“I had other priorities in the 60's than military service” - Dick Cheney, vice-president of the United States

What do I have today? Other than an indignant political post brewing, that is...let's see....

Dropped my older brother at the bus station this morning. He’d been here since Saturday, and his visit was great. He and the boys played a lot of hockey in the backyard, he accompanied Primo to his first t-ball practice, he played Stratego and Don’t Wake Daddy and dominoes with the boys all weekend long, and he watched The Baby while I ran Seg to the pediatrician yesterday (poor little guy has an ear infection, complete with perforated eardrum). I cooked this amazing Parmesan chicken on Sunday, and salmon with roasted fennel and onions yesterday, and we demolished a Victoria sponge layered with mascarpone and homemade lemon curd (most successful experiment). Not to mention a shocking amount of alcoholic beverages.

About that ear infection: Seg started complaining his TEETH hurt on Friday. Lots of crying and whining, lots of clinginess; I dosed him up with Motrin and stuck a warm water bottle on his pillow, under his face. Called the pediatrician and got an appointment for Saturday morning, which I called and cancelled because he was fine all night and woke up Saturday perky and chipper. However, by the time I got home from work on Saturday, the pain was back, and by Sunday had migrated to his EAR. Injudicious pouring of Motrin and he was mostly fine, but I took him to the pediatrician first thing Monday – or at least, as soon as they could fit him in. He was VERY BRAVE while they dug out tons of wax and dried blood and pus from his ear. The doctor thought it had ruptured probably Saturday which is why he felt so much better that morning, but she put him on two kinds of antibiotics, and Motrin for the pain and fever till it eases up. He slept all through the night last night, seemed fine by this morning, and indeed was healthy enough to get into a screaming match with Primo over whose hockey gloves were whose after breakfast. Not to mention teasing both brothers that HE got to drink “yummy pink medicine.” Ah. All better.

And about that amazing chicken: I bought Real Simple: Meals Made Easy at the library’s Half-Price Scholastic Book Fair a few weeks ago, and it has become an inspirational source for meals. Who isn’t sick of cooking the same old thing all the time, and unfortunately we cannot live on desserts from Nigella (not that I wouldn’t like to try, mind you). Some of the Amazon reviews complained that the recipes call for things the “average home cook” might not “stock”, but c’mon, anyone who cooks at all keeps chicken breasts in the freezer, and a stockpile of dried herbs handy, don’t they? Seriously? A couple recipes will NOT be attempted – the very idea of eggs baked in spaghetti sauce is indeed revolting – but I have the Cannellini-and-Tuna salad on tap for tomorrow night, I will probably give the vegetable pasta, the chicken souvlaki, and the roasted cod with potatoes a whirl at some point, and I will most definitely make the Parmesan chicken and the fennel salmon again.

I am cranking through and once again enjoying End of Mr Y. I realized that, despite the fact that it is a novel, it covers some pretty profound philosophy, and so I need to take a break now and then. I am halfway through Susan Isaacs’ Past Perfect, whose heroine is whinier and more insecure than Isaacs’ heroines usually are, and with whom I feel no empathy at all, again, most unusual for an Isaacs book.

I pick up Salley Vickers’ Instances of the Number 3 at my library’s ILL today, and then Lord’s Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, The Secret of Lost Things, and Scarlett Thomas’s first detective novel Dead Clever at the public library, on my lunch break. Plus, I took home Sophie’s World last week, to bone up on my almost nonexistent philosophy knowledge.

Fair weather and lots of good reading ahead!

"...the nation that assumes stewardship of the Moon now will inherit stewardship of the galaxy in the coming millennium." - Wilson Greatbatch

I just hit a thousand books on Library Thing, and still have all of the actual library/computer-room books (lots more fiction, most of my history, and all of H's textbooks), and all of the boys' books, plus my old children's books, to do.

Not that it's a competition or anything.

I realize now that, were I filthy rich, I might just be the type to roll around in my money, flinging fistfuls of dollar bills into the air while I capered and cavorted and chortled.
I am not rich.
But I DO have a lot of books.

Do with that what you will.

"The paramedic called the press and sold me like a loaf of bread." - Charlie Sheen

A friend highly recommended Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, and several book bloggers had intriguing things to say about it, including Doppelganger over at Fifty Books who called it “great and terrible.” (Which she meant in the best way possible.) It’s a compact, attractive little book, and the first couple sentences were interesting enough, so I checked it out and brought it home and it sat in my bedside basket for a couple weeks before my friend who recommended it in the first place asked if I had read it yet.

I had not.

I went home that night and crawled into bed with it.

I read a few chapters.
I skipped around the book and read bits and pieces, here and there.
I stopped to look up what John Gregory Dunne had written.
I put it down and have not picked it up again, nor will I.

My father died of a heart attack when I was teenager.
He’d had some heart trouble, and was on medications for high blood pressure (which I found out much later he’d stopped taking because filling the prescriptions was so expensive), but he also walked miles and miles each week, disappearing on Sundays after church often till dinnertime.

I was working at my part-time job at The Gap the evening he came home after a fruitless visit to fix some error on his driver’s license and collapsed in the living room smack in the middle of complaining about the inefficient morons who ran New Jersey’s DMV.

I drove home as quickly as I could, and I recall – but this CAN’T be right, they must have left by then – following the ambulance to Cooper Hospital.

I do – pretty accurately, I think - recall seeing him after they’d declared him dead, still and cold on a hospital gurney, looking old, and helpless without his glasses. I recall coming home to a living room littered with paramedic paraphernalia, which I think my sweet boyfriend cleared up. I recall my mom picking out a casket lined in blue “because he always looked so nice in blue.” We three kids made merciless fun of my mom for years about the little seagulls embossed on the inside of the coffin lid, accompanied by the caption, “Going Home.” (Yes, we were and are rotten children. We also pestered her for not burying him in his horrible, beloved Jolly Green Giant suit.)

So I can’t – won’t – read Year of Magical Thinking. It cuts a little too close to the bone for me. It’s been twenty years since my father’s death, and I don’t want to be reminded of the excruciating details. I don’t want to think about that night, or how we got through it. I don’t want to think about what my dad’s death did to my mother, or what it did to the rest of my thirteen-year-old brother’s childhood. I especially don’t want to think about what it did to my dad, someone who’d worked like a fiend for all his life, who tried very hard to be a good person but at the same time was crotchety and irascible and drove us all nuts occasionally, someone who I am sure thought he’d live to see his children grow up and marry and have children of their own, just like we all hope and expect.

And while I am sorry for Didion’s pain and suffering, I can’t relive my grief alongside hers. I don’t want to. I’m sure it’s a lovely book, that she is an exquisite writer. I will go read Slouching towards Bethlehem instead.