November 2002 Archives

Ah, the post-turkey languor sets in...

I'm munching on stuffing and sipping pumpkin-spice coffee; there's turkey soup on the stove, and John and Elain left the Maker's Mark here when they left--oops--so I'm looking forward to a pleasant day of relaxed dining. The only thing on my agenda until Tuesday morning is finishing up my students' exams, calculating their grades, and writing my teacher comments. I'll try to get some editing done on my basketball essay at some point, too, but I foresee for today nothing more imposing than a lengthy session of reading of Terry Pratchett's new novel, Night Watch, and a little time spent playing Animal Crossing on the kids' GameCube.

Hey, I deserve the day off. I spent Wednesday on the phone with my publisher, hammering out the last few details of the manuscript before it's typeset. These last few details occupied about three hours, which is more time than I've spent on the phone in the last year--all calls combined. I don't like the phone. It offers all the disadvantages of writing (You can't get facial cues, make gestures, or quickly detect subtle nuances in tone) with all the disadvantages of conversation (You can't carefully prepare what you want to say, organize your thoughts, or delete your mistakes). And of course, when the topic of conversation is a book you've been revising nearly nonstop for the past seven years, it's hard not to hang up. Even when you recognize that the changes being made are useful and valuable, part of you is screaming "We've DONE that bit already! Put down the phone and go help with the kitchen prep!"

(As it happens, I did nothing whatsoever to prep the kitchen. Kelly took charge of it completely. I restricted myself to cleanup and a little light shopping.)

Yesterday, alas, we violated the spirit of Buy Nothing Day because the friends with whom we wished to shop were leaving today. (If it'll help, I'm not buying anything today...) We went to the Green Valley Book Fair outside Harrisonburg, which is something akin to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory for bibliophiles. There are a full two and a half warehouses of marked down and/or remaindered books, and the selection is simply outstanding. I saw (and in some cases purchased) works by many of my favorite contemporary writers--Jim Crace, Charles Johnson, Neal Stephenson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tim McLaurin, Ralph Wiley, and even Pratchett--and spotted plenty of old favorites to boot: Shakespeare, Twain, Woolf, Yeats, Hopkins, you name it. My friend John snagged one thing I wish I'd seen, a copy of the Everyman Library's Mabinogion, but I was otherwise extremely pleased with everything I grabbed and felt as though I'd done as good a scouring of the place as possible in 90 minutes. Mind you, I barely tapped the history section, and didn't even look at the children's books, the gardening books, the mysteries, the religion books, etc., so perhaps a really good scouring takes a wee bit longer.

I'm very thankful for friends, family, books, and the plenty we enjoy.

And tomorrow Kelly's making waffles.

Pretty much the perfect holiday.

7:40 PM

Kelly called her friend Elaine the other night and said, "Want to feel old? Thing One has a date!"

I don't know what Elaine said in response, but since she's younger than Kelly, who's younger than I am, this particular milestone is presumably supposed to make me feel decrepit indeed. Thing One is our elder son, a sixth grader who on Friday attended his first school dance and met a date there. I do think there's something about this that seems fretworthy, but the fret has more to do with the onset of adolescence in him than the onset of old age in me.

I don't know that I'm going to age gracefully, but I'm sure as hell doing it openly. I will not be denying my age, dyeing my hair, trying to retain the hair that's falling out, or doing anything else to hide my many years. My beard is already thoroughly shot with grey, and my temples are heading that way. (My dad's hair didn't go grey until well after he hit fifty, and my mom is still an emphatic brunette, so I may not go a long way down that road just yet, admittedly.) If nothing else, I'm hoping that my advancing age will clear up my skin; I'm so tired of having acne. Wrinkles would at least be a change from zits.

But here's the straight dope: I will be forty years old on March 1st, 2003. There is not one damn thing I can do to prevent this other than dying beforehand. And frankly, that's a step I'd prefer not to take.

I've already informed Kelly that there will be no cute black gifts or black decorations or black icing on this year's birthday cake. This is no time to be mourning the approach of death--it's been right here all along. This is a time to celebrate the fact that I've dodged it for four decades.

I've worked hard on reaching forty. There were plenty of times when I could have quit. I could have given up in high school, especially on that night when I was riding in Alex Zaffron's Dodge 442, barreling down Lakeshore Drive at some hideous multiple of the speed limit, with Quadrophenia blaring and the tailpipe dragging behind us, kicking up a tail of sparks that Halley would have admired. I could have burnt out my brain in the hundred-and-five-degree fever that the Cocksackie virus inflicted on me after a Cold Chisel show in 1983. I could have come up short of forty when my own car, a pale green Plymouth Horizon with a death wish and a vicious streak a mile wide, burned to the ground in 1986. I could have drowned in riptides, been fried by bad wiring, been overcome by fumes, taken a bullet from a psycho, or been laid low by disease.

But I didn't! I'm still here! Let's party!

4:25 AM

LBJs

*As you can tell by the dates of these last two entries, the fall at WFS gets busier as exams draw near. Tomorrow is Review Day and I give my first exams Friday afternoon. Maybe then I'll have a chance to keep up with my journal in a more timely fashion.

*Parental Trauma #461 in an ongoing series: putting your child in a tepid bath because he's running a fever. It's especially upsetting to be doing it in the middle of the night, because he's been in a warm and cozy bed, sleeping, and here you come to yank him out of it and drop him in the tub. Worse, because he's feverish, he's shivering even at room temperature, and he's of course utterly miserable when you demand that he lie down in the water to help cool off his system. It's very hard to look at your naked, shivering offspring and force him to feel awful.

*Kelly and I have been hitting the weights. After a full year, we finally got ourselves oriented to the WFS fitness center and have been doing a basic workout twice a week. It's certainly helping me feel better, though I do have periodic bouts of extreme achiness after I've increased the weight I'm lifting. The treadmills and exercise bikes have also been welcome in recent weeks, because we've had the longest period of sustained precipitation that I can remember in a good long while. We're still catching up on the drought, mind you, but we're good and wet now.

*I missed the Leonid meteor shower this morning, but since it's an annual event, I can live with that. I saw it last year from the balcony of a friend's place in Virginia Beach, and it was stunning--a streak of light from out of the east every other second. Once dawn came up, we went to Back Bay NWR and birded for about seven hours, too--I saw my first Pintails, my first American Bittern (in one of the most poorly-lit sightings on my life list), and my first Northern Gannets on this side of the Atlantic. All in all, a good day.

*I'm done with the last (?) round of edits on the book. It's now tighter, more precise, and a wee bit shorter than it was. On the plus side, the stuff I cut may end up being used as a radio essay.

*Kelly's writing a novel this month. She decided to do this as part of the NaNoRiMo (National Novel Writing Month) movement--50,000 words in thirty days is the agreement that participants make. I have no idea what it's about--I've been carefully avoiding asking about it--or whether she's been able to keep up with her daily word goals, what with the feverish kids, workouts, etc. She's got a good attitude about it, I think; first write the thing, THEN worry about whether it's any good. At the end of the month, you'll still have written a novel. That'll make the next one easier, and presumably better. Am I participating? Hey, I'm lucky to have written the college recommendations I promised my students... and my contribution to an upcoming collection of essays on basketball... and my column for The Readerville Journal.

*Speaking of TRJ, I should note something in big letters:

KELLY WINS.

We met in a writing class, so we've both long harbored dreams of being writers, but there's always been a bit of friendly competition in that area. Up until now, I've been the first to cross each of the various literary rubicons we've encountered--I had the first rejection slip, the first professional publication (a review in The Comics Journal panning DC's execrable Wild Dog), the first solicitation (for another review in TCJ), and the first book sale. But even if she seizes up completely and I finish a novel before she does--damned unlikely at this point in the month--she wins: she's still the first to get a piece of fiction published. It's a story called "The Whispering Dictionary," and it appears in the second issue of The Readerville Journal. And it's mighty fine. Get a copy and read it.

12:07 AM

It's Bonfire Night...

No, not the British version. Not Guy Fawkes' Night. This is Woodberry's, and in a little less than two hours, the Bonfire will be burning in celebration of tomorrow's game against our archrivals. That's the excuse, anyway. Kelly disagrees. At our first Bonfire, Kelly looked around at the howling, half-naked boys brandishing torches like something from a roadshow production of Lord of the Flies and said to me, "This isn't about a football game. This is about the death of the Corn God!"

I like bonfires, but they can certainly be a bit frightening. When I went to Manchester University, I didn't know about Guy Fawkes' Night. I mean, I knew about it, but I didn't know when it was. One Saturday in November I went on a field trip, along with all the other American exchange students, to various places in Yorkshire, including Halifax and the Bronte Museum in Haworth. It had been a lovely day, but as the sun set and our bus began wending its way home to Man. U., I noticed that visibility was getting bad. Fog? Well, it wasEngland, after all... Still, it was a bit unsettling. It was even more unsettling when I realized it wasn't fog at all; I don't have much of a sense of smell, but even I could catch the scent of smoke after a while. Then I started catching glimpses of orange light on the hillsides, and sometimes down in the valleys. They were fires, I realized, and they were everywhere. It wasn't one big fire, but dozens, even hundreds of smaller ones. What the hell was going on?

I had recently seen a production of Raymond Briggs' post-nuclear tragicomedy When the Wind Blows, and it may have influenced my thinking, but I became worried that civilization had fallen. I thought about Isaac Asimov's story "Nightfall," in which a planet accustomed to eternal light from its six suns finally has them all in shadow--and has to set fire to its structures to provide itself with the light it needs. Our own world was being run by Reagan and Thatcher at the time, and who knew what they might have done while we were wandering through the museum, looking at photos of actors who'd played Heathcliff and copies of Kate Bush singles? Somehow it seemed entirely plausible, traveling through the mysterious darkness of the Pennine Mountains, that the bombs had dropped.

Eventually I realized that the fires were too cheerful, too controlled, for anything so apocalyptic, though I might have thought differently if I'd been able to see any of the effigies of Guy Fawkes blazing amidst the flames. I finally remembered the British tradition of setting fires to commemorate Fawkes' attempt to blow up Parliament, and I took note of the date. And since that time, I've tried to remember the fifth of November.

It's what one is supposed to do, after all. In his last Sandman story, Neil Gaiman perhaps half-jokingly had Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare collaborate on a bit of doggerel that achieved immortality:

Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot.
I know no reason the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

Smoke 'em if you've got 'em, everyone.

1:37 AM