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Friday September 22, 2000
"Don't accept rides from strange men -- and remember that all men are strange as hell." Robin Morgan, Sisterhood is Powerful
why is this here? because someoneis selling it on ebay, of course, and because that blimp is flying over an old Houston skyline
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a lonely trip To add to the disconnected, unreal quality of my life I drive back and forth to Houston to have a meeting. I know others are driving but decide that I should try to get there early and set up and leave myself and others to their own thoughts after the meeting, on the trip home. The boss unit for whom I have done this is last seen going to one of the company cafeteria's with a twenty dollar bill he just borrowed from me. I don't know if this means I did well or poorly or simply that he didn't want to go back to his office and borrow money from his secretary. On the way home, I stop at Half Price Books and get some books on tape. Fiction by Kinky Friedman, Dick Francis and CaroleShields. Then I stop and eat some junk food and buy some more junk food and soda. The act of munching and drinking and listening to something with a plot keeps me awake. The strangeness of my life lately, the cold, the battle with the left wrist have made me weary. I have no right to complain. The luxury of my life puts me in the top fraction of a percent in the world. And I'm not really complaining. I'm just commenting on what I feel like doing. And not doing. We are already late for a party when I get home. I've already decided I can't do the symphony. I'd like to do it. I'd enjoy it. But I am too tired. We celebrate a little with a friend (and neighbor) who is 75. He seems lively. When I say so, when I in fact say, "I hope I'm so liverly when I'm seventy-fiverly," his companion looks concerned. I'm not sure if it's my silliness or a concern that he really isn't doing well. The night is hot and the party outdoors. I'm droopy. A sip of wine makes me more so. I take off my shoes and wiggle my toes in the carpet grass. It reminds me of a time of childhood. A time when our yard was a scraggly, hardy Bermuda. But my old maid aunts had a lawn of lush St. Augustine. Of carpet grass. Around a perfect little cottage. And they tolerated with a smile a bunch of bare-footed little nieces and nephews running across the lawn and in and out of the house. And they thought nothing of letting the same ragamuffins bed down on the living room carpet in the tiny house with one aunt on the couch having yielded her own bed to one of the married sisters who had created this storm of progeny. When your feet in the grass sets off a storm of nostalgia, it's time to sit in your chair and watch weird Olympic events and doze off over the stack of unread papers. And I do. I open my eyes briefly to see FFP in a tux. He's going to the party after the symphony which we skipped. He'll go mix with the suspects. |
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