Reading: Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

Watching:

Listening: Sister Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking (tape 2)

House: Lots

5 April 2001: laughleaning

Everything connects. So E.M. Forster should be happy for the next two paragraphs:

• I am listening to Dead Man Walking. Elmo Patrick Sonnier is executed on Thursday, 5 April. That's today. Also, I haven't read Across Five Aprils yet.
• Tuesday night I started rereading The Blue Sword, whose protagnoist is Harry Crewe. Sara Crewe is the protagonist of The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Haitch brought me back a Petit Prince coloring book from France. Looking in the Tattered Cover for a new coloring book that I could share (unlike my Great Women Paper Dolls, Castles of the World, or Le Petit Prince) on Wednesday, I found a Secret Garden one. It has the story in it, severely abridged, and I can't have an abridged book in my house without the complete one, so I also bought The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

I have two abridged versions of books in my house without the full versions: I have the Cliffs Notes of Pilgrim's Progress. (I have one other set of Cliffs Notes.) I also have a beautiful pop-up version of The Wizard of Oz that Haitch gave me for Christmas.

The other thing I saw in the Tattered Cover was that David Eggers was going to be there. That night. Months ago he was supposed to come but was snowed away, maybe in September. Now, on the one day of the week I didn't workout with Isosceles (formerly TDT), which isn't going to succeed as an alias, the one day I had planned to go to the TCLD to find the other two books in William Kennedy's Albany Cycle and The Bone People and whatever else, I happened to see the sign. And so I planned to go.

Wednesday evening found me scrawling in my paper journal and going nowhere. Ooo, two Yaz allusions: "For the times we've had I don't want to be / a page in your diary" and "lost in daydreams you...got nowhere." I had struck up a good conversation with the clerk I asked about the author of The Bone People (I was looking under He---, combining Keri and Hulme). As I stood at her desk and looked around, a title caught my eye: Sin and Syntax, which reminds me of RDC's and my e.e. cummings poem.

When I'd asked her about other titles by William Kennedy, the clerk said "Oh yes the Albany trilogy," which isn't any great literary coup but enough that I could tell her that the title reminded me of a poem. So we had to find it, which was difficult since I couldn't remember the first line. We skimmed through collections and I found it:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laughleaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

She liked it. A lot. And we talked about seeing each other at the reading in the evening. I remembered, just before I bought my books--The Bone People and Paradise, in paperback like most of our other Morrison, and with the Oprah mark, like The Bluest Eye that DMB gave me for my birthday, and now I can return Haitch's hardcover that I've had for two years (that I'm certain of but probably three or more)--that I wanted to ask about coloring books. So directed, I returned to the third floor but to the opposite corner, where the children's books are, but whither also my clerk had migrated. We discussed coloring books. I opted for Cathedrals of the World over a Shakespeare one because I had Castles of the World and I wanted a nice bi-level effect, but I should have opened Cathedrals before I bought it. The cathedrals are a lot more detailed than the castles and even colored pencils will be difficult to wield. I didn't get Henry VIII and his Wives Paper Dolls because, tragically, unlike my Great Women Paper Dolls, these are already colored in.

Instead of going to see David Eggers I stayed home and read The Blue Sword and The Secret Garden. Yes, I realize that that was not the best choice. Tonight I was meant to go see "Memento" at an advanced screening with Lou, but she couldn't get the tickets so we're going to see "You Can Count on Me" instead.

The suggestions of What to Do on Wednesay 4 April 2001 progressed like so: No Kidding was going to do the Twilight Art Beat at the Denver Art Museum to look at the Winslow Homer exhibit. Then SEM was going to come on Wednesday so NK and the DAM got dropped. Then SEM showed up a day early, by which time I'd thoroughly forgotten the NK/DAM thing anyway. Wednesday I found out about David Eggers. So I blew off two real social opportunities instead to scrawl in my paper journal and reread fave books. I'll snap out of it, promise.

So yes, SEM passed through town. He called early Tuesday evening from Grand Junction, saying he'd be in Denver in four hours. It's 270 miles--it took him 4.5. Naturally this accelerated my cleaning and prepatory frenzy, and while yanking the a comforter out of the storage closet in the laundry room, I also pulled a particle board shelf off its tabs in order that it could drop three feet onto my left toes, edge first. I screamed a lot louder than I would have if RDC had been home--dunno whether for Stoicism's sake or not to scare him or because his presence and comfort would have made it hurt a lot less than it did. I seriously thought I had broken my toes and was scared to remove my sock. All my little piggies were exactly where they belonged, happily, though the swelling of the big one justified my wearing Tevas to my non-Teva-wearing office on Wednesday. I couldn't bend my big toe, but I could run and stomp, and that's what I did when, a couple of hours spent sniffily reading Robin McKinley later, SEM showed up.

I showed him our plum trees and our whateverthatother tree is and our conifer that I'm not at all fond of and our pear tree and don't trip over our new gutters and our nectarine tree and look it's coming into bud and there's the dead peony that maybe I should have cut back? that my friend Beth identified and screech opening the gate to the back yard here's our patio it's all gritty because we just cleaned the gutters Sunday and here are raspberry transplants from Charenton well only one's still wick and here's our lamppost to Narnia and this is our cherry tree that the magpies love and that's the other lamppost that's going to die for the eventual hottub and be careful of the rope that holds up the fencepost and this is the frame that is going to be my vegetable garden and (jumping up and down like Christopher Robin in puddles) I'm going to plant tomatoes and eggplant and basil and more tomatoes and beans and here's our garage with its see-through walls that we have to have tuck-pointed and round to the front of the house again because I am used to doing my house tour from the front so we couldn't possibly go in the back door and here is our porch swing and I'll stop there but rest assured, OMFB, that SEM got the full effect of my enthusiasm for my house, for him, for seeing him in my house and being able to show it to him.

What's great is that he really liked it. He said it was huge, and I asked really? It's bigger than the house-converted-from-stable he lived in during high school and maybe bigger than the house I knew in college, and certainly bigger than the condo his mother lives in now, but it's not really big. But even RDC's and my one-bedroom apartment would look big when we came back from camping, and SEM'd spent the last week in a tent and otherwise lives in an apartment admirably crammed with gear for every possible outdoor activity, so yeah, the house probably looked pretty big.

Speaking of outsize things, his hair was crazy long. It might have been a whole half inch, long enough to start to curl. For him that's the equivalent of mine being to my knees. ("Crazy long" is what my sister exclaimed over my hair in December. It's past my brastrap but not yet to the small of my back, which is the goal.)

He liked our lavender bedroom, which makes four men for (RDC, Kevin, Isosceles's friend Greg, and SEM), two opposed (SPM and another DU man who housepaints for a living and said it looked like there was a blacklight somewhere), a few others whose opinions perhaps were not forthcoming, and one carefully politic response from Isosceles's boyf ("It's very...interesting"). SEM also liked the television shrine, which RDC and I ridiculed when we first saw the house (the hockey game blaring, the wires tangling everywhere including in front of the screen, and the lightweight speakers propped on barstools to either side) but have outfitted, as we do watch television. And movies. And, uh, own a dish. "So do I," said SEM, and I'm so glad one of my friends shares my guilty pleasure.

We stayed up talking until all hours, which for me means "after midnight." He told me about his various plans and here I do best to quote "A Room with a View": "What a weathercock Sir Harry is." I can say this with impunity because his own mother called him a tetherball once. Also because I'm envious of the fact he has so many plans when I have so few. The best piece of news is that he got a dog! And its name is Kodo! Which is the best name for a dog of his, as appropriate as Phoebe is for mine. And then we talked some more over breakfast and he drove me to work and lied, saying my arms looked like I was in pretty good shape, and with one last and another last and maybe one more hug and kiss he was gone.

---

As soon as I got to work that morning, which was maybe a tad late, I pointed the Tevas out to CoolBoss and explained the reason with apology. That was fine. Otherwise I was wearing an ankle-length, lavender tencel jumper and a white t-shirt--Teva type clothes, to be sure, but I would usually wear sandals--and my Levi jacket. When I picked up the jacket to go home that afternoon, I laughed quietly--to myself I thought, but CoolBoss called from her office "What?" (PLT here snorts at the possibility I could laugh quietly.) I snagged this jacket from SEM freshling year. I think he'd outgrown it anyway--the sleeves are too short on me so I wear them folded back twice--but I did make rather a career of borrowing his clothes. "I doubt he had that sunflower in the buttonhole, though," CoolBoss pointed out--I have a small silk sunflower through the buttonhole of the right breast pocket--and that's true, but he wouldn't've been opposed to the Michigan J. Frog tiepin I have tacked through the flap of the left one. It is probably healthy of me that I cannot remember what buttons he did have on it, back in those crazy days when we wore our philosophies as well as our hearts on our sleeves--but I do remember one because I liked it so much I bought one for myself and it's probably still in my box of abandoned jewelry. He called it a Zen button: it was all white with no slogan or image on it at all.

---

Oh, and I didn't make up "chia abs." I thought that phrase appeared after my mind rearranged the letters my eyes saw, which it does sometimes just for kicks. That appears in poundy, which I must have skimmed through by way of 3WA.