Reading: Keri Hulme, The Bone People; Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook; Susan Cooper, Silver on the Tree.

Moving: walked 2.7 miles and some weights

Watching: Magpies' sloppy nests

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

16 April 2001: Barefoot

A balding Puddleglum with acne. I am now hoping for an opportunity to use my new favorite insult.

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Waiting for something to process in BBEdit, I started rereading Silver on the Tree. I completely don't remember this one. But I should be reading The Golden Notebook, although if I'm going to make any headway in my lists I had better try the shorter books. I like The Golden Notebook, but I'm struggling with it. I'll probably read Susan Cooper tonight.

I finished The Bone People. It was fantastic. I'm processing it. Commentators at Amazon either love or hate it, five stars or one, with a few high-ranking reviewers giving it three stars. I can appreciate the criticisms, but I still loved it. It didn't remind me of anything else, and therefore, unlike as with The Haunting of Hill House, I have nothing to say about it.

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Tonight we have been playing with our new Total Gym.
RDC said, "But you're not supposed to use it barefooted!"
You're not supposed to drive barefooted either, I responded, like that stops me.

Which reminds me of something that happened last summer at my mother's house. She and her husband and RDC and I were getting into our two cars to go visit Granny. This was already a problem: she said, "I thought we'd all go together?!" but the both of them drive at a crawl, timidly, and thus dangerously, and make my teeth itch. Plus she had just showered in Jean Naté, which aggravates RDC's asthma. Plus we would have had to return to Old Lyme with them afterward, which I'm sure was part of her cunning plan Just to Have More Time with You, Dear, and never mind if it makes you late for your next engagement, dear. No, we'd drive ourselves, thanks. I had opened the driver's side door in the same state in which I'd been in her house, which is the same state I spend my time in nonpublic buildings: barefoot.
BDL said, either to inform or reproach me, "You know it's against the law to drive without your shoes on." If to inform, did he assume I don't know the law? If to reproach, is that his place?
"It's not against my laws," I observed. I had not been this to be a retort, but that's probably the tone I reflexively affected (my fault). Driving barefoot has never struck me as dangerous at all, has never impeded my use of the pedals. Heeled shoes are dangerous, and slippery or wet soles, and platform soles, and hiking boots. I've driven with folks who've gotten a pedal stuck between their foot and their Birkenstock or Teva. I drive barefoot.