Reading: Rose Daughter

Moving: 150 crunches and walked 2.7 miles

Watching: Olympics, natch

Learning: After WWI, the new leader of non-Austro-Hungarian-Empire Turkey told Australia and New Zealand that the cannon-fodder ANZAC troops, whom the Brits had positioned for slaughter to save their own, were now also the sons of Turkey, and would be honored so. (Too bad they can't be as nice about Cyprus.)

15 September 2000: Percy

I walked to work yesterday and this morning. I borrowed Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil from the library in the first week of August (I live to renew books). This morning I started tape 7. That means I've walked to work 13 times in six weeks. Maybe 15, because there were the two mornings I walked reading The Archivist. That's pitiful. And I haven't Nordic Tracked yet. When I finally saw a doctor at the end of August, I weighed 141. I figured I'd lost about 10 pounds of water. If I'm going to mainline Olympics--I was looking for large-bore IV needles this morning--I should do so from the track. In that spirit, I also did 150 crunches this morning, for the first time in longer than I can remember. I was going to be fit and trim--perhaps I should eat dog food--for October, for the two weddings and the Hallowe'en costume I envisioned. Ah ha ha, no. Oh well.

Even if exercise, such as it is, didn't make me feel better--which it does--this morning would have perked me up anyway. I left the house thrice and returned thither twice, once for a bra and once for the next tape. After that I stopped being stupid until after I got to work, when I didn't understand what Dora meant by "TWA," as if Three-Way Action (which I abbreviate 3WA) weren't the big time-suckage it is for me too. I just enjoyed the walk.

When I finally got away from the house and walked west, I came in view of the moon arced far to the west, just beginning to wane. Now that the moon has swung farther south for winter, we get moonlight in the house. Moonlight is extremely healthful. I'm glad we put the bed where it is, against a wall, so nothing blocks the light and air and the getting very close to the windows, but one day I'd like to sleep with moonlight on my bed again.

At East High, I stopped to watch a murder of crows. They were foraging for snack scraps on a metal bleacher next to a baseball diamond. We often tease Blake for making so much noise when he walks, despite his weighing such a piddling 80 grams. Perhaps we should shut up, considering how the wood floors creak under us. (Maybe they won't after there's furniture on them.) These crows pinged the metal with their talons and sproinged whole benches at once with their weight, particularly as they hopped from one to the next, down to a footrest and up a little to the next lower bench. Then a student squeezed through the chainlink fence at the corner to shortcut to the west (and only?) entrance of the school--since I guess they're not allowed to go in through the service doors on the east side--and noticed me watching through the fence. I indicated the crows to explain my loitering, and he turned around and squeezed back outside the fence, saying those "things" scared him. Why people raise children in cities I don't know. Of course, my sister was raised exactly where I was, and she's afraid of all birds. A mystery.

Anyway, a few blocks later I stopped to snuff the agastache shrub, carefully selecting shoots that didn't have bees droning around. Walking, I saw, for the first time, a resident (and his dog) in the front yard, so I told him I loved his agastache and have been snorting it for weeks. He offered me a cutting from it! How kind, and to a perfect stranger (except we did introduce ourselves). That abundant plant is only three years old, he said, and it was just about that big last year. And Beth says they're easy to grow, so I'm hopeful.

Speaking of plants, the corn plant I inherited from Verm's wife is droopy. Certainly when I first met it, it held its leaves more perkily. I did ask Verm's wife if she fed it--and she said only annually, and I'm sure it gets more sun in my sunroom than it did in their house, where it stood in a corner on the wall opposite the windows. I like it, but I don't talk to it; maybe I should, like Calvin to his philodendrons. (Were they philodendrons?) (No, he got the idea with an article about philodendrons, but he himself planted beans.) I read somewhere that if your plant's leaves are brown around the edges, you're overwatering them. Confession time: how accurate can that advice be? I can't vouch for it, because where I read it was Judy Blume's Forever, when Michael first takes Katherine to his sister's apartment. These leaves are edged with brown. Since watering is really the only care I know to bestow on a plant, perhaps I've been slightly zealous. I'll ease up.

Hmm, then what happened on my walk? Of course: then I saw magpies. I don't think I saw one yesterday. As I passed the playing field of an elementary school, I saw a magpie burying a morsel. Do they bury, like squirrels? It sure looks like it. Earlier this summer I saw magpies burying cherries in my backyard, for later, presumably, or maybe because they want me to grow more cherry trees. This is not the first time I've seen a magpie industriously planting a crust of bread.

A few blocks later I overtook a woman walking her beagle. The dog was dragging along what I assumed was its blanket, and I asked the woman if that was the dog's best and favoritest toy. She said no, Maggie Jo had just picked it up from under a tree. I looked again, and it was a shirt. With bloodstains. "I think there's blood on it," I told her. "Oh!" The woman picked it up and threw it away (I maybe would have kicked it, myself). "Thanks for saying something--I never looked and wouldn't've noticed." My good deed of the day.

It wasn't until I got to work and changed my voicemail message that I realized the date. Again, 2000 after Leap Day has had the same calendar as 1995. Today, Friday the 15th of September, five years ago, Percy died, alone in an incubator in a veterinary emergency ward.

I'm okay. I have Blake. We can still whistle Percy's particular song--I hope we never forget that merry, adoring little tune--and Blake doesn't tilt his head against things and sing to them as Percy did, but Blake's a good buddy in his very own ways. He's developed this nice little bow, an all-occasion, just 'cause he's happy kind of bow. All the time, like the third-place winner in "The Sound of Music." If only Blake could keep a nice tail. I haven't opened the envelope of Percy's tail feathers in over a year, and I try not to regret the several I gave away during his lifetime. I'm better, really I am.

Can I read 400 pages by 7:30 tomorrow? I'm going to try. What dining room? Does it want paint? What Olympics? What men's 400m butterfly?