Reading: William Faulkner, Light in August

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

Listening: Fathers and Sons

27 April 2001: Sitting on a Hill Overlooking the Water

I returned The Golden Notebook and Dead Man Walking yesterday, discovered that Ironweed is still missing, and learned Yet Another Reason for me to keep far from the New Fiction shelves. Browsing along, innocent as a lamb, when boom, The Diary of Henry Fitzwilliam Darcy leapt off the shelf into my hands. The frightening thing is that I didn't need to see the last two names to have seized it. Henry, though. Henry?

So I sat and skimmed through it, expecting no better level of discourse than I found. And it's based not on the novel but on the BBC version, because he emphasizes teaching himself to swim (to set up Bridget Jones's pond-swimming scene) and the dog (Beau) whom Elizabeth plays with when staying at Netherfield. Ooof. If I had read further than her rejection of his first proposal, there probably would have been a fencing scene too.

I was so proud of myself for reshelving it. I can read the worst trash. This is not true. I thought I would reread V.C. Andrews when I brought the Flowers books back to Denver last year; I didn't. I did read the stupid Pride and Prejudice continuation, The Bar Sinister, earlier this year. And Lady Catherine's Necklace, which I didn't mind as much as I wasted only a few hours on it and it wasn't nearly as bad. Other than Austen fanfic, then, I don't read trash. Don't want to, couldn't stomach it. Cold comfort.

The last days of the Winslow Homer exhibit kind of snuck up on me; the last day is Sunday. I renewed our annual membership yesterday and today we went on my lunch hour, when I discovered that Girl Sitting on a Hill Overlooking the Water is my favorite Homer. I thought I liked him because of his powerful seas and New England connections, but it turns out I like him because he painted me in one of my favorite spots--in a long dress, with a single braid, under trees, looking at water. Except it wasn't me, because I don't wear boots in that sort of setting. I want a print of this painting very badly, except it might not turn out as well. In the original, he used the texture of the watercolor paper to suggest the surface of the water; in a print, that dappled effect might be lost.

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My sister is such a freak. A couple of days ago she emailed me, "watch for a box at work." Today it came. Now, she's almost always late with my birthday present, but it is a present; whereas I am generally on time with her card, but it is only a card. This year I figured my birthday would be three weeks late and observed when I go home, as it was in 1998 (and in 1999 my birthday box had not yet arrived by the time I went home in June for Grampy's funeral). It was on time in 2000, but I myself didn't bring the gifts home from work until after my birthday, since we moved into the house the following weekend.

Anyway. The box itself cracks me up; it's from Orvis with our grandmother's address in Kelseytown--where she hasn't lived in over seven years. Written in my mother's capitals around the sides are "Fragile" and blather about this being wedding presents Granny received in 1938 (when, in fact, she was married). Then I opened the box.

Packed in glossy green excelsior was a collection of the very worst possible Easter candy, bought after Easter when it would be half-price. Peeps. Chocolate marshmallow bunnies (my whole family knows I hate marshmallow--or ought to*). A pint carton of chewing gum jelly beans. The pastel, Easter equivalent of circus peanuts.** Bizarre lollipops in a strip. The pièce de resistance was the sucker-lollipop on a ring, for that sexy pacifier look. Also a pair of hot pink tapers with bunny appliqués. The only thing I could eat, and did, was a flat chocolate bunny head on a stick, lollipop style.

Io, who has been pleased to accept whatever candy distribution goes on this department, found nothing to eat, which is a measure of how loathsome everything was. The box, minus the candles, wound up in the breakroom, where even late on a Friday afternoon the scavenging hordes would empty it. I perhaps should have exploded the peeps in the microwave, an experiment I've wanted to conduct for a while (but the documentaries of this practice that I have found online really do suffice).

Then I turned on my phone, went into a conference room (for the fenestrated emptiness of it) and called my sister. I had expected to get her machine, but that didn't stop me telling her in real time what I was going to tell the machine: "You are such a freak."

* Maybe only my mother, who fed me and was there for this important story, and my sister, with whom I have eaten and do eat more than with either of my parents, know I hate marshmallow I don't know if my father would even remember that I hate eggs. (N.B.: another reason to prefer "Pretty in Pink" to "Sixteen Candles" is that Andy hates eggs. "Since when?" asks her father. "Oh, maybe since birth?" she tells him. On the other hand, whether Sam eats eggs remains unknown.) (Please desist with the hate mail. I know I'm in a despised minority there.) My father was stuck with me one weekend day, the memory of which stands out probably because such occasions were so few, for enough hours in a row that he had to feed me. I was the World's Most Finicky Eater. He tried to make me a bologna and cheese sandwich, dismissing pb&j as too insubstantial. He slathered either mustard or mayonnaise (because I didn't distinguish between them, I don't know which) before I caught him, freaked out, and required a do-over. I only liked cheese in grilled cheese sandwiches, so the cheese had to come off. I ate my bologna alone on unadulterated white bread as nature intended, but not without a struggle. He was so disgusted with and angry at me. As years passed I realized that here I had been old enough to remember an incident clearly, though too young to make my own pb&j, before he had ever prepared a meal for me or paid enough attention to what I ate to know what I liked or didn't like, and how rare were my mother's days off by herself (or probably not by herself but doing something with my sister without me). She was a single mother long before sixth grade, which is when they got divorced.

** When I first arrived at UConn, my sister and BHM assembled a care package for me from CVS (which is where the best stocking-stuffing material and other gag gifts originate). In addition to whatever else, there was candy; in addition to the edible candy, she and BHM had separated in the store with the mission to find for me their two opinions of the most disgusting product in the store. What they each returned with was circus peanuts.

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Egg and I were talking books the other day. She is struggling with Sentimental Education and doesn't understand why, when Madame Bovary is one of her favorite books, this doesn't move her. And she's looking forward to finishing it so she can start The Brothers Karamazov, which she's looking forward to because Crime and Punishment is anther favorite. If Flaubert can disappoint her, Dostoyevsky might too, which possibly had already occurred to her. I told her I've only read some short stories and Notes from Underground, and that, speaking of Russian lit, I've been trying to read Anna Karenina on and off for almost two years.

There's a reason besides becoming well-read that I want to read that and War and Peace. They were BHM's favorite books, and I want to read them somewhat in memorial to him (since I never ate the circus peanuts). My father might not have been too involved with us as children, but he is now that we are grown. BHM's brother and his family live in Florida; so does my father and he visits them sometimes for my sister's sake. I think the sister-in-law, who maybe never met BHM, might think this a bit freakish, but my sister was her children's uncle's best friend, and she loves those boys.