Feeble Musings

I was going to say I had been pondering a list of things, but that sounds rather too organized. Say, perhaps, that I have been agitating the contents of my mind and seeing what comes uppermost: candor; meeting and parting; the interpenetrability of aspects of life one might prefer to be separate; the fineness and the folly of love; what goes into and comes out of creativity; the art of criticism; the art of conversation; the art of intimacy.

Tomorrow I'll be fifty. Perhaps that explains it.

David and Lydy are hosting the Minn-Stf meeting tomorrow, because it contains the final collation of Minneapa, and David wants to do a semi-instant group shot of present and former Minneapa members as the cover. I am exempted from cleaning. I did remove my objects from the living and dining rooms. It would be neat to bake something tasty, but I am rather out of the habit.

My family birthday celebration is tomorrow. I'm bringing Eric. If I were just bringing him as a new sweetie in a nice staid monogamous way my mother would adore him; I am perfectly confident of that. As it is I am a trifle nervous. There will not be any fireworks. My family doesn't do that any more. My brother and sister-in-law and brother-not-in-law will like him a lot too.

My book is fermenting, but I haven't checked the vat for -- never mind, I can't do this metaphor. I haven't written anything new yet, but I know that things are happening in the right part of my head.

Wednesday we got together with a largish party to eat Chinese food. Many participants had come straight from work, and it was nice to watch them relax as the tea went round and the food came out. I got to eat spicy eggplant and stir-fried mustard greens and green beans with black bean sauce.

There was some linguistic conversation and some nice hilarity. Possibly my favorite moment was when somebody remarked that the fun was hard to pick up with chopsticks. I happened to be looking at Martin, who was across two round tables from me. He got the look he gets when you say something ambiguous, started to speak, and thought better of it. I caught his eye and began to laugh, and he laughed too, and we had our whole joke without needing to make it. David made a dire face, recalling that Martin and I used sometimes to become helpless with laughter and be unable to stop. A merely implied joke did not do that, however.

David and Lydy and I gave Eileen a ride home so Martin could go straight to work (he was beginning his day rather than ending it), and on account of a momentary misapprehension on her part as to whether we could get there from where we were, we had a longer drive in an unexpected direction. This produced reminiscenses, first Lydy's and mine of the little indoor garden you could find by getting lost in the skyway, when Donaldson's was still there. Then we went through the neighborhood I lived in when I first lived in Minneapolis. I had two different apartments there, separated by an unfortunate six-month sojourn in the 3500 block of Second Avenue South in the hands of three alcoholic (though benign) caretakers. The second one was just a building or two down from a place that Eileen had lived in not much after I moved to Massachusetts. We found ourselves reminiscing about how our kitchens were so small that the refrigerators had to live in the hallways; Eileen said hers had a two-burner stove and her roommate had to divide his pizza in half to get it into the oven all at once.

Nobody had to go to work in the snow uphill both ways, however.

I've been reminiscing a lot lately. I don't entirely know what that means.

Pamela

Forward into the past

I wonder if even I will be able to untangle the chronology. I think the order in which I recall things is terminally odd.

Thursday I got up late and was immediately behind on everything. I did manage to put together a double batch of Barbara Tropp's recipe for Hoisin Explosion Chicken, only I used chicken-style seitan, more cashews, and peapods instead of bamboo shoots. It was very nice. Eric arrived in plenty of time to prepare the peppers and peapods, and to help stir when the load got too heavy for me. Over dinner the four of us discussed daily events, the upcoming Minneapa collation, the angelfish, the upcoming anti-war protests, and almost certainly cats.

Eric and I snuggled on the couch for a bit, and he read me pieces from Gibbon, mostly about the Monophysites. I went upstairs and put together a very hurried Simon's order for the Not Cooking that I anticipate so eagerly. I must have said, "And that is yet another reason that I am taking a vacation from cooking," at least three times during the course of making dinner; the only reason for which I remember saying it is that I growled at David for putting his glass on the cutting board for a whole thirty seconds. (The putting, not the growling, took thirty seconds.)

I did some laundry and dish puttering; Eric left, his hat and gloves being dry enough. I went upstairs and had some conversation and snuggling with Raphael; packed my stuff, went downstairs and had a big hug from David plus a look at, I think, Page 2 of the last issue of "Gray Lensman," slowly, slowly, slowly printing away in all its glory; and just made my bus.

Eric kindly did the rest of his Gibbon reading in bed where we could snuggle more. I had forgotten my book, so I picked up a copy of Linda Nagata's VAST and was unexpectedly absorbed. We had a nice date.

This morning, I took the bus downtown and picked up my medication. There's got to be a way to get the different prescriptions synchronized. At least the automatic refill stuff all worked right. I thought for a while that it had not, but as it turned out, the combination of my cold-benumbed pronunciation and the slight hearing impairment of the pharmacist made him look for me in the wrong part of the alphabet.

I bussed home on the 18G, which meant walking from Grand Avenue back over to Blaisdell. This is seldom a difficulty, but I was to see that stretch of street a lot today. After a mixup with the Kitty Klinic (sic) had been straightened out, I walked over there to pick up an interim amount of Tapazole for Minou, and home again. Then I had a discussion with David, who was busy denuding the downstairs of extraneous objects, about whether my cooking would help or hinder the general effort. We decided it might hinder, especially the getting the kitchen even dirtier part, so I then consulted Raphael and called Saigon and walked over there (the fourth trip between Blaisdell and Grand) and came back (the fifth trip) with mock duck and potatoes, curried mock duck, and tofu with mixed vegetables. Mmmm.

I've got some laundry to do in aid both of the meeting directly, and of David's mother spending the night with us after the family birthday party. The house doesn't look so awful that I feel impelled to do any cleaning additional to what David and Lydy will manage. Well, not the part that the meeting will be in, anyway. The less said about the upstairs the better. But that's for next week.

I need to go actually write something so I can take tomorrow off with a clear conscience.

Pamela