Catching up from my commonplace book. Really, I don't get to call it that. I'm channeling Quigley Quagmire is all.
Etymology:
flim-flam?
Somewhere in San Francisco, probably in SF MOMA, we saw a photograph of an early 20th century law practice: Flam & Flam.
Eh, probably just nonsense syllables.
From our 2002 trip to Steamboat Springs: looking around at the local businesses, RDC asked if Jane Austen had written a book called Taxi and Taxidermy.
The hotel room's guide to San Francisco writes that the neighborhood of Noe Valley is pronounced "Noh-ee." This works better orally. But Noe Valley is spelled with an e.
We saw a sea lion tattooed with number 382x--we couldn't make out the fourth digit. Perhaps it was in a swim race.
A public announcement: next summer, I plan to participate in the Danskin triathlon. It's not much of a triathlon: swim .5 mile (or .75K, a difference of 50 meters), bike 12 miles, and run 6 miles. I say "it's not much" but let's see if I actually do it. I don't, after all, run, at all, or swim particularly fast, or bike racingly. But I think I can do it. I deleted a photograph of me jumping into the San Francisco Bay because my ass was an affront to the eye. I cannot pull myself into a raft. I had a nightmare last night that I must be pregnant, because look at this belly! but it was just fat.
Jorge Luis Borges. Alexandria. One Hundred Years of Solitude again. I am not equal to describing this book's effect on me. I want more Umberto Eco.
I could not haul myself onto a raft, despite handles. The sexy back of lore (I had a fabulously sexy back once) has lost definition. Today I did weights for the first time since the pool opened.
Bike 8.3 miles in three legs; squats, 3x12 @ 80; lats, 3x12 @60; chest press, 3x12 @30; shoulders, 3x12 @25. Swim 1000 meters.
I usually pause every five laps for water. At 10, I noticed a man leaning against a planter, and he was still there at 11. I asked him if he needed to share a lane, and he said he would wait until a whole lane was available. I was about to turn back to the water when he asked, "May I suggest something?" It had to be about swimming, unless he was wantonly cruel, and he looked like a swimmer--in his 60s or maybe 70s, but a swimmer. "Of course."
He told me something I knew but didn't enforce: each hand slices the water index finger-first instead of chopping it pinky-first. I did two laps thus and did feel a difference: my shoulders were more engaged. Now he was standing by the pool edge where I would see him and stop. I stopped. He said his index-finger gesture was an exaggeration and modified it for me. And two more things? I nodded. One, I should look not beneath me but to the bottom at the other end. By raising the head, the shoulders follow. Two, with the body parallel to the water surface, the hand enters at an angle, toward 8 o'clock, rather than at 9, and in front of the eyes not the shoulders, and keep the elbows up.
I know I have seen him before: I remembered him because he looks like McCarthy's father. Now I know his name and am hugely grateful to him. He said that just in those laps he watched, I had improved greatly. I liked that. And unlike with the ski instructor, who also said I improved in March of 2004--the last time I skied--this is made sense to me and that I'll therefore remember and apply it.
Even after his first comment I was thinking of him as Gram in Dicey's Song, descending upon Sammy's grade as the Lone Marble Ranger (so he was the Lone Swimming Ranger) and, as she said to Mina's family, to put a face on the boogeyman of my bad technique.
Plus it didn't rain until I got home.
My littlest boy with the big feet is ten today. We tossed around the idea of having a party, but he can't have ice cream and cake and is afraid of balloons so maybe not. Instead he had his head pet lots and lots, got to take a nap with his daddy, had a shower, helped daddy shave (serenading prevents scrapes), had pasta and basil stems with his dinner, and is now making small tired squeaks in a one-footed, beak-chewing way from my lap.
He's ten! I don't want him to be old.
That foot! That foot raised in mid-step! That is just too adorable. By the bye, when he raises a foot asking to be picked up (to be stepped up) is different--he raises the leg higher and holds the foot horizontal, and manages to change his expression to pathetic instead of curious.