Blake preens on my shoulder. The worst of the fallout is over but the incoming feathers cause him no end of aggravation. Plus he's prickly like a hedgehog

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

Moving: weights. Ow.

Watching: "Shakespeare in Love" for the eleventy-third time; "Memento" last night.

Listening: Cowboy Junkies

22 April 2001: Earth Day

Today we made moldings for the left window. Mostly I watched, learning how to operate the table saw and the router. I always wanted to play with wood, and except for its being shop, I enjoyed the woodworking section of shop.

Have you seen who takes shop? I take shop. Well, even with me, there'd be no light. We made shelves, not lamps; and the two brackets of my shelf didn't match. My sister still has the shelf though. (In seventh or eighth grade, we took a quarter each of shop, home ec, music, and art, to break us into what we might be interested in. I believe this was an attempt at equity.)

Otherwise, it snowed all day onto warm earth where nothing accumulated, and I watched "Shakespeare in Love," did weights, pet Buddy's head, and read Faulkner.

What a great Sunday.

Also I talked to my father and SMW and was told Yet Another Version of how I grew up Protestant. I am primarily of southern Irish extraction with a bit of (southern) German and some scattered Others so this has always puzzled me somewhat. Only somewhat, though. I suppose children in traditional households would tend to grow up with their mothers' faiths by virtue of her being the day-to-day parent; and that would apply to my family and those of my ancestors. My maternal line is English and Dutch and Scottish in addition to Irish--Featherly, Parsons, Rockefeller, a van Huyckensomethingorother that I never remember, Lawrence, Moore. So not very puzzling that I should have been brought up Protestant. My mother's father's family was Catholic and therefore from southern, not northern Germany (I'm guessing about Bavaria). And my mother's paternal grandmother, whose china I have, came from County Cork, and therefore was in all probability Catholic.

My father's maternal grandmother's name was Keyes, and, like my maternal Rockefeller ancestor, was disowned for marrying beneath her. The women of my family and their falling for flashing-eyed, though dirt poor, Black Irish men--who can blame them? Anyway, the Keyes explains my paternal grandmother and thus father having been brought up Protestant. My great-grandmother was Ascendancy. Allegedly her family owned linen mills in France.

And what did I get for my version of Irishness? The fair, fair skin but neither the flashing blue eyes nor the near-black hair of my father--I prefer to say "fair." Patrick Dennis describing Auntie Mame's ghost writer said something about paper or death or chalk. This confused me at the time, because my father always tanned and tanned and tanned (which is how I picked up that healthy habit and undying opinion that that's how I look best).