Reading: The Code Book. Also, I'll confess to Mademoiselle

Moving: I just missed the first day of the rest of my life

Watching: nothing

9 December 2000: Boston again

Friday was all very well, but Saturday was much more personally amusing for me. We cabbed to Logan, shoved our bags in a locker, and T'd to Government Station, where I suggested walking instead of transferring to the Green Line. RDC asked me if I knew the way and I thought I mostly did; if not I could cast around a bit and soon know which was the right direction. "You know how you always do." (Captain Holly, Watership Down.) Climbing the stairs, I told RDC to look for a building, any building, that looked like HBL, and Boston City Hall looks exactly like the UConn library so that was easy. Taking the T the one more stop would have been stupid, because Government and Park Stations are about three feet apart.

On the way, we walked along Freedom Trail, which is a walking path through Boston (with sidewalks painted or bricked red) taking in points of historical interest. I read the names of inhabitants of a cemetery to RDC. "John Winthrop's in this one."

"Good."

Perhaps he just hadn't had his coffee yet. We were able to fix that before it was time to meet Jessie, who wasn't really so very late that she had to comment on it, and all was well.

I didn't feel as cold as the others, perhaps because I have a denser layer of fat or perhaps because I had more and better layers. Thigh-high tights and a skirt and a coat that hangs lower than knee-high leather boots have got to keep your legs warmer than a single layer of jeans or khakis. Besides, I had my Nisou-scarf, which I'm convinced is as useful as that tapestry whatshername had in Black Hearts over Battersea. We walked, Dora, through Boston Common and the Public Garden and up Commonwealth Avenue--and Jessie hasn't read Taking Care of Terrific--turned up Dartmouth to Copley Place and Brentano's.

You know those posters of a city and its view of the rest of the world? This is Boston's view of New York. A pit of despair.

Having unearthed a ten-year-old gift certificate, Jessie needed Exactly the Right Books. She didn't get an alleged companion book to The Giver, and I forgot to look for the new E.L. Konigsberg, which I had started the week before in Curious George Goes to Wordsworth, and there wasn't Possession (which she might read because I love it so) nor even Babel Tower for me to show her the scene with Frederica reading The Hobbit to Leo (we'd been talking about Tolkien). Meanwhile RDC was finding us the stupidest possible Dummies books.

(Yes, I'm going to repeat her story from my own perspective. And getting a newbie to read Dummies' Guide to New York City actually in New York was my idea. RDC merely suggested that 125th Station would be a better location for the experiment than Times Square.)

Managing for Dummies. Consulting for Dummies. Spanish for Dummies. Sex for Dummies he had only seen in the Tattered Cover, and I asked if it was shelved near Contraceptives for Dummies or preferably Sterilization for Dummies. Dummies' Guide to Orlando and Walt Disney World--that's appropriate--and Dummies' Guide to Las Vegas--even more appropriate. I can't remember the different ways the Simpsons spoofed the Dummies series, but if the Simpsons didn't name it, RDC did: Reading for Dummies.

That set the tone for the day.

A brief debate and rapid scurry through the throngs of Copley and the Pru center landed us at Upstairs at Davio's, a café not quite as extravagant as the garden level restaurant that was the first Real restaurant I can remember going to.

Freshling spring break, I was in Boston with CLH as usual and PLT had accompanied his mother thither for a conference. We met up at the Westin, and his mother invited me to accompany their party to dinner.

I was shocked. I was a child in my parents' eyes and didn't think any other adults would find me, at 18, any more worthy of their time than the 'rents did. But I had heard correctly. I protested my khakis and fundage as inadequate to the occasion, both of which concerns AST scoffed. A colleague asked AST about finding her son with me unchaperoned in a hotel room and AST exclaimed she had never given it a moment's thought. This was excruciatingly embarrassing aside from the fact we were each dating other people because it meant that the colleague, a grown-up, knew what sex was and was alluding to it in front of a parent, who should be kept in strictest ignorance about such matters.

I'm transcribing this from my paper journal in a much-truncated way. The original, with me trying to figure out with textual evidence and what CDs PLT had bought that day (Peter Gabriel 1980) whether it was freshling or sophomore year, would have had CLH gnawing her own thigh off á la Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (unless of course I was giving her a backrub during the narration).

That was foreshadowing, because CLH joined us. She had been baking snow rocks and talking to our father when I called her before. She said she'd drop by but not sit down as there was shopping to do. She showed, sat, talked and drank, an excellent alternative. To explain Jessie, I told CLH about the pancake poem. Tripping over my own tongue, I couldn't say either "bliss" or "glee" and, in classic lisa fashion, coined "blee," which about made my year.

Jessie's favorite line in Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason is the bit about waiting for the dustbin to ring. Maybe because knowing that killed the surprise of that line, I had a different favorite: when Bridget wants to shut up her seatmate on a flight, in response to his question whether she had any hobbies, she replied "Napping." This struck me particularly because when a sleazy regular at CLH's restaurant had given my coworkers and me the eye a few days before, someone made the mistake of responding to him despite CLH's warning. Whoever it was said that we were all there for work--and considering that CLH had told us where we were seated was the hookers' table perhaps that was unwise. The man then asked with a leer, "What do you do?" and I blurted, "Leave," which made not a few people giggle--including Jessie and RDC, to whom I now recounted the scene.

So we were all extremely pleased with ourselves and distributing titles like Empress of the Universe (which long has been mine) when RDC came out with "Sarcasm for Dummies" whereupon my laugh exploded in all its extreme glory. Moments later, when we all could speak again, Jessie said that I had the most amazing laugh. An unamused cow at the next table, who had swapped her chair with that at another table when she first arrived because it had only four legs, or some similar insurmountable chair-problem, thereupon interjected, "It's very loud, too."

This cracked us all up again, although not, for me, as loudly. She's lucky she didn't mock my laugh directly, because there's nothing guaranteed to prompt it to louder and shriller extremes than how amusing I find being imitated. Many have tried and none succeeded. "They all tried and failed?" "No. They all tried and died." I'm sure the Bene Gesserit put it much more eloquently than that, but I've got up twice now to confirm Frederica's son's name and that Holly cast about for the way home after Efrafa so you'll have to read Dune yourselves, OMFB. If I were going to get up, I'd go get my Shakespeare and make fun of the Dauphin's speech about horses on four hooves and attempt to parallel it to the cow's chair.

That cackle was one outburst; I hadn't been sitting there hooting in her ear all afternoon. In fact we nearly had our backs to each other, so unless all the evergreen boughs around the fireplace I faced reflected instead of absorbed sound she hadn't even gotten a full dose. It is undeniably loud and, for the pathologically joyless, unreasonably loud, but CLH bristled in my defense. She is the only one allowed to criticize my laugh--a privilege I believe she is willing to share with RDC, who now has to live with it. RDC wanted to buy the cow and her companion a round of drinks ("Here, you need them"), or perhaps their lunch; and I liked Jessie's suggestion of Tact for Dummies.

Eventually it was time for CLH to go to work, and we left, not even having one tiny accident with a glass of red wine in the cow's direction. I wanted a snow rock. After the earlier call I had dutifully told Jessie and RDC that she was baking snow rocks, and they suggested we not use that term on a cell phone since it sounds like a term for crack. The chocolate snowballs were not burned, as they were when CLH, rooming with BHM, first baked and burned them (leading him to give them their new permanent name), and not flat, as they are when I make them. Sigh. Hers even turned out well when she lived in Aspen, so I can't use Denver's altitude as an excuse. We each had a cookie--Jessie was impressed, as well she ought to be--and the three of us walked up Newbury and through the park to the T and said goodbye.

Without even calling United, we T'd ourselves to Logan to find that our flight had been delayed two hours. Eventually two hours and forty minutes, time I much rather would have spent in Boston proper and not in the Red Carpet club, or at the party we had planned to attend had we arrived on time at 9:12.

As it was, we disembarked at 11:50, relieved Haitch of Blake-duty by 12:30, and would have immediately collapsed but that Blake was so very very happy to see his daddy that he woke up--this at midnight--and sang, helped RDC brush his beak, and protested as cutely as he knows how when put back to bed. (He protests either incorrigibly, when merely naughty, or irresistibly, when wanting more cuddling. This was the irresistible sort of protest, talking and chirruping and singing and indicating by all the means he could that putting him to bed was a bad idea. But we did.)