The Forest of Cockatiels is less effective as camouflage but more intimidating than the Forest of Dunsinane.

Reading: Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook; WIlliam Faulkner, Light in August

Moving: 4.2 miles altogether, maybe nearer 4.5

Watching: "Small Time Crooks"

Listening: Dead Man Walking, tape 8 (the last)

20 April 2001: Arbor Day

Today at lunch I started Light in August. More accurately, I opened it again after having read the first chapter weeks ago. (It doesn't escape my notice that I started The Golden Notebook a month ago either.) In the second chapter, the woman sits on the top step of a general store, and after I read it, I stood, dazed, to go look at the mountains and get my breath back. Faulkner had taken my language away, not stolen it like Sethe's milk, but made it redundant and inadequate for anyone else to say anything, ever.

Which is a bit in Maus I really like. In one square, Spiegelman tells his therapist that Becket said that every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness, and the next square is blank, and in the next, Spiegelman continues, "But he said it."

Of course, that next square isn't blank. It's full of the pen-and-ink drawing of Spiegelman as a child-mouse sitting in an arm chair across from the therapist mouse. And the point of a graphic novel is that the pictures are narrative too. But in that single frame anyway there are no words. Do other panels of Maus have no words? Not many.

This morning over breakfast I finished Silver on the Tree. I remember actually disliking Greenwitch, perhaps because it scared me. How old was I when I first read the Dark Is Rising sequence? Was I grown? My favorite continues to be Over Sea, Under Stone, followed by The Grey King. In Over Sea, Under Stone, three ordinary children in an adventure not too removed from reality, plus the Holy Grail. Also Gumerry, and Barnabas realizing who he is. Its being the first in the series also helps. If I read them all at once, by the last books I might have been bored with the shticks.

In both The Dark Is Rising and Silver on the Tree, the adventures are simultaneously too fantastic for me and too dead easy. The danger the children faced in Over Sea was real enough, in this world--abduction being the only one I remember just now. For the nature of the conflict Cooper sets forth, the action that's needed to win seems inadequate. All the Old Ones from all over the world congregate on a train for a vital, fate-of-the-world-level Last Confrontation--in which none of them but Will and Merlion partake? Besides that the children's campaign is nearly guaranteed by virtue of its being at stake in a children's book, the outcome of the various trials seems never in doubt. And so easy. And since the bigoted father is A Bad Person for hating immigrants, what is Arthur for his opinions about Saxons and Danes and Normans? I suppose Romans were okay because they had already been there by the time he arrived? And Bran ap Arthur came from a thousand years ago, not from 1500 years ago? Huh. And a thousand years ago Latin was being spoken in England, not a post-Norman-Invasion Old-to-Middling English? Huh. I maybe should reread The Grey King to get the bad taste out of my brain. I don't remember my objections to Greenwitch; wasn't the greenwitch evil or antiChristian somehow? If so, that would irk me, as it, a true-life, ongoing folk tradition, is a holdover from pagan/Goddess worship and nothing to do with Christianity except for its being coopted through no fault of its own.

Anyway, those two of the five in the series that I like, I like a lot. And King of Shadows. So I'd still have fallen all over her feet if I had been at Books of Wonder that day. Pity.

---

My favorite Far Side, and I have to emphasize that I saw it for the first time probably in junior high, was a single panel (of course) of a gumball machine filled with rats, all piled up. A cat has just put a coin in and is twisting the handle; one rat in the middle has flung out its forelegs, help meeeee! and its eyes are all buggy. Another rat, apparently blind or willfully oblivious to the fact this will be its fate too, stands and points, exclaiming, "Randy's going down!"

---

Last week when Bob asked me about Easter Egg dyeing, I told her that I was kind of glad that Easter had slipped my mind, because RDC could never eat as many as I could dye and I didn't always bring them to shelters.
"But I love hard-boiled eggs!" Egg exclaimed. "Lots of protein." She's a body-builder.
"Do you eat the yolks too?"
"No."
My expression said well there you go, so she continued,
"I give him to my dog. They're good for his coat," and it was this last exchange that we found so exceedingly funny, laughing at one another and one another's laughs, and as we parted in the hallway, we laughed our respective ways--meaning, she with her laugh and I with mine as we separated toward our individual desks. Trey was with me, and I had introduced Bob to her as the only other person at Dot Org whose laugh is as loud as mine. This exchange had proved it.

So Tuesday when I talked to Kymm, one reason I was anxious to do so was to find out about her laugh, which by all accounts is phenomenal. We dished and gossiped and speculated and this and that, and after Blake had his fit about the placemats, she denied that my bird could possibly be as insane as her cat Baldrick, who has taken to eating styrofoam.

I gave my usual spiel about a parrot having the emotions of a two-year-old human, the intellect of a three-year-old, and the hormones of a thirteen-year-old. Except for its entire life.
"You can't neuter them," she asked.
"No," I confirmed, "so one of the reasons he's so maniacal is that he never can get laid." I paused to consider what I had just said and to whom I had said what I just had said and added, "No offense."
And then I realized that that was even worse, and I started to laugh. Luckily, so had she. And we were so mutually delighted with ourselves that we just laughed and laughed and laughed and eventually I was sitting on the floor, arms on my knees, forehead on hands, still chortling as I tried to breathe. And then for her to go and say this--"She started laughing with the scariest, giantest, loudest, most laughy laugh in all the land and I thought. 'Okay, I get why she didn't want to talk from work'"--actually kind of startles me. Does my laugh actually trump hers? How unlikely that seems.

---

On the other hand it's not unlikely at all for me to say tactless things, now is it? In our staff meeting yesterday, CoolBoss told us that a Dot Orger fainted dead away at DIA the other day, falling backward like a tree, and gashed her head open on the people mover. Apparently a passerby saw her drop before her companions noticed, and yelled, "She's going down!" It sounded, the way she repeated it, as if he'd said it gleefully, the way I've always heard the rat speak its line, instead of out of concern for her well-being. "Not even I would say something that bad!" I exclaimed, and CoolBoss laughed and pointed at me, because actually, I probably would.

---

In the book club on Wednesday, one of the books for next time that someone suggested is set in the town where Dot Org will host its next annual Big Top. It's in a special edition with our logo on the front, Lou said, and signed. "Who signed them, UrBoss?" I asked. She giggled, repeating, "Yeah, who signed them, UrBoss?" and the rest of the group heard her where they had not heard me (doesn't that seem unlikely) and cracked up. "That was my line!" I interjected, not too maturely. I should learn just to let things go, shouldn't I? But it's so rare I amuse anyone but myself that I like to get credit for what little I do say that works.

---

Yesterday I scampered to Ross. I'm bad. Shocking. I found two sleeveless shirts, not meant to be tucked in (which is a fine thing with my waist in its current state), pale blue denim and rose twill, like regular men's shirts that shed their sleeves, and a little ice blue linen shift for around the house in the summer. When I emerged from my post-weights shower yesterday evening, I was wearing the pale blue shirt with the newish sweatskirt. RDC nodded approvingly: "Is that what you're going to wear to the play?" Err, I hadn't thought to. The fabric of this skirt is sweatshirting, I pointed out. But he thought it was a nice outfit, and I wore it to work today. It is a good combination, I think. I'm a column, without sleeves and in a long straight skirt. Currently, being a column is the best way I can look.

To the play I wore the long linen dress with the high waistline Haitch encouraged me into, kind of this color, a little duskier, which also makes me a column. But I had forgotten it was windy. Because the skirt hangs in a sort of sarong from the high waist, it's dangerous in wind. But I held onto the skirt and all was well, except that our VCR is rebelling and neither Haitch nor Trey had a blank tape so I missed a new "ER." I'm not addicted to television, no not at all. Besides, I can see it again, sometime, whereas I couldn't see "Wit" any other time.

Despite this production's lack of Emma Thompson, the script naturally is much more affecting as a play in the little Space Theatre than it can be as a movie. The movie excised most of the metafiction--the play began with Vivian saying she'd be dead in two hours instead of eight months (the chorus in Henry V says something about the stage being an hourglass), and she addressed the audience more directly than anyone, even Emma Thompson, can address the camera in that Ferris Bueller kind of way, whatever that technique is called. The stage has one obvious disadvantage: even a dying woman in great pain whose strength has all been sapped must Project onstage, whereas in a movie Vivian can speak in a realistic whisper. That's called suspension of disbelief, lisa. This particular performance had another disadvantage exposed only at the end: when doctors worked to resuscitate her, physical attributes of the actress's body betrayed her otherwise faultless portrayal of a deteriorating woman: her breasts. Not that women who've had breast augmentation are thereby spared ovarian cancer, but the two half-grapefruits did somewhat spoil the effect. Especially since her tumor had been described as the size a grapefruit. And the play could end with her spirit ascending to heaven as the movie credibly could not, the stage dark but for a single spotlight shining straight down, around which she danced, climbing upward, her perfect breasts in taut skin protruding implausibly from the rest of her middle-aged body.

In the movie, the nurse is a stronger character and not dumb as post. I liked that. Otherwise, even with Emma in the movie, the script works better as a play, in this production. A stage is more intimate than a screen, and I wouldn't know how to judge which is the better actress but the stage one here was more evocative than Emma on screen.

Cut from the movie, I recall, is, unfortunately, an analysis of one of Donne's poems whose speaker wishes not forgiveness but forgetfulness from God. That makes the line from The Runaway Bunny, in which the mother bunny as God will never forget or abandon the little bunny soul, resonate more. And that scene is yet again more important because of a classroom scene, also not in the movie, in which a student asks why Donne couldn't just say what he had to say simply, instead of so convolutedly. Simply put and easily understood; Margaret Wise Brown offers the same idea with much less taxing of the brain.

---

After work today I took the bus to the mall. Let me confess one of my paranoid fantasies. Perhaps because I didn't have long hair or commute by bus when I took Restoration and Eighteenth Century English lit, I didn't develop it then; I had long hair and took the bus when I first read Bad Girls, yet still lived without fear; but now I take a much dirtier bus with meaner passengers. I had always minimized how much I touched any bus surface with my hands, but now I wear my braid in front so it doesn't touch the railings or seats. I'm not sure if I wear my braid in front because of hygeine or because all I can think of is "The Rape of the Lock" or Louis Casselli cutting off Mikey's braid.

---

The day's highlight came not from any consumerist coup but at the library. The mellifluous George Guidall reads Fathers and Sons, which I have wanted to reread since I first had it in college. It must have been in Russian History to 1905; the classroom the memory evokes is the wrong one but I certainly didn't read it for Near East Pre-History or Germany since 1815 (and in Russian Lit I read Dead Souls and Eugene Onegin, which is why I was a history major rather than a Russian one). I found it online, called to ask the library to hold it for me, and petted two dogs (Peak, an anorexic-looking whippet, much more friendly than Jake even though Jake was a spaniel, which in principle I prefer) before returning The Haunting of Hill House and picking up my audio book. When the clerk saw my information on the screen, she asked about my address. "Is your house so many from the corner, and does it face this direction?" she asked. Yes....

It turned out that in the '70s she babysat for one of our house's former owners. They worked for the library and the father got her her first job at the library, which of course I was delighted to hear, and they are the ones who installed the solar panels. Apparently these owners were in town from Minnesota over the summer and drove by the house. They should have stopped by; I would have loved for them to see their old house.

This kind of connection is exactly what I miss from living in a small town. When I was in grad school, I was near the information desk at the Co-op when someone asked for directions to the grad center. I was going there and offered to walk with her, and on the way--not far, going around two sides of the library--we passed four people I knew and greeted by name. "So it is possible to get to know people here," the woman said, "even though it's so big." Oh yeah, said I, omitting to mention that I had been there for nearly six years by then and befriended the natives.

And we have very little information about our house and its previous owners. We don't know when someone knocked out a wall to make one big room, when the patio was built, or who planted the fruit trees. As RDC pointed out, if these people lived in the house in the early '70s, they were probably responsible for the avocado green paint that was one of the layers under the freak's mint green. If that's case, I returned, we could probably return to the then-children some of the Lite-Brite pegs we found under the orange shag carpet in the closet.

Coming out the library (and petting the dogs again), I called Dora. Through email we discovered that we were ech planning to shop that afternoon, and I figured that a remote shopping companion might be a good idea. We could assure each other that we looked fabulous in whatever we found and never know about the other's fat ass or matronly shoes. I left her voicemail about the house and proceeded to shop.

I found several cards in Papyrus, including a wedding one for an acquaintance who got married back in December and others not quite so tardy. And a Topsy-Tail, not that I would confess to purchasing or owning anything once Not Sold in Stores. And The Golden Notebook from the Tattered Cover on the way home. In between the hair appliance and the book, I found a) no summer shoes, b) that I am apparently no longer a size 10, c) a complete dearth of summer shoes, and d) absolutely no summer shoes at all. (I was looking because my Great Gilly Hopkins shoes ended up being too small and are no longer available in a larger size.)

The sizing dilemma happened over the only clothing I tried on. I wanted a long straight simple natural linen skirt, and I found its near relations, a dress and a knee-length skirt and also a pair of trousers, all of the same line. The size 10 dress was too tight across the hips, which I didn't want to know, but the size 12 skirt and trousers were too big around and positively swam at my waist. But the Great Two Months To Go Home Skinnification has begun, and I walked five miles today, and mean to walk every day and do weights and force myself back onto the Nordic Track.

If I lose weight, I will double my wardrobe, because it seems my clothes are now back in style. The suit I bought from Ann Taylor seven years ago, full price, as an interview suit, is available, jacket and trousers, from Valerie Stevens (aka linen for fat chicks). I also saw the black with white polka dots skirt (Gap 1991), which I have not been able to button at the waist for two years, somewhat available but in navy with knife pleats. And the houndstooth shorts (Gap 1989) were for sale, though lined.

A coworker got scary cholesterol numbers over the winter and gave up cheese for Lent, just to ease himself into a healthier eating pattern. By Easter his face and belly were noticeably less round, and he had lost 16 pounds. I'm off four-footed food and am trying to reduce cheese and chocolate, my two biggest failings. Chocolate is dietarily easy to do, if not psychologically, but without cheese I might shrivel up.

---

Not very long far along in my walk home, I met another dog, a thirteen-week-old Golden Retriever-Border Collie cross, still woolly and with big paws and needle teeth. Her name was Mathilda, and I, loving names as I do, asked why. Her owner was about my age, and I figured she maybe had read Roald Dahl. But no, she said her mother used to call her that when she being silly or naughty as a little girl.
"Mine too!" I exclaimed. "Or Tillie."
She nodded. Mathilda for naughty, Tillie for silly. This woman grew up in Vermont, but it's not only New England regionalism because Beth's mother used to call her Tillie as well (but not Mathilda).
Silly Tillie? Is that a name from a movie or a book?
There's the French doll character Mathilda, the puppy's owner said, you know, with the long black hair?
I knew, but is that character old enough for our mothers to have known, for it to be so pervasive a nickname? Amazon tells me that there is a book called Silly Tillie, except it was first published in 1989--and I bet it is so titled because its author's mother used to call her Tillie; and another site I didn't stay at long because of the terrible midi file of the "Northern Exposure" theme song claims that a campfire rhyme about Tillie is also called Aunt Sally.
I must find this out.

Closer to home I met an Irish wolfhound, perhaps my first in the flesh, named Dugan. I would have asked his owner as well about the name Dugan, except Dora called. And it's a good thing he was there, too, because if I hadn't removed my earphones to talk to his owner, I wouldn't've heard the phone ring.

We talked about shoes and dogs and Susan Cooper before our connection failed. There was time for her to call me a walking fool, and indeed if I am going to live in the middle of a city I'm glad to be able to get around without a car (even if it means I get anxious about my braid). Also time for her to ask me when a dog, and I said after Blake, because the risk is unacceptable.
"Well I can understand that; he's your child," she said, and in "child" her accent leapt out.
"Chiiil'," I repeated, laughing. She's self-conscious of sounding like a hick, her word, when talking to anyone from away; I don't think she sounds like a hick but like someone from the Bayou--exactly what she ought to sound like. But I shouldn't've teased.

---

This evening we watched "Small Time Crooks" again. It's painful to watch, not because of Woody Allen's usual character's whingeing but in a "Fawlty Towers" kind of way. Tracey Ullman has started to memorize the dictionary and her speech is awkwardly and incongruously crammed with two-bit a-words (which is as far as she's gotten). Meanwhile, Blake was happily destroying my DayRunner and shredding the pull-tag on the zipper of my fleece and had been scolded several times from our laptops' power cords. RDC observed, "Blake is the embodiment of entropy." He paused. "I've been memorizing the dictionary. Entirely."

(Saturday: it's not only the pull-tab Blake destroyed. He actually bent the teeth of the fleece, right at the bottom, so it can't be zipped at all. Destructive little beast.