what was that? is that all there is? who is this? this is it.

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BTWTBAWADD 2022

May 20, 2022

As you know it’s Bike to Work to Bike at Work All Day Day (BTWTBAWADD)  

 

However, I took the day off, so I might ride a bike today but I won’t be riding a bike to work to ride a bike at work. 

 

Bike to Work Day has always been unofficially subtitled “honey can you pick me up after work? I’m too tired to ride that fucking bike home.”

 

Clo'e Floirat SPOT  The New Yorker 5-16-22

Aside from Junior riding a stationary bike, a highlight from our trip to the thrift store was seeing Carole King’s Tapestry perched front and center on the pile of vinyl near the books, dvds and vhs tapes. It was as if another shopper placed it up front to make sure someone like me would see. Somewhere in the haze of my memory I have sounds and visions from the 70s of my sister playing tracks off various albums, including Tapestry. She was the DJ, I was the audience. I never paid much attention to the album cover until now. 

 

Holding the album, I mentioned to Junior that I recently read a poem about the cat on the cover and she could not have cared less but it made me smile as I tried to remember where I read that poem. Today I remembered, it was in The Threepenny Review #168 on page 26. 

The Cat on the Cover of

Carole King’s Tapestry is Dead

 

The photographer who took the picture is dead, too. For nine years now. He died in his seventies. But the cat – his name was Telemachus – has been dead longer. Just look at that cranky face. He’s been staring out at us for fifty years now, each day wanting us gone, wanting his mother all to himself while they wait for brave Ulysses to return home from battle. All he wants is to be left alone on his pillow throne there in the window beside her bare feet, soaking up the sun while she knits her gatefold tapestry. Only once the moon rises over Laurel Canyon will she unravel her progress, to fool us into thinking she’ll soon choose one of us. 

 

–Kevin Grauke

 

 


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