Here I am. I left Open Pages and the Diary Registry, anyway. I unsubbed from journals-l ages ago--I wanted a digest version, without someone's two cents thrown after every comment, two cents plus the whole dollar of the original comment included in the response.
Excuse me.
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Tuesday riding to work, I saw the same two joggers I often see. They run side by side and they hold, in their inside hands, a strap like a buckled belt or something. I have been agog with curiosity every time I've passed them. If they were practicing for a three-legged race, they'd do better to strap their near ankles, wouldn't they?
Should I say "adjoining" instead of "near"? Their limbs aren't conjoined and I figure no one remembers about the near and the off animal in a yoke. Their inside ankles.
So anyway this time instead of passing them, I came abreast of them while we waited for a green light. "Excuse me, I see you two all the time, and I just have to ask, what's the deal with the strap?"
They laughed. The right one said, "Oh, I'm blind, and this is how she guides me."
I swallowed. I wouldn't have found considered my question a rude one if she had been fully able. Now looking at her face for the first time, I could see that indeed her eyes didn't function. "Oh gosh, excuse me," I fumbled.
But clearly I found the disability more of an obstacle than they did. "Don't listen to her," said the one on the left. "She only tells people she's blind--really the strap is to pull me along."
I cracked up. The light changed, we all moved off, I said "Have a good run," and they each responded with "If she doesn't let me run off a bridge," and "I'm the one who needs a dog--to drag me."
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Yesterday I was almost home and on the sidewalk instead of cutting through the parking lot as usual, heading for the mail. Someone walking a bike stopped me. She had lost all her air, she explained. As I dug the pump out of my pannier, I asked if she was far from home. "I am from Switzerland," she responded. Somewhere German-speaking I had already guessed, but I grinned, "No, I mean, far from where you live now--do you need a ride home?" No, not far. Then it turned out I had RDC's pump, switched during our trip, and its nozzle didn't fit her tube. I invited her home to use the regular pump, and along she came. She's at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, painting, drawing, and doing sculptery (must be some kind of blend of sculpture and pottery). No, I didn't abuse the girl's English, it being far superior to my French or German; besides, maybe there really is such an artform. Anyway, I pumped the tire up, listened for a leak and heard none, drew her a map to a nearby bike shop and looked up its phone number, offered her a glass of water and the phone, was declined, and sent her on her way. "Poor kid, hope she gets home all right."
When I told the story to RDC, he didn't get that line. Oh come on, I berated him, it's the last line before the first commercial break. Then he got it. The first time I saw "The Wizard of Oz" without commercials, I was disoriented. Watching it, I knew exactly when they come. The second one is as Dorothy leaves Munchkin City.
Blake had not been impressed with Katerina, since her arrival meant he couldn't come out of his cage. I did bring him outside while we messed with the bike, since otherwise he'd've screamed. With us outside, though still in his cage, he chirruped cutely, and if he didn't talk, at least he didn't scream either. After she left, we fetched the mail. I should get the mail like this every day, since it's a nice little dose of sun for Blake and he likes to be admired by anyone else at the mail hut. Finally, a key in the box! I'd been wondering if I had sent checks merrily off to Bibliofind stooges. A key, a key, a key! I opened the box, took out my package--Tavern City Books, the first one, saw that it was marked Book Rate, thought "Aha!" just as Rabbit wanted to do after capturing Roo (partly because here was the booty and partly because of book rate), and scampered home. With the bird in his little travel cage, of course. We've told him he could go out without the cage if he'd only deal with his harness, but no.
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Someone--this makes the third person--asked if I had a notify list in an email I received about two seconds after I posted what I hoped would be my final journal entries. (As it turns out, though, I don't want to stop posting. Somehow posting with the hope of an audience makes this more valid. As ever, the contrast between my personal and public writings I continue to loathe and consider to be false.) She is going to be my partner in Jean Auel-induced sloth, when and if, and she's someone I want to get to know better (so why the hell don't I say that to her in email rather than here, where I know damn well she'll read it anyway?), so as I took the Open Pages logo off the index and failed to upload some corrected pages, I wrote to her. Also I read my new book, Cat in the Mirror by Mary Stolz.
I was such a sheltered child.
When I read Auntie Mame in 1997 or so, for the first time since I was maybe 16, I laughed at myself for not getting some of the jokes much more than I laughed at the jokes themselves. The humor is puerile, which explains why I thought it funny when I was 13 even though I didn't understand it all and why it left me cold at 29.
But Cat in the Mirror! It's YA! How could I not understand it!
The protagonist, Erin, is talking about Switzerland's hospitality. A vicious pack of classmates want to know all about a custom she mentions--and immediately regrets--by the clumsy name of "pinching the nightie." They have provoked her into a rage. "Goddamn it!" she screamed. "They take your nightie out of the drawer and lay it on your pillow and pinch in its effing waist and it's supposed to look welcoming and gracious, qualities you wouldn't know anything about!"
Now, Erin lives in a brownstone in New York City, goes to private school in a Park Avenue mansion, has a housekeeper, has lived in France, Holland, and Brazil, skis, and what's more skis in Gstaad. I figured "effing" was a characteristic of fine lingerie, embroidered and beribboned linen, that I, who slept in pjs from Sears, didn't know about.
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I am so happy. There are two banks of elevators in my buildings, one for the low and the other for the high. In the lower bank, two of the six elevators are dedicated to only three floors to which the other four won't go, although the buttons are there. This causes confusion often, as today. Today was subtly different. Today, I got to make a joke.
A man in maybe his late 20s got in the elevator, asking the other passengers as he looked at the controls, "Does this go all the way to 11?"
"Just like the amplifier," I told him.
I suppose you had to be there, or you had to be me, or maybe him, but we thought it was pretty funny. Two Dot Orgers were also on the elevator, one younger than 20, the other about 40. They didn't get it. I am glad that of all the people who could have got on the elevator and set me up for "Spinal Tap," this man, pierced and tattooed and the right age, did the job so well.
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