Reading: Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita and Jane Smiley's The Age of Grief

Moving: walked somewhat over 5 miles

Listening: individual snowflakes falling

Watching: snow snowing, magpies playing, dogs romping, sunshine emerging, snow melting

29 January 2001: Beautiful

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful day!

It's been snowing off and on since Saturday noon. Haitch and I walked dogs at the pound first, and the day was just raw and unpleasant. "Raw" is one of those adjectives I happily had not applied to weather since leaving New England, but the cold and dampness deserved no lovelier term.

Then we wandered up and down the interesting-shop'd stretch of Pearl Street. In a store selling crystals, candles, jewelry, and psychic readings, I eavesdropped on a woman talking with the folks about whether she was more a 2 or a 7. I was browsing very deliberately and quietly while she told them what a gift a particular reader had been, as she hadn't had a reading in five or seven years, and she almost died on New Year's Eve, and then she asked the clerks their names, so she didn't even know them while she told them all this, and I was listening and looking at jewelry and books and noticing a title: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Wicca and Witchcraft.

I (just now) searched for Christianity for Dummies at Amazon, which suggested a DVD, The Good Sex Guide, instead. Huh. And I understand the point of an introductory book on the Dummies level for someone just starting out. But I must say, disdainful as I am of crystals and numerology and astrology, the Idiot book on Wicca didn't help me take the store or its offerings or the clearly deeply held beliefs of its proprietor, clerk, and some of its customers, more seriously. Although I do take Wicca seriously.

So anyway. We walked about two miles, if that, and shopped--Haitch found a Brownie camera--and ate twice. When we went severally home, our plans to walk Sunday were undecided, and so they remained over Sunday.

When I picked RDC up from DIA, I did so, instead of letting him fend for himself on Supershuttle, only because he had severely sprained his wrist. Or broken it. But he didn't want to go to the hospital. "You have to go!" I told him. "If you let a broken bone go unset you could die like Phineas!" That's not what killed Phineas, but close enough and it's not as if he's read A Separate Peace anyway. At home we untaped and unwrapped the wrist, and it was so swollen in such a weird way that it looked, I said, like David's hand when it's just beginning to turn from a hand into a paw. He didn't comment on that allusion either. We talk two entirely separate languages sometimes.

Not very long afterward we sat waiting in the emergency room. Looking at his hand, he said it looked like it was about to transform, like in "An American Werewolf in London," and then he realized I had already observed that. Unlike the last time, in September, there wasn't a huge wait, and he wasn't completely sick and sliding off his chair and unable to stand up, so I didn't freak quite so much. This time, we scampered from emergency to urgent care, to and fro Radiology, and no one gave him an anti-nausea drug--to which almost everyone reacts badly but which is still first choice because it's cheaper--that made him climb out of his skin. So it was a much less freaky trip. Also unlike last time, we weren't there at 2:00 a.m.

He broke his ulna, quite near his wrist, and did something or other to the metacarsal called the snuffbox. Apparently this is so named because of where you position the two pinches of snuff before snorting them, which I think is pretty bizarre. (Actually I don't know the origin and I wanted the nurse practitioner to think I was sane so I didn't ask her either. But how else?) Da Vinci had been sawing people up for ages before Europeans started messing around with tobacco, but no one named the bone until then?

And then we got monster burritos and then we went home again, before 8:00 even. Blake was extremely irritated at our leaving only a half hour after getting home, when he hadn't seen his daddy in a week, and so to make up for it when we came home, Blake fixated on the splint.

It's going to be a long six weeks.

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In other news, I laundered the doormat for the first time this weekend. I figured with a few months of mud and snow and the tree having been dragged over it twice, it might want washing. It took a long time to dry and filled the lint-catcher a couple of times, which I figured was because it was new. When I removed it from the dryer, I realized I might have done a Bad Thing. When I lay it in front of the door, I realized I certainly had. What had been at least a 3x5 rug is now 1x2, if that. The tag, which I am far too clever to look at, says "Dry-clean only." It's a doormat! Not anymore, of course, but dry-clean a doormat? I laugh, I chortle, I go ha ha ha. Also the tag says "Does not meet federal nonflammability standards." Can I pick 'em or can I pick 'em?

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Any visit to the ER means books. I brought Lolita and The Age of Grief. I asked RDC if he wanted me to bring Midnight's Children for him but he didn't think that would be a good ER kind of read--which is why I brought the Smiley short stories in addition to Nabokov. "Get me Sex, Death, and Fly-fishing, please." So I packed that. It's a good thing I read Smiley and he didn't read at all--who knows what kind of perverts the folks at the hospital would have thought us to be, pedophilia and pescenecrophilia.

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Burritos in hand, we settled in to watch "Shaft." I figured Fox would be in reruns tonight, and I have vowed off "X-Files" until the Terminator ditches that terrible accent. I wanted to see "Shaft" why? Because Samuel L. Jackson remade it? Because that's what Peter Benton (from "ER") wanted to be when he grew up? I don't know. I was asleep 45 minutes into it. I don't know if RDC was awake. I do know Blake was, because he continued to fixate on the splint.

It's going to be a long six weeks.

This week RDC looked forward to working on the house, spending time with Blake, and working in his bathrobe. Now he is not working on the house, is wearing his bathrobe but not typing easily (this serves as his excuse to get voice-recognition software), and is shutting Blake in his cage because Blake is so fixated he's violent, hurling toys around and dislodging his dishes and biting hard enough to draw blood.

I am hoping that tomorrow when RDC gets a permanent cast, he gets one patterned in wrapping paper or something equally scary. Because otherwise, it's going to be a very long six weeks.

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This morning I woke to more snow, actively falling. Beautiful! Even if sunrise hadn't cooperatively been early enough, I would have walked to work. I wore my mittens and hat, my fleece pants and jacket, and ski boots, and contacts. Snow's no fun melting on my glasses. I pet dogs who gamboled in the snow, trudged through unshoveled walks, trotted in the street until I was close enough to downtown for there to be traffic, and had a beautiful walk.

Snow snow snow snow snow snow snow!

People's attitude toward snow is directly proportional to how much they have to drive in it. Which is why children love it and people old enough to drive love it less. This is why I will never drive to work again. As long as trucks can deliver my non-locally grown food, and the gas and water mains don't burst, I could live like this for months.

And then I walked home through sunshine on snow instead of snowing on snow. It wasn't warm enough for my beloved mittens and hat, and I still can't think of a favorite picture book. Watercolor illustrations, an appropriate medium for a story about a girl who receives an umbrella and boots for her birthday and waits and waits and waits and waits for rain. Finally it rains, and there's a lot of onomatopoeic words in the songs she makes up, Pooh-like, about the rain, about walking to school in the rain, about the noise of the rain pattering on her umbrella. She's Asian, and there are Chinese or Japanese ideographs in the margins. As a child I would have called her "Oriental"; if I ever can find the book again I probably could tell, now, if she was Chinese or Japanese. I haven't made up any songs about my fleece accessories. Yet. Instead I play with dogs I meet in the snow. Snow is much more fun with a dog.