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 This weekend the Denver Botanic Gardens held its annual plant and book sale. I was going to ride my bike with a fanny pack of wallet and keys and two cages full of water bottles, but RDC suggested I bring a pannier in case I wanted to buy anything. I ended up bringing my DayRunner (smaller than my journal) and a book and the cell phone. Just in case. I used them everything I brought, too, except the toolkit.
Considering
how hideous traffic and parking looked, the Gardens themselves didn't
feel crowded. I needed some solitude, and yesterday that solitude came
in a crowd. That made me happy.
Can anyone
explain to me what seems to be inherent racism in the ads for Dockers
Khakis? In one, a black man dances extremely lascivously with a variety
of black women only. In the other, a white man is dunked at a carnival
by a variety of white women only. I'm not sure but I think the Gap khaki
ads have dark- and light-skinned people dancing together.
On "The
Simpsons" tonight, a trip to Hawaii was replaced shell-game style with
a trip to Hartford, Connecticut: "No one said anything about Hawaii."
Of course
I watched "Family Guy" because it's on between "The Simpsons" and "X-Files."
Driving from Rhode Island to New York City, the family get lost and wind
up at "Geronimo's Casino." Yep. That's my neck of the woods.
Speaking of that crucial Sunday half hour, I'll be pissed if "That '70s
Show" doesn't rotate back to this spot. I wasn't enamored of "Futurama"
and while "The Family Guy" ranks on Rhode Island, which I appreciate,
I wouldn't miss it. But "That '70s Show"--that I like.
I also like
the VW commercial with the car driving through New Orleans and everything
in sync. Just like Camazotz.
Enough about
television.
I am in my usual
spot, in the armchair with my gimpy leg over the arm and the laptop on
the other thigh with Blake on my shoulder. He's preening. When you're
the pedestal for a preening cockatiel, your shoulder ends up looking like
you have the most severe case of dandruff you've ever imagined. Not just
flakes of white dander but chunks of white filoplume and half-pipes of
keratin he's freed feathers from and tippets and hackles. I actually don't
know what a tippet is but it sounds reasonable and has something to do
with fly-tying. When our friend MRC walked into the tenement and saw Percy,
he greeted his existence thus: "Aw man you're never going to get any hackles
out of that."
MRC flyfished. A lot, every day: he probably couldn't see any bird without
thinking of hackles.
And my right shoulder is peeling from Thursday, so I have matching shoulders
covered in chunks of bodily detritus. A pleasant image.
Thursday
wasn't a good day for me. Actually I've been in a daze since then, but
Thursday was the start of it. I left work early, in the morning, and walked
out into the chilly sunshine. When I called RDC to tell him I was leaving,
he had just left for work and told me he had left the Mac defragging and
unusable for a few hours. I hadn't thought to go home to the computer
though; in fact I didn't go home at all. I went to the library, to the
museum, back to the library. I skimmed a few Ursula LeGuin books, thumbed
two early Tintins, found new books by Julian Barnes and Sue Hubbell, and
when searching for the 1949 Newbery, saw two Paula Danzigers on the shelf
above.
I loved Paula Danziger once. The Cat Ate My Gymsuit is one of
the best YA books ever. These were definitely children's books, though:
Amber Brown Is Not a Crayon and Amber Brown Goes Fourth. I
read the former waiting for the bus and the latter on the bus and the
Newbery, The Door in the Wall, at home. Blake was happy to have
me home at 2:00 and I planned to settle in with a book and not move for
hours, and suddenly the sun occurred to me. I took our comfy redwood lawn
chair out and my green stripey blanket and a liter of water and a bowl
of chocolate chips and some bananas. Then I took Blake in his cage, and
I sat in the chair and read.
I thought I had
read The Door in the Wall long ago and it did seem vaguely familiar
if not memorable. I considered it of only dubious Newbery material, medieval
as it was. The protagonist is a ten-year-old boy during the reign of Edward
III or so and is inexplicably paralyzed and crooked. This book won the
medal in 1949, and I don't remember when the last worst polio epidemic
struck before Salk saved us all, but I think it was in the late '40s or
early '50s. The novel didn't seem imaginative or well-written enough to
deserve the Medal unless a crippling disease created a need for a heroic
disabled character.
Anyway. We
stayed in the sun for three hours, from two till five, and while Blake's
cage-cover offered him shade and some shelter from the sun, I took no
such precautions for myself. My arms and a vee of my chest are quite burned.
I am a stupid fool not to remember my Hibernian skin needs protection
from the Colorado sun no matter how chill the wind nor late the afternoon--especially
on the first outing of the year. The fronts of my shoulders and the bends
of my elbow will peel, but not my chest or nose. My nose should be used
to the ill-use anyway. I have the nose of my maternal line. Unlike my
sister, who has, we say, the postman's nose, I have my mother's nose,
my grandmother's, my great-grandmother's, and as far as I know, my great-great-grandmother's
nose (I remember her; I was five when she died), and maybe even my three-greats
grandmother's nose, which would impressive because she was a Rockefeller
(John D.'s sister and disowned for marrying beneath her family).
Friday I
continued upset and fucked up at work. I buffle
through periods in which I interpret my regular ordinary human fallibility
as evidence of my inability to function, and Friday was such a period.
So when at 10:30 yesterday morning I found myself beginning to nap instead
of read, I shook myself firmly by the shoulders and reprimanded myself
and got myself up and out and on my bike and under the sunny sky and,
eventually, under the lilac in the lilac garden of the Botanic Gardens.
I passed through the Hundred Aker Wood garden and the Looking Glass garden
and Farmer MacGregor's garden and the Oz garden. I looked at the scripture
garden and once again sighed over my terrific idea for a Watership
Down garden--an idea that will never come to fruition because I wouldn't
plant non-native species in my garden.
I lay on the grass under the lilac, breathing deeply of their wonderful heavy scent and watching the blue sky through the green leaves and thought of "A Room with a View": "My father says the only perfect view is of the sky over our heads." But I have never read Dante, or at least not so much I understand why anyone thinking that should have been reading Dante.
In the evening
I did not read Julian Barnes or Sue Hubbell but Rosamund Pilcher because
I needed the comfort. Not needing to concentrate and indeed not wanting
the silence, I kept the television on and was amused to find "Barbarella."
I had never seen this and I'm not sure if I ever heard of it before some
chance remark RJH made years
and years ago. It is remarkably bad. Really phenomenally hideously bad,
worse than "Logan's Run." What must poor old Henry, with "The Grapes of
Wrath" and "Twelve Angry Men" under his belt, have thought of whatever
acting talent he might have passed down to his child, upon seeing that?
I see where the inspiration for "Child's Play" came from, anyway, and
I had forgotten where Duran Duran got its name from.
The news
hinted that Monica Lewinsky might be on Saturday Night Live, so I began
to watch that. Could she be so stupid? Apparently so. I taped the rest
and watched it with lots of fast-forwarding this morning. Still a waste
of time, and in the morning a waste of daylight too, but goodness what
a bad show it is. That was Monica, all right, or a damn good look-alike.
I confess I watched the Baba Wawa interview; without it, I would not have
been so sure of her mannerisms. Cuba Gooding Jr. was the official guest,
though, and at one point was dressed up as Lincoln to do a meta-skit about
a Lincoln skit. It was at this point I broke my great promise. I have
never seen "Jerry McGuire" and therefore don't know the context of Gooding's
one famous quote, but when everyone in the U.S. began to say it, I decided
I wouldn't. Ever. Until last night when he dressed as Lincoln. Instead
he should have played an ex-slave hearing about the supposed 40 acres
and a mule: he could have told the lying carpet-bagger "Show me the money!"
That would have been funny.
Am I being incredibly racistly insensitive in suggesting that? "Oh, he's black, he should play a slave." It wouldn't be funny with anyone but him, and I wouldn't've thought of it except for the Lincoln costume.
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