But Reading: The Hours

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

Watching: Dogma

Weird Thing: That "this special island" song from "South Pacific" appeared in my head and stayed there for several minutes before something or other that RDC was watching on the laptop had that on its soundtrack. Ooooooo.

3 July 2000: The week

How is it that nearly a whole week can elapse, collapse, between entries?

Later in the week I realized that my period had hit me so hard because I was coming down with some kind of intestinal bug. The less said about that the better. Except that I didn't eat much, not because I wasn't hungry but because I couldn't think of what I could eat that wouldn't exacerbate the problem. Blake was all upset because, not eating myself, I was just giving him dry cereal in the morning when he really prefers selecting his own flakes slightly soaked in soy milk directly from my bowl.

So. We say we're doing okay without television but we're lying. One night last week when it was either too hot or too slightly drizzly to eat on the patio, we took our supper downstairs (where our only indoor seating is) and looked at our meager stock of movies. "Peter's Friends" is a sentimental favorite and I put that in, but there on the muted screen was Robert Osbourne from TCM. I know the announcer's name on TCM: I'm a television addict.

I had taped "Being There" over "Peter's Friends," at RDC's request, I told him. RDC denied ever having heard of this movie. "Well you'd better have heard of it and you'd better like it if I taped over 'Peter Friend's.'" So we watched part of it, and RDC remembered that he'd read about it maybe in John Berger's Ways of Seeing.

But I miss "Peter's Friends." The first time we saw it, we had rented it to watch in our tenement near UConn. When we'd moved into Orchard Acres several months before, friends had given us an old couch, but now, in the humidity of August, the couch's past life as a dog bed had made it uninhabitable and we would soon get the futon. Anyway, the next evening we went for a walk around campus, talking about how much we liked the movie--and it is very rare for us to share movies--and we decided to go home and watch it again, not even a whole day later, and so we did go home and watch it again, with a stop at Dairy Mart to buy a Sara Lee chocolate cake for supper, and after we moved the television into the bedroom, away from the couch. (That might have been the first time we had chocolate cake for supper, and at the time, we said we could do so because we didn't have parents. Now we're older and married and we can have chocolate cake for supper because we don't have children.)

I'll need to get "Peter's Friends" somehow.

Then--I was talking about being a closet television addict--sometime this weekend RDC was watching clips of CNN on his laptop on the patio (wireless DSL! wahoooo!) while I read The Hours. I was reading, really, but distracted as ever by music or television especially when it's that voice! "Is that Martin Savidge?" It was. You know you're a CNN addict when it's been six weeks but you can still name the newscaster from a snippet of voice.

Also I was talking about RDC and I sharing movies, or not. Independently, we both liked "Harold and Maude," It's a Wonderful Life," and the Kenneth Branagh "Henry V" before we met. I introduced him to "Brazil," which he loves, and "Kafka," and he introduced me to "Dead Ringers," which despite having Jeremy Irons (like "Kafka") I hate hate hated. He likes "The Philadelphia Story" fine and I don't grumble too much about watching Woody Allen movies. Otherwise, "Pulp Fiction" and "Richard III" and not much else do we watch and rewatch together.

Speaking of Woody Allen, one of the lines in the trailer for "Small Time Crooks" has the onion farmer--which is what we call the actor whom Mia Sorvino wound up with in "Mighty Aphrodite," whoever he is--wearing his headlamp backwards "because it looks cool that way." RDC has no tolerance for backwards baseball caps, and so that line cracks him up. When he bought a headlamp to fix the pipes a couple of weeks ago, I asked him if he was going to wear it backward and it was one of those ohsorare occasions I made him laugh out loud.

Speaking of laughing out loud, as we moved into our house, HAO paused over the front stairs, which are painted white but also considerably scuffed. As HAO heard me behind her in the stairwell, she said, "I know how you can pay your mortgage." One of the scuffs on one of the stairs looks remotely like Jesus, if you squint and are the type to see faces in road signs and raisin buns. We could charge admission. Two weeks later when we took her to dinner in thanks, she checked the stairs for Jesus again. Meanwhile, I pointed outside into the light drizzle and saw two perfectly dry footprints on the front sidewalk. "Actually, Jesus is outside." Both RDC and HAO cracked up, which I think marks the first time in the almost four years I've known her that I've made both of them laugh simultaneously. (Jesus's footprints were from where RDC stood in his Birks waterproofing them that day.)

Speaking of slant rhymes, not that I was, no one I know appreciates stee's band name Sudden Infant Dance Syndrome and I haven't been able to think of how to introduce into conversation Modern Humorist's spoof on Ask Jeeves, "Ask Jeez, the Son of God."

Speaking of Modern Humorist, HAO has now read the first three Harry Potter's and is now midway through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius so finally someone else is able to appreciate this.

---

Saturday we strolled through the Cherry Creek Arts Festival. We haven't been there since our first Fourth here, four years ago. Last time our attitude "look at all the pretty things." This time, we were looking with intent for the house, not that we were in serious buying mode. Such a nice contrast. Though buying and furnishing a house has shown us heretofore unplumbed depths of marital accord, I think in decorating the house we are going to veer sharply. Craftsman brick bungalow, check; mission oak furniture, check; Russ Chatham trout prints vs. bucolic Impressionist landscapes, uncheck.

We were debating "Small Time Crooks" but wound up staying at home and having HAO and her friend Ben over for supper. We fed HAO a portabello mushroom cap and had pork ribs marinated in raspberry, chipotle, and sesame. HAO brought dessert. I asked them about the song whose fragment has been rattling around in my head for weeks. Ben knew what song I meant, but he didn't know, and HAO and RDC neither knew nor cared nor wanted anything but for Ben and I to stop singing.

Sunday the four of us went to Grand Lake. We got munchables at Alfalfa's, which fucked up HAO's sandwich and gave her a portabello mushroom cap sandwich instead of the Mediterranean vegetable thingie she had ordered, but she didn't want to wait for the clerk (whose guts were surely made of molasses) to make another.

There's a pattern emerging here.

When we got home, Ben and HAO stayed for supper again. We really don't eat this much meat ordinarily but RDC had wanted to be a carnivore and grill whenever he wanted to this weekend, so Saturday along with the ribs and two mushroom caps, he bought some ground bison. Of course, HAO had only eaten one mushroom the night before so guess what she had last night, for the third time in 24 hours.

We are bad hosts.

Grand Lake was great. There is a sort of biting fly there not quite as painful as a deerfly, and I have no love for jetskis, but both I can cheerfully put up with since they're inescapable at the one publicly accessible freshwater lake I can swim in in this state, nearly two hours from home. Sun, freezing cold water, mountains, forest.

The lakebed is rocky, not gravel but teetery stones from grapefruit to pumpkin size. Going in, I wade, lean, tip, wade, until the water's deep enough and the rocks absent enough that I can flop down without taking a stone in the liver. Getting out, I pull myself as close to shore as I can, until I fall and sit abruptly on a rock covered in algae and sediment. My bathing suit is white. This is a mistake I keep making.

Afterward, when I lay on my stomach, I kept a towel over my butt since my suit was filthy. As clouds rolled in and I figured I wouldn't swim anymore, I shucked my suit off under my big purple dress (what would I do without it?) and HAO wound the towel about her waist to protect herself from the flies. Then we started eating watermelon, and after dripping watermelon juice all over, HAO looked like she'd been in a knifefight. The walking wounded, we were.

Hao gets back to nature. Actually she just pulled the straps of her tank top off her shoulders--no tan lines for her. It's true I posed her with the sandwich box for a more lascivious picture, though.

Somehow we wound up with a boys' beach and a girls' beach. I don't think Ben is asleep, or dead, but he might have been.

Hao took the cover off her copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and discovered two things: the epigram impressed into the cover ("Mercy is not a cure/ Quiet has its own set of problems") and that it is a perfect match for her maroon and gray asthma inhaler.

We just escaped a surely freezing rainstorm but as we entered the west side of RMNP, the sun came back. We saw a moose cow and calf in the marshy bits along the Colorado River, and elk along the top of Trail Ridge Road--they spend summers on the tundra when the temperatures at lower elevations climb too high. And ground squirrels and chipmunks and a marmot. So that was a good first visit to the park for Ben.

Despite the rainstorm that drove us from Grand Lake, our crossing of Trail Ridge Road was beautiful.

Tomorrow the four of us are going to Blues Traveler at Red Rocks, from which we should be able to see four or maybe five fireworks displays.

Reading at the lake yesterday, HAO made notes in A Heartbreaking Work and I read The Hours. I really like the parallels Michael Cunningham draws between his characters and I'm looking forward to discussing it Wednesday, I hope. But this morning I started to read Taking Care of Terrific--which is making me homesick for Boston--because I'm sure I can finish The Hours before Wednesday (book group) plus Terrific, because Wednesday through Friday is reserved for rereading Harry Potter.

Oh, that's right, HAO and I talked about who is going to be offed in Goblet of Fire, the unlikeliness of Ron or Hermione and the probability (because it's our theory and therefore the best) of Hagrid. In almost eight hundred pages, somebody's gotta die.

Except maybe I won't finish Terrific tomorrow because we have to replace our leaking upstairs toilet. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Speaking of an almost 800-page children's book, with this book I shall not be surprised if Rowling trots down Jean Auel and Stephen's King's too-trodden path of the market being able to bear a longer book than the author's ideas, characters, or writing ability can manage.

However, unlike with King but just like with Auel, I'll be reading Rowling till she drops dead. I maybe shouldn't say that too loudly about Auel, because at her pace and her age, I wonder if we ever will get book six. But perhaps that's like not knowing what's up with Charles Wallace: Madeleine L'Engle might have deteriorated too much to do his story justice. I am going to be smote for saying such a thing.

Latest suggestions for the Invisible Library:

• Martin Amis's The Information has lots (but I have to start from the beginning again)
• Martin Amis's London Fields has a novelist. Clearly, I don't read as closely as I ought to, not remembering all this.
• Tony Fremont in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride has written two books, Four Lost Causes and Five Ambushes
• Ellen Conford's Alfred G. Graebner Memorial High School Handbook of Rules and Regulations, eponymous.
• In the envelope of instructions Milo finds for the Phantom Tollbooth (eponymous, Norton Juster) is "One (1) book of rules and traffic regulations, which may not be bent or broken."
• The Magic Book that Lucy finds on the Island of Voices in C.S. Lewis's Voyage of the "Dawn Treader."

And I am so ashamed--Dora had to remind me that Matthew Maddox writes a book in A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I remembered that he wrote two, anyway: Once More United and Horn of Joy.