Reading: The Hero and the Crown

Moving: swam 1.1K

House: unpacked some books, bought some flowers

21 June 2000: Solstice

"Sometimes we live no particular way but our own
Sometimes we visit your country and live in your homes
Sometimes we ride on your horses
Sometimes we walk alone
Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own."

One of my favorite pieces of music, right up there with Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" is the Without a Net version of "Eyes of the World" with Branford Marsalis on sax. Yesterday, painting, I was suddenly consumed with a need to hear it. I scampered downstairs to where most of the CDs are still taped into their crates. I found the case of Without a Net empty. I skedaddled back upstairs to the stash that came to the house with similarly vital things like the water filter and toilet paper and I found the disc itself in a case RDC keeps for the car. I spun. I danced. Blake bopped his head. The heart has its beaches, its homeland, and thoughts of its own...the heart has its seasons, its evenings, and songs of its own.

In 1998, on a visit with TJZ to HEBD, the latter asked me about RDC, whom she had never met. It didn't take me long to mention the Grateful Dead, perhaps because we were in Saugerties, New York. Her husband choked, asking, "Do you know what one Deadhead said to the other Deadhead when the pot ran out?"

It's not an original joke. I was able to answer, "Dude, this music sucks!" and to reflect that I would not have so deliberately insulted someone I barely knew. (I prefer to insult accidentally, stupidly, or carelessly, and I'm quite good at it.)

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Lynette linked to the Invisible Library, a catalog of books that exist only in other books. Harry Potter's text books, A Child's History of Arrakis, they're all there.

I sent the URL to my pals, at the time able to think of one contribution, the book in Seven-Day Magic that writes itself as the four children read it. It's seven-day magic because that's the term of the library loan.

But then I thought of more and contributed them all to the cataloger:

• In Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, Aerin reads a history of Damar.
• Lemprière writes a dictionary in Lawrence Norfolk's Lemprière's Dictionary, but I don't think he finishes it.
• This doesn't really count, but The Handmaid's Tale is Offred's narrative on a series of audiotapes that a historian later transcribes.
• And this shouldn't count, because I should be ashamed that I ever read such a book let alone remember its details, but in ??? Conran's Lace, the character Kate writes three bestsellers, one of which is titled One Woman's War.
• Jo March writes a bunch of stories in Little Women, but I don't think a full-length book (only in the most recent cinematization does Jo actually write Little Women).
• Speaking of books that are themselves, at the end of The Outsiders, it becomes evident that Ponyboy has written his own story.
• Goldstein's book, the history that Winston Smith reads in Nineteen Eighty-Four that explains what's really happened.
• I'd have to read A.S. Byatt's Possession again to get Ash's and Lamotte's titles, but the cataloger's already working on those. Easier is the book Babbletower: A Tale for the Children of Our Time by Jude Mason in Byatt's The Babel Tower.

So anyway, everyone except me has been in touch with MCB. After freshling year, we weren't particularly friends, and you, PLT, can stop making vacuum-cleaner noises now. I've had his email address from others' recipient lists, though, and for the invisible library, I finally had a good excuse to use it. And he wrote back. So that's it: I am once again in touch with everyone from first semester. SLH and NCS came along second semester and SSP seventh and others elsewhen, but TJZ's wedding should be the Compleat Reunion of First Semester.

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A beautiful, beautiful day. I walked out to buy stamps and mail my change-of-address cards and CLH's present. I bought a raspberry Jamba Juice and sat in the sun reading The Hero and the Crown. I came home and went for a swim under the flawless blue sky. I sat on the porch swing with Blake (not on the porch swing) and read until he got cold or scared or whatever it was that made him whiny. I did not go into the park to watch the solstice sunset over the mountains, but I was with my own buddy, in my own house, with my own (library) book, and that was enough for today. Even if today wasn't really solstice, it was the 21st, which is when I, regimental librarian that I am, remember it.