Reading: Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Below the Root

Moving: Walked 2 miles

Learning: More reasons to dislike The Giver

Moving: Oh! so many boxes packed

2 May 2000: Distance

Yesterday I just vented and vented and vented in a thorough kind of way, leaping from topic to topic with even less transition than usual. I wrote the way my journal used to be, less aware of an audience. When I got home, I tidied up, packing some stuff and putting other stuff away, and some of the latter stuff was physical and some electronic. I found a few images in my graphics folder and blathered on about that.

Now, with 24 and more whole hours behind me, I wonder if I can assemble whatever I said yesterday into sense. No, I'll just leave it. It might not be much different than usual.

---

While I wait for my modem to join the living, Below the Root.

I can sense Zilpha Keatley Snyder's voice within the tone she adopts for this, a full-fledged fantasy book. I think her voice sounds the most genuine in The Egypt Game and The Changeling, but that could be because they're my favorites anyway. Or they could be my favorites because of that tone. Phoebe must not have had The Egypt Game because I remember the Center (elementary) School librarian laughing at me when I wanted to check it out in middle school. I wouldn't've'd to find it in my elementary school if Phoebe had had it. The Egypt Game is the one essential Snyder, so if Phoebe didn't have it, it didn't have any, and that's why I didn't know any of her other titles for so long.

I found The Changeling in the Mansfield (where Storrs and UConn are) Public Library in the fall of 1992. I was profoundly moved. I had had a friend like Ivy when I was seven, as Martha is at the beginning of the book, and I desperately wanted her back by the time I was 15, as Martha is at the end. This is the same reason The Evolution of Jane struck such a chord with me before I even got to the cataloging bits. Hmm, except in Evolution of Jane Martha is the lost friend, not the loser.

So anyway, I don't know how when I found out about Below the Root, And All Between, and Until the Celebration. If I saw them when I was younger, when The Egypt Game was all I knew by Snyder, I might have ignored these because they're fantasy. My official line is that I don't read fantasy. After I read The Changeling and decided I would read everything by this author, I realized that Until the Celebration is based on the fantasy-land that Ivy and Martha make up for themselves in The Changeling, but it was only Until the Celebration that I could find. Of course I cannot read the third first. That is Wrong. Eventually, that is, last week, I asked the library to track Below the Root for me. I started reading it yesterday on the way back from the library.

It didn't take me long to realize that not only wasn't The Giver properly deserving of a Newbery medal, as I have long thought, but its themes are entirely lifted from Below the Root. And from "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," kind of, but Ursula LeGuin's story isn't for children of The Giver's or Below the Root's age:

• Superficially idyllic society
• War, fighting, and apparently death are unknown concepts
• Certain members are selected for their abilities to bear the burden of memory and serve as advisers

Naturally, I've packed The Giver already--it being a pulp-sized book among the general fiction--but I quote from Below the Root, 1975:

"Therefore it has been decided that we, as Ol-zhaan [the priest/adviser class] must bear the burden of memory, so that the tragic errors of our ancestors will never be repeated."

The common people don't have the memory and so don't have the choice.

Lois Lowry, care to comment?

(It's not as if it's that much of a leap that any charge of plagiarism is probably valid.)

And Below the Root is pleasantly ecofeminist. Another point in its favor.

---

From yesterday:

I am officially In a Grumpy Mood. Don't mess with me.

• I missed my chance to meet HAO's friend Martin. If I'd known he wasn't going to stay over Sunday, I wouldn't've frittered Saturday away.
• Macintosh vs. Windows, Netscape Navigator vs. MSIE, and most of all, puny 640x480 vs. barely acceptable 800x600 vs. all other better resolutions. I have no idea how to juggle all of that.
• Navy and black just don't go.
• I had a great time Saturday night, despite losing so spectacularly, but I'm not used to staying up until almost 1:00 and sleeping until almost 9:00:
• I have a tired-headache and
• I feel like I wasted several hours of today by sleeping after sun-up.
• Cramps loom.
• My father tells me my favorite (a relative--har har--term, but still) aunt, the one after whom I am named, has an aneurism on her aorta.
• I can feel my hair. I haven't had a headache this bad in ages and I've had it since I woke up yesterday. I probably have a tumor.

---

Dot Com had a seminar in Denver Friday and RDC asked me to go to the Happy Hour following. I said okay. Then HAO asked me to meet Martin, who'd be in town for the weekend. I figured I'd have other opportunities to meet Dot Com people, so I decided to blow off RDC. He wasn't too pleased, especially since I had made the plans for Saturday night. So Friday evening we went out with someone from a school Dot Com has worked for.

Gary grew up in Denver and went to George Washington H.S. when it was a nationally prestigious school instead of its current war zone, and he was talking about high school in the '60s, which threw me. He said some other stuff and I was consumed with curiosity until eventually I asked straight out just how old he was. Because, you know, I'm so polite.

Forty-seven. The last time someone ended up than much older than I expected, she was obese, and the only reason for obesity is as a wrinkle-deterrent. This guy wasn't fat. Or gray, from what I could tell from his quarter-inch hair, mustache, and beard. Or bald. RDC--who will not have that much hair in 15 years--and I were both surprised, so at least I didn't gape alone. He lives in Moscow, Idaho, works at WSU in Pullman, Washington, and wants to get out. No surprise.

Saturday morning, I got home with my tickets by 10:30, and then RDC and I went for a walk before it got cloudy, then worked on our respective projects and napped through the cloudy, windy afternoon.

Then we went to Jenn's (I added another picture to the first entry). I am not, no surprise, the most gracious of losers. I don't recall gnashing my teeth, at least externally, but Jenn did capture a charming shot of my frustration at not knowing what London school JFK attended or what two suits have one-eyed jacks (stupid orange questions!)* or whatever I was currently being clueless about.

Clearly, I am an asset to any social gathering. Unfortunately, Jenn was a little quick off the mark and captured my eloquent guesture prematurely.

*Kevin, to his credit, suggested one black and one red, which is correct. However, it's not clubs and diamonds but spades and hearts. Or whatever; I still don't remember. I haven't played enough set-back with my family, I guess.

Everyone else already knew everyone else, as far as I could piece together. RDC and I were the interlopers. When someone asked me how I knew our hosts, I didn't demonstrate a whit of wit and merely say, "We met on-line." This would have been credible, since that's how Jenn and Kevin met, although she probably would have then asked how, in a MUD or a chat room or what and I'd've been back where I started. No, instead I went for subtlety, since that's my strong suit. "I'll be right back," I hedged, and nipped up to Jenn. She was talking to Keli, who already knew about EDO and Speaking Confidentially (and before I responded to Keli's first email a couple of months ago, I queried Jenn--this Keli is writing from your company! Is this okay?). After Jenn cleared me, I returned to my inquisitor. "We both keep on-line journals," I said, and that was the end of that.

My eyes and I were tired and someday I'm going to get us into a hideous accident because RDC with a couple of glasses of wine probably drives more alertly than I do stone cold sober after 11 p.m. Plus it was raining. I woke up late and with a headache. I tried to be good all day and work, but neither words nor work flowed well. By 3:00 I gave up. If I couldn't work with my head, I could work with my hands.

(Speaking of head and hands, the other two Hs of 4-H are heart and home, as Jenn answered in response to I think an orange question. She was thinking with her hands as much as her mind, maybe because there's pledge type thing, like in Girl Scouts, and she was recruiting muscle memory to assist her. Or maybe she was gesturing. Anyway, it was when her hands were by her waist that I suggested, being on another, losing team, "hips.")

---

Before yesterday, I had done barely a lick of packing. Yesterday, I started in earnest. As always, cleaning, organizing, and throwing out served as excellent therapy as well as an avoidance tactic. No, I didn't write my term paper, but my socks are in apple-pie order! By the end of college, I had perfected procrastination to such an art that I could not work in a cluttered room. Same here. I've been bringing home boxes from work, copy boxes and monitor boxes and book boxes any other available boxes, and mourning the fact that if the boxes of RDC's new computer had been allowed to moulder for another few weeks, they would have magically become not pointless mess in the dining area but beautiful beautiful boxes.

I'm fixated on boxes.

Last week I started. I packed most of our sweaters up into copy boxes. Three copy boxes, all that I can reasonably get home on the bus in one day, all used up for not very much clothing. That small effort hinted at what a much more mammoth project this move would be, so I studiously ignored packing for several more days. Until yesterday.

The Packing Journal.

This really appeals to my list-making, trivia-pursuing nature. I'm humoring me.

Lots of the winter outdoor gear is already in a box, as are the costumes and the nostalgic t-shirts (U2 Joshua Tree 1987) we'll never wear again, so I taped those and called them done. Three.

RDC's sweaters in a box, mine in a box, and another box to share. Three more makes six.

The negatives, the bad shots, the ancient photographs from my eighth-grade trip to DC and of him when he had blond straight hair, are all in another copy box. His fly-tying material is in another copy box. Plus a box of his old papers and a box of random personal junk. Four more makes ten.

I emptied the crap--the deicer, the antifreeze, etc.--from three milk crates that've sat on the deck for the past year and put them in the tub to soak under the shower.

Our closet has space on the left end that's nearly inaccessible. On the inaccessible shelf there were the costumes and t-shirts copy boxes, then a milk crate with RDC's swim trunks and bike shorts, then a stack of his jeans and some of my sweaters across the middle, then another milk crate with my jeans and a copy box of ski gloves and insulated underwear. (No, we have no furniture.) The two crates were very important: they held up a long piece of wood that served as a second shelf for more sweaters. Packing the sweaters and worn-out, unworn jeans freed up two milk crates. More milk crates along the floor used to lend some order to our shoes. No longer. Plus the one that held stuff ready to go to Goodwill. But there's more Goodwill stuff than fits in a crate now. I came up with 12 crates and began to empty the bookcases into them. I got about 20 shelf-feet of books into twelve crates, up to . Eighty more to go.

The only good thing about pulp paperbacks is that 3.5"x5" books fit into four interlocking stacks in a standard milk crate with a nice center square column for anything you have that might be 2x2x2x2. Which, in my case, is nothing. All other books now annoy me. Douglas Coupland's Postcards from the Dead is square. Two huge folios of Charles Olson. An outsized collection of Katherine Mansfield. PLT is responsible for my owning The Slant Book. Guess what shape it is. Stupid books.

Blake's playpen is on top of one of the bookcases. When he noticed the shelves were empty, he bent himself in half to peer into the space. Change is curious.

As I assembled the puzzle of book-into-crate, Sheryl called. I was ready for her to say that my father found my recent entries (although as far as I know he's never been on the web, refusing outright when I offered a small tour almost four years ago) and isn't speaking to me. Not so. We chatted. I talked about the house, she talked about her root canals. I should print out the webpage for them, too.

Then she handed the phone to my father, and either he was very very tired (it was about 7:00 p.m. in Florida) or he'd been socking it away for a while already. He must assume I knew anyway and would probably only be surprised that I didn't know before now. He knows damn well CLH and I tell each other everything about our parents.

Talking to him was fine, normal. He was a little sloshed: perfectly standard. He'd played some golf: that's good because he couldn't for a long time after his knee surgery, also business as usual. Sam was barking at a new dog in the neighborhood. All ordinary topics.

Then he told me about my aunt. My oldest cousin--that aunt's oldest, that is, for whom I was a flower girl lo these many years--is coming out from California for the surgery. The aunt's youngest, the only family member from whom I have ever gotten email, cannot afford to fly up from Florida "because her jerk husband is out of a job again." He didn't mention what the middle child, a son who lives in town if not, in his late 40s, still actually with them, is doing for his mother or father during this difficult time.

My father is the only one of his five siblings who quit smoking, 17 or 18 years ago. Somehow all the others, all older than he, don't have lung cancer. It doesn't surprise me, with my aunt the chimney she is with emphysema to boot, that she has this whatever wrong with her. She got pretty winded walking the quarter mile between the parking area and the picnic area the last time [980620] I saw her. I sent her one of the worst written get-well cards in my long history of awkward outreaches at sensitive moments. If I talk the hind leg off a donkey, the donkey'd better hope he's in fine spirits, because if someone's suddenly died or something, I'll be sure refer to it, somehow, however obliquely and inadvertently, because that's my special gift. So.

Then dinner was ready and I had an excuse to end that sad conversation.

I piled all the crap from the television cabinet--the branchy candelabra, the Pooh bookends, the photographs in their random frames--onto the mantel, where there's more such detritus, there to continue gathering dust until last minute packing. The top of the television cabinet is for measuring tapes and flashlights and hammers and housekeys and such, plus all the stuff from the top of the other short bookcase in the study. I am going to break down that bookcase and stow it on the floor of the study closet to get it out of the way of traffic. The large bewheeled suitcase currently on the closet floor will hold heavy things like overcoats and become packing and so be moved to the dining room.

Then I attacked my closet. All the stuff I have no chance of wearing in the next month went in a big pile in the living room, and all the contents of the cheap plastic stackers my mother gave me when I graduated from high school, for my dorm room, which were on the floor in the inaccessible left end of the closet.

Some of the clothing with sentimental attachment that I will never ever ever wear again, I managed to throw into the expanding Goodwill pile:

• The well-broken-in, faded, lavender cotton mock turtleneck that I bought from the Co-op to go with a long-gone, very short stretchy black skirt that I wouldn't wear anymore even if I could.
• All the socks I own but do not wear, the ones I bought to go with certain shirts, the ones whose elastic has long rotted out (in no small way because I used to wear my socks over my jean legs--well, that was only freshling year and I doubt any were that old). How did these things even get out of Connecticut? I'm not sentimentally attached to them.
• The lavender, green, and black plaid shorts that I wore so often in grad school when that was such the in color combination and before I met RDC who hates almost all plaid. (I wore the above mock shirt with them a lot more often than I wore it with the slutty skirt.)
• The pantsuit I inherited from CLH that I have never, not even in the spring of 1996, fit into.
• The royal blue tunic, also inherited from CLH, whose cut I loved (like the jacket of a riding habit), which I wore over black stretch pants. As if I'll ever wear royal blue again in my life.
• A pair of cowboy boots I've had since 1985, also from CLH, that were uncomfortable then, before I reached my current staggering height (with corresponding foot-size) of 5'6", and which I have worn perhaps a half-dozen times.
• Two more pair of boots, both suede, one lavender, one green. Living with NBM my first year of grad school provided a lot of opportunities for shopping therapy. At the big J.C. Penney outlet with her, I found a big stack of cheap suede boots--basically a sole with scrawny suede glued on. I found a dark forest green in my size, but the only lavender ones were sizes 5 or 12. Weeks later, NBM found a size 9 lavender pair, and she came home and hid them, barely restraining herself, until Christmas, when she gave them to me along with every other purple thing under the sun she'd found for me. I don't remember what I wore the green boots with: over the black stretch pants, surely, or perhaps blue jeans if jeans then still had narrow enough legs. The lavender ones I wore with my still-favorite-after-13-years dress, a lavender paisley jumper. I think I'll keep those.
• A pair of brown leather flats I have never particularly liked but found tolerable, which is about all I ask of a pair of shoes, and which I shall never wear again.
• The skirt made of a sweatshirty material neither celidon nor sage, which I bought from a store in Boston, Downtown Crossing somewhere if not actually the Basement, along with an olive sweatshirt I'm keeping (which I wore one St. Patrick's Day in Boston, when I was ticketed for not wearing the right green).

And speaking of St. Patrick's Day, one of another team's question was "What date is St. Patrick's Day?" I demanded a year, too, and in my poor-sport loserhood, I made my impossible demand rather loudly. Sorry, Jenn, but this was when my team was getting questions like "What is the Neil Simon play about two retired vaudeville actors?" and I don't know the Sunshine Boys from the Odd Couple. Poor loser? Moi?

The stuff I kept, even though I'll never wear it again:

• The equally out-of-style riding habit-jacket-tunic thing that I kept is a shade of toast with lots of black frogging. I like the cut, outrŽ or not, and I like frogging.
• The plaid mini-skirt from high school, no later, which I also have minimal expectation ever of fitting into, let alone wearing, again.
• The lovely ruby velvet hand-made dress with the lace inset in the bodice that I picked up at the Old Lyme Congregational Church's White Elephant sale in 1990 or'91.

I have no expectation that I'll wear my evening gown in the next month, either, but I'm not packing that until the very end. Same with my suits and wool blazers.

During Sunday night television, I did laundry, made a batch of buddy chow to freeze, and folded all the relics and off-season stuff into the one monitor box I brought from work, and rolled $2.00 worth of coins. The only coin rollers I had were nickel rollers, and I had 78 nickels. I hate that. I had to run out to Safeway to get frozen vegetables for Blake's chow and considered doing the coins in the automated counter there that gives you 90% value, but that 10% really irks me.

One good thing: this is the antepenultimate time I will do laundry while dressed. When we have a house, I'm going to do laundry as nature intended--working appliances in the nude.

---

This morning, I woke at 6, reset the alarm for 6:40, finished A Fabulous Creature with its hastily sewn-up plot on the bus, and arrived at work after a weekend that made it look as if I have a social life (except no Martin), with progress made on the freelance project, partly packed, with a card to mail to my aunt and a baby card to mail to a cousin (six weeks or more late, but who's counting), with a week's worth of clean laundry, a month's worth of buddy chow, and still with the headache that floored me yesterday. Piss tits corruption lies.

At lunch I went to the 'brary and picked up Below the Root, a ZKS I have somehow never read but which is based on the fantasy land Ivy and Martha begin in The Changeling and therefore critical no matter how conveniently A Fabulous Creature was ended which is why I ordered it (Below the Root, that is) through ILL, and Patricia McKinley's The Blue Sword, which despite also being fantasy is something I should read, according to Mary Anne and others, and We Dare Not Go A-Hunting, which looks like something I might have read from PGN (about summer people sucking, a theme close to my fiercely protective pubescent heart) but don't remember, and Organic Gardening. I've read Western garden books and mountain garden books and low-water garden pamphlets and now here's an organic garden book and what I want is Low-Water Low-Effort High-Yield Blue Violet Lavender Yellow and White Plus Vegetables and Blueberries Organic Back-Yard Gardening in Zip Code 80206 And Don't Skimp on the No Effort Part, but no one's written it yet. Slackers.