Reading: Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon; although officially Iris Murdoch, Under the Net and Nick Hornby, About a Boy

Moving: painting and window-scrubbing and mowing and weed-whacking

18 July 2001: Tobacco Road

I heard CoolBoss chortle in her office and a moment later she came into my cube to show me a book about effective management, how to leave an effective legacy or something (sounds like how to write a will, no?). She just bought it for someone, and, randomly flipping it open, what she saw was a two-page spread about learning to have spontaneous casual conversation. There was a checklist: you go and accost someone, talk at them, and record the person's name and check it off. We both found this deliciously ironically funny. I suggested that after completely the list, you get a merit badge. Then I asked her, "So, are you going to go back into your office and write down my name and check it off?" and we giggled and giggled. She doesn't like the word "boss" applied to herself, a fact I didn't know when, years ago, I assigned her that alias. But the fact is, she is. She's a great manager and can be goofy about John Cusack and mock Planning to Be Spontaneous: Follow These Rules to Be Fun! stuff with me.

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Bits of Tobacco Road were so shocking (in a "Pulp Fiction" kind of way: it shouldn't be funny when Marvin gets his head blown off, but somehow it is) that I had to read them to RDC. After I decided it was gallows humor, that ÜberBoss was right and it was a hoot, it was extremely funny. Caldwell cannot seriously have meant it as a portait of anyone human.

Item: the father wants to sell a load of scrub oak as firewood. No one will buy it, so he decides that rather than haul it home, he'll burn it up. He sets fire to it in a pile of dead leaves and hay, both of which burn merrily for a while, leaving the blackjack nearly untouched. Nevertheless he doesn't understand why no one wanted to buy his "firewood."

There's a racist incident displaying the cavalier attitude of whites toward blacks in this time and place. It ends with the father commenting, "N-----s will get killed. Looks like there ain't no way to stop it." Even if a person thinks white makes right, there is no way he could dismiss someone's death the way you'd dismiss a cake falling. (Those dashes are mine, not Caldwell's.)

Later on the father's mother is killed in exactly the same way, with exactly as little reaction or compassion from her family. A while later, "she was procumbent, and her face was mashed on the ground, but she had moved several feet closer to the house." Dude's father, her son, comments, "She ain't stiff yet, but I don't reckon she'll live."

RDC said, "Grandmas will get killed. Looks like there ain't no way to stop it."

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I saw something I've never seen before. It was a treat, like a double rainbow. Blake's always on my shoulder when I brush my teeth because beak-brushing is fun. I've described this. I've also described the buddy yawn, the mandible-cracking, tongue-chasing perfection of a tired cockatiel. Last night Blake had begun his bedtime yawning fit atop his cage, but when I invited him onto my finger he enthusiastically stepped up, because he's about like Calvin when it's bedtime--very sleepy and cranky but hating bedtime nevertheless. Brushing, I watched him in the mirror, the usual lean forward from my shoulder trying to get a closer look, the head-bobbing. He was leaning and bobbing when he began to yawn. He couldn't decide what he needed to do, investigate or bob his head or yawn, tried to do all three, lost his balance, started again. I nearly fell over myself. My son is illegally cute.