Frame
To frame something
to give it a skeleton,
a chassis,
a form,
a border,
a construct, a way to hold together disparate pieces
Newspaper piece:
A local woman recently published her first book and she’s hit it rich—a first run of 100,000 copies. She says that everything just worked out—her agent, the topic, the present climate. May I add the phases of the moon, astrology, and the reading of tea leaves?
Speaking of leaves. A few still hang tenaciously to the oak tree outside my window. Why do they ignore the inevitable and hold on by their fingertips?
My fingertips turned the color of the blue-black ink in my antique fountain pen when the soft-rubber sac sprung a leak.
“… in 1945 … a crowd of over 5,000 people jammed the entrance of New York’s Gimbels Department Store. The day before, Gimbels had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times promoting the first sale of ballpoints in the United States.”
I owned many leaky ballpoints. My sixth grade teacher accused me of cheating. The evidence—fingers and palm covered with blue ink from my Bic ballpoint. She recanted after examining my leaking pen, but not before I learned something about the tenuous state of being innocent.
When I tire of ponderous literary tomes I read mysteries and attempt to discern between the innocent and the guilty. The clues, too often known only to the writer and her self-appointed detective, elude me as I read. I wait for an epiphany. Often detectives lack skills honed in a precinct or at a police academy. The sleuth may be a bookseller residing in a small community, or a botanist or a quilter or a medieval maiden wandering across the country.
I grew up in the Bronx and loved going to the country. That’s what we called anyplace with a green area larger than a city park. I returned from a trip to the country where sitting on a patch of grass, walking barefoot, rolling down a hill, and finding treasures in the woods initiated me into a magic kingdom.
I tried to find their equivalents in the city. Sitting on the stoop of my friend Miriam’s house, tiptoeing past the pigeon coop on top of the Lewis Morris building, eluding tags by running down the alley way when playing ringolevio, finding pennies in the street—all corresponding city delights.
To frame something—
To give it a setting, a casement, a stage—
a chassis,
a form,
a border,
a construct,
Newspaper piece:
A local woman recently published her first book and she’s hit it rich—a first run of 100,000 copies. She says that everything just worked out—her agent, the topic, the present climate. May I add the phases of the moon, astrology, and the reading of tea leaves?
Speaking of leaves. A few still hang tenaciously to the oak tree outside my window. Why do they ignore the inevitable and hold on by their fingertips?
My fingertips turned the color of the blue-black ink in my antique fountain pen when the soft-rubber sac sprung a leak.
I owned many leaky ballpoints. My sixth grade teacher accused me of cheating. The evidence—fingers and palm covered with blue ink from my Bic ballpoint. She recanted after examining my leaking pen, but not before I learned something about the tenuous state of being innocent.
When I tire of ponderous literary tomes I read mysteries and attempt to discern between the innocent and the guilty. The clues, too often known only to the writer and her self-appointed detective, elude me as I read. I wait for an epiphany. Often detectives lack skills honed in a precinct or at a police academy. The sleuth may be a bookseller residing in a small community, or a botanist or a quilter or a medieval maiden wandering across the country.
I grew up in the Bronx and loved going to the country. That’s what we called anyplace with a green area larger than a city park. I returned from a trip to the country where sitting on a patch of grass, walking barefoot, rolling down a hill, and finding treasures in the woods initiated me into a magic kingdom.
I tried to find their equivalents in the city. Sitting on the stoop of my friend Miriam’s house, tiptoeing past the pigeon coop on top of the Lewis Morris building, eluding tags by running down the alley way when playing ringolevio, finding pennies in the street—all corresponding city delights.
To frame something—
To give it a setting, a casement, a stage—
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