Reading: Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

Not yet given up on: John Milton, Paradise Lost

In the midst of: A.S. Byatt, Biographer's Tale; Dava Sobel, Galileo's Daughter

On deck: Guns, Germs, and Steel; Suburban Nation; Invisible Man; Don Quijote; Tam Lin

28 February 2002: Why the Silence

Being a lemming, here I am with the more frequent updates. Except that it's Disney's fault we all think lemmings committ mass suicide together (and Richard Adams reinforced this myth in Watership Down, but I forgive him), and also except that I've had a good excuse not to write publicly given that I couldn't think of a thing to say as important as the one thing I couldn't say. Which was that from 11 to 25 February, we were going through a Multiple Sclerosis scare.

Which in turn can be summed up as Probably Not, Probably Okay, Stop Fretting. I hope I would get wet in the Sea of Knowledge swimming back from the Island of Conclusions, but I wouldn't want to jump there anyway.

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Er. Yesterday I began to write up some good lines. Dunno where I was going with that. Also yesterday, I bought a loaf of bread at the deceptively named Corner Bakery to go with the vegetable soup I invented when I got home. (Deceptive because not on corner, not homey and nearby; but it does have good bread.) Instead of slavishly following the recipe--which I didn't the first time I made it either--I popped into the pot anything that wasn't tied down. Onions, mushrooms, carrots, potatoes, garlic, and a can of tomatoes since the fresh ones were spoken for. Salt, a dash of red pepper, some chipotle sauce (which last was RDC's idea). Done. It was RDC, too, not Mollie Katzen, who told me that you simmer soup until the potatoes and carrots are cooked through and then stop, whereas I thought you simmered until you were ready to eat it. Whatever.

I couldn't be arsed to clean Blake's cage before JGW and EJB arrived, but I finally did that on Sunday, lucky for SEM. I also just dumped their laundered linen on the couch, expecting to fold it Real Soon Now, whereupon it mouldered for only a day. Then SEM called and spared me duplicated effort. And it's a fine thing I didn't have to go into that closet, because at this point I have about forbidden that man to enter my house because every time (of the two) he has, that closet has attacked me. Last year, as I took out sheets, it flung a shelf off its little nubbins and tried to break my foot; this year, it harbored the nastiest spider I have ever seen in my own house.

I sped upstairs, seized RDC by the wrist and tugged him downstairs. Often one of us will pretend to be afraid of Blake, and so he tried to reassure me, "That's just a cockatiel," but no, that's not what I meant.
I pointed. "There, on the floor, next to the right foot of your waders. Your job." Bees are my job, spiders his. He couldn't smash it without giving it opportunity to run away and leap at me from some other corner, so he sucked it up with the vacuum.

Spiders are good. Spiders are beneficial. I don't care. Outside, I'm okay with them; inside, they survive only if either a) I don't see them or b) when I do see them, they are not threateningly placed, overly large, or excessively scary.

When I was about eleven, maybe ten, maybe twelve, I decided I was going to confront my fear of the monsters under the bed. I don't know when most people stop leaping into bed from three feet away to avoid the underbed monsters--this despite my reading light still being on--but I was that old. I can pinpoint the age because in the first few years that I lived in that room, which I moved into in fourth grade, I rearranged the furniture often. Eventually I struck upon the best arrangement and left it thus thereafter. Which means I could have been even older than twelve and still leaping to avoid the monsters. Whatever. Anyway, I was going to be brave and elegant and avoid the monsters, and I stepped firmly up to my bed to turn back the covers all swank and elegant (like Charlotte says in All-of-a-Kind Family, when she advises putting a loop into a skirt that's part of a costume, "so you can move your skirt like the swell ladies in the magazines." I'm paraphrasing, but she does say "swell"). I turned back the covers--and I'm sure the flowered sheets and acrylic blankets couldn't've looked elegant if they tried--and there, in the middle of my bed, under the covers, was a gigantic spider, with easily a two-inch spread to its legs.

I screamed bloody murder.

There I was, all ready to be mature and step into bed like the teenager I probably was, only to learn that there really was a monster, not under my bed but in it, and if I had only continued being afraid and jumped like a sensible person, it would have scuttled to some farther corner of my bed, to bite me in my sleep like a civilized spider and me none the wiser till I scratched.

My mother, to give her credit where it's due, came charging upstairs expecting a gorey mishap. And I was old, because I don't recall my sister reacting at all. So I might have been old enough for her to have been in college (15), though it's also possible she was at a slumber party (allowing me to be younger) or she was just ignoring her annoying younger sister. My mother, I'm pretty sure, disposed of the spider for me.

But I've been afraid of them ever since.

Sophomore year of college, I was in bed with NCS when I saw a spider--not very far over our heads, since I had was the top bunk and I recall there not being quite enough clearance for proper sex between the bed and the celing--and insisted he kill it. He protested that this was ridiculous and I was braver than that. (In a single entry, nice things to say about both NCS and BJWL. It happens.) This was true. Not very long later, I was alone in my bed when I saw a spider. Reach, smash, and "pouf" on my trigger finger.

But in this relationship, bees are my job and spiders are his. Spiders being his job didn't stop him from continuing to freak me, the ever gullible, out, by saying he couldn't see the spider in the clear canister of the vacuum. As if that means anything, since North American spiders are probably mostly all dust-colored anyway, because of this camouflage thing.

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Anyway, SEM came. He has more than an inch of hair for the first time in at least a decade, I think. I am writing off the hideous pictures I took of the two of us to the facts that it was 6:30 in the morning, my hair was loose and wet, I was pulling my head into my neck to get it farther from the camera so don't actually have nine chins, and I didn't mean to point the camera up my nose, which needed blowing.

He is not afraid of spiders.

He also got points because he admired the bread plate all on his own. I told him about how CLH and I struggled with our inability to leave an obviously finished thing alone. I said, "Now look at that. It's done, right?" [Yes, he nodded] "But I hadn't used the purple glaze yet!" I flipped it over to show him where I had used the violet glaze to initial and date the piece.

That, more than everyone in my high school's being named Kim or David, might be why I use initials: Granny marked all her artwork dew. I have always been envious of good initials. There are handsome sets of initials, like NCS's; there are pronounceable ones, like SEM's; there are near-words, like HAO's; and then there are actually words, like Granny's.

Ludge. What am I supposed to do with that?

Anyway, SEM laughed at me, but look what color he's wearing!

This afternoon RDC put Blake on the kitchen windowsill so he could watch me fill the birdfeeder. (I told SEM that the little beasts tap on the windows when the feeder's empty. He said, "Really?" I said, "No. But wouldn't that be great?") From outside and at ground level, I saw Blake bounce on the windowsill a few times before fluttering away. When I came in I experimented with the bread plate, which was drying in the dish rack near the window. Yep. He's afraid of it.

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The day RDC left for the mountains with his pals, it was over 60 and sunny, so I walked down to Cherry Creek. Gorgeous day, why not shop. I'm an aunt again! Nisou and SPG welcomed Emlet (not really, but a nickname that HEBD came up with six months from now) on the 11th and she called me Friday morning. I gave the Bulge Runaway Bunny, Good Dog Carl, and (I think) Jamberry in September. And a camel. Now that she's an outside person of more than bulgeness, I sent her Goodnight Moon (that finally being back in stock), either Whistle for WIllie or A Snowy Day, and maybe a third book. Damn, I wrote it in my Palm (I inherited RDC's old Palm Pilot) wrong, with both Ezra Jack Keats. I'll have to ask. Also Rabbit, in a gnawable Ernest Shephard decoration edition, and this dragon I'm in love with. It's green and lavender! Unfortunately it's labeled "Dylan Dinosaur," but we'll ignore that.