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Saint Pat

  • tommyvinhbui
  • Aug 11, 2014
  • 2 min read

This bonnie barometer of blitheness was all bangarang. A meandering muse. An inspiration and more. We met on the third floor of the Americana building of LACMA. The steel elevator doors draped apart and I espied her looking intently at a painting. The vision of her looking at a painting was a pulchritudinous portrait itself. Notebook firmly clasped in her hand. Hands graphic with Marlboro red nail polish. I almost forgot to make egress from the elevator.

Patrycja hails from Poland. She was regaling me about a city that is home to Poland’s one and only palm tree. Apparently the palm tree isn’t in the best of health. Probably because it’s in Poland and is aggrieved over the constant lack of salty air and California sunshine.

Patsy is a gung-ho mathematician. Who actually had an answer at the ready when I asked who her favourite mathematician was. I don’t rightly remember the answer. I was just too charmed and taken aback by the readiness of her reply to register anything she said for the next five minutes.

I grilled her in front of the Urban Lights exhibit. I ran through the usual volley of stock questions: What do you love? What do you fear? And what’s in your pocket?

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She loves art. She fears living an unfulfilled life. And her pocket harbored a boarding pass stub that didn’t belong to her and a dollar coin I had given her earlier as a memento of her trip.

“What did you have for breakfast?”

“I had a single egg. Some toast that had seeds on it. And a few hours later I had ice cream.”

“This is excellent material,” I said as I scrawled this down and calculated her caloric intake. Considering her height and legginess I wanted to make sure she wasn’t in danger of McCandless-ing on me.

I pointed at a door tucked away in the shadows adjacent us. “If you could step thru that door and be taken anywhere in the world, where would you like to be?”

She, again, didn’t need much mulling to craft an incisive response.

“A spice bazaar in India.”

From there the conversation somehow landed upon how many teeth are stored in the human skull. We had a slight quarrel over the number. A skirmish that was only mollified when she stuck a finger in her mouth and counted them aloud one by one. The sequence started to get muddled and illegible around the third left bottom molar.

Other fanciful facts about Pats include: She’s learning Persian. Her phone wallpaper is a James Turrell light exhibit from the Guggenheim. I watched her draw either a fish or an oblong infinity sign with a tar pen near a model mastodon.

And in such poor cheer I was when she left our sunny shores. I suddenly feel a great deal of envy for that solitary palm tree in Poland.

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