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By Root 105 0

yes. Her arms suddenly moved like a museum docent’s or a stewardess’s, gesturing formally this way and that. Every living thing had mysteriously died the second we turned the camera on. I tried in vain to start over, to loosen the air, but after a while I felt out of line, almost rude. Eventually I let go of my plan and asked if Lynette might sing for us again. Lynette performed a rap she had written herself, titled “Oh.” It was very, very catchy. I had it in my head for days. But Dina and Lynette would not be in the movie, and this was a very bad idea, casting people through the PennySaver. Whoever was responsible for such a bad idea should be burned at the stake.

JOE

–

FIFTY CHRISTMAS-CARD FRONTS

$1

–

LOS ANGELES

–

And so I went to Joe’s, knowing that he would be the last person I interviewed. The PennySaver mission had been a worthy escape, but it felt different now that I had tried to make it useful and failed so completely. It was a little bit silly and definitely frivolous, given how little time I had left in every sense. I’d gone from high-high to low-low, and now I was just trying not to disappoint the man selling the fronts of Christmas cards.

Joe lived near the Burbank airport; a plane roared over my head as I rang the doorbell.

Joe:

What’s this, a machine gun?

Miranda:

That’s a camera. And just to get it out of the way, here’s your payment for the interview.

Joe:

Yeah, we could really use it, I’ll tell you. We’re living on about nine hundred dollars a month from Social Security, so it’s kind of tight, the money is, and as you get older you need more pills and more medical care. I never went to a doctor the first fifty years I was born, but after then you’re falling apart. I just turned eighty-one about three weeks ago.

Miranda:

How long have you lived here?

Joe:

It’ll be thirty-nine years in August that we’ve been here. Moved here in 1970.

Miranda:

Where are you from originally?

Joe:

Chicago.

The house was very clean and worn; each piece of furniture was tidily being used to its very end. The walls were covered with a lifetime’s worth of pet photos, cat and dogs, but there were no actual pets in the house. Out of the corner of my eye I could see shelves filled with what looked like handmade cards.

Miranda:

And what was your work?

Joe:

Well, I was a painter, a painting job, and I turned into a contractor when I came out here, and I was doing real good.

Miranda:

So a painter of, like, houses?

Joe:

Houses, yeah.

Miranda:

What are all these cards? Did you make these?

Joe:

Yeah, I make cards for my wife. See, what I do is I make them out of paper like this, and I cut these pictures out of magazines and papers. Then I make the poem here, then I make limericks. But I don’t know if you want to read some of them – they’re pretty dirty.

Miranda:

Oh, really? Can you read me one?

Joe:

All right, if you want. Let me find a good one.

There once was this beauty from the city

And her boobs were so big it was a pity

Her boyfriend marveled about her nice chest

Then he proceeded to lunge for her breast

Soon his mouth was jammed with her left titty.

Miranda:

Very nice rhymes.

Joe:

The first and second and fifth lines gotta rhyme, and then the third and fourth lines rhyme. Say for instance the word sex. Well, there’s only maybe two words that it can rhyme with, so I have to go through and dig back in the library.

Miranda:

And does she like them? What’s her reaction?

Joe:

Oh, yeah, she likes them. A couple of years ago she started wanting to make one for me, so she’s got a couple of little ones up there like these. I make her nine cards a year. Mother’s Day and our anniversary, and the fourth of July is the day I met her, in 1948, so that’s the last card I just made. And I make Christmas and New Year’s, and Easter, and Valentine’s Day. We just celebrated our sixty-second anniversary – we’ve been married sixty-two years.

Miranda:

I just got married about two months ago… I hope we have as many fourth of Julys together.

I did