Reading: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, though not noticeably; more noticeably, Rosamund Pilcher's Winter Solstice

Water: rai

12 June 2002: Old Lyme again

In the morning I brought my newly lavender-scented body downstairs and asked my mother if she could do me a favor. Yes, she said agreeably. A quite personal favor. Okay, she said. I had picked up my third tick, not on my right quadricep where LEB removed one Sunday nor on my left hip where ABW had lent me tweezers and then her eyes after I tackled it myself Tuesday, but in the cleavage of my tuchus. This is called foreshadowing.

I want to say, I spent almost 36 hours with my mother and didn't snap at her once. I might have grumpily protested the cuteness of well after my bedtime Tuesday but I didn't refuse to go along. In the morning, I awoke to her telling BDL she wanted to have the truck that day because I had never ridden in it, and I failed to point out that I had been in it a year ago, thanks for my visits being so fucking memorably important to you. She had said she needed to go to the bank so I asked if I might pop into the drugstore while she stopped in the village; she proceeded to ask me at least three times before we left the house what my business was at the bank (the local bank, I should clarify); and I did not snap but said and repeated twice that I needed the drugstore. When I noticed that the tailgate of the truckbed was down and asked if I should close it before we began to drive, and she told me no, BDL wanted it that way (presumably despite the loose lumber in the bed), I said nothing more. When she parked the massive truck in the parking lot of the nursing home and left about two feet of it projecting into the lane (despite the front tires being on the lawn), I said nothing. When we left the nursing home and those front tires met the slight resistance of the edge of the blacktop and my mother gingerly goosed the truck fully onto blacktop, I made no sarcastic comment about how the half-inch probably wouldn't hurt the excessive suspension. Much.

(I mean damage it much. I actually didn't say anything at all. My face might have spoke volumes, but she wasn't looking at me.)

I felt like a damn saint.

When we visited Granny, my mother entered her room first and then me, and her face lit up when she saw me.

After that the two of us had lunch at the Bee and Thistle. It was pleasant, except that the current interlopers have changed the sign--no longer iconographic but featuring an indistinct, unattractive, Old Lyme-esque watercolor.

I didn't print photographs of the house in time and so, last minute, slapped together a web page and printed that on plain paper with attendant poor resolution and bad color. My mother accepted that the yellow patch on the floor was not a pee stain but a bad printing of a patch of sunlight on the oak. She didn't read every last word on the page aloud, thank heavens. When I skimmed the readings for the ceremonies Sunday morning, I read them aloud, because I was going to, you know, read them aloud. But my mother has this thing about reading anything--an article you clipped from the paper and gave to her, a program--aloud, and I would have had to clamp my jaw with a vise if she'd read aloud my fascinating commentary about what plants those are in the front garden or how we had first placed the couch on the opposite wall. I had specifically included a photograph of the sunroom featuring the notorious gateleg table, and I deliberately had not written anything about said table, and when she remarked, "Oh, I see you still have the gateleg table," I extremely deliberately didn't respond aloud but snorted in my head. Again, I was glad she was looking at the paper and not at me, because I can control my speech (with effort) but not my face.

So yeah I was very much aware I was being good.

I was going to go to the beach afterward, with or without her. She asked if that was a good idea, tired as I was (tired=another reason being good was easy), as if a single danger ever presented itself at White Sands Beach. A rogue seagull? An undertoad? Rain began to fall before we finished our mango and chicken salads, so I went home with her. I plucked Winter Solstice from the shelf (whereas if I'd really wanted to sleep, Midnight's Children would have been the wiser choice) and read for three hours. In the later afternoon, when she wanted to know if I was still asleep, she climbed the steps to my room instead of shouting up the stairs, which is a drastic change.

I had supper with her and BDL, and she accepted my declining to participate in grace. Whoa. Then I went to the beach by myself, and there, on the stone jetty in the sunset, as long as I kept my phone pointed at Long Island, I talked to RDC. Also I saw a fox.