I love my Hyatt's Saturdays for many reasons. For the high holy ceilings and churchmouse atmosphere. For the dirty curbs and completely urban experience. And, above all, for the terrifying store manager. Grizzled and sharpeyed in the manner of English wolfhounds and high school physics teachers, he passes judgement on customers and offers help but rarely. The Little Sniffing Tyrant, I call him. We enjoy a relationship consisting of the barest acknowlegdgement that I find to be utterly satisfying.
This all ended a few weekends ago when, immediately after I'd entered, he leapt from his perch and dragged me to face another customer--demanding didn't we look exactly alike? She and I glowered mutual disagreement before I fled and took refuge in Graphites. But it wasn't enough. He followed me. Wasn't it uncanny, he asked, to have two such similar looking girls enter at once? I muttered a quick "Doppelgangers abound", hoping he'd catch the offended tone, but it served only to goad. He exclaimed that he'd just read a piece on doppelgangers and launched us into a (largely one-sided) discussion of turn of the century literature. He jabbed his fingers up at me and twittered of magic and religion and secret societies. He sang of Williams, and MacDonald, and Tolkien which of course made me love him once more. And then he was off, disappearing between the watercolors. And back again with, of all things, a reading list, and then pushing me out the door.
Don't think that I didn't love every moment. That I didn't imagine this to be my initiation into some cult of wild-eyed romantics. The beginning of gatherings in dark corners with tea stained tablecloths and inky hands and quiet mutterings about mythopoesis. The start of my tenure as Jess, High Preistess of the Theurgists.
But, christ. My erasers are all nubs and my brushes are shedding more horsehair than paint at this point, and I'm only five pages into Williams' The Place of the Lion. And there's clearly no way I can go back for supplies before I've finished what was assigned.
1 comment:
i love that store. i wish i drew more so i had a reason to go in there. last time i was there, the owner saw my green coat, green markers, green wallet and green shirt and asked if i had a problem. i replied "most likely" and then i was promptly given a book on the meanings of colors and sent on my way, leaving the other customers green with envy.
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