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

Water: Atlantic coast of Oguinquit. Fell into a tidepool.

13 June 2002: Ogunquit

Thursday I tried a New Thing. Last summer when we drove from Boston to home and back, CLH did something she'd been meaning to do for ages and finally remembered: used a triptometer to compare routes. Driving to Old Lyme from Fleet Pavillions, it made sense to use I-95; returning, she used 395 and the Mass Pike. Okay, the Fleet Pavillions is a way from the Fens, but the mileage in the two routes varies by less than one percent. So I thought wot the hell, I'd take I-95 and have phone coverage. I didn't think of traffic, which was bad both around Providence and for miles south of Boston.

I had expected that my rented car wouldn't have a CD player and it didn't, so I pulled out tapes. Two commercial: Annie Lennox's Diva--so cheery for driving--and the Talking Heads' live Stop Making Sense, great album overall. Others dubbed: Laurie Anderson, Mister Heartbreak b/w Strange Angels, the Waterboys This is the Seas b/w Fisherman's Blues, REM's Murmur b/w Reckoning (and except for Green, they should have stopped there), and the Who's Who's Next b/w Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy. I barely ever listen to the Who anymore, but that tape dates from twelfth grade, when I had use of my sister's car and it was driving-to-the-beach music and thus I thought good vacation music.

However. The tape is sixteen years old and was dubbed off vinyl. It was almost unlistenable-to, except by then I had listened to everything else and was desperate. I need to buy Who's Next. Meaty Beaty, not so much. Finally I was close enough to Boston to listen to the radio, but I couldn't remember what channel WFNX is. Somewhere on the left side of the band (further dating myself, if listening to the Who didn't already).

I got all amused at the lyrics of "Behind Blue Eyes" which, in the throes of my pathetic high school crush, were fraught with significance. For lo these many years I have listened to that song laughing at myself; now its plaintive whininess amused me because of an entirely different person. But the line "when I smile, tell me some bad news/ before I laugh and act like a fool" has always been about me, for the "Who died?" story.

And so I finally arrived in Boston. I picked up my sister and off we went to Ogunquit which, OMFB, is just stunningly beautiful. I rolled my eyes at myself thinking of Frannie and Harold in The Stand. I am flawed. Yes, I weep for me. Okay, now I'm done with the Stephen King. Ogunquit's all touristy, sure, but the ocean doesn't change. We toured touristy shops and art shops and antique-read-junk shops and book shops and the library, which I could put in my pocket. It doesn't waste any person-height wall space with windows, but nor does it sacrifice them altogether: daylight streams in from over the shelves, ten feet up. I guess all its new children's books circulate or maybe CLH was right that the collection had barely been updated in decades. Lad: A Dog but no Sharon Creech. All four Potter books, though.

On the way to the library CLH said, "Let's go up this side and come back on the other," by which I thought she meant sides of town. But she meant sides of street, so when I scampered across the street toward a shop that ended up not being worth it, this was Going Backward and frustrating because contrary to what she thought I had just agreed to. We both think linearly, but with big differences otherwise. I told her about ABW's sons' toy with its magnetized sticks and ball bearings. Anyway, I was pondering my modes of thought rather a lot at this point.

I did squeal and Go Backward about five feet when what I spotted in a store window resolved itself in my head. I had heard of the new Seuss park in Springfield, where I will certainly go on one trip home or another, but I didn't know the characters had been licensed. I clutched Horton to my breast, wholly in love. The clerk wanted to put him in a bag, and, poor soul, she thought I was insane when I protested that he would smother. She was worried that he would get dirty. Whatever. I brought Rakumi the camel to France carefully in my messenger bag, not in my suitcase, because it would get more air that way. I carried Pantalaimon home through the streets of Denver because I wouldn't shove him in a bag. I brought the Garfinkel animals to Connecticut in my messenger bag not suitcase for the same reason. I like anthropomorphizing my animals. Isn't that what makes them friends rather than toys? Sheesh.

In a bookstore before the toyshop, I bought Possession for Nisou's parents, because I want all my favorite people to read it. I should have bought Horton Hears a Who then, though of course I didn't know I would find him in the flesh (in the plush?), because no other bookshop we stopped in afterward had that particular Seuss. Also in that bookstore lived Roxanne the Dachshund, and she was a bratwurst rather than a hot dog.

The other book treasure of the day was in one of the antique shops: The Normal Woman to add to Haitch's collection of vintage self-help and similar books. The next day in Portsmouth I would find reprints of two '30s books, The Art of Kissing and How to Make Love, which latter was about wooing not sex. This antique shop was a cooperative, and so when I found a delightful volume called Tips for Teens without a price in it, no clerk could invent a price for me (torn cover with gum on it, folks, not valuable). It looked much more entertaining than The Normal Woman. But it was not to be.

After lunch in an amazing restaurant mere yards from crashing surf and wandering around town and having ice cream, we returned to our hotel. (Our two hotels were all Location Location Location.) I left CLH to nap and explored the Cliff Walk and some tide pools. I should've shucked my Tevas, but I didn't. I probably would have fallen in bare feet anyway. The one part of me that didn't go in was my left arm, whose hand clasped my camera. And it was only a tide pool. The actual surf would have been much, much more dangerous, and not just because of the camera. I stayed wringing out my dress for a while, then scrambled back up to the walk. I turned to look back once, and I should have watched my path more. A huge wave bore down on me, and I thought, "Well, this is going to be interesting," before a vertical outcrop broke it up and I was only splashed. I made for the nice safe paved walk and smiled at two folks watching the water from the more sensible vantage point of a bench. They had watched me fall, unable to prevent the tumble but planning to help if I went properly into the drink. So we laughed at me, and the woman assured me that my walk back would be only embarrassing, not obscene (in a not quite soaking pale blue chambray dress), and we admired the water and the weather (they had been there for two weeks and this was only the fifth day of sun) while I dried off a little more, and then I went home.

We had cased a restaurant whose beauty stunned me and whose gardens delighted me, but I'm much more parsimonious than my sister plus I had just had a weekend at Charenton and didn't need to pay for the experience. So we ate in town, and that was also lovely. The laugh emerged.

Background: CLH and I condemn the Outfit theory of dressing. At least one of the garments is patterned or figured, and you would never wear the blue leafy top with any anonymous solid-blue complementary pants but always with the leafy one that were displayed right next to the top in the store. Resort towns are packed with outfit-wearing women. And children, who cannot be held accountable for their wardrobes. For instance, CLH would like it known that in this photograph, she is wearing our mother's clothes. I thought that was so obvious it didn't need to be pointed out.

Our waiter, who looked just like Peter Pan, told us about the specials, including a particular wine that--well, I ceased to follow him, but CLH liked the sound of it and ordered a glass. He returned to the table a moment later because he had forgotten to caution us about the price (for a glass, you could buy a decent bottle). That wasn't a problem. A while later we noticed that when he gave the spiel to the next table, a four-top, everyone at the table visibly recoiled and audibly protested. An expensive glass of wine is an expensive glass of wine, but does anyone really think good breeding entails such a crass display? When I declined to eat at Arrows, I didn't read the menu and hand it back to the host with a huff, for instance. At that point, we began to watch--discreetly, CLH and I are models of decorum--the reactions of diners. When a matron entered and CLH said, "Outfit, ten o'clock," I snorted; when a waiter began to pitch the wine CLH invented the matron's protestation: "That's more than I paid for this whole outfit!" So the laugh bubbled out.

Back in the hotel room we played cribbage. Or I held cards and CLH instructed me in the play of it. Yeah, I'm Lady Bertram, unable to follow the rules of a card game. She had warned me that it, like Setback and Spite & Malice and Stratego and even Parcheesi, required you not only to think of your own progress but also to plot against the other players. She had just been talking with our father about how I don't think like that. Now, two weeks later and for other reasons, I wonder if it's whether I'm not aggressive or whether it's something more onerous, like that I am too self-centered to think in tandem with someone else. My inability to kickbox, even in sport to strike another person however well-padded, I had recently discovered before the eve of my grandfather's funeral when my family played setback. My mother told me I had to think intelligently when I played this game, the subtext of which made me blow a gasket. It occurs to me that I don't, or won't, play games of strategy now in protest of that remark. But two days before ABW had skunked me in a simple game of Concentration, too, which didn't entail defensive or offensive strategizing at all.

Hm. Now it occurs to me that being skunked playing the Goodnight Moon game, of all things, illustrates yet another shortfall of my linear thinking. I had to do a straight card-to-picture comparison rather than being able mentally to arrange 23 items and recognize the missing 24th. It also occurs to me that she's played this game against a six-year-old and is in practice.

Well. I'm all for the theory that I've allowed my brain to atrophy. I had Midnight's Children with me (and Middlemarch, for those frivolous moments) but the only book I read in its entirety in the whole ten days was the Rosamund Pilcher. Which, granted, I read Wednesday during naptime at my mother's house and Thursday after my tide-pool fall during naptime with my sister and finished Friday before breakfast. Not a challenging read. But I chose Pilcher rather than Rushdie.