Reading: Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Moving: swam 2k

27 July 2001: Picabo Augusta

I often wish I lived crunchier. On Friday at the Tattered Cover I read a pictorial biography of Tasha Tudor, whom I would love to be. That is, if I didn't have to wear those clothes. I love long skirts--I just retyped that, originally I had "I'm all about long skirts"--but the layers and all would drive me batty. But the goats and the fowl and the dogs--again, I'd have Labs and lab crosses and heelers instead of Pembroke Corgis--and the parrots and and the gardens and the living in Vermont and the illustrating children's books--not that I can draw--that all sounds great. Also if I could have a gas stove instead of wood. And DSL, natch.

My parents raised me to be better-educated and -employed than they were, which is a worthy goal. Human and infallibly grasping as I am, though, I wonder how I would have turned out if I'd been raised like Nisou, with languages and dusty books and without television in a log house in a university town; or like PLT, of two academics who with their adult peers treated him as a thinking contemporary; or indeed like his own daughters, among third-generation scholars and friends; or like HEBD's daughter, with both parents loving and nearly continuously present.

In the pool Tuesday evening, thinking about this, the name of that skier eluded me for several laps and then revealed itself: Picabo Street. Whether named for an American Indian tribe or for her favorite game, still she was raised wild in Montana in a family so off the grid they didn't name her until she needed a passport at the age of three. And the Phoenix kids all have retained the veganism they were raised with. I guess I was thinking of names, of course, because I love names, and Picabo's odd name and Joaquim-Leaf-Joaquim Phoenix, and of other people who've changed their names. Perhaps some fictional characters are as real to me as celebritiese: I next thought of Charis in The Robber Bride and how carefully she named her child August and how much that child rebelled against the way she was named, and raised, as she became Augusta.

If I had been raised in such a radically different context such that I would now approve of, yet still didn't get along with my parents, I might own a minivan and live in the 'burbs with my sprogs and wear a suit, jogging or pinstripe, and be a woman of business. So I am content to be as I am, to have been raised as I was. Because again, how I am now is my responsibility and choice.