Reading: The God of Small Things

Moving: Walked 3.6 miles

Listening: Big Head Todd and the Monsters

Watching: the final episode of M*A*S*H. Again. Though we know it by heart, just as we know most of the regular episodes.

23 April 2000: Easter

At the crack of eleven, we staggered out to do homage to the Home Despot, a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week one. It was closed, thoroughly shut. Something about a guy dying a long time, or not dying--turns out no one's really sure.

So instead we grocery-shopped at Alfalfa's, which probably counts more atheists and pagans among its clientele than Home Despot. You'd think a hardware store would be a great place to go pick up men, but not this one--it's full of couples, many but not all breeding at a rapid clip.

At the counter, as I tucked chard and a fine piece of escolar into our canvas grocery bags, I noticed a large flower, actually a small sunflower, alone among the paper bags. I picked it up and smiled at it: sunflowers love to be smiled at. The cashier grinned at me: "You can have that if you want." It had fallen out of someone's arrangement and been left. About seven inches across, it drooped even on its thick stalk. That droop gave it the perfect Duchess's chin, and I put it on my shoulder. My shoulder feels lonely and weightless without a cockatiel on it, and since Blake steadfastly hates his harness, he cannot come out with us and I guess I should make do with sunflowers. My new shoulder buddy, I called it.

When we got home, I discovered that Blake does not like any buddy on my shoulder but himself. He huffed and launched at the interloper, wings spread and mandibles wide, ready for biting. So I put it safely in a beer bottle full of water. (I want vases.)

Something struck me as we carried the canvas bags into the house, a scene from a book. Frank Bonham's The Missing Persons League is set in the future, enough in the future that the father of a teenaged protagonist can say "way back in the '70s," which is when the book was published. It's a future where humans' trashing of the planet is nearly complete, and what I remember liking about the book was the hints about living conditions and how resourceful the protagonist is at running an illegal garden in his basement. Quite a while ago I remembered an anachronism that would have made sense to a '70s author: a police officer is filling out a form, rapidly and in computer symbols. He doesn't have a handheld computer, not even the data-input bit the lowliest UPS delivery person carries nowadays. I remember trying to explain that anomaly to RDC and he not understanding what I meant by "computer symbols." What I remembered while carrying the groceries was a scene where the boy is in a grocery store (to divert suspicion he has to pretend he eats the state-authorized swill) and has to juggle all the purchases home in his hands, as the store had run out of sacks.

I can understand an author in the '70s not foreseeing handheld computers, but reusable shopping bags? It has only been since, say, let me grasp for a time as I have no real idea, WWII and the explosion of suburbia that grocery stores used "disposable" paper then plastic sacks instead of the string bag, the basket, a box, to put groceries together.

I need to find that book. I wonder what else I'd notice.

---

As we watched M*A*S*H that night (see sidebar), I said that my favorite episode was the one where they needed the aorta, and RDC finished, "and Hawkeye had his hands inside him and they kept him on ice?" That's the one.
Also "Dreams," which has given me nightmares myself more than once.
"Plus the clock one," continued RDC.
I guess he really likes the aorta one.

Oh, so we're watching all the officers leaving--abandoning the enlisted men who continued to break down the camp presumably without supervision--and Col. Potter mounts Sophie, on his way to the orphanage. (It always bothered me that Sophie was always played by a different horse.) (And don't even mention one of the final regular episodes when they build a time capsule and Hawkeye contributes Radar's teddybear and it's a different bear. Radar's bear was old-fashioned and about as well-loved as the Velveteen Rabbit. The props dudes had obviously lost that bear, because the time capsule bear was both new and new-fashioned. Grrrr.) So anyway, Hawkeye and BJ salute Potter and he trots off and we both exclaim, "Sophie's a boy!"

Can't pull anything over on us, except it took us 17 years to notice.

M*A*S*H, even the final episode, isn't particularly Easterful. I couldn't find "The Ten Commandments" on anywhere, and I just missed the penguin scene in "Mary Poppins." Poop. Those two movies, plus egg-dyeing and chocolate, are my spring sacraments.