Kim,
The trip to Boston was--was is it people always say about flights? Uneventful?--short; it's 1:15 minutes tops from gate to gate. I was looking forward to 7C, my carefully picked aisle seat (close to the front, but not too close, 7--the lucky number), but when I reached the row, alas!, all seats were occupied. There was some sort of confusion: A guy in 7C--my seat!--was telling a woman across the hall in 7B that she was in his seat, and her companion in 7A was saying, Yes, yes, we're in the wrong seats--Sorry--but they showed NO SIGNS of moving, so I just said, "Where's your seat supposed to be?": and they pointed to window seat 6A, next to this enormous fellow with a Boston accent, and I said, "Ok, I'll just sit there."
This guy looked like Kurt--same hair type and color--if he were ten years older and had been inflated like a balloon. As I pulled out my water bottle (the one like yours that my mom got us, with the insulated sleeve), he said, "Hey that's nice, my daughter's always bustin' my balls about gettin' one of those," and then--seriously--we both uncorked our water bottles (his was plastic, disposable, Poland Springs), lifted them to our lips, drank, and set them down again, at the same time--like syncronized drinking. He actually looked at me for a second like I'd copied him, but we were tight the whole time.
. . .The bones of [Kurt's] apartment are stunningly beautiful, like something out of a decorating magazine: about twice as wide as deep, on maybe the third floor corner of a building rented and owned entirely by artists (the walk to his studio from the elevator is lined with all sorts of visual art, including a large one of Kurt's that's more abstract than most of what he's done recently. . .The walls that meet at the outside corner are all exposed brick, the walls and ceiling maybe twenty feet high, with seven pairs of nearly floor to ceiling windows, five sets of them--on the long side facing the street--arched at the top cathedral-style. Wood floor, of course, and then you bend around this bulward which turns out to be the closet, walk up ladder stairs, and meet a narrow plank with a bookcase and, at the left end, Kurt's bed, resting atop the roof of the closet. It looks like if he rolled off, he'd drop, oh, about 15 feet.
Paintings everywhere--big X/O cowboy painting you might have seen on his website, catalog girls, something modeled off Lichtenstein, etc. Furnishings by IKEA--coffee table, kitchen cabinets and sinks (three of them, one just for paint), bookshelves, etc. A TV the size of a pickup bed hanging on the wall. (OK, not that big, but literally the dimensions of the kids' kitchen work table.)
Kurt has in his refrigerator: Two bottles of juice we bought last night; two slices of leftover pizza (we ate last night); salsa; two 2-liters of Coke; a bottle of flavored water; an empty sack. In his freezer, only mint chocolate chip ice cream and a jar of black-eyed peas his mother made him. He has a sleek red teapot from IKEA--no tea.
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find poet and artist
Kurt Cole Eidsvig's Website HERE.
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