Reading: The Princes in the Tower

Moving: nada

Listening: nana

Watching: "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," yeeeeeeehaw!

20 November 2001: Until the evening

It was a good day until I got home. Oxford, Connecticut. A 94-year-old woman in Oxford!

Just today someone was asking if I wanted members of the Taliban dead. I am not sure but I think here is where his opposition to the death penalty ends: he's not a pacifist, and this is war. My absence of bloodlust has puzzled him, but then his reaction to this puzzles me. He has been subject to ethnic profiling and doesn't like that but now sees the sense in "keeping an eye on" the new demographic.

I have no good solutions. My answer to whether there should be a death penalty is to prevent the crimes that for some people warrant a capital sentence, which is avoidant to an extreme. Conflict, brrr!

But not when anyone fucks with Connecticut.

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Today I remembered there is a large building down the street that makes available media in different forms. It is called a library and perhaps there I could experiment with Christmas carols. So I went through two shelves, maybe 50 compact discs, and of those found six to borrow. I'll have the Perfect Christmas Carol Compilation one day. Also Jessie recommended an organization called Revels. I found a concert 22 December in Boulder that I hope I remember to go to, and maybe some of their albums would be acceptable. They do mostly medieval and renaissance stuff, and, while I first thought of course, that would be what I like, it turns out that my

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HAO canceled on tonight's Harry Potter excursion with sudden new plans that involved someone named, I think, mmm, McCarthy? We rescheduled for this weekend. And then, just before I left for the day, Lou pranced up to my cube and invited me to go along with her, her boyfriend, and another coworker, to the movie. Ack! I was torn. I tore my hair for a minute and said no, I would stick with my original plan. As I packed my bag, pondering how I never go out and never see anyone and how much it sucked to see "Phantom Menace" a week after it opened when no one cared any more, Tex walked by my cube, saw my contorted face, and asked "Deep in thought?" so I told him. Telling him, I decided what the hell, and I sped off down the hall to reverse my denial. "Oh, they've already left," called Tex after me, because he is mean mean mean. She had not left and I bounced back to my office, bound bound bound, and sproinged on my toes, and was otherwise merry, until Tex observed that the floor was quaking under his feet. I thwacked him.

So we went. I had not met the boyfriend before, and I liked him even before he bought my ticket (he bought all four). I usually name my coworkers geographically, but I name other people after Hallowe'en costumes, and this coworker dressed up as Monica Lewinsky, three years ago in the midst of it all. The scary thing is that she kinda looks like her. Prettier, not nearly so chunky, with better hair and a real smile, but her hair is thick and dark and shoulder length with that kind of bounce, and her eyes are blue or green, and she's not willowy by a long shot. So she's Monica.

When I was ten and she 13, my sister and I were going to go on an upside-down roller-coaster for the first time. The ride was closed that day, and we vowed that if we ever did go upside down, we'd do it together. I finally did try an upside-down ride in 1999, without my sister, and I nearly spewed chunks. Similarly, I should not have blown off Haitch. Even though she blew me off a little bit first, even though I still want to see the movie again, this weekend with her. ("You bitch!" said Haitch, the next day when I told her.)

I was with coworkers, and despite the thwacking of Tex and his witnessing my bouncing, besides the fact that I lent all four HP to CoolBoss and Lou in succession, I couldn't whoop and applaud around coworkers as I would have liked to. You know, Haitch doesn't really care for such outbursts either. I haven't stood on the arms of a movie seat and applauded since "Dead Poets Society." I was 21. Go away.

So the was great and entertaining and looked just beautiful, not quite as visually overwhelming as "Moulin Rouge" but still spectacular spectacular, and fun fun fun. Just like the book, huge plots holes and inconsistencies in the world of the movie, and did I mention fun? Monica, who has not read the books, said she liked it just find, but I saw her check her watch once. I myself only noticed the passing of time because of my stupid bladder.

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When I saw Nicholas Bantock, I had a really high number for a place in line, so I browsed for a while. I wanted The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, but the A that caught my eye was not Alexie (who wasn't there) but Adams. There was a new edition of Watership Down with an introduction by the author. In it, Adams tells about how the story came to be born. Kehaar is based on a Norwegian code-breaker he knew during the war. He said another thing, and I kicked myself for never having found this out before. He says he responds to every letter anyone writes him, because if he didn't he wouldn't deserve them.

I have never written to him. I have written to Madeleine L'Engle and received a reply. If I've written to others I've forgotten; I saw A.S. Byatt in person. But I never wrote to Richard Adams, even when in Tales from Watership Down one of the Efrafa emigrés tells Hazel she laughed, even though in WD he quite clearly states that rabbits don't laugh. (He says no animals laugh, though dogs and elephants may have an inkling. But parrots, Mr. Adams, parrots.) How could I never have written to Richard Adams?

Dear Mr. Adams,

Although Watership Down has been one of my two favorites for twenty years (I was 13 on first reading yours and then came To Kill a Mockingbird), I had never thought to write to you before now, because in a way you are to me as mythological as the Greek mythological characters in Watership Down's epigrams. Even reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn with Betty Smith's later introduction about her readers' letters didn't sway me. Only now, tonight, am I compelled. I had wandered into the lit secion of my bookstore (Denver's Tattered Cover) waiting for my place in line--I am #79 for Nick Bantock to sign his new book--aiming for Sherman Alexie. First I was distracted by Peter Ackroyd--I love his English Music, which is out of print but which I just chanced across in Shakespeare & Co. on my first trip to Paris. Then I saw the new paperback copy of Watership Down with your introduction. Of course I had to read that. When I was 14, having borrowed the book numerous times from my beloved library, I finally bought a pulp coy. It had yellowed into ochre before my husband bought me a handsome hardcover one Christmas. So I read the introduction, and that you always reply to fanmail. What was I waiting for? So the first draft of this note was scrawled on a scrap of TC notepaper.

What can I say? Watership Down was the first adult book I read, not counting Patrick Dennis's Auntie Mame. I wouldn't read Lord of the Rings until university. Perhaps I'm a bit slow. Perhaps I was just reading and rereading Watership Down. Your epigrams confirmed my love of Greek mythology, which I started reading (and rereading) at nine. Though I cut my teeth on D'Aulaires and had progressed to Edith Hamilton, the year of Watership Down was also the year of The Odyssey and The Epic of Gilgamesh. (Which isn't Greek, but you know what I mean.) (This would make the story you wrote about Odysseus's dog on the dungheap for that collection of authors' stories about dogs resonate the more for me.) Because of you I read Walter de la Mare (when I was too young to appreciate him), because of you I read Yeats and Auden before ever I became an English major; perhaps, because of you, I became an English major.

(I don't blame my run-on sentences on you, though, nor my tendency to make everything about me.)

In that year of myth and epic--Arthurian too, with Malory, Renault, and Tennyson--you distilled literature and history into mythology, into everything I have wanted to know and study since. Watership Down is as much my archetype as anything Joseph Campbell mentions in Hero with a Thousand Faces. For that I thank you, humble and inadequate words to condense the enthusiasm and adoration I hope I conveyed in the previous paragraphs.