from our own correspondent

this week, von on his semester in boarding school:

many years ago, in RI, julian and i spent a semester boarding. the stories we could tell about that: the apple in the courtyard with names inscribed in liquid paper, the plum injected with methanol and set aflame, the 42 paper aeroplanes on the roof of the opposite building's porch, jeremy leong and the toothpaste in hand, the under one roof theme song, and the incident with the can of stew, the banana, and the microwave. plus many more. the times we had.

during this time, we ate in the boarding house where the best anyone could hope for was a block of grey steamed eggs, some kind of boiled spinach, and cubes of (also grey) meat. as you are aware, steamed eggs turn grey because of trapped hydrogen sulphide reacting with iron in the yolk -- the older the egg, the greyer the egg. so now you know. sometimes, when the cooks felt special, the meat would be luncheon, and soaked in a tangy orange sweet and sour sauce.

once, we packed food in a tupperware box belonging to pat chan -- small, formidable, the housemistress -- and forgot to give it to her. when it grew a layer of fuzz, we left the box, sealed, in the hallway under the phone. several days later, no one was using the phone. though not because of the smell, since tupperware does a pretty good job with the air-tight seal.

julian will have to fill in from here since i don't remember what we did with the roiling mass of maggots, or who eventually picked it up and dumped it out, or who ended up saddled with the task of cleaning it up and scraping caked-on food and wriggly things into the trashcan. the outside of the box had become unclean and susceptible to the full transformatory power of the imagination. damn right. it was like how my ma refuses to touch anything with a picture of a snake on it, even the happy-looking ones with the waggly tongues.

mountain view, ca.
december 2005.