’s an awful (and awe-full) lot to find in mirrors.
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