Reading: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel

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: Suburban Nation; Invisible Man; Don Quijote

Moving: walked from work and another couple of miles after that

Watching: "Best in Show" which was pathetically hysterical

7 March 2002: Get a horse!

I've been walking home and taking the bus in the morning. I still struggle to get up anything like on time. I am sure being in better shape would give me more energy; I was struck by how perky SEM was after a 14-hour drive. Yesterday morning I heard someone shout something from a passing vehicle as I approached the stop--a child's voice from a minivan taxi. This morning the same thing: I was at the bus stop and saw the yeller when he yelled. He yelled "Get a job!" which sounded like what was shouted yesterday. Charming. Is the taxi driver bringing its children to school before its work day? Why else would children--I saw more than one--be in a taxi at the same time two days running?

Anyway.

When it's too cold to read at the busstop (because gloved fingers don't turn pages well, or maybe I was just reading pulp, like Tam Lin and To Say Nothing of the Dog but certainly not My Sweet Audrina, whose pages are too flimsy for gloves), I pay more attention to the passing cars. So many the single-driver commuters, and I thought of the high-occupany guidelines that determine what lane on San Francisco bridges you can travel: I read somewhere that people just stand at the other ends of the bridges, reading their papers and drinking their coffee, and perfect strangers pick them up, cross the bridge in the HOV lanes with them, and dump them off in San Francisco, with never a word exchanged. So I was thinking about these single-occupant cars, and how when they're stopped at the light near the busstop I could just pop into the car with them, except that I've never hitchhiked.

Except once. When Fugly had a new alternator put in, the mechanic failed to connect it to the battery. I drove from Storrs to Norwalk, went to the bead store, saw a movie and spent the night at a friend's house, and headed home the next morning after stopping at the Remarkable Pink Bookshop (which McCarthy tells me is now a Talbot's. Oh, the humanity!) in Westport, where I bought Immortality and a small pewter knight. Storrsward called for the Merrit Parkway, and there I was, in the rain, with headlights on and wipers wiping, dimmer and slower and dimmer and slower and the engine didn't sound so good either, and then it stopped.

I pulled over and considered my fate. Jean shorts, early '90s: old pair of jeans cut off and rolled at the knee, which somehow I didn't think were culotte-y. Broken down bluchers. Merrit Parkway: no commercial vehicles, exits few and far between. I remembered a pair of jeans in my sewing bag, jeans I had intended to slather in pied patches. APB sells fabric and I had culled some of his sample swatches for interesting stuff. Also, running sneakers. I shucked the shorts and broken-down bits for full jeans and sneakers and got out, expecting to walk to wherever.

I hadn't walked even a quarter mile when a woman pulled up. One woman. British accent. Two little boys properly stowed in the backseat. I had never accepted a ride from a stranger before, but this was okay. She drove me to a payphone, where I called the AAA, and then back to the car, where I waited, reading, for a mechanic. I should have got her name so I could be properly grateful to my good samaritan. But I didn't. The mechanic spotted the missed connection between alternator and battery, fixed that, jumpstarted the car, and left with my thanks. In Fugly, now running strong, I got back home.

That's why I loved that car. She never broke down in an emergency. She broke down, oh yes, but never in a time crunch.

The Storrs mechanic, whom I previously had trusted, was only vaguely apologetic. That pissed me off. The other thing that bothered me is that when I brought the car in, he had had a vicious pimple on his temple. I swear I remember it as a boil, with red lines of blood poisoning and a whole volcano effect going on, and looking extremely tempting to me, who has never left a blemish be. When I returned to point out the fairly major, obvious thing his shop had failed to do, it had receded. But not because it had been popped, which clearly is always the best approach, but because he allowed the toxins back into his bloodstream. I am not sure which annoyed me more: that he had endandgered my life by not hooking up the right wires or that he had clearly not enough interest in exploding his own boils.