TodayI haven't checked how many episodes of "Northern Exposure" the current tape has recorded in more than four days: RDC just called to tell me that the tape popped out just a few minutes into the show. Oops. Bless A&E's heart, it replays the same episode at 10 A.M. and 4 P.M., so RDC programmed the VCR to pick up this afternoon. While he had the television on to ensure he had the right channel (he maintains he can't remember what channel any station is on, except for CNN), he saw a bit of the episode. He said, "It's got Joel and Maggie in a barn." I whooped a quiet, businesslike whoop. To miss that would be like missing the "Sympathy for the Devil" episode of "Moonlighting." (Dave and Maddie's eventual consummation was much less fun than that first kiss.)
Yesterday: Dry CleaningI did errands yesterday after dinner. They were errands because I had to do them now, not because they were annoying in themselves. I picked up dry-cleaning, including a shirt I want for Florida, and chatted with the dry-cleaner. It's one of the small-town community feelings that I have missed, not knowing the proprietors of the businesses I patronize, so when someone does finally remember me, I respect that. I talked with him about the weather and the holidays and dry-cleaning (all subjects he pursued enthusiastically, despite surely having analyzed them with other customers throughout the day: a good businessman) while I removed the wire hangers and plastic bags from my three items for the big recycling cartons at the front of the store. Seeing this, he asked, "Don't you like to keep your clothes on hangers?" "I have hangers at home," I replied, surprised. Don't most people have hangers at home? And don't most people dry-clean a garment more often than they buy one? So that you might have, by the drycleaner's system, a dozen hangers per garment?
They had put my blazer and shirt in one bag and my sweater in another, because the latter is mohair. Besides that I poach in it, I don't wear it often because I reupholster everything I touch while wearing it. It's very pretty, though, one of the few shades of purple I like (I usually say purple when I mean violet; the sweater is purple), fuzzy, luxurious: clearly a hand-me-down from CLH.
Actually, looking at my wardrobe recently, I realized the proportion of CLH hand-me-downs to things I have actually bought has shrunk. Of course, the proportion of CLH's clothes among the things I do wear has shrunk too, because I've gained so much weight. Actually I've lost weight and gained content: when I worked out at the Auraria gym this fall, my weight was on the high side of middlingly acceptable, but my volume was not: less muscle, more fat. When I was at my fittest adult condition, I weighed several pounds more than I do now but kept all that mass in less cubic space. Lots of muscle.
WeightAnd I hope that I am changing that now. I initially wondered about the Nordic Track coming to live with us, but I now am pleased with how worthy an addition to our household it is. I first used it Saturday morning and managed 18 minutes; Sunday, Monday, and yesterday I did 20 minutes and a slightly longer distance each day, and yesterday I upped the resistance slightly. I need to work up to 30 minutes, on an incline, and with greater resistance than currently. When I began to exercise a lot and regularly when I worked at C&A, I saw results fairly quickly, in three months. A free StairMaster in the free basement gym of your building is nothing to sneeze at. You could snort, maybe, or huff, if the job in that building was as repellent as mine, but oh well. I snorted and survived.
All that from dry-cleaning? Ah, the sweater knit the tangents one to the next.
Yesterday: LibraryAfter the cleaners, with its requisite load of guilt (bad for the environment, expensive), I scampered to the library to return items I could have returned to a Denver library closer to home, except that I like the Koelbel. I took out Stones from the River, which I saw in the Tattered Cover last week and briefly considered for DEW. Looking at its reviews at Amazon, I see that Stones is an Oprah book. Oh well, I shan't dismiss something for that alone: she is encouraging people to read and one of the books was She's Come Undone.
One item in the catalog I made for CLH is a Henry VIII teapot, I kid you not. I think it was from the Design Toscano catalog, or maybe Signals or Wireless (can anyone explain to me the place of Dilbert and commercial products in a public broadcasting catalog? or, perhaps, the role of public broadcasting in retail? except that those sales probably keep PBS and NPR alive. So anyway, next to the teapot, I wrote, "I already know what I'm getting you for your birthday."
As long as I rely on the Smoking Man for my bizarre retro or reminiscent music dosages, I should make him get "She's Come Undone" and "I'm Not Lisa," neither of which I have ever heard. I know most of the references in She's Come Undone: I know Sly and the Family Stone's "Different Strokes"; I know what "Mission: Impossible" is although I have never seen it and don't know the expression Dolores mimics from it; I had an Etch-a-Sketch (though I don't know what the cover to Axabraxa looks like). But I don't know "She's Come Undone." And people at Millstone used to sing "I'm Not Lisa" at me and were surprised that I didn't know it.
Speaking of Smoking Man-music, that's what I listened to driving last night, perhaps inspired by this past Friday night. "Kung-Fu Fighting" (I needed that inside joke in "Wayne's World" explained to me), "Billy, Don't Be a Hero" (which the boys danced to and acted out (some more than others) on Friday), "Wildfire," and stuff like that. So many other people remember songs like these from childhood, but I don't. I'm not sure why but it must be mostly because I heard music like this so seldom. My mother listened to Musak and easy listening and so that's what I was exposed to; my sister and I didn't have our own radios until high school. The only friend I remember who liked anything contemporary was Connie, whose older sister, whose name I don't remember, had a Bay City Rollers poster on her wall. I remember thinking that she must have been fast or loose or whatever else a sheltered second-grader thinks about a less sheltered new kid in town. But "Saturday Night" was my favorite song until "My Sharona," which came out in sixth grade, by which age my friends and I relied less on our parents' taste for our listening pleasure. And my sister introduced me to Barry Manilow and the Osmonds. But not Shaun Cassidy.
In fourth grade I took a math test that determined the rest of my mathematical life. I scored 16th out of 30 and was therefore placed in the lower math class in a community, school and town, that didn't facilitate change. Old Lyme had a tough time dividing social status (we had skids and preps) from academic status, or behavior problems from stupidity problems. I didn't understand that my academic performance determined my grades more than my deportment (or even that they were discrete) until eighth grade. I was a well-behaved student in a class with problem children; all I knew was that well-behaved children did well in school and poorly-behaved ones, who wanted to hang a poster of Shaun Cassidy on the fourth-grade classroom wall, didn't. Which affected my musical as well as mathematical development, I suppose.
Lower math--and why we were never tested again, I don't know--meant that while the classmates I excelled with in reading and social studies did pre-algebra in middle school, I was bored silly with the skids in classes taught by reject student teachers. I was in lower math until high school, when I finally understood that if I couldn't change my ability or liking for math, I could at least try to catch up, so that in tenth grade I was still in the second half of an extended Algebra I; but in eleventh I took Algebra II and Geometry, ready for Trig and Pre-Calc senior year. One reason I did poorly in the lower levels was that less was expected of me, and yes that was my fault too; but at least in realizing the problem, I could correct it in time to graduate with the math classes on a par with my academic track.
Anyway, the songs that give me a pang for childhood are the Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night" from second grade, the Knack's "My Sharona" from sixth, and then even later songs like whoever's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and Joan Jett's (?) "Crimson and Clover." And of course Styx's "Come Sail Away." And the two songs HPV and I thought were so daring: the Eagles' "Hotel California" and the Charlie Daniels's Band's "Devil Went Down to Georgia." At the Smoking Man's latest party, a 19-year-old knew more lyrics to the Partridge Family theme than I. Give me Eurythmics, Police, Elvis Costello: that's about the earliest pop stuff I still listen to by choice. Rock and roll has progressed more smoothly than the stages of pop and I don't consider its age as much.
I left out a sentence or two in the above section that might have explained the progression of my tangents but that also might have incriminated me. Ooops.
Also from the library I took out Closing Time, whose Amazon comments and reviews are mixed, and Cat's Eye in audio. I had been listening to Meir Shalev's The Blue Mountain, which had interesting turns of language and George Guidall narrating but which failed to entrance me. I've read Cat's Eye; it was my first Margaret Atwood. It is also CLH's favorite and my least favorite Atwood, so I wanted to reread it. In the order I came to them, I've read Cat's Eye, The Edible Woman, The Handmaid's Tale, Wilderness Tips, The Robber Bride, Good Bones and Simple Murders, Alias Grace, Murder in the Dark, and Surfacing. I began it this morning on the bus and its narrator is a good choice. Wry, throaty, uninflected.
Today: LibraryI need to go to the library today to try to find Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled again. I just checked: three copies are on the shelf. RDC lent Into Thin Air, which was going to be my light Florida reading, to Stuart, which I did know and forgot about, so I am going to give up on the light and try the weighty again. I also plan to bring A Confederacy of Dunces, which is rather in the middle. And Closing Time, and HAO gave me Uppity Women of Medieval Times, which is rather lite but not nearly as apocryphal and steered by its agenda as Wild Women.
A colleague of RDC's is going to teach to her freshling class this quarter The Unconsoled, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and a couple of other equally challenging books. To freshling. A ten-week quarter. I hope her students are as ambitious as she. Meanwhile, Underworld is mentioned everywhere. Having successfully grappled with Libra, once I toughen up with a rereading of White Noise and a delving or too into Mao II, maybe I'll try it.
Then when I got back from the 'brary last night, we watched "It's a Wonderful Life" for the eleventy-third time. If without Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed (having not married Sam Wainwright) had become that worst of all possible things, a librarian, and Potter had taken over the town, then how would a Gomorrah like Pottersville have a public library at all, let alone one that was open that late on Christmas Eve? Remember, she was just about to "close up" the library, not "leave her library office" at some late, career-woman hour.
And today we had a short bus (a regular, not a double) bus, but I got a seat anyway. A good bus day.
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