soup’s up
This is the first day in over a month when we’ve had nothing planned, and no reason to hustle the little girls out of the house. As soon as we got back from Australia, JavaOne began and Garfield, Olga and Madeline arrived from Russia.
Garfield and I were the fierce twin Noam Chomskyites of the 1993 English honours class at Sydney Uni. We argued (successfully!) for Vietnam-inflected readings of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. We drank gallons of espresso at the Craven, watched 24-hour science fiction marathons at the Valhalla and kept Gleebooks in business with nothing but the power of our righteous convictions. Garfield was on his way to visit me in Dublin, stopped over in Russia and has lived there ever since. Has yet to set foot in Ireland.
Younger readers, consider the power of irony: Garfield and I, furious post-colonialists born and raised at the utmost fringe of the West; our children, native-born Americans and Muscovites. Never say never.
What with one thing and another, we had dinner with a different set of friends every night this week. Yesterday was tower and flowers: the top of the De Young Museum and the Japanese Tea Gardens. We had a farewell lunch at Lovejoy’s, and then the Reynoldses flew back to Moscow and I gave in to jetlag and tiredness and went to bed until 7pm.
Claire already misses Madeline. They approached one another very warily, Madeline shy of using her excellent English, Claire bewildered by the appearance of yet another foreign language. By Friday, they were flying hand in hand around Golden Gate Park, looking exactly like sisters. Oh, and a checkout girl at Good Life flattered me VERY MUCH by assuming that Olga and I were the sisters. MY CHEEKBONES ARE COMPARABLE TO THOSE OF A RUSSIAN WOMAN. Hurrah!
So this morning we slept in. It was fantastic. After a v-e-r-y s-l-o-w morning I dropped Jeremy and the kids on Cortland at noon and tootled down to the Alemany Farmers’ Market to buy the very last of the fresh produce. With all the Fitzhardinges down for naps, I made puree of garnet yam for Julia and a potage parmentier and roasted carrots and pain perdu for the rest of us. Now the house smells deliciously of leeks, and Bebe has curled up to go to sleep on my left hand.
Julia stirs. I must away!
