Not that I particularly like the entries that I wind up with, not that I don't agree with y'all that I'm a whining pretentious git who claims grammatical elitism but doesn't proof herself effectively, not that I'm unaware I excise all the really embarrassing or painful shit that proves I'm a real human being, none of that, but secretly I'm still convinced I'm an okay kind of person. So there. And I began that sentence to say that I prefer entries when I have a particular topic in mind and am not doing day-by-day catch-up, but I forgot what my original point was by the time I ran on to the end.

Today is the 29th of July, a date I've long held to be particularly significant in the Lisa Religion for reasons I forgot only slightly less long ago. That's not true, but it sounds good, doesn't it?

The summer after fifth grade my family took what my father prophesied at the top of his voice late during the night of our return home to be our "last family vacation." (True enough, my mother filed for divorce that fall.) We went to Long Lake (?) in Maine, where my parents honeymooned. So whatever, you know, they began and ended at the same place. Closure's very important. I set forth the above totally unnecessary detail because that one detail is the one I remember before any other, even before the detail that I began this paragraph to explain, which is this:

While in Maine, I saw a house that instantly became my dream house. And when [my] sister abused it as ugly, I added, with perfect unconcern, "Oh! but there were two or three much uglier in the shop; and when I have bought some prettier coloured satin to trim it with fresh, I think it will be very tolerable." Looking back on it, I see CLH's point: it squatted brownly on an inadequate plot and possibly the only thing in its favor was my imagination. Anyway, I instantly began to draw it, redraw it, landscape the grounds, and populate it with friends (almost all of whom existed solely in my head or on my paper, although some arrived by way of books, particularly A Swiftly Tilting Planet). They all came in groups of four--four for my splintered immediate family, four for my splintering group of friends--family groups, fantastic animals, whoever they were, and there were seven groups of them (in cottages around the estate). Seven groups of four plus me led me to 29, but how I lit on July I do entirely forget.

Anyway, from 1980 onward, I remembered the 29th of July. In 1985, I was at the Hopwood Scholarship Program at Lynchburg College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and my first full day back in Old Lyme and ready to live there until I could leave was Monday the 29th of July. Somehow I have always considered this date to be PSA's and my anniversary. Full moons occurring on this date are especially significant. So happy anniversary, PSA, during a waning moon.

The other date I started noticing was 2nd of March. In ninth grade the two Ancient and Medieval History (not "Western Civilization," we weren't politically correct yet) were planning a little mini Ren Faire--it was supposedly medieval, but since those things are commonly called Ren(naissance), Ren it is. Further evincing our un-pc-ness, and in proper dieu-et-mon-droit style, the boys of the classes arm-wrestled to determine kingship. I think on the day of fest, the two boys from the two classes would wrestle or similarly decide primacy between Messrs. Roach's and Hage's classes. Anyway, Mr. Roach's class debated who else should do what. Here my memory disserves me because I remember MEWN's presence, but she was new in 10th, when we had Modern European. Anyway, one of the boys--one of the jock boys, of course, LOLHS being a rarity in which the best athletes were also the best scholars, which further ensured their popularity among their peers as well as the faculty--suggested "Lisa could be the town whore."

Understand I had done nothing to deserve this besides be the Dawn Wiener of my class. This was one of those times I escaped myself out of the classroom in tears (although I don't remember if KAG followed me this time). The thing that kills me is that though Mr. Roach tried to summon me back (I ignored him), he summoned through his chuckles. I wonder now if the boy was reprimanded. Anyway, that was the 2nd of March. Most years have failed to provide misery as acute, but then only I spent only three of the seventeen since in high school.

(Maybe this all did happen in 10th grade, which would explain both MEWN and my remembering the date. For the month or two before I started to keep a diary, I scrawled days' landmarks in my monthly calendar (with dogs and cats, a Christmas present every year from DEW, who got such freebies from Purina). My first dated entry (in the back of my geometry notebook) was 19 April. Hmm. Perhaps when I started Speaking Confidentially I should have waited another month and three days.)

Whatever.

So anyway.

I continued escaping. I kept up with my "estate," drawing and designing and writing stories about it, until I was well away from middle school. In high school I had the library and my bike; in college I was happy; but in grad school I began to escape again. I designed a small, a very small, apartment in which I would live my solitary life. Very tidily arranged, with shelves in the closets (another Pride and Prejudice reference), my bear, books, and basil plants, and, having just read Possession for the first time, lots of green glass. I lost those drawings, or so I thought until a few years later when SEM found them (I had been living in his room in his mother's house) among his books, where I had apparently stuffed them one day for safekeeping. He teased me very gently about it.

I was living with RDC when SEM unearthed that escape route and I haven't invented any since.

From my sixth-grade dream house to my grad-school dream apartment. See? It all connects.

Oh, and tee hee hee, PSA has never been much of a small-town boy. Visiting me in Old Lyme, he demanded to know what that noise was (it was crickets). He visited me twice in Storrs, a far cry from his college town of Palo Alto. The last time I saw him was in Boulder, where he went for a conference of last year, over a weekend the Front Range had a winter storm--in April. He was not prepared. Anyway, he went to Stanford, he's a Fullbright scholar, and white male though he be, he has just been given a tenure-track position teaching Japanese literature.

In Bozeman, Montana, at Montana State University.