Reading: Biographer's Tale

Moving: 20'12" and 2.0 miles today

Listening: KBCO

Watching: "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels"

Learning: what's happening with a former high school classmate

25 October 2000: Wednesday

Today (Wednesday), at lunch we had a brown bag session about all the referenda, initiatives, and whatnot on the ballot. I love working at such a useful place, with knowledgable people and a purpose. Explaining one of the revenue issues, Lou bungled "statutory" and "constitutional" and uttered "statitutional" and we all cracked up. A new way to write law, statitutionally.

Last night RDC channel-hopped in an excess of lassitude. "Nothin' on but Jane Austen movies with Peter Gabriel soundtracks!" he moped. So the stakes have been raised. They didn't use to have Peter Gabriel soundtracks. Today he had his flu shot and feels poopy and again scanned for something to watch. "Life and Times of Katharine Hepburn...At Home with Peter Gabriel..." I think he wants me to go watch tv with him. I'm not exactly getting everything out of "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" watching it in the reflection of my photograph collage. He had "An American Werewolf in London" on to kill time, but "Lock &c" came on before I heard my favorite line in all moviedom, "A naked American man stole my balloons."

He talks about Jane Austen movies because of something that happened when we first moved here. I wrote to Charenton about it:

Sunday we explored a teeny bit, venturing carefully out into Denver's carefully laid-out grid of streets. Perhaps they're carefully laid out, but then the cartographers interrupt a street with a park and continue the street a mile away (with no obvious [to me] way around the obstacle). Of course, this leads to having lots of parks, which is nice, but when you expect obvious, boring navigation and you end up in Toledo, it's kind of frustrating. We did find the university. D.U. has a beautiful campus. There is a series of fountains, blue and sparkling, that drip into each other, and as it's on the west side of the city and slopes a little westward, the view of the mountains is wonderful. Many of the buildings look like those at Avery Point or like Wood Hall and Hall Dorm. They do have an Arjona-type one, but they've tucked it discreetly--and discretely--in a corner.

Saturday a.m. Today we are going to venture downtown, and so RDC dug out Let's Go USA, which was invaluable on his graduation cross-country trip. He read aloud from the Denver section: "World's largest bead factory."

I bounced around from my newspaper and peanut butter breakfast (high in fiber and protein) to face him. "Really?"

"Museum- and jewelry-quality beads. Factory and warehouse store open to public."

My joy knew no bounds. "Really?"

He continued: "Winnie-the-Pooh Land."

I shall not describe for you the ensuing scene. You have noticed that I used only one set of quotation marks, ", around his speech instead of a single-within-double, " ', to indicate a quotation from a book within speech. I leave it to you to guess whether there are such places here or whether RDC committed a severe case of spousal abuse.

This, which was part of a five-page single-spaced letter I sent to Charenton, was the first epistle beyond a thank-you note that Nisou's parents had ever received from me. Nisou said of my letters to her when she first when to Europe that they were infrequent but they were long, and she needed a wheelbarrow to bring them home. So I think her parents enjoyed my letter, and I can imagine that AMB did a dramatic reading of it. When next we phoned after they got my letter, Nisou asked if we'd been to Madeleine L'Engle Land yet. Abuse on all sides, I tell you.

So from then on, anything too good to be true is Winnie-the-Pooh Land. Or it's a night chock-full of Jane Austen movies on television.