The white stripe forms the outline of the folded wing. He's standing on his right foot and has lifted his left leg over the left wing, exposing a bald spot at his hip, to scratch his face. Look at the little pink foot. Could there be anything sweeter?

Reading: Elizabeth Bowen, Death of the Heart

Moving: walked about two miles through the park

Listening: "What's Up, Tiger Lily," which RDC is watching behind me in the family room

Watching: "Turandot" at the Buell

11 February 2001: Turandot and Elizabeth Bowen

We trekked through the park yesterday, watching kids sledding down the wee little hill behind the Museum of Nature and Science and dogs throwing muzzleloads of snow onto their own backs and squirrels quarreling. Also something I'd read about in Life on Capitol Hill (a neighborhood newspaper), had forgotten about, and was glad to run across: on the plaza behind the Museum, staffers with telescopes offered views of the sun.

I don't believe I've ever seen the sun through a telescope before.

Lyme-Old Lyme got a ridiculous bequest. The school is large brown metal box, poorly ventilated because it's built to be air-conditioned, but the air-conditioning was never installed. It's hellish early and late in the school year. Also, the towns're on the coast (well, Lyme's nearly on it) and has a lot of strong swimmers but the school has no swim team because the school has no pool. But we do have an observatory. I saw Halley's Comet through it in twelfth grade, possibly twice, in the fall sunward and in the spring outward. I remember the spring viewing because by that time I had my license and use of CLH's car; I went to the midnight show of "Rocky Horror Picture Show" and afterward woke up my mother and we went to the viewing together. If I hadn't already been up for Rocky I probably wouldn't've made it to a 2:30 a.m. viewing. And the rings of Saturn and several of its moons and Jupiter's, and the less fashionable constellations.

But never the sun; I guess the LOLHS telescopes didn't have the right filters. In one telescope the image was regular sun-color and flipped horizontally so that the sunspots showed up in the lower right. The other had a red hydrogen filter and showed a much sharper image: the penumbras of the sunspots and a flare shooting out just at three o'clock, a flare about two Earth-diameters wide. Wow. Plus the texture of the sun, across whose surface waves of hydrogen flow, whose face looks mottled, as if there were seas as on the moon. Really amazing.

We walked north of the zoo through the public golf course, which you only can do when snow means no one uses the course. There's no sidewalk along 23rd Avenue, either on the zoo side or the golf course side. Which is so sensible. We read tracks in the snow: the dashes of squirrels from one tree to another, the landing site of a bird. Where the latter tracks began, they turned in a circle and then stalked off in an arc, and the last pair of prints were deeper where the bird launched, and just in front of those, the tips of the "finger" feathers at the ends of the wings had scrached slight traces into the snow on the bird's downbeat. We wanted to see that this was a raptor swooping down on a rodent or small bird, and so first read the initial rotation as a struggle and the arc as a pursuit. But there were no other tracks and no signs of a struggle, and probably just a magpie had landed looking for something interesting, found nothing, and took off again quickly. Or a crow, since there was no tailmark.

Elsewhere in the park we walked through a flock of Canada geese, disturbing some who were napping in the snow. The bellyprint of a goose is flanked by two footprints (and usually tailed by a turd); the bellyprint itself looks as if it's from weight alone, as if the bird's down insulates it so well that no heat melts the snow beneath. Or maybe this particular bird hadn't been napping too long.

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After our own nap we went to the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and saw the Puccini opera Turandot in the Buell. It was opening night and there were tuxedos; it was opening night and there were also jeans. I might be mistaken about my own outfit, but I was glad to look around and consider myself adequately dressed for the occasion and season. Some women wore ballgowns; these occurred with other women in ballgowns or with men in tuxedos. My theory, and I should ask Sara, is that strapless or spaghetti-strapped gowns in February when it's 10 degrees out are inappropriate. Another theory is that wearing a Broncos nylon jacket to opening night in February indicates that someone has nothing better and nothing warmer. Makes me wonder why he would go to opening night when any other showing is both less formal and less expensive.

Yes, I was going to the opera for the same reason everyone in Age of Innocence goes to the opera: to see and be seen, and to dish about everyone else's clothes.

I began Age years ago--when I read it through last month I found a bookmark my sister gave me untold years ago--and this passage I remembered last month and recollected last night: "...an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences." The only two opera I have seen have been Puccini: Madame Butterfly and Turandot, and I wondered Japanese and Chinese tales would work into Wharton's theme.

Anyway, RDC wore a sport jacket and I the floor-length, blue velvet, beaded dress with cap sleeves that I wore to his company Christmas party. In the afternoon we had reserved a cab for a 6:30 pickup and, when no call of "it's on the way" had come at 6:25, I went out in dress, black leather riding boots, and fleece to chip the car out. By the time I finished, the cab company had just taken RDC off hold and told him they had no record of our reservation and it was 6:40. See, there's a reason for me to be fretful. So I drove in my grey satin pumps and we walked several blocks to the performing arts center. The whole reason for the cab was so that I could wear girly shoes; pumps on ice, especially when my companion is in a cast, just aren't practical. I first wrote "when my companion is plastered," and we certainly would have been more clumsy had it been the case.

I don't know if merely I didn't like the singer or if the woman couldn't handle the part, but whoever played Turandot was screechy. The actress playing Liú was a stronger soprano and a more likeable character. Calaf, the lead male and a tenor, was my favorite. I prefer altos to sopranos in women's voices and baritone and tenors to basses in male voices: I guess I don't like extremes. I thought of "The Mikado" whenever Ping Pang and Pong, Turandot's ministers, were onstage--they're the comic relief.

In the first two acts these three are steered about the stage in slightly larger than life size, wheeled costumes to make them big and imposing, just as the emperor is always on an elevated scaffolding and just as the princess begins on another such an elevation and comes down to stage level as she melts from ice into humanity. In the third act the ministers are on stage in huge belled skirts that hid their feet and made them look like they skimmed along like birds on water.

One bit that I liked in "O Brother Where Art Thou?" was when the three men knock out three KKK members to get the sheet-disguises and enter into the fray and thus rescue their friend from lynching, just as the Scarecrow, Tinman, and Lion take out three Winkies in order to enter the Witch's castle. Turandot's three ministers' costumes didn't really look like that, but it's a good enough segue to my favorite dress last night. I can remember having seen three of this sort of dress, on Kelly from Hateful Inc., on a clerk at Laura Ashley the night I shopped for my current blue velvet, and the best of them last night on a woman I accosted to tell her what a fabulous garment she wore. Looking rather like a coat, fairly militaristic, with buttons down the front--yes, like a Winkie's uniform if the Winkies wore gowns instead of coats, but gowns that looked like a Cossack might wear one as a dressing gown. One day I will own such a thing, and that is what I will wear to opening night at the opera when RDC wears his eventual tuxedo.

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Yesterday in The Death of the Heart a character was introduced as Anna's former governess and I thought "Poor Miss Taylor" before Bowen even admitted that "Anna used to call her Poor Miss Taylor: she had been as much pleased as surprised when Miss Yardes had followed Miss Taylor's pattern and, at the end of her annual holiday, announced her engagement to a widower." The first time I read Possession, I had read Northanger Abbey only once but within the past several months, so I got the bit about laundry lists--ah, I hope I would have, as Byatt actually names the book. Anyway, I get all the Austen references I come across, but since Shakespeare and the Bible are quoted much more often, I figure I miss the majority of literary allusions I came across.

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And before it gets too far in the past, I have to say, now that I remember, that this is how I would wish for my theoretical labor to be. A vaginal, unmedicated, home birth like Karen's is just how I would want to be begin external mothering. I wouldn't be so polite, though. Or brave. Which Reason Number Whatever I don't meet my own several and unflinching criteria for parenthood, and why I and my hypothetical child are better off never meeting. I talked to my mother Friday night, and in the midst of an otherwise pleasant--yes!--conversation I mentioned that friends are expecting their second child in a couple of months. She made appropriate noises of congratulation and bridged to Yet Another Hint. How is it that people can't understand that I am doing the best by my child by not sporing it? Have people never heard of Wrongful Life suits? I can't wait for menopause if that'll get her off my back.