R: She’s got a big splinter in her heel. We should get a proper first aid kit.
J: Good thing we live half a block away from Walgreens.
R: Walgreens, pfff. I want a good one, not one from Walgreens. Ye Olde Crap Worlde.
C: Crap!
R: Oh, shit! Oh, crap! Oh no!
J: Your days of swearing like a sailor are strictly numbered.
Oz. The pump for the domes was broken, so we ended up with a choice of Liberty, Newbird and the yurt; we took Newbird again, and Salome and Jack took the yurt.
R: Already less drama than last time!
S: Really?
Jeremy: Yes, by the time we got here, people had been arguing for three hours over who got which cabin.
Jack (without irony): Damn, and I missed it. I love interpersonal conflict!
Newbird was raw and sort of plonked into the woods when we were there last, in 2003; now the woods have grown up around it and it belongs. There was a very cheerful and friendly hopping mouse in our outhouse. I also saw a deer and fawn, and an opossum and a gopher. Salome and Jack saw moles. Nature being red in tooth and claw, about half of these instances of wildlife were dead when the weekend was over.
It turns out it’s completely impossible to concentrate on games with a three-month-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old spitting up or trying to eat the choking hazards. Lord of the Rings: Risk never got further than opening the board. Simpsons: Monopoly ended prematurely when we all nearly fell asleep in the yurt. We actually achieved two hands of gun rummy last night, before Salome declared the game stupid and announced that it was bedtime.
Instead of trouncing each other at things, we talked. This led to some oddly dreamlike results, as for instance:
Jack: Yeah, Heather used to be a huge activist.
S: That’s right, she grew gills.
Jack: Right.
R: Wait.
Jack (merrily): What?
R: Heather. Grew gills?
Jack: Yep.
S: Didn’t she break into a nuclear reactor?
Jack: Yeah, but the doctors never figured out if it was a mutation from the radiation, or just, you know, one of those weird things.
R: She grew gills.
S: I didn’t believe it either, so I went and asked her, and she showed me the scar where she’d had them removed.
R: Gills.
S: Well, she couldn’t actually breathe through them, they were just these flaps of skin.
R: Okay, I see what’s happening here. You two were lying in bed this morning, complaining about how I’m always making these authoritative statements with no evidence to back me up except what I read on the Internets, and you thought ‘How can we mess with her mind?’ And one of you said: ‘Gills!’
Jack and Salome (in unison): Nooo!
We cooked mountains of organic food, we ate it, we baked in the sun, we swam naked in the ice-cold river, we napped, we had hot bubble baths, we sat on the deck and looked out over the apple orchard and the meadows and redwood forests of the Garcia River valley; hawks screamed and there were turkey vultures, which last caused a certain amount of confusion among the child population:
Claire: Yummy turkey!
No Net, no cell service, no TV. I take all these big old books and end up reading a six-month-old copy of Harper’s someone left in the kindling pile. In short, Oz rocks. Next time we go, you should come.
“Hi
Seem a bit upset by the Hate mail…
So here is the LOVE.
HUGS
MORE LOVE
MORE HUGS
can u feel the LOVE
Luv Al”
The day certainly has improved. Miss Zoë got the big thumbs-up from Yeshi, my fabulous midwife, and I had the number three lunch at Sunflower. I really should get some actual work down now.
R: Andy Gill posted to Tristero that the Enlightenment is over, and we’re heading into an age of superstition. It made me sad. Do you think he’s right?
J: Only in America.
R: Heh. Well, I don’t really care if I’m out of step with my world-historical moment. I like Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, I approve of human rights and I’m going to live like a nineteenth-century liberal humanist even if there is no liberal humanism any more. If I believe in the scientific method really hard, it must be true, right?
J: The Enlightment! It’s shiny!
R: Actually the nice thing about the scientific method is that it doesn’t matter whether I believe in it or not. I guess I do have to have faith that mathematics really can describe the way the universe behaves, and that it’s not just all in our heads.
J: It’s one of those subtle philosophical questions: does pure maths really map onto physics, or do we just think it does because our brains evolved that way? Paul Erdös believed in maths. He liked to talk about The Book. He said that when mathematicians die, they get to read about how everything really works.
R: Oh, I like that. It’s like how when I die, I get to read the rest of Jane Austen.
I am inundated with hate mail, and I haven’t even had breakfast. Jeremy and I walk to Katz Bagels.
R: Everybody loathes everything I write.
J: Go eat worms.
R: Okay. Perspective. One of the readers at a mid-Western literary magazine I’ve never heard of, and the founder of a small Canadian software company, have ridiculous and insubstantial objections to some things I wrote.
J: And the rest?
R: …all my other stories got published.
J: You need to write some more!
R: I thought of writing up that weekend I spent in Kentucky at the Rolex. I wanted to call it Four Star. I thought up some great characters, a dorky divorced dad who keeps embarrassing his thirteen-year-old daughter, and a crazy ingenue riding school instructor from California, and her leathery eventing trainer. And her trainer’s horse, that they’d bought as a yearling, that bites and kicks so that even though he’s really talented, no one likes him.
J: And the dorky Dad could say, break a leg, and they do.
R: Yes! They’d all be watching the water combination, and the competition would stop for ages and ages and they’d gradually realize that someone had had a bad fall, and it would turn out be the trainer, and this fun frivolous weekend suddenly turns into something else.
J: And the dorky Dad comes into his own.
R:Wait. Is this getting heart-warming? I HATE heart-warming.
J: No! Dorky Dad could be a brain surgeon! He could operate right there on the cross-country course!
R: He could transplant the horse’s brain into the trainer’s head! The horse could give its life so that the trainer could live!
J: Now you’re going too far.
R: Oh.
J: He should just transplant a leg.
We hop gracelessly and giggling down Valencia Street, although it’s unclear whether we are humans trying to run on one horse leg or three-legged horses attempting to trot.
She is given food.
C: THANK YOU MUCH MAN DARLING!
I don’t know where she gets it from.
J: Claire, do you want a bagel?
C: No.
J: Okay. Do you want hummus on it?
C: Yes.
Grant writes: The pubs are *jammed*. And the flirting is intense. You can see how the english ended up shagging against walls through world war two.
Though they’re Australian to a man, my London friends are being English as fuck about this morning’s series of incidents. They praise the response of the emergency services and beloved mayor Red Ken Livingstone. There’s a general sense that everyone was waiting for this, and that it could have been much worse.
Jess had the best news: one-week-old baby Leo! Another potential boyfriend for the fetus-who-has-resumed-being-known-as-(how-original!)-Zoe!
R: So is BART on strike today?
J: Don’t know.
R: Doesn’t seem to be any havoc.
J (squinting skywards): No burning treehouses.
R: …burning treehouses?
J: You know. Burning things, falling from the sky.
R: …treehouses?
J: I don’t know. I was looking up, and got distracted by the blueness of the sky, so I just threw in a random word.
I’m wearing my “I’m blogging this” t-shirt today, so I’d better get to it, and not make a liar of my handsome milk-distended rack. I wanted to note how funny it was that when Morrisa came over on Friday to wander around Bernal, I bumped into both Cate Reigner AND Marina Berlin, which never happens, even though they both live only a few blocks away. It was one of those ineffable Bernal days, with the sun and the flowers and the ridiculous neighborhoodiness of it all. Claire and Miranda played adorably in the playground, Salome got her legs waxed and we all blew dozens of dollars on ubercute baby clothes in Chloe’s Closet.
Then on Saturday Morrisa came to the SF Mime Troupe performance and we bumped into Aaron and Bronwyn Ximm. That’s pretty much everyone I know in San Francisco, so there’s no chance I can maintain the charade of being a popular and connected gal. The Ximms lost the lease on 964 Natoma, which sucks, but they’re moving into a place on Bernal! Two blocks away! With a hot tub! Which rules. I went barefoot in the park but failed to put enough sunscreen on my blinding white lower extremities, so I got sunburnt, and now it looks like I am wearing pink gumboots. Odd.
I forgot to mention that on Friday night Jeremy and I dumped Claire on poor Salome and zoomed off to see Spencer’s Someday, Love, a musical based on his Crimson Club cabaret numbers, at the New Conservatory Theater. Listening to Spencer sing makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, because he is the Real Thing. His songs are getting better than ever, all Gershwin and Kurt Weill and Cole Porter-influenced, and he had two singers whose voices blended brilliantly with his, and he took his shirt off! Ian was amazed. “He’s so classically handsome and well-formed!” “Ian,” we kept reminding him, “you are NOT GAY. Remember?” But Spencer is so beautiful that even straight men are impressed. Someday, Love has finished its run, but Spencer and the band are playing Cafe du Nord on July 21. Book tickets now RUN DON’T WALK.
Um, so. Sunday we went to Leonard and Sumana’s party, which was great fun, and then had dinner at Bursa Kebab, where the gorgeous hostess who fell in love with Claire turned out to be a Jordanian writer who invited me to stay at her parent’s place in Amman next time I am, you know, over that way. Monday I spent the morning eating too many Krispy Kreme donuts with Shannon while Bryan and Jeremy and the kids got sunburned in the park. In the afternoon we went to a block party with Jonathan and Re in their outrageously lovely Berkeley neighborhood, all leafy trees and Craftsman mansions and home-made peach pie and berry cobbler, mmm. You need a thick skin to hang out with those guys though; Re approved of the name Zoe but when we told Jonathan, he said “Really? HOW ORIGINAL.” And it is the case that we have met at least twenty thousand little girls called Zoe, so it’s back to the drawing board for us.
Just another splendid, funny, sweet holiday in San Francisco, made even bittersweeter by loss and fear of loss. Driving into the Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning I cried and cried, because in my life I have known three truly excellent animals, Alfie and Sade and Belinda, and now they are all gone. Shannon’s lovely silver tom Charlie was killed by a car, and she herself is on bedrest until Ruari can be safely born.
Claire: Mummy sad?
R: Yes. I’m sad because Belinda had to go away.
C: Mummy sad. Bye-bye Belinda.
…because thanks to her championship, Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse is back in print, including this nutshell encapsulation of my child-rearing beliefs:
“…Miss Heliotrope caring now not two hoots whether Maria liked her or not, if only she could make of the child a fine and noble woman.”
I am actually looking forward to Half-Blood Prince, if only to witness the ramifications in slashland.
Jeremy took me to see Howl’s Moving Castle last night. It looks sensational, of course, but the plot is incoherent. Apparently my newfound love for Diana Wynne Jones trumps even my longstanding passion for Miyazaki! The book of Howl is amazing, and highly recommended. The film is probably best for Miyazaki completists; that said, nothing will ever knock Totoro and Spirited off my list of favourite films of all time.
Other good things: I prayed to Epona, goddess of horses, last night, and she gave me a parking spot that’s good till Friday at noon!
Oh, and stone fruit! Have you tasted the nectarines this year? Wow!
The Columbia River delta
Was shining like the back end of a deer
I am following the river down the highway
To the cradle of microbeer
I’m going to Portland, Portland, northern Oregon, I’m going to Portland
Powells and poly kids have families and we are going to Portland.
My travelling companion is two years old
She’s the child of my first marriage.
I’ve reason to believe we both will be received in Portland.
How much Portland can you pack into one 36-hour trip? We had breakfast at Old Wives’ Tale, visited Shannon and Heather in the south-east, rode Cricket the appaloosa and Dinah the paint horse at Penny’s farm, oohed and ahed at Multnomah Falls in the Columbia Gorge, lunched at Burgerville and splashed in the water fountain in the Pearl District. I passed out in front of Princess Mononoke before Quinn could drag me off to a fiftieth birthday party for a Flying Karamazov Brother. I did make it to Powells, though only on a technicality: there’s a branch in the airport mall, where I bought stickers for the flight home.
Portland was clean and green and beautiful and even sunshiney, exactly the sort of city we bleeding-heart liberals would plan and build if we could; perversely, and no doubt to Quinn’s chagrin, it’s made me love dirty old Fogtown better than ever.
Claire turned two and a half years old yesterday, and I love her more than I could ever possibly have imagined. As for example when we were getting off the plane this morning, and she said “Goodbye man! Goodbye lady! Goodbye people!”
Recheng: Thank GOODNESS THE KID DOES NOT HAVE to live with the NAME SAM.
Kirsty: Yay! How are you?
R: I’m pregnant!
K: What?
R: I’m five months pregnant!
K: Oh I knew that. I thought you said you were fragrant!
R: Yes! I’m five months fragrant!
K: You should have a bath!
She looks perfect – four-chambered heart, two-hemisphered brain, fingers, toes, even lenses in her eyes.
Spare a thought for Jeremy, trapped in his houseful of women.
preoccupations