Reading: Myra Goldberg's Bee Season

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

Listening: Grendel

Watching: CNN

Learning: about other close votes, and that the Republicans ceded the presidency in (I've already forgotten the year and administration) in return for the end of Reconstruction, and that Harrison was the last president elected by the electoral college without the popular vote.

8 November 2000: My mother

I went to bed around 11. When RDC came up at 12:30, he told me the election had gone to Bush. Walking to work, I tried to ignore headlines in the newspaper boxes but I cannot look at a thing without reading it. "Gore concedes, retracts." Huh. It wasn't until I got to work that I learned what happened. I still wore my mourning dress, cleverly disguised as a black work dress, because that's what I'd packed before leaving the house. I accidentally borrowed the mourning dress from other cultures as well: as I gathered my gear leaving the shower room, the velcro strap from a Teva tore my left stocking just below the knee. Some culture or other at some time had included the rending of garments in its grieving process or mourning dress, so there I was, multicultural.

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After a few weeks of walking to work more often and using the Nordic Track, I noticed this morning that I was walking faster more easily. That's good. It took almost exactly one side of a tape to walk to work when I was listening to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I wondered if I've been walking slower lately because walking the same route takes a little longer than one side of Grendel. Today I got to work in less than one side, so now my theory is that I'm walking faster and the sides are shorter.

I don't know what to make of Grendel. I can't say I'm enjoying it. I know it's more a contemporary novel than a retelling of Beowulf from Grendel's point of view, but it's just not thrilling me. I suppose reading it (eventually, if ever) will be easier for having listened to it, anyway.

The Illustrated Longitude : The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time is really good. I love puzzles like this, learning how someone figured something out. That was my favorite part of And the Band Played On, learning how someone put together his own idiosyncratic experience with hepatitis, feline leukemia, and practicing medicine in remoter Africa to figure out what this phenomenon was, how it worked, how to combat it.

I'm not thrilled with Bee Season and Coetzee makes me wretched and Byatt, when I go back to her, is going to continue kicking my ass, so I'm not enjoying my current selections. So unless I get a burst of inspiration (or a stack of children's books from the 'brary), I don't expect to rack up a lot of titles in November, what with the New Determination going on about the painting and all. But hey, I already read this year's Booker winner. Congratulations Margaret Atwood! I called CGK but she already knew.

Tex asked me if I would like to do readings at his children's daycare. Which reminds me I've done nothing about possibly volunteering at the Park Hill library. Or calling Gove Middle School about adult ed classes or National Jewish about whether the hospital pool is ever available to the paying public.

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Last night during the compulsive cleaning in which I long have indulged to calm myself when stressed, as I put the photograph of my father as a boy into its new frame and decided that somehow I have to fit all the photograph albums into the shelves flanking the fireplace in the living room instead of leaving some in a back corner of the family room, I realized I have never scanned and posted my absolute favorite photograph of my mother. Or bought it a frame.

I love this one, of her with her two daughters at a friend's wedding, June 1991. It's on my bureau.

(I loved that dress, new that spring. It was ruined my first day at work the next summer. I'm glad I have the pictures at least. I can date it by my jewelry: the bangle on my right wrist, after summer 1987; paua shell earrings from SEB, after fall 1989; turquoise and jaspar ring from my grandmother on my left ring finger, after May 1989; the glint around my neck of a small box chain, sitting Tigger silver pendant, after fall of 1990. I don't understand jewelry as mere accessory; every piece means something to me. Also I can date it by my hair: I'd been growing it for 10 months. It was nearly at the point I could hold it out of my face.)

And I like this one, of her with her two daughters from Christmas 1989, which lives in my album:

(I've never known what to wear under that sweater, whose vee is a little deep. That's the hat I wear with my super eggplant suit.)

She doesn't like either of these because of the smiles. I like them because of the smiles--because they're real, not posed. (I also like this photograph because that upholstery, as well as the build of the couch, is just so scary. And those pillows. Oof. My mother made the knife-edge square one on top, which is patchworked out of corduroy. I don't know who made the round one I'm on; it's crocheted and I know my mother used to crochet but it's more likely my grandmother or my great-grandmother.)

Anyway. But the one real favorite photograph I own of my mother is one I readily see our resemblance in. The photograph of my first UConn id looked almost exactly like this next photograph. Sadly, I lost that. Happily, I still looked this happy at the ripe old age of 18. Our grins in the two photographs were identical. I am not at all sure my mother's apparent happiness from this photograph--early enough to still have baby teeth, though I'm not sure how old she was--lasted much beyond the birth of her younger brother and her being assigned full responsibility for his irresponsible behavior.

As I look at it, I see that in this picture, the resemblance is to CLH more than to me. Whatever picture you look at, it's obvious we all share the same genes.

Wasn't she adorable?