Reading: Sons and Lovers

Moving: I'm feeling under the weather

Listening: Waterboys' Fisherman's Blues and This is the Sea

Watching: ER

28 December 2000: Lawrence

I'm reading Sons and Lovers because it's on the MLA list. Last night reading in bed I told RDC it was like reading Of Human Bondage--it has no discernable point or writing style to make it worthwhile and afterward I would regret having wasted 420 pages of my reading life. "Uh-huh," RDC agreed. The only amusing thing about this book is that it's the copy he had for Modern English Lit (100/226W), which he had with Regina Barreca, who insisted that you buy new books and then write all over them, so that there's all his undergraduate marginalia. So far nothing's been hugely revelatory--oh, this is Freudian, is it?--but I am still startled by RDC's misspellings. And his handwriting is atrocious in ways mine, hardly copperplate, has never dreamed of. His output is better nowadays now that his most of his writing happens on computers that offer squiggly red lines, and he says his spelling has improved with the correction enforcement, so that's good. But in this ten-year-old volume, over the chapter heading "Defeat of Miriam," he wrote, "Pauls hates Merriam again." Even looking at Miriam's name, he misspelled it, but he misspelled it with such a reasonable English major's mistake. Merriam, as in Webster.

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Yesterday I started looking up breeders of Labrador Retrievers. RDC and I have gone back and forth on this, the morality of buying a deliberately bred dog when there are so many needy pets. I was more opposed to a pedigree than he, but I do love Labs and adopting a puppy of known genetic background from parents whose temperaments are known in a household with humans who care could make all the difference for Blake.

I was talking with a breeder here in the Denver area whose name I got off the web and all was going swimmmingly. I told her that although morally I would prefer the Dumb Friends League, I want a Lab for temperament and a puppy for exact training because I have this cockatiel whose safety is paramount. She told me that a cockatiel arrived in her backyard last year and lived happily with her three yellow labs until last week. She has been babysitting a chocolate (therefore stupid) lab who killed the bird.

Not just any dog killing any parrot but specifically a Lab killing specifically a cockatiel.

And people ask me why I don't have a dog yet.

Last night when I took that picture, Blake was pressing as much of himself as he could into my throat. I was holding my chin up not because his crest tickled (although it did) but because the chin annoyed him and he's not above snapping when it's past his bedtime. Despite his snappishness, I love the little dude. Madly and perhaps to excess, but judge me not, OMFB, before you have seen for yourself his itsy little eyelash hairs and wee perfect eyebrow feathers. The dog breeder asked where we had found Blake, because now the house feels so empty ("and unnaturally silent?" I asked) and she wants another 'tiel. (By this I assume it's not just me, and that even someone with three whole living dogs, instead of this "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" son-dog-theory RDC and I bat back and forth, can have a cockatiel-shaped hole in her life. I know that hole; I have a Lab-shaped one.) We started talking 'tiels, to clip or not to clip. She said that she had allowed Fred to be fully fledged because she figured that enabled him to escape the dogs if need be. I said that having jumped the moral hurdle of caging a tame but not domesticated bird, I further assumed the moral responsibility of keeping him safe. While we had decided that clipping was safer, clipping an individual bird must depend on the bird and the household.

Okay, the murderer was a chocolate, therefore inferior, Lab, the result of an accidental inbreeding, who didn't know the bird, but still. If I believe that I have the right to deny Blake flight to keep him safe, then I should damn well believe that denying myself a dog is similarly in his best interests.

Sigh.

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Today I went to the library for the new E.L. Konigsburg and Lois Lowry, Silent to the Bone and Gathering Blue. Neither was available, but I found the former's Throwing Shadows and the latter's Rabble Starkey, neither of which I had heard of before. Rabble is set in Pennsyltucky and I am comparing it unfavorably with Susan Creech. Lowry, I know well, is from the Boston area, and therefore I have scant faith that the dialogue is genuine. Creech manages to convey the nonstandard grammar and regionalisms of her characters without quite writing "We was always laughing."

Also I borrowed The Sparrow, which I'd asked for. Jessie complained about it recently, which brought it to the forefront of my attention. The disheartening thing is that I am pretty sure I will find it more tedious than D.H. Lawrence. Whoa.

While there I read Lowry's The One Hundredth Thing about Caroline, which possibly wasn't as stupid as I thought but just aimed at younger readers than I prefer.

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I love my sister.

When I unpacked my stocking I thought that one box would hold earrings. Then I unwrapped it and it was toothpicks and I thought she had wanted me to think it was earrings, which sororial bait-and-switch was just as good as earrings. Then when I put them in the drawer (along with another box of similar size and yet another about five times as big: we have plenty of toothpicks and I feel like Robert Ferrars) I noticed that these were Lady Dianne toothpicks. I thought aha, of course, she does have that Diana Spencer thing. (Our mother's wedding was the Saturday after Diana's death. My sister watched the funeral until we absolutely had to leave for beautification. Oh, and the day before, one of the German Shepherds told us that Mother Teresa had died too and we both thought she was pulling our communal leg.)

Last night CLH emailed me asking what I thought of the toothpicks and I told her my thought process.

When I spent the weekend with her in early December, we had to go to the grocery store for packaged pesto (which she prefers) and Tropicana OJ and bananas for me and, because I was there to lug, more 2.5 gallon containers of water than she can carry herself. We had already shopped for crafts, and leaving Michael's, I carried all the bags. "Just because I paid doesn't mean you have to carry everything, Jwaas." I know. But I'm the camel. Leaving Star Market, I carried everything again. Then when we got back to her apartment, she mentioned within three breaths that she had all her laundry to do and that her back was hurting her again. I offered to do her laundry for her.

"It's bad enough you always carry everything and I'm going to make you give me a backrub later," she responded. "I'm not going to let you do my laundry too."

"I don't mind doing it," I said truthfully.

"Jwaas, you would clean my bathroom grout with a toothpick if I asked you to."

I cracked up. Yep, I would.

So anyway that's what the toothpicks were for.

I love my sister.