My sister is home safe from England, and my mother–budding NewsBruiser hacker–is using the import feature to document her own trip from last July.
Category: Joan Wood
Ian has been and gone, leaving giggles and makeouts in his wake. Thank you very, very much to Deb Core, Sumana Harihareswara, Joan Wood, Sharon Calhoun, Lisa Brown, Scott Stauble, Kyle Neumann, Angel Brooks, Ken Moore, Monica Willett, Sean Hoban, and especially Maria, whose idea this was in the first place. You guys are the champions of friendship!
I associate exclusively with overachievers
- As my mother reports, my sister will be interviewed for an appointment to continue studying at Oxford. My predictions are on target so far! Yay Caitlan!
- I have been thinking lately of what a little expletive I was from, oh, about ages nine through nineteen; my hyper, piping self-absorption stands in sharp contrast to Sumana’s high school martyr complex, but I still identify strongly with the behavior she describes. I wish my motivation had been as progressive as hers, and I wish I regularly could come up with the kind of beautiful phrasing she uses at the end of the column. (But read the whole thing first, dammit.)
My family is a shotgun shell
My sister has landed by now, I think. Mom and Kyle and I saw her off at the airport yesterday evening, carrying her life in four bags bigger than herself. Caitlan is a packrat. She is also a genius. She’s going to have a degree from Oxford and I could not be more jealous or more proud.
Today is my brother’s birthday, and he is alone in Los Angeles, sans roommate, sans internets. Happy birthday, Ian. I’ll call you later and tell you that you should go to a bar and let drop that you’re alone on your birthday on your first week in California. If you can’t wring some makeouts out of that, you’re just not trying.
Today’s Hitherby Dragon, The Land Where Suffering Is Remembered, is one of the best I can remember. It reminds me of a story we used to listen to in the car all the time, about frogs and a witch and three dogs and grains of magic corn. My mother knows a magic trick, which she used when telling this story aloud, to make a glass of milk turn blood-red.
My mother is flying to London now, with my great-aunt and -uncle and her best friend. Be safe, Mom.
NOT COOL. My mom is supposed to leave for London tomorrow. That is quite enough with the bombing.
Only two fatalities so far, but as of this morning there were still people trapped underground.
Update 1046 hrs: Thirty-three.
Update 1329 hrs: Thirty-seven.
Pookie
He was a canine Houdini, absolutely brilliant at escaping whatever fences, gates or other barriers we could set up to keep him safe. He was brick-stupid about everything else: glass doors, bigger dogs, cars. Those two things in combination don’t make for a long life expectancy; it’s kind of surprising that he lived to be eleven.
Pookie was always nominally my dog, although Ian took care of him more often, and after we moved out he was really my mom’s. She found him, Friday afternoon, on the wrong side of the fence around Kelly Ridge. There wasn’t any real evidence of what exactly happened. Could have been a car, or another dog, or some unknown medical problem.
He was a shih tzu, the kind you see like little furry hovercraft on shows: glossy, legless, gliding. Pookie never looked like that. His fur was short, tangled and dirty; he smelled like a dog. He lived outdoors, and always seemed satisfied with that.
After Mom sold the house, Pookie spent much more time with Joe and his giant antisocial dog, Greg Brown, out on the ridge. I don’t know how Greg and Pookie first behaved around each other, but by the time I saw them together they were inseparable. Pookie was already nine, but he acted like a dog finally growing up: his body got thicker and more muscular, and he seemed more reserved, less goofy. Greg never let anyone he didn’t trust near his protege.
When he was wet he looked like a rat, but when his hair was just the right length he looked like those Chinese statues of lions. I’ve never met anyone more confident, or more trusting, or who spent his entire life in such a happy mood.
