Reading: The Professor and the Madman

Moving: 30' Precor elliptical, resistance 5, ramp 15 (the maximum), plus weights.

27 March 2000: If I'm going to say anything,

I'll have to write it with a pen first. Maybe I just need more application and discipline to learn to compose with a keyboard but the fact is when I need to ruminate on what I want to say, I want a pen. This is one of those traits in myself that I don't know whether to challenge or embrace.

I have a new reader who delights me (hi Joe!). Searching for John Perry Barlow, he found me, way back in the days I inconsistently titled my entries. He had never heard of on-line journals before and I gave him the run-down according to me. I've been meaning to write about that, about my perspective on the development of this genre. However, to write about online journals I want to use a pen. Sigh.

In the meantime I'll just tell a story. The Story of How Lisa Learned about Shriekback.

Christmas break freshling year a bunch of us visited TJZ in Fairfield for a few days. For one thing, she lived closest to New York, on the MetroNorth line, for another, she had a house big enough for four guests. Also, for most of freshling fall TJZ and I had been joined at the hip such that going home over Thanksgiving was extremely traumatic for us. For me, at least; she was my first and only bestest friend since fifth grade. PLT came down from the Danbury branch of MetroNorth and SEM and MCB picked me up in Old Lyme, traveling the a and b of a right triangle instead of the hypotenuse. Not having use of a car meant leaning on my friends considerably.

So we went to TJZ's, and from there to NYC. I think it was my first non-school trip to the city--no, I visited PSA in 12th grade, but that was Brooklyn. We did not go to the Met and we did not go to the Stock Exchange and we did not go to Trump Tower. We wandered around SoHo and visited the sister of a friend of TJZ's who was living in a shop window for a week for a cause I have long since forgotten. We walked Bleecker Street and roamed through Tower Records where I bought a Spyro Gyra and an Iggy Pop album. We ambled through Chinatown where TJZ and I bought two matching bowl-and-spoon sets with thoughts of rooming together the next year. (We both hove a sigh of relief that that plan never came to fruition.)

And we came back. I believe this is when I was introduced to the movies that explained so much about TJZ's and my three favorite boys. "Highlander." "Re-Animator." "Nightmare on Elm Street." The kung-fu spoof they made in high school. Speaking of which, channel-hopping Saturday night I saw a man in an underground parking garage and exclaimed "Wheeeee!" and RDC looked up in time to see the man throw a sword among the ducts in the ceiling and wrested the remote from my grasp. He claims "Highlander" is a porn movie with sword-play instead of sex, but I was proud he recognized it in such a short glimpse--with the considerable help of my "Wheeee!" and the sword as a hint.

The next day we all went home, and here our troubles began. PLT got safely on his train, but SEM and MCB and I faced 60 or so miles of I-95. Did I mention it was snowing hard? It's never just an hour trip, either, 60 miles or not. Going from Fairfield to Old Lyme means going through New Haven, which is always always always choked going over the Quinnipiac Bridge. Always and forevermore. MCB popped a Shriekback tape into the player and began to sing along. In falsetto. This was reasonable, since the song in question was "Those Pretty Things" which Shriekback sings in falsetto. MCB continued to sing, mostly under his breath, in falsetto, the whole way, guiding his huge boat of a Murkan car through snowblinded traffic.

All semester long I had complained about my mother in that fascinatingly interesting manner that I possessed as a resentful late teen. She was legendary. Everyone knew that when I called home, as I was expected to do every couple of weeks, I needed TJZ to hold my hand. Now I wanted to prove that my assertions were true. "C'mon in and just say hi," I coaxed. "She'll be uncomfortable just exchanging greetings."
"Why, in that case," SEM queried reasonably, "would we want to meet her?"
Because I wanted people to know it was true! Because it would amuse me! Little did I know how accurate a picture they would get.

Whether they wanted to meet her was a moot point. As MCB swung the (Buick?) into the driveway, my mother appeared in the (never-used) front door. Clad in her woolly pajamas, she shouted from the stoop that the boys would have to come in and were not allowed to continue the 45 miles to Storrs.
SEM's mother had called during our trek and asked my mother please to put the boys up for the night. I would love to know how my mother responded to that request. That the drive was dangerous she could not deny, especially according to her own standards. But to host two unknown young men overnight, whether known to and friends of her daughter or not, she did not like. All she knew was that NBM had made a reasonable request that she resented, and she would make SEM and MCB, whose choice it was not, suffer for it.

As I recall it was already past 7:00 by the time we got there, and by the time telephone calls home were placed and an interminable, uncomfortable supper consumed, it was nearly 9:00 and we wanted to go to bed. My mother was reluctant for that to happen. Why should anyone our age go to bed at such an hour? It must be because we wanted to have sex upstairs. It could have nothing to do with the fact that we'd been up to the wee hours watching movies the night before, or that MCB had driven 60 miles in more than two and perhaps three very stressful hours, or that staying downstairs with her was unfathomable.

MCB took CLH's bed and SEM had to be put up on the folding cot in CLH's room. I would happily have shared my twin with SEM but I wouldn't have put it past my mother to come upstairs (which she almost never did) at 5:00 a.m. to check. I don't remember why I didn't take the cot myself and set it up in the living room. SEM accepted the cot with the grace of a man who wants to sleep because in sleep he can forget his present, and thus we slept.

Until 7:00 the next morning when my mother bellowed up the stairs that we all three of us were to come downstairs immediately and shovel the driveway. It was our fault it had snowed, of course, and therefore our responsibility to remove every trace of it from her sight. I think she blamed us as well for the fact that she did not move her car to the top of the driveway as was her wont during snowstorms, to minimize her pre-work snow-removal. Why she didn't move her car after our arrival, I cannot say.

Ten minutes later SEM and I were in the driveway shoveling. MCB did not make an appearance, figuring that however my mother perceived him would not matter a particle, since they would never meet again in life, not if he saw her first. SEM, ever the accommodating one, shoveled, because he perceived it would make life easier for me.

She trundled off to work, MCB miraculously directly thereafter awoke, and they were off soon, oh yes very soon. NBM sent my mother flowers that day, to thank her for her hospitality. I bore my mother's vociferous complaints and lectures about how such a pleasure-trip (which necessitated her being put upon) had been unnecessary, for the last fortnight of Christmas break.

However immature I was to gripe about my mother in public, however much I should have just got over her and been done with it and not inflicted my grievances on my friends, no one ever again thought I was exaggerating. I should still just get over her. This happened over 13 years ago: I don't still resent her for this incident. She was not used to guests at all, let alone two unannounced unknown overnight male ones; and most of a baked chicken was eaten in one meal instead of over two or three days; and she didn't much like being put upon by a stranger, even a mother-peer, or the guilt that accompanied NBM's perfectly reasonable request. It illustrates her and our relationship well, and talking with Joe about how we discovered our favorites--he saw Kate Bush on SNL and had no idea who it was--reminded me.

I like Shriekback anyway.

---

Speaking of hospitality. Did I mention we just, like three weeks ago just, got rid of our futon? RDC works out of the house enough that he really wanted more office space, and he would use desk space a lot more than we used the futon. Except for SEM (who loves me anyway) and Skip in December, we haven't had an overnight guest in the year we've lived in this apartment. So soon after sunset a few Saturdays ago, we set up the futon on its frame, neatly and appealing, near the dumpster. I had made noises about bringing it to Goodwill, but the Co-op delivered the thing to our Connecticut tenement in 1993. It wouldn't have fit in the Terrapin then and it wouldn't fit in Cassidy now. We figured someone in this complex would like it. I wanted to bring it to our neighbors a few doors down, who, I've noticed, sleep on mattresses on the floor. But I figured that would be unsubtle.

I nipped out a few hours later that night. It was gone. Good: it was mostly serviceable. It didn't stay up on its own very well, had compressed along its fold and slouched rather, and I hadn't lain on it straightened out as a bed in several years--the only time we used it as a bed was after RDC broke his collarbone, in 1995. But I suppose someone appreciates it.

So, less than a month later, we have KMJ driving through from Toronto to an unspecified somewhere in Arizona, and the best we can offer is the couch. Which, I can attest, is divinely comfortable, but it is not in its own room. It's in the living room, with Blake, instead of being in a study with a door to close and private bathroom, and I get up at 6:00 in the morning. So does Blake.

Unlike my mother, however, I can offer a complete set of sheets, enough blankets, clean towels, and pillows. And conversation and books. And no resentment, even if it snows (as it might).