Reading: Bud, not Buddy

Moving: nope

House: painted trim again

13 June 2000: what really happened

This is the beginning of my entry, based on what I jotted in my DayRunner this morning:

Six years ago, looking for a birthday present for his mother, RDC and I found me a perfect dress. I said no, because it was about four times more than I usually spend on a dress. Well, twice: back then I shopped more at Express than at Ross. He insisted, and he was right. A very dark teal, very blue but distinctly teal, linen, buttons down the front, no waist, sleeveless, straight and unadorned from shoulders to hem except it's cut for a waist. I love it. It became my Occasion dress, and fifteen months later we moved to Denver and became gobstoppingly poor and had no Occasions. I've never worn it to work because it is an Occasion dress (to me). I've worn it perhaps a half-dozen times in a half-dozen years, which is a crying shame.

Until this morning. Despite three new dresses two weeks ago, I was thinking I had nothing to wear. I decided this dress wasn't too revealing for work (its vee is quite modest) and I no longer have to reserve it for an Occasion. I pulled it out of the garment bag it shares with my two real Occasion dresses (one perfect and another less than perfect Little Black Dresses) and buttoned it up. I looked at my earring board and immediately pulled from it a pair of earrings I wear only with this dress.

In 1994, Nisou and I loved beads (still do, but that was the last year we were in close proximity). We often went to bead stores with another friend. In June of that year, in Newport with Ulla and Janet, I held up my hands as blinders to shield Nisou, a ploy that worked exactly as I wished: anxious to see whatever I didn't want her to see, she ducked my hands and eluded us three and whooped into a Beadworks where we spent several happy minutes puttering. I had just acquired this dress and Nisou, being herself, made me a pair of blue and green beaded earrings to wear with it.

So there I was at my earring board, reaching without hesitation for Nisou's earrings. But there's another pair of earrings there that would go with the dress, silver tear drops inset with iridescent, aquamarine paua shell. I looked at them and smiled, but I left those, a present from SEB, where they were. I wore Nisou's with my new amethyst studs.

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We woke in the wee hours to a house filled with the smell of smoke. RDC got up to look for our own fire but I was sure it was the Bailey one and stayed in bed. It was. After interrupted, restive sleep, I didn't walk to work. At the bus stop I saw someone's front page as he tried to tame his paper in the stiff breeze. Two fires: another, camper-set, in Larimer County, between Estes Park and Loveland. From Dot Org we can see only southwest, not northwest, and during staff meeting we were all glancing out the window. The wind continued, and I wondered if the wind had turned the fire back on itself, because I could see no smoke. Unfortunately, the wind was only clearing the smoke away as it fanned the blaze. Cool, it perhaps wasn't as unhelpful as a hot dry Santa Ana wind, but wind it was. Cool or hot it hindered containment efforts.

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But this is what really happened:

I went to the library at lunch, returned unread John Fowles's Mantissa and Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton, and passed through the children's room on the way to the YA section. The only book I wanted was The Hero and the Crown. Oh yes, and Bud, Not Buddy. On the shelf over Christopher Paul Curtis I found two other Sharon Creech books, Chasing Redbird and The Wanderer. And then I headed for the YA section and the only book I wanted. I walked alongside a man holding a laundry basket.

"Washing your books?" I asked.

"Oh yes, it's the thing to do these days; who has time for reading?"

So we had a goofy conversation about that, which amused me, and both turned into the YA stacks. I browsed a bit before the Ms, and when I saw him, an adult man, pull a book from the YA shelf, I had to know. I peered into his basket, apologizing that I always like to know what people are reading. He had two by Brock Cole. He asked if I knew that author, and I said no, but that name was familiar. I looked at Cole's shelf and found another book from the School Library Journal's list that I wanted to read. "Aha!" I thanked the man, adding The Goats to my stack. Also Avi's True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle.

He told me that Katherine Paterson has written that the bridge to Terabithia isn't Leslie and Jesse's metaphorical bridging of two worlds to friendship or anything but the quite tangible bridge Jesse builds for his younger sister at the end, so that the adventures can continue, to pass on the memories. I told him about discovering Robin McKinley. He said he wanted Brock Cole for his strong female characters, for a class he's teaching in Douglas County--teaching teachers of reading.

Eventually, I stuck my hand out. "I'm Lisa." "I'm Tony, and sometimes I work here, too." A light dawned: "You're the fellow who gave the raccoon Rascal to read!" I realized. A couple days later last October, looking for children's books again, I had talked to the librarian who had given the raccoon additional books. This was he. As soon as Tony said he'd worked in DPL, I--this never happens! I can barely distinguish members of my own family--realized, six months later, that this was the same man.

We chatted some more about Christopher Paul Curtis and suddenly he asked, prefacing his question with an apology about prying, "So what do you do?"

God I hate that question. I answered without apology, "I'm a staff assistant at a research organization." He composed his face. I knew what was coming. He wanted to restrain himself but, like me in more ways than one, his restraint shows and belies the effort and the thought. In fact the whole performance felt familiar. I said, "You asked me that before."

"Oh...It's just that you're so well-read, and you love to read, so unlike most librarians." He continued in the same vein for some minutes.

Let me just throw myself under a truck, okay? since my life is so obviously without purpose.

I have just reconnected with a friend whom I for more than ten years considered an ex-friend. The last books we shared together were the Prydain Cycle. I remember sitting in my car after returning her to her parents' house the last weekend and making plans for our next munchings and crunchings and knowing that that probably wouldn't happen. (It didn't.) The last time I read Bridge to Terabithia was the first time I realized that in addition to Narnia Leslie also introduces Jesse to Prydain. SEBB, this friend, is a reference librarian at a college. Dora, author of Words Diminish, is seven years younger than I, reads a slew of children's books too, and has taught high school English.

Sigh.

So here I am. In addition to the Christopher Paul Curtis, the two Creechs, the Avi, and The Goats, I got the one book I was allotting myself, The Hero and the Crown. I finished Amsterdam, a recent Booker winner, this weekend, and yesterday reread All the Pretty Horses because it's so amazing, and have been reading Miss Wyoming, garden books, home improvement books, and books about bungalows and Craftsman design. Now I have my five children's books, though.

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This is what else happened:

I listened to voicemail when I got back to work. HAO and her mother, visiting from Oklahoma, had just left the library heading for the Mint "but don't panic, we didn't have plans and you didn't blow us off but you have to call me on the cell and tell me I'm right: didn't I bring Mom downtown the last time she visited and didn't we get you from your office and didn't we three have lunch at that deli place?"

I called the cell. "So how much does your mom look like a six foot four gangly man with big ears?" Hao and Ben had come downtown when he drove out to bring her home last year, which is when we three ate at the Market. I've met her mom twice: the first time, the three of us and another visiting friend had black-and-tans at the Wynkoop (downtown but no bus involved) and the second time we met at the Nature Reserve before we went for a walk (no downtown and no bus at all). Hao conceded, "Okay, Mom, you don't have Alzheimer's."

A few minutes later, she called again. "I'm sorry to bother you at work and all but where's the Mint?"

I swallowed my guffaw of abusive laughter. Picture a horizontal rectangle. Call it, oh, off the top of my head, Civic Center Park. At the east end is the state capitol, along the south side are the library and the museum, and on the west side is the City and County Building. Behind the C&C is the Mint. There are signs, even. They had walked around the C&C without spotting the Mint (which takes up the entire next block and is surrounded by a black iron fence of the type you'd expect a mint to be bounded by). Now they were back on the 16th Street Mall, in front of the Adam's Mark. I headed them back toward the C&C, called up a Mapquest map, and gophered out the window again. I could probably nearly see them from where I was. "The Mint is directly behind the City and County Building, between Bannock and Cherokee. It's got a red tile roof and a big ol' flag flapping at the corner closest to you."

Okay, Hao, I'll stop now.

They did find it but took one of the last tours when few of the coining machines were being operated. HAO told me that Susan B. Anthony dollars were being sold in the gift shop for eighteen bucks apiece. Quarters, when you use public laundry facilities, are worth more than twenty-five cents. Susan B. Anthony coins have never been worth a whole dollar, let alone eighteen.

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So. I foresee a lot of Thai food in my future. We used to live within a quarter mile of a Safeway and less than a mile from a King Soopers. No more. I used the car to fetch frozen veggies to make buddy chow, picked up Tommy's Thai, and came home to eat on the porch in the teeth of the wind. RDC read something or other and I read Bud, not Buddy. Our apricot tree is so dry that when I went to move the hose to the other tree (whose species I know not), I didn't find the sopping earth I expected. The tree had drunk all the water up so at least the earth is not hardpan yet. Instead of moving it to the next tree, I just shifted the hose to the other side of the apricot and was still leaning over (wearing my short house dress) when I realized I was being videotaped, from behind. I stood up quick. HAO and her mother are taping Betty's Denver Journey.

Happily, she didn't want to tape inside the house. I gave them the tour ("and there, behind the lovely laminate bookcases on their sides, is our fireplace with its built-in shelves..." kind of like a sheep in a box) and Hao laughed as once again, I pointed out the California Cooler bit of the pantry. (It's got two vents to the outside, long since blocked off, at its top and bottom, to help keep the food cool, and the shelves are the original slotted ones to facilitate airflow. I like it.) Hao said the house looks better than the last time she saw it, which was two weeks ago when she helped us move in. I introduced Betty to my live-in carpenter, who was hammering shoe molding into his study. They both love the bedroom (and noticed that it matches my dress). I showed them the Scariest Thing Ever, which is the dustmop. Blake fluttered and huffed appropriately. Then he fell in love with Betty's red nailpolish, so we grabbed some cookies and left.

Betty started taping again once we got into the park, and Hao reminded her, "Where are you?" and Betty looked up. "I don't know." "City Park," I spoke to the camera, and then failed to do a fake history of the park. I failed because I cannot invent like that off the top of my head. We saw some bunnies and heard the peacocks and looked at the goslings of various ages. At the museum, we saw the "Dolphins" IMAX. It included regular, non-IMAX footage someone risked his own life to film of dolphin slaughter from tuna boats and I was glad I've always hated tunafish. I still eat other fish, though, and the other kind of tuna. Sigh.

It was still light out when the movie ended at 8:50, light enough by far to walk home safely. So we did. I love summer. They left, and afterward RDC and I sat up in bed, reading, petting Blake's head, and eating the rest of the cookies along with strawberries, which was just fantastic. And with the continuing wind, it was cool enough to sleep under the comforter. Bliss.

My own mother came to Denver once, for a week and nearly four years ago. I just had met HAO, only once, and I think my mother visited before I invited myself over to HAO's to hurl my Aerobie at her, so they have never met. They've spoken on the phone, though: my mother called when HAO was Blake-sitting once. I, probably 30 by this point, hadn't told my mother, two thousand miles away, that we were going away for a whole weekend, so at first, registering a female voice and (I am convinced) not hearing well enough to distinguish HAO's voice from mine, my mother just rattled on, until HAO could interrupt her and say "I'm not Lisa," at which point my mother decided she was a phone-answering burglar.