Reading: Still Life. New York Times Book Review. Also the menu at an Indian restaurant, Saffron

Moving: strolling up and down Newbury Street

Listening: plane thrumming

Learning: how much Newbury Street has changed, and hasn't changed, in four years.

22 October 2000: Day after

After checking out of the wretched Holiday Inn Express, we returned to the manor for breakfast. The day before, my mother said she didn't find the hotel as scary as I'd claimed, but I say I am no longer a grad student road-tripping to Dead shows but someone who wants a little luxury on her weekend away and I Don't Like It. Seeing the Industrial Plant while approaching on I-395, seeing only two signs on the exit ramp (one lodging establishment and one industrial plant), finding a ripped-up road underfoot, and (for RDC) patronizing a restaurant that didn't serve espresso (the poor dear) whose patrons thought that two 7.5% tips would total 15% made it scary enough.

But anyway, it was behind us.

I was back in my suit, a fact that didn't escape EJB's mother. She said, "You look like you're going to work!" and I said that I had indeed traveled from work. She'd already seen me in the same dress, the violet jersey, two days running. I hope she assumed I had limited luggage space. RDC told me later I'd probably embarrassed her, which I hadn't meant to do, and had compounded that by catching her in another faux pas before the wedding--she introduced me to a cousin or someone as "Lisa Hislastname" and I gave my own name, smiling at first her and then the cousin. It's a reasonable mistake to make, and I hope I didn't sound peeved (because I wasn't), but I do like people to know my own name.

Which is why the place cards were very interesting to me. The wedding invitation, my bridal shower invitation, and the thank-you for the bridal shower gift, all came addressed to Mrs. LJH, which I think is just the goofiest gaffe. If I omitted to change my name, I'd say it's a given my title is Ms. I consider it a major blow to feminism for a woman (presumably TEM addressed her own thank-you cards, if not the two invitations) to assume Mrs. as the proper title for a married woman, and even for a married woman who didn't change her name.

So before the ceremony when I found the head table to leave my purse and shawl, I did deliberately notice the place cards. Many were Mr. & Mrs. Firstname Lastname. RDC's and mine was Mr. Firstname Lastname and Ms. LJH, and I smiled. But that is not the end of the story, oh no. The head table comprised the bride and groom, matron of honor and her husband (neither of whom I had met before and both of whom I liked very much), EJB's sister and her boyfriend, and TEMB's brother. (Parenthetically, I thought it very convenient that the siblings balanced so neatly.) The brother was seated next to me and he asked his question as tactfully as he could. He observed that my name was different, and I agreed monosyllabicallly, and he asked, "...and the reason for that would be...?"

I paused, then plunged. "Because it's my name. It's always been my name. I can't imagine having a different one. Names and naming are vitally important to me; I always like to know why and how people name their dogs and children and boats," I grinned at EJB, because

--two years ago when we sailed with him and TEM, I asked what the boat's name was. EJB asked if TEM had put me up to asking that, because she was after him to paint the name (Sea Breeze or Cool Breeze, I forget) on the transom. No, I'd asked it on my own, because I wanted to know the reason behind the name (and why it wasn't on the transom). (I guess it wasn't a very interesting reason, which I why I can't remember whether Sea or Cool.)--

"...and for me, to change my name would be [here I omitted to say "a stupid remnant of how a woman's identity is stripped from her and how she's subsumed from one patriarchal structure into another"] really to change my identity, my personality. My surname's the only part of my name I've ever really liked--Lisa's so common and Joyce is squicky."

He nodded and that was that. I don't know if he considered my reasons valid (for myself) or if he thought I had proved myself too much of a rabid feminazi to pursue the topic.

The bride and groom ate quickly in order to commence mandatory mingling, so none of us stayed at the table for very long. In the great five-minutes-later rule that guides my life, I wondered if I should have given as my reason instead the fact that I see no reasonable purpose in changing. But then I figured that that sounded about as antagonistic as I thought it sounded, and that it was better to have given actual reasons than merely to have asserted there was no reason to change, rather than coming up with reasons not to change. I took advantage of being alone at the table with RDC to ask whether I had sounded as fed up as I felt (he said no) and to confirm that I was right not to wax sarcastic at the man (yes).

And I bet if I had a tedious name like Smith, that changing it to something interesting like RDC's name would have been tempting, and that if I had an unusual and hard to spell and pronounce name like his, I would have been glad to marry a man named Smith and take his name. TEMB, with an albatross of a rare birth name very difficult to spell and pronounce, took the B gladly.

So anyway. After I embarrassed EJB's mother possibly twice by agreeing that yes, I looked like I was going to work (but who was tactless first, for mentioning it? Does that count? I never know), we had breakfast. Then everyone said goodbye to the bridal couple about ninety times, except RDC and me. And then the four of us drove to Boston.

I never did successfully get in touch with my sister at home or at work, and Jessie told me her phone number probably mostly because it spells something nonsensical rather than to invite me to call her (so I promptly forgot it), and besides I was still being the Dutiful Spouse of the Best Man. We strolled up and down Newbury Street to CLH's restaurant, which doesn't serve lunch either at all or on weekends, but whither they considered returning for supper before their 9:00 flight (if they did, CLH would have told me if they'd connected, and she didn't, so maybe they went somewhere else). We had lunch at Saffron on Newbury and Hereford (or Gloucester? I think Hereford), which was yummy. And then RDC and I scampered off to Logan.

I left the floral arrangement I had been given on Alamao's shuttle bus. The important thing for me to carry was my grandmother's painting.

In between haranguing me for shedding hair on the hotel floor and wearing heathenish thigh-highs and generally acting like I speak a totally different language than hers, my mother showed me some of my grandmother's stuff she's unearthed. This is what I want, Granny's crafts, her ceramics, her paintings, her little wooden figurines that she decorated. I tucked a bunch of stuff into my suitcase and hoped it wouldn't get smashed, and I carried a painting on a 2'x6" beveled piece of wood. I don't know that Granny ever painted on canvas, or much. This is a harbor view, mostly slate blue and reds and browns. RDC asked if it was drawn from life and I think probably certainly it was. Of a summer day when I was a child, my grandmother would often come and fetch me and we'd drive somewhere or other on the coast and she'd paint or do needlepoint and I'd wander and explore and color.

RDC had already jumped up and down on his suitcase to smash his parka in the outside pocket, to make it fit in the carryon space. Then he remembered his Palm Pilot was in there too and he got very quiet (but it was okay). He had no room, and besides the painting was too long even for the medium suitcase he'd taken to Vancouver and the wedding. So I swaddled it in my slate blue fleece jacket and hoped it looked more like a jacket held awkwardly than a poorly concealed weapon. It was also a third carryon item.

I loooove flying with a Premier member, because such folks board with first class. I would stow my wheelie above and my knapsack and painting under the seat in front of me. Or so went the plan. Our seats were in Economy Plus, and ask me how much I love that extra leg room, in the row behind the bulkhead. We had an overhead bin to share with the bulkhead folks who had neither under the seats in front of them nor an overhead bin, but our row of three faced the back of a row of two. I was at the window, behind the emergency door. I had no seat in front of me either. I asked RDC (on the aisle) to stow my knapsack overhead as well, and tried not to feel guilty for using the overhead for both pieces of carry-on, though by the airline's own rules that's how it had to be. I slid the painting in my jacket between the seat and the wall. I figured no attendant would make me stow my jacket and thus discover the wooden painting, and none did. The only difficulty was that when I finished Still Life, I had nothing to read. RDC handed me a pen and I completed the crossword in Hemispheres. Then I noticed the man in bulkhead had been dropping sections of the Sunday New York Times on the floor beside him (to facilitate quick, slippery egress through the emergency hatch) and so I asked him if i could read his paper. I certainly could. So I read the book review and bits of the magazine--which reminds me, I want to track down last week's magazine for William Safire's column, and why does such a conservative man have to write so well about language and be so prescriptivist I have to agree with him?--and tried to do that crossword, at which I was much less successful.

This flight made me more nervous than I have ever been on a plane. I don't know why. But it went fine. The plane banked out over Boston Harbor far enough for me to see Cape Cod and Provincetown, and then I watched Massachusetts slip away beneath me, looked unsuccessfully for Mt. Monadnock, saw the Connecticut River with I-91 alongside it, then the Hudson, and then glimpsed the St. Lawrence as a silver streak in the sunset, and Lake Ontario, and skipping Lake Erie to Georgian Bay, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, and so home. Aisle seats, ha!

This time, a shuttle for Mt. Elbert showed up immediately. I remembered exactly where I left the car and we found that without incident. And luckily the city takes plastic now since the addresses on my license and checks don't match. And so we came home.

In the morning I scampered out to fetch Blake. I could hear him yelling from the reception area as a technician brought him from the boarding room through the hospital area to the front. He is so much louder than any other male cockatiel I've ever heard, and his scream is a mangled "PRE-ii-IRD." Very pleasant. In the past year we found a tape we made of Percy one day. He, too, would yell when he heard our car come up. His yell, like that of the other male cockatiel in the waiting area and like that of every other 'tiel I've heard yell, is loud and insistent but not nearly as piercing or unpleasant as my buddy's. I'm so proud. He can say "pretty bird" nicely, when he wants to.