The picture's too small, and it's hard to capture him at just the right moment, but that is the beginning of a buddy yawn.

Reading: John Fowles, The Magus. Yes, still. I broke the 400-page mark.

Moving: walked 2.7 miles to work

Watching: "Dead Again" last night; ER's "Love's Labor Lost" tonight.

8 March 2001: Nosegay

Farrar Straus & Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi was quoted in a CNN article about megamillion word-processor authors like Clancy and King and Crichton: "'It's easy to blame the agents,' says Farrar Straus & Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi. 'But it's the publishers who throw these offers in the ring.'" A few paragraphs later, "the landscape is strewn with such writers, he says: 'They're a bit like Roman gladiators. Only a few can win the brass ring.'" I thought the brass ring was on a carousel, and if you caught it you got some sort of prize. I learned that reading Katie John books, I think. If your gladiator version of Don King freed you, did you get a ring, and is that the source of the carousel ring? Or am I just taking Galassi's two figures of speech out of context? Maybe a little.

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Walking to work this morning, I remembered something about my junior prom. Recalling the memory later, I couldn't think why it had occurred to me, and I churned through the stimuli: magpies commenting on crows crawing, East High School to the south, the #20 unloading a busload of students on the City Park side of 17th, noticing the same kid still wearing camo and wondering why--h, and listening to Paradise and a description of a wedding bouquet with freesias closing up.

In my wedding I carried the plainest ever bouquet of pale pink roses, because all along I had planned to carry Percy in a little gilt cage, had I found one. Except what if he shrieked throughout the ceremony, and what if he gnawed on what surely wouldn't be Vet-Approved Wood and Paint, and Charenton's cats are Not Nice to Birds. For her wedding, my mother had much more attractive bouquets, in arrangements we carried in our arms like babies rather than carried in our hands. I really had no idea, for my wedding, what the possibilities were, and I didn't do any research. I was pleased for her while kicking my own self in retrospect.

What Paradise reminded me of was not wedding bouquets but the corsage I wore to my junior prom.

We didn't have a senior prom, the theory at Lyme-Old Lyme being that you were saving your money for college in 12th grade. As if perhaps you hadn't started saving when you started babysitting in sixth grade and only now, months before entering the groves of higher academe, had started. But anyway, there was a prom, and I was determined to go. I wonder now what sort of functions promenades and cotillions are supposed to be, because there was no walking at our prom. Or much dancing, as a matter of fact. I wore a frock I saw in a catalog, droopy white cotton with cap sleeves and not at all a Formal Dress. And of course, I went stag. Stag stag stag, driven both ways (less than three miles each way) by my mother. Mercifully, my brain allows me to remember almost nothing about the actual event inside the country club. Two things: first, the couple who would be chosen Best Couple in our senior yearbook were not chosen King and Queen. Some schools choose a Queen, who of course has an escort, but our prom had separate elections. So that one boy was elected King (doesn't that sound odd?) and two girls tied for queen and there was a three-person slow dance to Led Zeppelin's "All of My Love." Second, my sister was right that the best thing, maybe the only good thing, was seeing everyone so very dressed up and looking their best.

I was talking about my corsage.

Stag or not (hind or not?), I was going to have a corsage. I ordered a wrist corsage of lavender roses (see, the lavender thing started at least that long ago) and when I was in the florist picking it up (on my bike, earlier in the day on the Saturday), the boy who'd been my first kiss two years before was picking up his date's corsage. When I got home I shoved the thing in the fridge.

I primped, such as I could. Frank's haircut had exposed my bone structure to the world a few months before, but I still wore glasses and braces. I hadn't realized yet that glasses + dangling earrings = Too Damn Much going on, particularly with a mouthful of metal, and I wore my New Wave white-painted, gold-colored-metal, elongated teardrop earrings (with a gold stripe through them) in the first holes and drugstore-quality lavender hearts with a fold through them in the second holes. I am so glad no pictures of this exist.

Sometime during my preparations, my mother gave me a corsage. I think the look she was striving for was, say, Willoughby's nosegay. While I hope I received the gesture graciously, the reason I don't open the appropriate volume of journal and find out is that I don't want to know if I was mean. I am pretty sure I was not, that I felt appropriately guilty when I told her I would rather carry the corsage I had bought for myself yet appropriately relieved when I did carry the artificially colored and preserved roses rather than her roadside volunteers tied up with string and already drooping.

That's the second thing I've meant to tell her this week.

The first thing was that, on Saturday night, for the first time, I saw "Fiddler on the Roof." One of the few records my mother had was the soundtrack--to the Broadway production with Zero Mostel. That cast was not the one in the movie, and I don't think it was only the differences in the scores for stage versus screen that I noticed: the singing was definitely not as good, even compared to the memory of an LP I haven't heard since before 1986. And the acting was terrible. RDC--who read throughout it, unenthralled--asked about a plot point, and I had no idea. I saw it in elementary school, when the Old Saybrook high school produced it, but besides being petrified of the ghost in the dream I remember nothing about the play. I only know the music. In fact when Tevye tells the dream to his wife, despite how different it sounds in the movie than in the stage version, despite that I am 32 and know now that the ghost was formed by one student riding the shoulders of another student and wasn't really a ten-foot monster ghost, I was scared. Because I never listened to that song but always, in those pre-CD days, lifted and reset the needle on the vinyl to omit that track.

And I could still sing along with every song--except the dream--despite not having heard it since I left my mother's house. Of course, this is the first time I've heard the music or seen the play since I read Pride and Prejudice, and now I want to draw all these parallels among the five daughters. Three married at the end but one to someone totally inappropriate....

And I have to tell her these things because I love her. If I didn't thank her for the corsage then, I should now.

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We get the greatest magazines at work. Besides the Smithsonians that Überboss recycles to the breakroom, there's Preservation, the magainze of the National Trust for Historic Preservation; and E, an environmental magazine; Civilization, and Reason whose tagline is Free Minds and Free Markets and whose editorial slant is suspect, and Civilization, which is affiliated with the Library of Congress.

In Preservation (Vol. 53, No. 1, Jan./Feb. 2001), I'm reading an article called "Material Gains: From wood to concrete to plastic to plastic wood, the search for enduring...things to build with." I quote: "In 1924 a Mississippi engineer named W.H. Mason was messing around with a pressure cooker, wood scraps, and water to see what would happen. What happened was the pressure cooker exploded. Wispy tufts of cellulose adorned Mason's walls. His discovery was significant: by putting wood fiber under pressure and then rapidly releasing that pressure the wood was broken down to cellulose, which could later be reconstituted as pressed sheets of wood, much as Pringles would one day do with potatoes" (p. 35) I am way too easily amused.

Another Preservation article shows a cell tower--a "personal wireless service facility"--right next to the steeple of an 1842 church in Ohio. Folks interested in preserving the period look--also, presumably, folks with an iota of aesthetic sense--object to the 250' steel column. However, no one in the article objects to the entire church being surrounded by blacktop for the convenience of cars.

There was a publishing company's ad in Reason, I think, whose headline was right side up but whose images were all upside down; the headline read that the company's books had been turning the liberal viewpoint upsidedown since the dawn of time, roughly. The blurb for one book read, "You won't find this one on the front shelves of your local bookstore!" and I thought, you know, that's not a good sales pitch.

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We talked to RDC's aunt and uncle today and later I called my mother. I sent each of them a set of photographs of the dining room, RDC's family because they gave us our table and my mother because she gave me the china and us the candelabra. Shutterfly includes a proof page, and that plus the gorgeousness of my dining room made the uncle think the pictures were an advertisement. My mother said the dining room looked "classy." Erk.

I wonder if either of our families actually likes the look of the room. Both RDC's aunt and my mother are given to Collections that I call, in my tenderer moments, dust catchers. I don't know how to characterize his aunt and uncle's decor but the dining room has mahogany and blood red glass; to me it looks ponderous. My mother attempts a countrified charm. Braided rugs. Depression glass. Yer basic New England collection. Whereas I like clean, simple lines, which some might find unimaginative; complementary colors, which some might find dull and faded. To me the room feels relaxing, calm, uncluttered, functional.