13 February 1999: Relative Age

HAO and I walked our full walk for the first time in many weeks on Saturday. I think it might work out better for us to go on Saturdays rather than Sundays, since I'm more likely to coordinate on a weekday the one car among three people thing planning for a Saturday than I am for a Sunday, which should take care of itself. Plus HAO can do whatever it is she does on Sunday mornings and the walk doesn't have to happen at noon.

This week we saw very few dogs, which was unfortunate for me because I suffer from severe prolonged canine deficiency right now. We did see a Swainson's hawk perched in a tree, waiting for lunch to scamper through the grass, and I would have stood watching it, hoping to see it pounce, but I figured lunch would be too timid to emerge with a couple of smelly loud humans inches away and I would thus preclude a pounce. When we came back, it was gone, but instead for our viewing pleasure there was a pair of something very large indeed perched in the tippity top of a tree upwards of a half-mile away. They looked big enough that I expected the tree to topple under their weight, bigger than the Swainson's but probably only seemed so. It is unlikely they were golden eagles, which is what I hoped.

A magpie huddled in an aspen quiet as Canby near the Swainson's, though. The contrast was comical: usually these birds cannot keep their beaks closed and continually flip their tails as they survey and govern their domain. This one was using Evasive Magpie Tactics and hiding behind the slender trunk. Also we--I--spotted a male kingfisher. Hao saw him at the end of my finger, so I didn't get to tell her, "Don't look at the finger or you will miss all the heavenly glory." (I think that's "Enter the Dragon" but I'm not sure: any martial arts lines I know have permeated my resistant skull over the years I've known PLT and SEM and not by any direct involvement. Except I did watch "Shao-Lin Temple" once, which is how I know the dog dies. I just looked in imdb for the movie I've always called "Shao-Lin Temple" and there are a bunch--burned to ashes, disciples of, fury in--but all I remember about whatever movie I saw was that it was in Chinese, subtitled in Japanese, and men had been training for so many hundreds of years on a stone floor that they had worn holes through it.)

Last week we saw a small flock of mountain bluebirds. Remind me to start a lifelist. This year I'm going to learn to distinguish all those stupid sparrows, though I shall spare myself the frustration of distinguishing hens of different species. "Little, brown." Hmm. How many publishing companies do you know named after sparrows?

Which reminds me, now that the sparrowhawk has been renamed kestrel since it's not a hawk but a falcon, will LeGuin reissue The Wizard of Earthsea?

Anyway. I've got to learn about these stupid fleece pants that Denver usually doesn't require them. Instead of proceeding directly to the mall and not collecting $200, we went home and ate some lunch and I changed into my new overalls. The only thing wrong with them is that they're too dark, but the tag warns not to wash them with anything lighter than black, so I hope that means they'll fade a lot.

Then we began our mission to alter HAO into Hao, Woman of Élan and Mystery, which is what I've been saying since Saturday but which doesn't describe the change she's trying to effect. I have some clothes that fail utterly to disguise my figure, and then I have my comfy favored clothes. HAO's decided that she's got legs, see, so why not own some skirts.

I have never, ever, felt so old in my life.

That doesn't happen until later. Upon entering the mall excuse me, shopping resort, I checked the directory. I figured Express would be the place to go. In that direction--the other end of the top floor--lay Guess?, into which HAO wished to pop. All I registered was a pair of shorts overalls in the window and a G. It was several minutes before I realized we were not in a Gap. Not the slit black skirt HAO selected but the price tag on the overalls--twice what I paid for mine--clued me in. Denim, X crowd, '70s tunes. How's a girl to know? I had told her Gap, Abercrombie and Fitch, and J.Crew were out of bounds for today's purpose, so my entering at all shows how brainless I had already become.

We agreed all the '70s tunes were making us lonely for the Smoking Man, but allegedly he's returning soon, him and his 30-year-old music and his asphyxiating parties--"but I've got the fan!"

I directed the next detour, into the Museum Store. In whose museum is Curious George? Better to call it "source of stuff to ape an intellect with." Curious George and Madeline for the kiddies, imitation Degas statues for the grown-ups, and joy of joys! "Fractured Proverbs" for me. I have wanted these since Hallowe'en of 1997, but I guess I don't shop enough because this was the first time I had seen them. Well, the first time I had the expendable cash, anyway. During a moment of pecuniary straits once RDC and I were in the TC there they were and I did this explicit song and dance about how I wanted these for Christmas. He looked but did not find--which is how I ended up with William--and this day I found. I jumped up and down.

After a restorative dessert from Paradise, we descended on Express along with every other female between 10 and 40 in the greater metropolitan area. I either sat in a chair like a great aunt or fetched garments for HAO. Size 1 from Express is too big on her. She makes me crazy. Also we have much different taste in dresses, which came as no surprise. I like princess seams and either a dropped or an absent waist, since those are slimming lines. She likes that repellent empire bodice cut that's been out for a couple of years, because it emphasizes cleavage. Which explains why I don't like it. Anyway, Express was having a sale, more so even than its quotidian markdowns, which meant lines for dressing rooms and registers were extremely long. Unlike some mothers I heard, I didn't whine: "Today would be nice, Tiffany." They reminded me why I don't want to be a parent.

I remembered Contempo Casuals as carrying the sort of stuff HAO wanted to experiment with, and we went there, but as soon as I entered, I wanted to leave. I resisted encroaching matronly fussiness, cringed at neither merchandise nor clientele, and fetched more stuff for HAO. And I felt old: I don't understand the little clips to hold smidgens of hair in unattractive patterns--says me, who scrapes all my hair away from my face to look scalped; nor several layers of baby tees with shoestring straps (perhaps because deliberate bralessness is such a distant memory); nor trousers one must hold to one's body while walking; and I emphatically do not understand, condone, or tolerate this damn '70s reminiscence. The audio system played "1999" and HAO asked me how many times I'd heard that since December. I said, "Actually this is the first time," and responding to her incredulous look continued, "because I don't listen to the radio, remember?" and now I felt the stares of other shoppers so continued merrily, "besides, I heard it plenty when it was first released in 1982."

Most of the other shoppers hadn't been born yet in 1982. I don't feel old when I play with kids born four years ago, but there's something about teenagers and my high school scars that I tend to hate myself more than usual when in any high-school age person is around. I felt aged, agèd.

When I got home, I began scooping the magnetic poetry off the fridge. I bought myself the basic set when I got my first job in Denver and was given a Genius set (with words like "priapism") this summer. After sorting them by part of speech, and resisting the urge to alphabetize them, and with two sets on just the freezer door, there wasn't a lot of room left for composition. And I'm not going to tell you any of the "poems," because I think those books of compilations are stupid and anyone who wants to read them without knowing the stories behind the writers has too much time on her hands. I'm not going to fracture any proverbs until we move in to the new place, but by golly then I will tell you what I fracture!

RDC and I went to dinner and a movie. We parked at the east end of the 16th Street Mall, where we usually do, in a lot with a system of payment I have seen nowhere else, that apparently doesn't exist elsewhere in the country. You park in a numbered spot and shove folded bills or quarters through a slot into a numbered compartment of a large box. Apparently the lot owners patrol frequently enough that this really works. Denver's not so polite a city that this would work on the honor system.

One thing that disappointed me when I arrived here is there was no afterdinner stroll part of town, like Newbury Street in Boston or Harvard Square in Cambridge or wherever in Manhattan or the A1A in Ft. Lauderdale or lots and lots of places in San Francisco. I love wandering up Newbury Street on a summer evening, window-shopping (popping into Emack's for ice cream, or plotting what stores to visit tomorrow) and people-watching (lots of women huddling in their men's suit jackets). Denver sprawls, and the downtown part of downtown isn't very residential. If you saw footage from downtown Denver from the last Sunday of January in 1998, that was about the limit of concentrated nocturnal revelry in this town.

Until recently. Yes, this year too we had the riot in Larimer Square after the publicly-sponsored filthy-rich corporation "won" its little "game," but people come at other times too now: because of the Denver Pavilions. It's an open-air mall with lots of the standard clone stores, Ann Taylor and Express, and conglomerates like Virgin and Barnes & Noble, and McDonaldize-the-World restaurants like Hard Rock and Wolfgang Puck, but I find I don't care that people are coming downtown to patronize chains as much as much as I care that people are coming downtown. This was February (a warm night, granted), and people were strolling. Almost nothing but restaurants between the Pavilions near the east end and LoDo (lower downtown) at the west end was open, but people were out and about. I liked that.

For supper, to the Wynkoop. No new and interesting restaurant for us tonight, the Saturday before Valentine's Day without a reservation, but we like the 'koop. This restaurant is named after its street, which was named after a U.S. army figure who attempted to slow the extermination of American Indians (compare Mt. Evans and Evans Avenue, and indeed Denver itself, named for people who wanted all them injuns deaded). The street and the man are pronounced "Wine-koop" but since the Wynkoop is a microbrewery, it's pronounced "Wihn-koop." A little Denver trivia for you. We shared bruschetta with roasted garlic, sundried tomatoes, and feta, and peppers and olives that only RDC ate. We must have been feeling very married, because then we both had gulf shrimp and vermicelli. Unimaginative. That is, we were, both ordering the same thing. The food was good.

We did not have dessert. The only dessert I like at the Wynkoop is the black and tan, which is a cream-cheese brownie topped with an ice cream far denser and fattier and richer and yummier and vanillaer than anything anywhere else. If the brownie didn't have nuts, it would be completely perfect; I consider the nuts the nose that sticks out from the warm bed. One of my theories to improving my diet is realizing that if I don't eat that right now, it's not going to go away and never be available again. Oreos aren't going to go extinct if I don't eat them for a few months. So I didn't have a black-and-tan, partly for that reason and partly because it is just huge and I usually share it with someone.

However, we did stop at the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory on the walk back, allegedly for me to get a napkin to blow my nose. Ha. RDC got one macadamia and one malt truffle and I got an espresso and a bittersweet. Not that we would ever sneak outside food into a cinema, oh no. We saw "A Simple Plan," since I thought "Saving Private Ryan" was enough WWII for me this year and because we like Billy Bob Thornton. I've seen "Psycho" dozens of times and I still bite my knuckles in the fruitcellar, so this was just a wee bit too tense for my taste.

Moving report: Stripped the fridge of magnetic poetry.