Reading: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

Swimming: none, but I did wade in the stream

8 June 2002: 90 Minutes

My sister was going to pick me up, but that's when I was coming in at midnight. Arriving after 1:30, I took a cab. I rang her buzzer for a long time, to wake her up, and when she spoke through the intercom, it was to ask, "Who is it?" But she was goofy with sleep and thought she had been asleep only a few minutes. But it was 2:00, not 11:00, and here I was.

My body hating me as it does, I didn't get to sleep for what felt like a long time, and when I woke up it was only 5:30. So I sat up and braided my hair and got up and peed and came back and read Midnight's Children and fell asleep again and then it was later. This no-sleeping thing set the tone for the entire trip.

On her way to work she dropped me off at the rental agency near Copley. I knew I wanted to rent a car this time and had dreaded the cost. All I wanted for my birthday, I said, was to rent a car without guilt. Apparently also to drag RDC to a wedding in Utah that entailed a fourteen-hour round-trip drive, two hotel nights, not three hotel nights because Moab's hotel's pool was empty, but also Arches National Park. When we first researched a car, the cost was less than half what I expected. By the time I made a reservation, a week later, the price had gone up by 30%. But anyway, I had a car, a Daewoo that I likened to a VCR on wheels.

Ninety minutes later, not 10 in the morning, I scampered through Charenton's doors and into everyone's arms. Almost everyone: two people were upstairs, the proud papa just finishing bathing my precious, wonderful goddaughter.

Yep. I said it about ZBD, and it's still true. She's delightful and beautiful, a magical five-year-old. Emlet, at four months, is also remarkable and charming and miraculous. Also, Nisou sings to her, using the tune of "My Darling Clementine" (same cadence as her actual name) but different lyrics.

Most of the day we spent preparing for the party the next day. Nisou had concocted a boursin, if I've got the name right, a cream cheese or sour cream dip flavored with garlic and punctuated with eggs that I therefore didn't eat when the time came but that I did decorate. Nisou turned me loose with wee jars of amber and black caviar and a pile of chopped chives and I considered designs. I am way too linear a thinker--remind me to tell about Jessie's paper cranes--and needed a pattern to follow or a definite design. Otherwise I only do angles--remind me to tell about ABW's magnetic toy--which I don't even like to look at. Then I decided to do a Tree of Life, because.

The day was glorious, the same weather Melissa and Greg married under. I took Coco for a long walk and, finding phone service at the clearing at the top of the hill, learned from RDC that it was 97 in Denver. Tra la, it was 70 and sunny and clear in Storrs. Then we--the dog and I--splashed through the brook and also sat, me thinking about A Circle of Quiet and Coco probably not sitting or thinking about much beyond when I would next scratch her ears.

I played what she called "Detectives" and what I would call "hide and seek" with ZBD, and I could have done that all afternoon. Starting in the vegetable garden, she told me I could count to eleven while she hid. Okay. I counted, and she ran, and I heard her scamper across the deck and then stop. When I began to look, there she was under the table on the deck, but I looked behind this shed and that shed--I need the lyrics to the Charenton version of "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore"--and under stones and up trees, working my way gradually to the deck. Then it was my turn to hide, and she counted to eleven really fast while I sped around the house, sneaking back onto the deck from the east side in time to see her just leaving it under the chestnut tree. Then I just stood still, not even behind the corner of the house, waiting to be spotted. Kids crack me up.

The only purchase I made in Vancouver was of these little critters I didn't even buy the first time I saw them but couldn't stop thinking about afterward. A raven, an orca, a hummingbird. Those went over well with mothers. The babies were unenthused, but ZBD (whom I'd given the raven) took the other two under her wing so they wouldn't be lonely. We also played lots of King Arthur things, and she was always the princess while I got to be "that guy" (who turned out to be Lancelot or Arthur or a dragon, depending). This reminded me of the second time I met her, when she was almost three. She was distributing clementines--see, it's a quite appropriate name--and offered one to TJZ and another to her mother and another to me and another to "that guy" whose name she had forgotten (RDC). Apparently that didn't hinder her relationship with him, though, because they got married the next day. Which reminds me of how HEBD reminds her daughter of who I am--the one who climbed under the table with her and ZLT.

Sometime during the day I made Emlet laugh. Not for the first time, but for the first sustained period. I noticed her little knit booties and started playing with her feet, talking about an acquaintance's grandmother who knit fantastically intricate booties and so forth even though she was blind and had been for a long time and finishing up with the fact that she just died, and all of this story I told in a goofy tone of voice and making silly faces, so that the baby laughed and laughed and laughed for several minutes. Meanwhile I was amusing myself that I was narrating fairly doleful subject matter in such a flippant way.

Saturday night ZBD and I climbed into the hot tub together. Here were Nisou and TJZD with their new babies, and her mother with her, and me, clearly a friend of and contemporary to the other three. "Where are your childs?" she asked me. "I don't have any children," I answered her, trying not to giggle at the "childs" and wondering if it was adequate just to say the correct form. She asked me something like "Why not?" and I told her that if I had a kid and didn't like it as much as I liked her, that would be very sad. She probably could have handled a more complicated (therefore more accurate) answer than that.