Reading: Pale Fire and Middlemarch.

Watching: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season one. You will be assimilated.

Moving (yes!): Swam 2K

13July 2002: Story

The year: 1975ish

My age: seven- or eightish

The place: Plymouth Plantation, Massachusetts

A woman in period dress approached my sacred self and either announced she was a Pilgrim or at the least canted about the difficulties of Pilgrim life. She said she was Pilgrim and I said she wasn't and she said she was. Approximately.

I said, "You're not a Pilgrim. You're not old enough."

At Sturbridge at least they have the decency to let on that they're acting and not lie to your face just 'cause you're a little kid.

My mother loves this story. Unfortunately she always thinks she's telling it for the first time. I'm pretty sure I've told it before in these pages myself. Anyway she had to tell it to me again because she had in-laws visiting from California who wanted to go, so she told it to BDL's brother and sister-in-law. I'm ready to believe she told them the story one first time and then several other times, just to make sure.

Why doesn't English have words for the relationship between two spouses married to two siblings? That's why I said BDL's brother and sister-in-law. Would BDL's sister-in-law be my mother's sister-in-law-in-law?

Later. I have a new inch-long cut across the top of my left foot. I know when it happened, on what occasion of putting-out-the-trash-and-doing-a-bit-of-weeding it happened, but I don't remember, and didn't when crouching among the cucumbers brought the fresh blood to my attention, exactly what caused it.

I laughed, because again I had done something that makes my beleaguered mother crazy. She's good with physical ailments, spotting the 1992 Lyme Disease rash and removing the indelicately placed 2002 tick, but maybe a little too vigilant. I have a mole, more a dark freckle, on the underside of my right arm, almost in the armpit, such that whenever I happen raise my arm in my mother's sightline, she says, "Is that a tick?" This got so frustrating I had to limit her asking that to once a year. (That was another story I likely have mentioned before.)

Last month, she noticed a completely scabbed over, not at all prone to infection, but long and complicated like a palmistry line, cut under my right kneecap. "What did you do to yourself?" she asked me.
I peered at my shin. "I have no idea," I answered, because I had no idea. This probably is another reason she doubts my intelligence, because I am so cavalier about physical injury. I would say, about minor physical injury.