Reading: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, though not noticeably

Water: swam in the river

11 June 2002: Linear Thinker

Tuesday morning I left RRP's house and drove to Putnam to find ABW. People think of Connecticut being all built up, and I have to say that people who think that haven't been to Tolland County. But most people think of Connecticut in terms of Fairfield County and "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House." I listened to the entirety of "Stop Making Sense" before I got there, and at least it was a pretty drive. Very pretty. Though humid, so the views weren't as good as they could have been.

ABW and I brought her younger son to Higgins Armory, which was outstandingly cool for a lapsed medieval geek like me. ABW leads tours and some of her detail I caught as she hinted and some she just had to tell me. If you get to go behind the scenes of this particular museum and wear gloves, you can try on some of the armor. So I did.

At her house again, AEW had his nap and ABW and I had lunch. From her table, I spotted her sons' Goodnight Moon game on the shelf. So we played that. There are two ways to play: for little kids, you match cards featuring mittens or kittens etc. to a board reproducing the main illustration of the book, the wordless view of the whole room; and for bigger kids, you use those 24 cards to play a form of Concentration. I am ashamed to say that ABW trounced me. It took her two seconds to spot that the little old lady whispering hush was missing, and then I needed to arrange all the cards according the illustration to spot the missing element (the fire).

We played another round in which I was equally pathe before moving on to a construction toy. With its magnetized i-beams and ball bearings, I constructed cubes. A helplessly linear thinker would have constructed lines, yes, but cubes are still pretty boring. Then I moved on to pyramids. This all was during the boys' absence--AEW napping and NKW not yet home--so my humiliation was limited in scope.

Although not solely of my own doing. ABW produced her new nylon lunch bag and a permanent black marker and had me sign the bag. Because it was purple and thus would become the LJH memorial lunch bag. "Commemorative," I pointed out. I'm not dead yet. "Okay," she agreed, "and now it's a limited edition," because it was signed. Ha.

But it was very hot and close, so I drove for nine years and found the Beasts' river. There's the swimming channel where I can't touch the bottom, but most of it is only a foot deep or less. So I found a good shallow spot and let the freezing cold current pass over me until it was time to go find RPR again.

I drove to Old Lyme listening to Strange Angels and arrove gratefully in my mother's driveway at what would have been a reasonable hour had I not been so damn tired. While I dug in the trunk for my nightshirt, which I think I left at RPR's, my mother came out to the deck to say hi, nearly startling the piss out of me. She came upstairs to talk for a little bit before I fell asleep, and when I got to the bit about the commemorative lunch bag she got to her feet and began to tug me by the wrist. She might have been bouncing somewhat. "Please don't be cute with me, Ma. It's far too late for me to deal with cute. Unless you insist. Which you obviously do." This protest I uttered between bed and bathroom, where she showed me in the shower a bottle of lavender body wash she had bought in my honor.

My reputation proceeds me.