Last time I was my sister; today I'm my dad. It's remarkable how gullible I was as a child to fall for my sister's typical older-sibling shtick of telling me I was adopted.

Reading: Mary McCarthy, The Group

Moving: walked 2.7 miles and did a full circuit of weights

Watching: clouds roll in

Listening: Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

14 May 2001: Great Weekend

I don't understand. Tex has lost a lot of weight, the spare tire around his waist, and he says that, glad as he is to be healthier, he feels, literally, less like himself. That belly needing those trousers was who he was for ten years, and now with his new belt he feels less substantial. Or something. I don't get it. I am so much more comfortable in my skin when I'm not bulgy. Caution: gender stereotypes ahead.

RDC bought new shorts for the summer but returned one pair because they caught on the fronts of his thighs with every step. He declared they were cut wrong. Now, my shorts rasp the fronts of my thighs when I climb stairs or hills, yet I have never considered this my shorts' fault but mine, for being fat. The difference here is that RDC has long slender legs and I have not, so his blaming the cut of the shorts and my blaming my fat make respective sense. But still.

This winter a female friend of mine was looking for a warm hat but didn't like herself in any of them; she blamed her forehead. In contrast a male acquaintance searched for a new winter coat that didn't make him look fat and when they all did, blamed the garments instead of inspecting his torso for squishiness.

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I ordered new contact lenses and they arrived by mail the next day, which pleased me, except that half of them were -4.25 instead of -4.50. The office insisted that this was the prescription the optometrist intended, which would of course explain why the free trials he gave me were -4.50. This morning someone called with no apology but with two boxes of the correct Rx on the desk, which means I have to go down to Curtis Street and back in 30 minutes, which means the shuttle instead of walking. I have to do this in 30' because I have chopped my lunch period in half to accumulate time so I can take my birthday off. I'm also working a half hour later each day. Heaven help me if ever I have to resume a 40-hour week permanently.

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What a great weekend. After work Friday RDC and I went to the Botanic Gardens' plant sale, at which I did not buy a fuschia plant but did snort a hillful of varied lilac. We bought supper at Wild Oats and later watched "Quills." RDC bought this only remembering that there was some movie I had missed in theatres and wanted to see. "Traffic," I reminded him. As Mr. Henslowe, Walsingham, and the Marquis de Sade, Geoffrey Rush has absolved himself for "Shine," during which I was grateful to have fallen asleep. "Quills" was yet only okay, the script being a lot stupider than the actors' several abilities. De Sade's drive to write was more important than his content, which I appreciated--"Breaking the Code" was more about whatsisname's sex life than about solving the Enigma, and "Wilde" more about sex than writing.

I like to know how people choose their children's, dogs', houses', and boats' names. This fixation of mine is of some years' standing. In The Thorn Birds, which I first read in high school, Anne asks Meggie, "It's a good name, by why did you choose it?" and Meggie tells her, "I read it somewhere, and I liked it." So. In 1999 I read Forbidden Knowledge and learned, for the first time (never having had a particular interest previously), that one of the Marquis de Sade's more famous books is titled Justine.

Huh, thought I. Because Meggie knew nothing on her wedding night and not much more afterward except pain, but then she lived at the Muellers' house, whose library was a lot broader than that of Drogheda, "and Meggie learned a great deal as she read." So I've wondered, since, if McCullough knew, as any reasonably well-informed person might, (of) the Marquis's book. I can't think of another literary Justine, though I'm sure what I've read and what would have been on the shelves of a private 1930s library in Dungloe, Australia, are two circles with not much overlap. Though this still leaves me wondering about Dane.

Saturday. What a great day. Except for abandoning Blake at home, what a great day. We drove up to Boulder with the bikes on the car, parked near the center of town, and biked x miles to the Boulder reservoir for KBCO's Kinetics festival. This is where I love being a girl: after we locked up, I ripped off my shirt, slid into a cool linen dress and, backing up against RDC, shucked my bike shorts, whereas he was stuck in padded black lycra. Heh. We didn't see the balloon launch or watch the 5K race, but we did get there well in time to watch the main event: arace among homemade, pedal- and paddle-powered crafts. They left the beach at 11:00 to cross the artificial lake and return. In the meantime, William Topley, of whom I have barely ever heard, played an hour-long set from 11:30 to 12:30, and then there was a very long wait, and then the only thing that mattered happened: the Cowboy Junkies came on stage:

• Miles from Our Home
• 'Cause Cheap Is How I Feel (because DIA lost Margo's baggage)
  During this, I called my sister (cell phones do come in handy) and let the band play into her answering machine the line "every time I see you, my love grows a little stronger")
• Songs from Open: the third part of the river trilogy, telling what happened to Bea, "I'm So Open," "Bread and Wine," "Small Swift Birds," and "Thousand Year Prayer."
  Now that it's the 15th, I can give those titles: "Dragging Hooks" is the Bea song, and "Thousand Year Prayer" might be my favorite song from this album
• Anniversary Song
• Blue Guitar
• Sweet Jane
• Hunted
• Townes' Blues

Michael, Peter, Alan, and the mandolin player--no names were given, but it might have been Jeff Bird, who for some reason is not a member of the band though he plays on almost every album--jammed during "Blue Guitar" and Margo wandered away from the mike to take pictures. She's just so wonderful. She looked around at the lake and the mountains and the blazing blue sky and said, "So I heard it snowed last week?" Yep.

From left to right, Michael Timmins on guitar; the neck of the other musician's string instrument, Peter Timmins on drums; Margo Timmins doing vocals; and Alan Anton on bass.

When the first chords of "Sweet Jane" pumped into the warm mountain air, I was incredulous, but only for a moment. Then I shrieked and bounced and jumped. I saw the Dead six times but only at my second Furthur show did I finally hear "Ripple." Fourth time's the charm, I guess: the Junkies didn't play it in New Haven in 1994, at Lilith Fair in 1998, or at the Fillmore last year. I had shouted for it in a pause between songs (as she sipped her tea; she always has a mug of tea and a vase of flowers onstage wither her). Afterward I demanded of RDC, "D'you think they played it because of me me me?" Pragmatist that he is, he said no; but the folks beside us, with whom we had shared photographs and sunscreen, said oh yes absolutely; and I love being humored like that.

The women I met last year at the Fillmore told me then that Margo always meets fans afterward. Her availability had been announced at Lilith Fair, but Fiddler's Green is run by such a bunch of Nazis that if you went out to meet her, you'd be denied re-entry and miss Natalie Merchant and Sarah McLachlan. Also I had had no idea this was her usual thing but thought it a special, womyn-esque, touchy-feely kind of thing for that particular event. After the Fillmore show last June, I think Jenn and Kevin just wanted to go home, and I didn't have my camera or anything for her to sign, so we just left. This time, I met Margo.

My hair! Well, I'd been in sun for six hours, wearing a bike helmet and then a cap (which she soon signed) and, OMFB, I am hardly without good reason to think that long hair seldom looks good loose.

And I saw the women from the ticket-buying last year, and Margo remembered them and looked at the pictures they've had taken of themselves with her. As she signed the "Summer Reading" cap 3SK gave me for my birthday three years ago and the t-shirt I'd biked in (the NARAL shirt I received when I volunteered for an event when I first moved here), I told her I was going home specifically the weekend the Junkies would be there, to see them with my sister, to whom I'd introduced their music, and that I planned to see them a few other times this summer. "We'll get to be good friends then," she smiled.

Wow.

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A little sidenote here. I haven't seen this pose in many many years, but it's familiar. That left arm that doesn't know what to do with itself? That's what the inside arm does in whatever awkward embrace I find myself. I didn't notice it until freshling year of college. Someone took a picture of my hip--nonvirgin, cokesnorting, from Manhattan--roommate and me one Friday before she went home to see Elton John at Madison Square Garden. She was therefore Dressed, and I was wearing jeans and a henley; she has an arm around my shoulders, and my other arm is flailing in a failed attempt to be similarly cool. It is a remarkably similar pose to one taken of me with an AFS student from Italy or maybe Spain, the summer after 11th grade. Boy, he was cute. And foreign. (This was the night I would meet Bill.) And had his arm around me, possibly the first non-family male contact my person had experienced since my abortive first consensual kiss. I guess I didn't feel out of my element with Captain Kangaroo. And, happily, the arm isn't quite as flaily now as it was when I was 17 and 18.

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On the way back, nearly to the car, I overcompensated making room for an oncoming bike, struck my right handlebar on a brick wall, and fell over, whacking my throat on my handlebars. The other cyclist was mortified but it was entirely my fault, and RDC had the same concern. Whatever; it was my own clumsiness. What's the oldest daughter's name in "Fiddler on the Roof"? Anyway, I looked like her, had she married the man, had Tevye's dream been true, had the dead wife really strangled her. Going down, I knew I wasn't falling hard enough to injure myself, but I hadn't planned on my neck getting in the way. I was scared in the instant after, thinking of Laurel in Army of Children (am I the only person who's ever read that?). But I had my windpipe and was fine.

And I was entirely too prudent with the sunscreen: I was in the sun in a nearly transparent linen shift from 10 to 3, and biking in a t-shirt for a half hour either side of that, and I am the same color I was this morning.

When we got home from Kinetics, RDC abandoned his idea of working out and we sat reading and napping until the sun set behind the house. Blake was glad of the outside time, I hope, and I was glad he had it, because he spent the next day alone as well. Sunday we finally got into the mountains.

In Rocky Mountain National Park, we heard frogs, whose lullaby I sorely miss sleeping to, and hiked nine or ten miles up and then down again, to Fern Lake. This trail keeps in sight or at least sound of the Big Thompson River and passes a pool and some waterfalls. I have to increase my water-hauling capacity, but otherwise it was a great day. The air sparkled with sun and the vanilla scent of ponderosa pine; the only sounds were frogs, birdsong, wind, and rushing running water; we saw critters, birds, and a snake; and we used all our new shoulder and leg muscles hiking and sinking through rotten snow and carrying packs.

Once home, we ate huge honking burritos and collapsed in front of the Simpsons.

I miss water. I miss the sound, the feel, the sight, its effect on its surroundings. I miss water. (This paragraph was originally much more evocative and picturesque and heart-rending but I lost it and then I was tired so I wrote no more. The End.)