Reading: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Not yet given up on: John Milton, Paradise Lost;

On deck: Don Quijote, The London Rich, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Moving: gardening

House:

Garden:

14 May 2002: My sister

Do I have the coolest sister or what? No, don't even answer, OMFB, there can be only one answer: yes I do.

Months ago, soon after she left here actually, she told me she had found me the best birthday present ever. This from the woman who threw me a surprise party at my lake and who has almost without exception given me wonderful presents, exactly right for me but the sort of stuff I'd never think of for myself.

She told me she was going to send the actual present to RDC so that it would be federally criminal of me to open it. She also told me she was sending me some other stuff to tide me over. When I got back from Vancouver, a big box awaited me. I tried to be good. I lasted a day. She said the early stuff was early to tide me over, she did. For the day I was good, the boxes, a cylinder and a cube, taunted me gaily from the mantel in wrapping paper she further knew I would love--sun- and moonfaces.

So I opened them today.

Years ago she gave me bendy straws--the sort we loved when we were kids the rare times we encountered them--in my stocking. Years later, I told her that we had run out and needed more. Today, years after that, I found that the the cylinder was a straw dispenser, a thing I'd never heard of, a clear plastic (so you can see the straws) tube with a (lavender, natch) top connected by a little rod to a bottom, so that when you lift the top, the straws rise and fan out. It's filled with colorful bendy straws.

In the cube were a pinwheel, and I haven't had one of those in four hundred years, and a Clifford the Big Red Dog toothbrush, and a little wee notebook, and a bunch of advertisements from the Sunday supplements for things like Pillsbury Dough Boy Yule ornaments, a (Disney) Winnie-the-Pooh Christmas train and a Peanuts one, and--the worst--a Tupperware form pan to make Jello jellybeans in. Bleh.

Also in the mail when I got back was a slip from the Post Office announcing an insured package addressed to RDC. I doubted he'd be thrilled by the prospect of an errand without a present for him at the other end, and so I merrily forged his signature and wrote my name where it said "agent to pick up" and scurried to the post office today after work. The clerk immediately saw that I was not the addressee and asked for identification. She retrieved the box even though the form wasn't filled out right--where was I supposed to forge?--and my version of his signature, my version of his printed name, and my own signature on my driver's license bore a suspicious resemblance to each other. But she did fetch it for me, and what was her reward? A lisa story. After filling her in on the above (she was laughing), I asked if I should come back after my birthday to tell her what the main present was. Oh yes, she said.

I have no idea (and pumping my father and notstepmother yesterday for hints proved fruitless, although they both know what it is), but I don't know how it could possibly beat a Clifford the Big Red Dog toothbrush. The box remains untampered-with in RDC's study.

She signed her card "One Strong," which I guess is what we're calling each other now instead of Blister. I don't know why she finds it so funny. When she was a junior in college and had been out of the house for 2.5 years, I was 17 and we were getting along better. Or "at all," I should say. She was turning 21 and had a party in her dorm (ha! a brownstone on Beacon Street). Two of her high school friends drove me up. I think they were tolerating me by then too. When she came to my party in 1998 I told RML how pleased I was, since she couldn't've liked me very much when I was 11. "I liked you as much as your sister did," she told me; and honestly, she wouldn't've come if she'd known CLH wasn't going to be there. Which is fine. Anyway, I remember it was a snowy night, that my mother was not at all pleased I was roadtripping and with the snow almost had an excuse to stop me, and that RML and L. introduced me to James Taylor on the drive.

RML parked her VW Rabbit in the alley behind the house and we attended the party (about which I remember nothing except that it's where I probably heard Altered Images' cover of the Beatles's "Birthday" for the first time, and I had the red and blue Beatles greatist hits albums so it was years before I learned that the Altered Images song was a cover). The next day, about to hit the road, we discovered that the frat next door had not approved of RML's taking one of their spaces and had nearly blocked her in. Someone was about to go back inside for men or to confront the frat, but I said, "C'mon, we're six women strong, we can move this." And we did. It was only a Rabbit. (The other two women were other housemates.) Everyone found my "six women strong" hysterically funny, and I have not, in the sixteen years since, pointed out that that's a quite valid figure of speech, that a jury is twelve people strong, for instance, and any company of people, like a ship's crew or an expotition, could be described as "so many strong." I'm pretty sure--my sister's suddenly harping on it again hints--that everyone thought I meant "six strong women." Which I didn't.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a used record store--used cd store just doesn't have the same ring--to replace my 13-year-old dub of a Joni Mitchell mix (Hissing Summer Lawns and Wild Things Run Fast) backed with Bonnie Raitt's Nick of Time. A fellow I worked with at my first real job gave it to me. I was dubious about Bonnie Raitt; if I had heard of her I knew her only as country/western. But I wanted to know Joni Mitchell. "Wild Things Run Fast" and "Don't Interrupt the Sorrow" continue among my favorite songs, and Nick of Time is one of the all-time great albums. The tape's in bad shape though. Second Spin didn't have either Joni Mitchell, used or new, or any Joni Mitchell at all, but it did have Nick of Time. And Blondie's Greatest Hits. Hooo yeah. Leaving, I ripped the cellophane off and called my sister, crowing about how I was going to blast, "blast I say," my new tunes.

My next email from CLH mimicked my "blast, blast I say," and she's been "One Strong" ever since. What the hell. She gave me a pinwheel; the best I can do is humor her.