More wild and crazy people from Ginger’s sister’s wedding.
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Christopher, Cole, Mark, Molly and Cole’s mom, Kay
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From today’s Book Section in the Boston Globe.
Art that baffles and Exhilarates
By James Sallis
The beauty of the novel, the great fascination of it, I often proclaim, shoehorning my words into a space taken up by sputtering attention spans, the latest celebrity news, and remakes of films that apparently (though who could have thought it?) were not bad enough upon initial release, is that it can do — can be — anything.
And is that, I wonder, looking out into the classroom, a vague terror I see in the eyes of my postulant writers? Nietzsche (I might continue) observed that every philosophy, every great summation of thought, however grand its intent, finally comes down to ”a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.” The same may be said of fiction, another, more modest summation of human experience.

In the recent comment section you can now roll over to see email addresses. In the past when this was an option for all comments, folks would make up addresses which would further add to the content of the comment. I suggest continuing to do that, or to alter your email addresses in some other way to thwart spam bots from harvesting them.

Thanks to Dan for pressing me, there is now a recent comment section just below the calendar archives. Now Adam, Rakkity and La Rad can’t have private conversations back in the dusty archives.

Someone wrote to tell me a solitary poker pic doth not a blog entry make. Well, phooey. How about twelve images from the holidays with captions?

These days, my mother rarely sits in front of the computer. I’ll log-on with iChat and she’ll be lying in bed, napping, watching TV or otherwise playing dead. Late Saturday morning I saw her bright face, up close, clicking away.

“Something funny happened last night,” she said as soon as she realized I was watching her.

“What?”

“Do you remember our friend Fred Howard? Mack tutored him in high school and I gave him your aquarium.”

“No memory at all of him. Go on.”

“He doesn’t have a job and what work he gets pays almost nothing. I don’t know where he lives, but Saturday night he knocks on our door. He’s had a fight with his wife Tiesha, over his cell phone. She thinks he’s sold it. “

“Fill me in a little more. He’s beginning to sound like your friend Ron who added a zero or two to that check he begged Mack to write and then ended up dead.”

“No, Fred’s not a drug addict. He’s a good looking guy, he’s big, over six feet tall, and no fat. He looks like he’s capable of doing hard work. You might hire him, but here he is asking for money or a place to sleep.”

“This young guy – he’s in his twenties now? – looking for a handout at what can be charitably described as a private nursing home? He has no one else to turn to? Or he knows he’ll get a few dollars from you?”

“He said, ‘I need ten dollars for a place to sleep.’ I wanted to give him the money, but Mack wanted to give him a bed. The next thing I know, Mack’s rummaging around in the linen closet for blankets so Fred can sleep on the futon in the living room.”

“This story is too good.”

“But it gets better. The next morning Fred gives me this big hug as he’s about to leave and says, ‘Thank you Mrs. Miller. I tell him, ‘You don’t need to be this homeless person wandering around in the cold rain looking for a place to sleep. You’re better than that.’ He says, ‘I’m never going to be in this position again and he walks out our front door. But standing outside is his wife, Tiesha. She’s screaming at him about how he’s sold their cell phone. I can just see the blinds going up in the neighbors’ houses. They walk away together and then the police arrive.”

“Who called the police?”

“You know I’d never tell your sister this story, or my friend, Phyllis.”

“Who called the police?”

“I don’t know. I guess his wife. Two officers come up to me on the porch and they ask if Henry Howard lives here. You know I’ve never liked the police leaning on me. Anyway, I turned to Mack who doesn’t want any part of this and ask, ‘Is Fred called Henry?’ Of course he can’t hear me. So I tell them no, Henry Howard doesn’t live here, but there was a Fred here. All this time I’m doing everything I can not to laugh. Can you imagine what they’re thinking? Here are these two old white folks and Fred is black of course. I tell them it’s nothing more that a domestic disturbance and they can leave now. “

“And did they?”

“They spoke to each other in some kind of code. And then they left.”

That’s the end of the Fred story, but not the end of the conversation. Helen continues to fill me in on the days events and how happy she is and how much she appreciates her kids. “You know, I really have had a good life. My kids are loving and successful, I have lots of friends – everything Is fine. Except for the relationship. Then she laughs loud enough for Diane to hear her in the other room.

As she talks I watch her intently looking at her computer screen. She then asks, “Is that Ginger on the blog?”

“Not recently,” I answer. “You might have clicked on some old pages. She is in there.”

I log on to her computer using Timbuktu. I look at her screen and what do I see?

The cursor scurrying around flipping solitaire cards.

“HEY! You mean you’ve been talking to me AND playing solitaire at the same time?”

I hear an embarrassed, hand-in-the-cookie-jar giggle and then, “How do you know?”

“What do you mean, how do I know?”

“Oh, you can see my screen. Sometimes you see too much.”

Susan called near dinner time to say she’d made it to Chicago. The pet-friendly hotel had a special cocktail hour for dogs and I guess Wex and Duffy needed to be carried back to their rooms.

Click here

Susan left Sunday morning and called later that evening from The Green Roof Inn in Girard, Pennsylvania, which is an I-90 town mighty close to the Ohio Border. Tonight she hopes to make it to the pet-friendly Burnham in Chicago. And from there, weather permitting, home.

I’m still marveling at this adaptable woman. Leaving the order of Torroemore to move in with us, in all of our near-finished or given-up-on chaos, not to mention our way over-committed social life, without a sign of complaint. Yeah, you say that’s easy given we’re all family, but imagine five weeks of trudging to the dungeon that is our basement to do your laundry, the kitchen drawers that fight back as you attempt to open them, the overly occupied bathroom, not to mention our icy driveway that remained a hazard worse than the slopes of K2 for most of her visit.
I know we’ll miss her, but I don’t think I’ll have to strain to hear that sigh of relief when she walks into her house tomorrow night.