Reading: Keri Hulme, The Bone People

Moving: walked 3 miles

Watching: the gorgeous day

Listening: Miles from Our Home, woodpeckers Morse-coding to one another.

15 April 2001: Contrast

Today's photograph reminds me of a comment someone made winter of sophomore year: "If you're wearing that [white] turtleneck for contrast, it's not working."

That was another Storrs local going to UConn. Right around then he invited me to a ROTC cotillion. He was, and here I use a figure of speech I picked up somewhere, a slice. PLT remembered its having been he, not Todd, that I didn't want to see during this incident.

---

This weekend for the first time in years I didn't have an Easter Egg dyeing party. Easter pretty much snuck up on me, and the waste of eggs--I usually bring uneaten artwork to a shelter, but not always--got to me, and late last week when Bob asked whether I was hosting anything this year, I remembered I wasn't. Trey had told me Greek Orthodox Easter is often off by weeks from western Christianity's Easter, and so I told Bob I might have it whenever it happened. Except that this year eastern and western Easter coincide.

I did, however, eat chocolate. We walked down to Cherry Creek, had bagel sandwiches, saw a woman I work with, avoided the mall despite its Godiva chocolate, and stopped in the new Whole Foods for oj and chocolate. RDC got a bar of unadultered pure dark chocolate and I got one equally dark but complemented by raspberries. "Diluted," RDC said, which is what I say about milk chocolate. "Complemented," I insisted.

We came home and sat in the backyard with buddy and read and napped for hours, and so it was my usual carelessness rather than remembering the above comment (I wrote the first paragraphs this morning when I took the first photograph) that resulted in this:

These two photographs are an accidental tribute to a pair I saw in the SF MoMA, maybe, whose media were listed as paper, developing fluid, sunlight, and melanin.

---

The Bone People is fantastic. I know nearly nothing of the relations between Maoris and more recent, European arrivals in New Zealand. The tension between relative natives and immigrants colors all the interrelationships in the book.

When I was in eleventh grade, LOLHS had an exchange student through AFS from New Zealand. She was Maori, or mostly Maori, loads of fun, and a great singer. And I can't remember her name, and I do hope all my yearbooks, from 7th through 11th grade, are somewhere in my mother's house.

The only other thing I already knew is that "Pakeha" means "white man," pejoratively. This I picked up from The Thorn Birds.

---

I think telling about breaking my arm and taking refuge in PGN reminded me of another PGN story. A year and a half after that, in the fall of 1985, a hurricane struck coastal Connecticut. Gloria hit on Thursday or Friday and there was no school those two days. My father worked round the clock restoring power hither and yon, a neighbor cleared a tree toppled into our driveway (my mother's car was safe in the driveway of another neighbor, across the street, who didn't have big trees nearby), and my mother and I raked and hauled to clean up the property and washed up, inadequately, with water heated in the outdoor fireplace. Saturday dawned without power.

I worked Mondays and Wednesdays and alternating Fridays and Saturdays at PGN. After 9:00, when a librarian would generally arrive to do paperwork, but before 10:00, when the library would open, I called to see if the library would open. I called both lines, the regular incoming (which wasn't answered during off hours) and the outgoing (which no outsider was supposed to know and therefore might have been picked up). No answer. I figured we were closed, and continued working around the yard. A little after ten, the librarian called. Indeed, power or not, the library was open. It didn't need power either for light--wonderful big windows the building has--or circulation, since it was still all analog. I said gee, I'd be right in, but I had called both lines, got no answer, and thought we were closed.
At this point the librarian's voice, which had only sounded annoyed before, grew icy. "I've been here since nine, Lisa."
"Maybe I dialed the wrong number?"
She thought I was lying, and I was mortified.

I pedaled in as quickly as I could. I shelved in the adult stacks, I did all my regular tasks, and the phone never rang, neither with reference calls nor with anyone wondering whether we were open. At the circ desk, with the librarian upstairs--we were happy to avoid each other--I dialed the incoming line from the outgoing and vice versa, and neither line rang. The desk volunteer--who did show up--asked what I was doing, and I told him I thought our lines weren't ringing in. I didn't mention the exchange with the librarian.

A while later I was shelving in the children's room when someone cleared her throat from the top of the steps. I looked up, and it was the librarian. "It would seem," she began awkwardly, "that I owe you an apology."
"Oh," I gulped, equally awkwardly, "that's okay."
She nodded and turned away, and it was okay. She knew I wasn't lying. I hadn't railed at the volunteer about being falsely accused, and I hadn't asked him to tell her the phones were off. He had done that on his own. Now, though, it occurs to me that he might have heard her end of the call she place to me, might have known what had gone before. I don't remember if he got to there on time that day.

Still on summer hours, the library closed again at 1:00. That afternoon I took myself with a bar of Ivory to Roger's Lake. Sunday my mother and I went to her parents' house and showered, blissfully if quickly--a neighbor was taking his generator from house to house--and when we got home the power was on. Thanks to my father. Who knows when he got any sleep.