House:
Garden
Errands
Stuff to look for
Kinwork and Lisaism
Reading:
Exercise
Two 3.6-mile city rides. I was going to swim after work but I realized as I put on my backpack that I didn't have my keys. I had left them in the outside of the back door, very clever and secure, so I couldn't lock my bike. I might have gone out afterward, but what the hell, I didn't.
I wouldn't leave my bike unlocked outside the gym for an hour's swim, but I'd leave it in the vestibule of the library while I stocked up for the weekend. The Portrait of a Lady is going well but this is a holiday: Lois Lowry's Messenger, which includes characters from The Giver and Gathering Blue, and I wonder if I remember the latter enough; William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner; and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. And yes, Haitch, one day I will read All the President's Men too.
No, I didn't remember the Gathering Blue characters particularly or well enough to fit them into the theme of this book. I got to know Jonas's fate, but not that of another key Giver character.
But of Messenger, eh: can you say Christ figure?
Also, can you say sequel?
Bike 8.6 miles. Swim 1K freestyle. I accomplished this in possibly in my fastest time ever because the club was closing at 5 for a Second of July party.
Freestyle 2K. Certainly I am faster in this pool, maybe because its being 25 meters means twice as many pushoffs but I am sure that not having to share a lane helps a great deal. Being able to keep straight over the line instead of having to circle means I don't steer into the rope nearly as often, especially with my strongly dominant right side.
But after 2K, my belly is sore. Perhaps I will eventually have abdominal muscles.
The tile is all on the wall. It is not grouted. But it is all on the wall. And that's what we did today.
About seven miles of biking from home to gym to art fair to home to catsitting place and home again. Also a 2K freestyle.
Blake is dozing on my shoulder. He shakes and a minor dust cloud rises, filling my nostrils with sweet buddy dust. He grooms the tendrils around my ear, because really my hair is a mess. He tucks, and then wakes up again to puff or chew his beak.
And I'm supposedly to get up and go to bed?
The biggest disadvantage to parrot companionship is not the uncontrollable shitting. It's not being allowed to sleep together.
Nineteenth century novel: everyone dies or gets married. Also there's a war. Peace is mighty thin on the ground.
I am so extremely glad to be done with this that I have declared this No More Tolstoy Day. Coincidentally enough, having packed away both this and Anna Karenina, there's no damn more Tolstoy to read (short stories? I can't heeearr you!). And I am glad.
Haven't I already said all this? I thought I had but maybe not. It's too long a book in audio for me right now: I only cranked through the last eighth because I gave up and listened at work until work got loud or busy. Its narrator should be slapped; the recording was made in 1982 before audiobooks were stolen by people who could still use their eyes. And possibly the Garnet translation doesn't convey Tolstoy's linguistic genius, if such genius can come through in translation at all. It's not the translation's fault that Tolstoy gives a child's age and then within 15 or 10 minutes gives it again. Damn.
My paper copy, which is the Maud translation, is at home, where I have to confirm this quote. I kept rewinding to see if I really have to hate the book after devoting two and half days plus, 64 hours, to it: "Once admit that human can can be guided by reason, and all possibility of life is annihilated."
Begun in early March. Oy.
I just found this. It's exactly a year old and I never published it.
It occurred to me that my list of shit I don't get is much longer than my list of stuff that pleases me. This struck me on Friday and on and off over the weekend I was able to think of three things:
That wasn't the original third one. The first third one inspired me to start this entry. Then I forgot it, because I'm such a deeply troubled, bitter soul.
Three things, people.
Later...
Two 3.6-mile city rides.
Interestingly, and impossibly, I broke the cleat on my left shoe sometime between clipping in as I left work and attempting to unclip when I got home. Eventually I unlaced the shoe and removed myself from the bike that way. Vice grips and a crowbar loosed the shoe from the clip. With only one screw holding the cleat in place instead of two, I could twist the shoe in any dimension without levering the cleat off the pedal.
I suppose I usually unclip the right foot to lean away from the street. I could have found out in a much uglier manner than comically on my front sidewalk that I was laced instead of clipped onto my bike.
I swam two miles! For the first time since November 1999! Which might have been the first time ever, because I am not sure if I did it ever in college. First I thought about three kilometers, but two miles is only four laps more. Also I thought I would do 2.2 first and the last k after a break, but I know myself better than that: I wouldn't go back. Two miles!
This is possibly my favorite collection of A.S. Byatt short stories, maybe second to The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. All the stories have a touch of the gothic or the grotesque, in a slight but satisfying way. The last one, "Pink Ribbon," made me cry, because it is clearly derived from Iris Murdoch's decline: it was therefore a fitting follow up to "Raw Material," in which a writing teacher tells his students to write what they know.
A while ago I added a bit to my list of movies with canine mortality for teddy bear abuse. The list of novels and stories with canine mortality and teddy bear abuse, including "Pink Ribbon," is too distressingly long to contemplate.
This should come as no surprise. The much-discussed and long-awaited buddycam is ready to go. We can support only two connections, so it's not a public cam, but his doting parents can watch Blake from afar now.
The subject is going through a minor moult right now. I thought it was the equivalent of shedding because it's hot again since most of the dropped feathers were contour feathers with a lot of insulating fluff on them, but this morning he dropped what is nearly a flight feather, a quite stiff body feather from the small of his back, nearly part of the tail.
Yesterday in the zoo a peacock displayed for me--I doubt it was for me, of course, but when he turned and saw me he rattled his quills and flared--and strutted about for several minutes with his tail so erect he actually formed his own Mary-in-a-bathtub look. He turned in circles and I looked to see how the series of tail feathers go. It must be exhausting to do, especially when you have to run after other cocks with your tail still spread to chase them away from your peahen, your two peachicks, and your humans with their KFC lunch that they are sharing with you, and your other bemused human crouching with a stupid grin on her face as she longs to cuddle a peababy. They looked like goslings except with peafowl feet.
I am paying too much attention to my buddy, who has now removed a racing stripe feather, to follow the petty warmongering outside, but two squirrels just had a screaming racing match and now the victor is sitting on a nectarine branch, looking through the dining room window, swearing at me and flicking his tail. What did I do?
Maybe Blake's shedding is the result of last night's shower. He is getting himself all pretty for his webcam fame.
Swim 2K.
I am so proud of myself. I tried to talk myself out of it but I went anyway, and I tried to talk myself into only 1000 meters and then 1500 but I did 2000.
One of the things Shrink and I talk about is my motivation and my shoot-self-in-foot-ism (N.B.: this is my term, not hers). Here is an instance where I did not! Go me.
So fucking hot.
I drove from work to the Esquire to see "Fahrenheit 9/11" with a coworker, and in ten minutes and four miles, in my air-conditioned car, over my entire back my slip of a dress was entirely sweated onto my skin.
I just saw this movie and I'm going to talk about my dress. Okay? Okay.
I bought this dress in 1995. I wore it, with my Interview Suit linen pumps, to work (temping at MetraHealth), and went out to lunch with some coworkers, and on the street in Hartford, a man approached me and said he would have to arrest me. I said, "Excuse me?" sure I had misheard him. He clarified, "You look so fine, it has to be a crime!" and he laughed with his friend and I turned away with my coworkers and I am so oblivious and unfoxy that I had never heard that line before and so did not recognize it for what it was that I responded with even just the "excuse me."
It doesn't hang on me so well anymore. I liked my sheaths a lot more when they fell straight from bust to hem without my ass or hips in the way. But today it looked better again, because instead of my clunky Dansko sandals I wore a pair of slingbacks I bought over the weekend to go with the dress I bought for Haitch's wedding. They are much sexier.
Not really "instead of." I had both pairs with me and switched on and off during the day. The week before the Big Top is a bad time to break in pretty, impractical shoes.
The movie pissed me off--both the content, what I knew to be true and what I perceived to be allegation, and the presentation, see allegation. Then when I got home, it was so fucking hot that about the last thing I wanted to do was leave--leave the cool interior, leave my long-suffering buddy--to do anything, especially anything social. Swimming sounded good, but I had a dinner promise with a pre-friend whom I like well enough not to want to blow off for his sake and do not know well enough to blow off for being grumpy in the heat.
As soon as we got to Sabor Latino and the driving was over and cooled air embraced me, I felt better. We dished about the movie some and about Canadian politics--about which my mind is about as blank a canvas as the Northwest Territory, Territories? (my point)--and shared arepas and plantains and empiñadas and then I had ceviche. He had something with beans and cheese, even though it was 99 bloodsucking degrees out. Give me lime juice or give me death.
The food was excellent, and I am going back when I can be better company.
A Coöperista (UConn's bookstore is a co-operative) dubbed the grad school me Sybil because he never knew what kind of mood I'd be in from one shift to the next. I don't mind the amplitude of my moods but their frequency--is that the distance between any two peaks or troughs? that's what I mean--can scare me. And their unpredictability. I was in a black mood yesterday, self-flagellating and dooming myself to one thing and another. If it hadn't been the week before the Big Top I'd've set Babe up and had a Talk to the Pig day; also except for that I brought Babe home and I now have only a palm-sized Snowy, finger-puppet Beaker, and a knock-off Beanie Baby named Dan'l Bloone at work. The excellent thing was that I knew exactly the source of the mood: it had a cause, and while if I had a solution I wouldn't have the problem any more, at least my mood was explicable.
I had my hair cut after work and told Janelle about Trey's second dog and Haitch's third fitting. My hair touches my collar bones when I pull it straight down; she took about an inch off. It's much tidier.
And then I sealed grout until Kal came over. We had Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream, a faux Oreo without high fructose corn syrup or hydrogenated fat (absence of the latter means the goo lends itself admirably to quintuple-stuff constructions), blueberries, strawberries, "A Room with a View," and "Sense and Sensibility." I haven't seen "Room" for years, and probably even my first, cinematic viewing was not as clear as this DVD. We lusted after Lucy's hair and Freddy and Freddy some more and admired Emma Thompson and wondered how Kate Winslet could be so good here and so bad in "Titanic" and I lent her The Making of Pride and Prejudice and The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries and I am making a friend! She even has a parrot in the family so I don't have to break her in Blake-wise. And she lives within six blocks, so while she of course walked over, when we were done, after 11, I drove her home.
So I'm happy again. And happy because my happiness again has an attributable cause.
P.S. A perk is that yesterday a Dot Orgerista of whom I'm quite fond said that I look different lately, thinner or fitter. I hugged her gratefully.
A quick and delightful read. I picked it up only because it's a Newbery Honor. I would have loved this in first or second grade--lots of illustrations, lots of animals, talking animals, a child outwitting by charming and harmless ways these animals.
The People of Sparks follows Jeanne Duprau's The City of Ember in plot and, sadly but expectedly in a sequel, in quality. Emberites have lived a sheltered life but even those of Sparks seem to know but little more of their common past. I realize Duprau wanted to explore tension and conflict resolution between the two communities and not their background, but I guess I am engaged enough in the story that I want to know more.
Actually, the theme of recovering post-apocalyptic community was done a little better than in Lois Lowry's recent Messenger. I do not understand how a world that contained the societies of Gathering Blue and Messenger could also contain that of The Giver, but it's the personalities Lowry wanted to combine in Messenger, not the societies. The macguffin could have worked if it had a source instead of being so starkly a deus ex machina.
At the family reunion, I made my best connection with my cousin Susan, really my mother's first cousin. We were simply immediately friends, which was terrific. The last time I know I saw her was at her younger sister's wedding when I was 10ish or younger. Her husband had been stationed in West Berlin and she spoke of one place being so many "kay" away from another place and even though I had had the metric system in fifth grade, I had no idea what she was talking about.
I noticed the goddess pendant she wore, quite similar to my favorite earrings, and when quite soon we recognized each other for what we are, the black sheep of the family, she listed as her first black sheep trait that she's a witch. I touched her pendant, indicating that I had already guessed and unintentionally reminding her to drop the necklace behind her collar. I wouldn't've thought to hide it because, as she herself said, lots of people just admire the goddess shape for its aesthetic value without realizing what it might represent. Later in the day she explained us to her sister. "We're both witches," and I said no, saying that I'm not but do sympathize with Wicca more than with the predominant religions of my culture, especially my mother's newfound fundamental evangelicalism.
What I wanted to say is that we're kindred spirits, but I didn't because I was restraining that book thing in front of the non-kindred spirit, and refraining from claiming kinship in front of a non-kindred spirit, and also sparing my kindred spirit from an Anne of Green Gables references, because the best thing besides her being a kindred spirit is that her husband is from, and they now live on, Prince Edward Island. I am promised that when (when!) I visit, we can do all the cheesy stuff.
One thing CLH discovered when she moved home is that our mother keeps dryer lint. She asked why; BJWL wouldn't tell her. She asked me if I could think why and all I could think of was firestarters we learned about in Girl Scouts, made of dryer lint and kept by the dozen in single-serving sizes in egg cartons. Just now my sister came up from the cellar brandishing an 18-egg carton partially filled with dryer lint, which would lend credibility to my hypothesis. BJWL continued not to 'fess up. She turned back to the sink when CLH mentioned flammable cotton in a flammable carton, and not answering the firestarter idea, she countered my sister's repeated query with "Just to make you ask questions." The egg carton means my suggestion is probably right, but her refusal to answer at first meant she was a little embarrassed, and her refusal to verify my hypothesis now might mean she just doesn't want to be found out.
This is cute, not vexing, because I don't live with her.
Minutes later I asked her where I would find a colander. Before she indicated a cabinet, she asked, "Why do you need a colander?"
"Just to make you ask questions," I entirely predictably answered, with a grin, and she grinned back! because she understood I was making a funny, and also because by the time I uttered the word "questions" I was tipping blueberries into the colander so her question was answered anyway.
A conversational exchange. Yea!
Sunday morning it rained mistily while the Happy Couple were at God, so I enjoyed the rain, while it lasted, au naturel. When CLH emerged, we went to the lake, but not very long. She read while I swam, and when I emerged, I realized I was hungry. And so was she. So we hied ourselves to Essex and ate deli sandwiches on the dock at the foot of Main Street. Conveniently, the Connecticut River Museum is right there, so I didn't have to dig that up with non-internet research. We wandered through an amusingly sucky little craft fair, browsed in and out of shops looking for fudge and a birthday gift and finding neither, and continued questing into Saybrook for fudge. (CLH needed fudge, while cookies usually satisfy me.) Summertime in shoreline towns, and we could not find fudge (naturally we required a little independent shop). Bereft, we returned to her lair for "Cold Mountain" and "Six Feet Under."
Monday the three of us went to lunch at the former Anne's Bistro and current Sherlock's 221. Sherlock is reportedly the new owner's surname, but since it is on Hall's Road and Old Lyme doesn't have a Baker Street, using Sherlock Holmes's house number doesn't make a lot of sense. Is the owner trying to tie in to the relative proximity of Gillette Castle, unrealistically hoping that most people know the detective was William Gillette's most famous and lucrative role?
I had a jolt of Age when our server came to the table. I honestly could not have guessed if she was 16 or 20 or 22. CLH guessed from her first visit that she was inexperienced, and I guess she was, because she didn't know how to pronounce some of the words. Describing the special, she said "proscriutto" at least twice and maybe thrice, and at every mispronunciation CLH would kick me under the table. When she was well away we laughed, and had to explain the humor to our mother. I wanted to ask if proscriutto came from the proscrotum of the animal, but I didn't. BJWL said that we have larger vocabularies than most people, which if true is pathetic, and that this was unkind. I said I expected people to know the jargon of their own field, such as servers knowing how to pronounce prosciutto and--here CLH kicked me again.
I continued, though more carefully. At the compound before the reunion, my mother had told me, when we spotted him approaching, that her and BDL's friend whom I had been partnered with at the Happy Couple's nuptials had had prostrate cancer and would appreciate my greeting him. As if he would remember me, as if I would ignore a friend of theirs wandering by to pass the time of day, and after we had been reintroduced I restrained from asking him if his illness had just flattened him for its duration. She said "prostrate" more than once and "prostate" not once. So now at lunch, I asked, "Remember that you told me that Groomsman had had cancer?" and she said again, "Yes, he had prostrate cancer." (I might be imagining her pleasure in emphasizing a detail I had seemingly neglected.) So CLH and I defined those two words.
When my father had knee replacement surgery and later physical therapy to strengthen his legs again, he referred to the muscles of his thighs as quadripeds. That's funny!
One might ask why I corrected my mother but not my father. Correcting might be unkind, but so might letting someone persist with a malapropism. Especially in her field: I didn't say anything about "biannual" plants or nor did CLH about "shy-take" mushrooms.
After lunch we popped into the Chocolate Shell, whose fudge supply is rendered unavailable on Sundays. Monday's excuse was that their supplier had had a kitchen fire. But one block remained, and CLH had that. We each had one of their peppermint patties, which are tremendous, and then we went to the lake, where CLH and I swam and BJWL hung out. Our mother wanted to be home when her husband got home from work. Apparently she times her every day for this occasion. It feels a lot more saccharine or surrendered than it does lovey. Whatever.
CLH and I met one of the German Shepherds and her husband and motored to Middletown for dinner. It's funny that it always seemed so far away, but it's 20 miles or less. I had more ceviche.
The family reunion was one thing because in such a gathering, it's expected that everyone talk to everyone else and that not everyone know everyone else. Dinner with the Shepherd and Angel was different: it was only the four of us, and a lot of subjects seemed prickly. I know the Shepherds had resented that CLH and I went to college and had expected us to be intellectual, so books were out. I own instead of rent, so nothing about my house. They're trying to get pregnant, so I wouldn't mention my favorite littluns unless they, by broaching the subject on their own, indicated it wouldn't pain them to hear of others' offspring. Politics and our parents are Right Out. Without my sister, I wouldn't've known what kind of small talk or big talk to make.
"Our heroine's biographer can scarcely tell why, but the question made her start and brought a conscious blush to her cheek" (163)
He doesn't know why? Why make the reader question the author's own creation? And why purposefully organize sentences so uncomfortably as this: "Looking up, however, as she mechanically folded [a letter] away she saw Lord Warburton standing before her" (154).
Also, I'm sick of these perfect-looking and uniformly charming heroines: Natalya Rostov, Anna Karenina, Isabel Archer. Get a fault. Elizabeth Bennet is not "uniformly charming," as Mr. Collins stammers: she is hasty and her decision outspeeds her judgment. She's real. Anna Karenina's perfectly formed, ivory arm; Natasha's every action being described as supple (maybe I can blame that on the translation); Isabel's charm and composure and appearance. They're the 19th-century equivalent of Jessica Wakefield.
I was hating Isabel for a while because damn, how could she be so stupid, but chapter 42 is one of the most skillful treatments of an invisible but tricky situation that I have ever read. After that I liked it better, and if I can’t adore a book based on only its last quarter, I can like it a lot. Nonetheless it’s probably the only James I’ll ever read.
Begun 28 June 2004.
Tuesday BJWL and I went to the Connecticut River Museum. That wasn't overly thrilling on its own but you can opt for a boat tour of the river, and this we took. The three floors of the museum were dedicated to Fenwick, bordered by River and Sound and most famous for Katharine Hepburn's long residence there; a discussion of the shipping and boat-building that helped the estuary towns flourish; and a series of photographs of Essex long ago and currently. The boat tour was wonderful. I had never been on a boat on the river, never seen the beautiful (and sometimes merely ostentatious) houses and estates on its banks, never gazed at my town from this angle.
Thirty years ago there were no ospreys in Connecticut at all; now there are at least 75 ospreys nests along this seven-mile stretch. This is thanks to Roger Tory Peterson stealing eggs from some less polluted southern shore. Eagles are more common in winter, and we didn't see any but did see many ospreys (hunting adults and begging nestlings), egrets, herons, cormorants, a school of agitated shad (I think that's what the guide said) and a deer. I learned that the Connecticut River is so shallow at its delta that it did not lend itself to industry, and that's why it's not befouled as the Quinnipiac in New Haven and the Thames in New London are. I learned that Selden Island is the largest in Connecticut at 610 acres and that stone quarried from its hill formed New York City sidewalks. I saw Brockway Landing, which during the years of quarrying serviced that business; and Joshua Rock, a sheer cliffy edifice from atop which Joshua, son of Uncas, watched his people fish in the river and the sun set opposite (I had never known for what Joshuatown Road was named). The boat turned around just south of Gillette Castle. It was a beautiful trip.
Selden Island
Joshua Rock
Gillette Castle on the hill
Abominable people whom I hate have built two houses on my ledge, an ugly one at the base near my house, and an okay one on the ledge proper. Fuckers. It does make me wonder if I would rather a contemporary with a longer view rather than the original Federal house right on the bank that has been mine for many years. Either way, the one I don't like has to go.
After a bite at Hallmark, I brought my mother home and returned to the lake for the late afternoon and early evening. Floating there, watching a sliver of a waxing moon rise, listening to birds and the wind in the leaves, feeling the water's cool embrace, that's what I went home for.
Uncas is what I returned for a full day of on Wednesday as well, but I was barely out of the parking lot when I heard way too many voices. At the picnic table, a man was constructing sandwiches, and the shouts and shrieks were many and louder. I asked, "Camp Claire?" and he said yes. He told me he had 42 kids. Then he offered me a sandwich. This I declined with a smile as I beat my retreat. The beach cannot accommodate 42 bathers, and I also question even a relatively affordable camp sending only one adult, who is making sandwiches, to supervise that many children in the water. But I had options. There is a little pull-off with a path I had never explored, but which I knew must lead to a wee gap in the laurels along the banks: I'd seen people there from canoe and rafts and from longer swims. So I went there. It was just about big enough to fit my (sister's) chair and my gallon jug of water.
I stepped off a foot-high bank into a foot of water with a clear bottom. The gap gets enough use that the leaf litter flooring the rest of the lake is cleared away. I probably wouldn't be afraid of it, but it's slimy and I'm happier without it. I haven't been on the lake in a canoe for many years, and I usually swim blind, so quietly and not really breast-stroking out in sunglasses let me see more detail than I have for ever and ever. I could see both the boat ramp at the south end and the other little beach at the north end. After I swapped glasses for goggles I started swimming.
When I swim with goggles I often open my eyes only when facing down, to ensure I'm still going straight. Sometimes goggles leak, and that quick glance down means less pool water in my eyes. Also, if I can't see other swimmers I don't compare myself to or compete with them. This is not such a good strategy in the lake. I am perfectly comfortable swimming anywhere within it, as long as I keep several yards from shore and possible snapping turtles, but I don't want to look into its greeny-brown depths, especially when I'm alone. When I'm alone, sometimes I cannot shake thoughts of the Unc Ness Monster. And I hate harboring any fear of my lake, especially of monsters I made up 30 years ago. This time I tried to open my eyes only to the side to mark my place, but sometimes I messed up and looked down.
I swam nearly all the way to the boat launch, but if there was a gap in the lilypads I didn't find it. If lilypads are significantly less gross than the seaweedy stuff that grows in untended parts of the much shallower and warmer Roger's Lake, they're still gross. And then I turned and swam, well away from the main beach, to the north little beach, and back to the gap. The lake is maybe three quarters of a mile long and this is the first time I have swum it end to end.
I swam and read All the King's Men and ate bananas and Luna bars (the Old Lyme A&P doesn't stock Clif bars?) and in the middle of the afternoon I heard singing behind me: the Camp Claire children walking back to camp (two miles of forest road and at least a mile along Neck Road, a long and dangerous way and worse for that many inadequately shepherded children. I swam out in glasses again to scope the main beach, which did look empty, and as I stood in the shallow water about to clamber up, I spotted a small snake noodling through the roots under the bank. I stooped to examine it: dark brown with a series of paler brown triangles down its spine. Copperhead? Whatever: snake, and extra impetus to return to the main beach.
BJWL and I visited the Florence Griswold House on Thursday, house and gallery. I hadn't been in the house since high school but I think middle school, and the gallery is new. I passed it when I walked to my mother's office after being locked out of the house last January, but this was the first time I had been in it. The exhibit was Childe Hassam in Connecticut, though two of the three generous rooms held paintings by other Tonalists and Impressionists in Connecticut's past and present.
We took a tour of the house and looked at the paintings in the new gallery. BJWL might have wanted to stay longer, but she acquiesced willingly enough when I said that was all I wanted to see, that she could visit any time but I needed more lake. So lakeward we went. She sat in the shade and read the paper, and I swam and read my book, and she gave me shit for picking up litter (including a pull-tab from a can that must have lain there 20 years) and I ignored that, and we ate raspberries and blueberries and Fig Newtons. We also saw another snake of the same species (the same snake, so little and half a mile away?) on the path. It was a lovely afternoon.
Me in Uncas Lake.
In the evening I picked up CLH from work and we returned to the lake. When we arrove, there were two women and a bounding labradog whom I got to watch as I blew up the raft. When I finished the body, CLH picked up the still flaccid pillow and asked if I would like for her to do that part. But I did that part too, because camels having very large lungs. Then I became a camel tugboat and pulled her around the water. Staying all the way in was just fine with me, because it was cool enough that being partly in and partly out would be cold. Also stringing the two parts of my suit on my arm was warmer than wearing it: a suit holds cold water against your body. So that was a good last lake jaunt, with only my sister, at sunset, unhampered by stupid clothing.
Hallmark had a line 15 people long so I drove past toward the beach. In September I did more beach than lake for first time in ages, but that was September, warm water, cool wind, and no summer people or jellyfish. This time, we had to get past the parking guard. It was 8:15 and our presence in my Massachusetts rental car hardly deprived a resident of a spot, so the guard kindly let us ("We grew up here!") in. We looked for toenail shells (if they have a proper name I don't want to know it) and seaglass and when CLH suddenly straightened and hastened, I knew her object. When she turned to me with a length of brown kelp in her hand, I agreeably mimicked fear.
I was afraid of seaweed as a child. We have a picture of us on Hampton? Beach in New Hampshire, summer of 1977, me in a Snoopy bathing suit, pretending to eat some kelp as if it were bacon. That was the trip during which I conquered the Great Seaweed Fear. But lakegrass is still icky: where it is, so could snapping turtles be.
And then Hallmark's line was shorter! I felt virtuous because I got only a large serving of fries to my sister's cheese fries. But I also had my third milkshake of the week.
And that was that for Old Lyme bit.
During the Saturday-to-Friday stretch I spent in my mother's house, I went to Uncas daily. That's the important thing. I also gathered raspberries and freed catbirds from the netting around the raspberries. I discovered that, even though she has neither computer nor mouse, my mother has a mouse pad, because she placed it under my iBook's power cord so it wouldn't set my bed on fire. I ate a lot of Hallmark, whose new owners received the previous owner's ice-cream recipes but who now use inferior chocolate chips, though they still make good fries. I ate dinner with my mother and her husband only once. I brushed and pet and snuggled with Kitty, who slept with me a couple of times thereby living up to another of her names, Benedict Kitty. I alphabetized my sister's CDs and cleaned her keyboard and monitor. I didn't snap at my mother. It was a success.
It was leaving Old Lyme that made me want to go home, 36 hours before my flight. Driving on I-91 near Hartford does not especially endear the state to me, and I wasn't sure how the visit would go, and so forth. Maybe I had just been gone long enough.
Visiting RPR was fine and good and fun, of course. Someone told me a while ago about how if you stick your tongue out at a baby, it'll stick its out at you, in a reflex. SFR was the first baby I remembered to try that on. She's three months old and a perfect age for this game: if a little old for the reflex bit, not too young to chortle and smile and obviously watch and interact with us. Babies are way time-consuming, aren't they? We talked and played with the baby and bathed and fed and changed and dressed her, and that's about what we got done while I was there. I got to coo over her closetful of adorable dresses, and I read her A Snowy Day and On the Day You Were Born and When the Elephants Walk and Guess How Much I Love You, and I cooked! yes, I cooked bacon for BLTs.
At the birthday party I got to meet three other hatchlings I hadn't yet seen, plus two others I hadn't seen since before they were mobile. Despite quantities of blocks all over the floor, the oldest of this set of cousins wanted yet more blocks that she spotted in a clear container whose screw-top she couldn't manage. She did not believe my assertion that this was only a large rattle. She is 2.5 and about the size of a four-year-old. I met RDC's best man's first baby when he was two months old (cute but boring) during the Connecticut detour of our New York City trip, and now he is nearly two (cute still and no longer boring). He had a baby brother in May, who is RDC's new godson. I hadn't met the birthday girl yet or the huge 2.5-year-old's huge six-month-old younger brother. And I got to play with them all.
Soon after RPR left another, family birthday party, farther from Boston, where she would be later than my travel allowed, I left too. I hadn't previously arranged to visit Charenton, and I didn't call ahead of time because if I left Nisou's parents voicemail both of us would be disappointed, and besides, voicemail might only mean they were in the garden and not really not at home. And they were home, hooray! I saw (and copied) photographs of their visit to France for Siblet's birth, and saw photographs of their days in Tuscany (jaw-droppingly opulently beautiful), and heard about their 40th anniversary party, and had only an hour with them, but an hour we were all glad to have, before I had to leave for Logan.
Once again I flirted with expense, fueling the car at Natick, 20 miles from Boston, risking Thrifty's perceiving the fraction gone. And that was after disaster flirted with me: as a minivan and I merged side by side in two lanes, leaving 84 for the Pike, the minivan was unable to pick a lane. It continued to fail to do so after I beeped twice, and even after I pounded the horn it continued to drift left, wanting to push me into the concrete wall that served instead of a shoulder. I braked, let the fucker pass on my right rather than sideswipe me, and as soon as we were both on the Pike I passed her slow ass on the left, maturely bestowing upon the driver a dirty look as I did so. As Ellen DeGeneres says, "That'll show 'em."
I returned the car and shuttled to Logan and was through security and at the gate a full hour before boarding began. I hate that that extra time is required, both by airlines and by prudence. I would have liked to linger at Charenton. But now RDC suggested France for Thanksgiving, with a five-month-old Siblet and an Emlet that much closer to three. I long for that.
Very sweet. A doll moves in and out of children's lives but without so much sentiment that the reader gets morose. Glimpses of 19th century American life. Rachel Field won the Newbery for this book, and she deserved it.
This reprint contains a rumor in its back matter that Rosemary Wells might write her next 100 years. Blech.
Again, why do I do this to myself? Any book with such a title should trust its audience not to need the clarification of its subtitle, "The Sequel to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice." First, not "the," since there are several; most importantly, Jane Austen's rather than whose else?
Among its dreadfulnesses is this gem: Someone--well, fine, Wickham--says, "Before coming into Derbyshire today I ventured first to Rosings Park." Possibly the author meant that Wickham journeyed to Kent during recent days before today's arrival at Pemberley, but that wording implies that Wickham has one hell of a fast horse. How Wickham could think to be received at Rosings, lowlife that he is, is a mystery to me equalled only by Mrs. Bennet's also making a casual visit thither, there and back in a day, some weeks before.
Darcy would not honor Wickham with an audience. As Elizabeth restrained herself from asking Lydia about Darcy's presence at Lydia's wedding but then pumped her aunt for details, so Darcy would restrain himself ever from conversing with Wickham again, let alone allowing him such a power over himself as disclosing secrets against his family--and he would thus restrain himself even if he didn't have someone to fill him in later.
Other plot wrongnesss and character betrayals: No mention of Mrs. Collins's young olive branch. Lady Catherine dismissing Mr. Collins for his being related to the Bennets but accepting Mary Bennet as intermediary and then as companion to Anne. Mr. Darcy's agreeing to mediate in a business transaction for a perfect stranger. Colonel Fitzwilliam matched with Mariah Lucas, who lacks the personal charms that made him regret Elizabeth's similar poverty. Caroline Bingley at Pemberley after the Darcys' marriage. Caroline Bingley sympathizing with Lady Catherine over Darcy's not marrying Anne. Georgiana Darcy matched with someone who is not Col. Fitzwilliam and corresponding with him before they are engaged. Mary married before Kitty. Mr. Bennet caving to and then Darcy agreeing, even for a moment, to Mrs. Bennet's stupid plans. Wickham reformed, at all and when no other more deserving character improves a jot. Naming a son Fitzwilliam--not Bennet, nor for his father or hers? A ball at Netherfield "a year ago [this November] and Elizabeth's first seeing Pemberley "the previous August," even though she has borne a child between the August and November. Darcy about five years older than he ought to be. Any conspiring between Lady Catherine and Wickham, and the idea of her hiring Wickham to ruin Lydia in order to distance Darcy from Elizabeth, when Lady Catherine didn't suspect their attachment until months after Lydia's fall. The idea that Darcy would have told his aunt about his love for Elizabeth before being accepted.
Among the stylistic faults: botched "former" and "latter" parallelisms. "Effect" for "affect." Hundreds of comma splices but a lack, OMFB, of setting-off commas, such as these that I illustrate in this sentence. Quotation marks curling next to the dialog tag rather than next to the dialog. "Collins's" as a plural possessive. "De Bourgh's" as a plural. "You have achieved perfection to some degree."
Affecting obsolete spellings in an Austen way, but considering eleven o'clock as "afternoon," even though the Austen "morning" stretched to our late afternoon, is pathe. No contemporary house would allow "chuse" and "shew" (I doubt), but this book didn't come from a house. It emerged from VirtualBookworm.com, an on-demand vanity press. And it looks it: though the cover doesn't look shoddy, the interior print looks like primitive inkjet, in a reasonable font but without anti-aliasing. Widows and orphans abound.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that all sequels suck. But must they suck this hard?
The only thing stupider than this book is me for reading it.
Earlier in the week, RDC being away meant that Blake's long days brought me home without swimming. Wednesday it stormed. So today was my first 1K in a week.
This list will grow, as had the list of stuff I don't get.
One of the best-crafted books I have ever read. The extended metaphors Warren creates become vignettes of theme and character and Americana; his pacing is exquisite; overall finely honed prose.
It's one of those books whose craft I admire and enjoy but that don't resonate with me on a character or story level. From what I have not been able to forget about Bonfire of the Vanities, I can see its influence on Tom Wolfe, and the foreword claims that Primary Colors borrowed heavily from its style and pacing and voice as well as from its plot.
Another two-mile swim! It took me 75 minutes, which is a good time for me. Twenty-five minutes is a good time for 1000 meters to begin with, so 25 minutes for 3 kilometers (and another 200 meters) is a pace I'm pleased with. I should look up what is an athletic pace for an enthusiastic 36-year-old should be.
We spent about four hours at the club. I swam straightaway so I wouldn't make excuses for myself or have time to do only 2K or 1. Then I changed from my swim suit (high-neck, low-hipped, one-piece in which I pretend I am Natalie Coughlin) into my bathing suit (high but not as high, two-piece "tankini") and lay out. I listened to The Odyssey (I'm at my 13-year-old self's favorite spot: Odysseus's calling himself Noman and secreting himself in the fleecy underside of a sheep in the Cyclops's lair) and lay there pulling the neck of my suit down from mid-breastbone to sun a vee of cleavage while wearing a wide-brimmed hat and tucking a towel around my hips.
The world will have to deal with an imperfectly skin-cancered moi, though. Soon enough I moved under a tree. But I kept the hat on. And I finished All the King's Men.