dreams are strange

Slept like a bump-on-a-frog-on-a-log-in-a-hole-in-the-bottom-of-the-sea after The World's Longest flight from Portland to San Francisco. Apparently,when it's really windy in SF, they close all but one runway at SFO, which means flights are delayed all over the world, and planes waiting for landing have to circle and circle and rise and fall and rise and fall in a dark foggy world lit by nothing save the blinking lights on their wings, and the passengers inside start to wonder if maybe they have died, and this is limbo, and if so, it's a good thing they thought to grab the new issue of the NewYorker before they boarded.

But anyway, we finally landed, and I was met by Brian, who had been getting worried because on the telescreens my flight had shown up as delayed delayed delayed before disappearing altogether, and he had thought I might have left this this dimension, too. And then I went home and slept the sleep of the not-dead-yet, I dreamed that I was watching a soap opera wherin a baby was brought back to life when someone was electricuted during a fight and knocked up against the cabinet in which its body was being kept, and the camera zoomed in on a headline which read Miracle Baby Found! Is Cleavland Next?

We're paying that cat too much

I just saw a mouse. We share this house a cat who weighs more than twenty pounds, yet mice (because as Carl Sagan once said, where there's life, there's community) are frolicking beneath my desk.

I grew up in a cat house. Not in the 'House of the Rising Sun' sense, but rather a more concrete and furry phenomenon: a house with nine cats. Cats were everywhere, on every sofa and every chair, swarming the house and surrounding evirons with thier purry furriness, their living being.

And for the longest time, I identified as a cat person. Cats are soft and slinky, they insinuate themselves into laps and armcrooks and the extended waning afternoon of a good book. Cats give the sort of affection I'm comfortable with: slightly standoffish, but unabashed and complete, in its own peculiar way.

When I was ten or so, we added a dog to the mix -- Francois Couperin (Le Grand), a large and clumsy aging labrador who added a new dimension to my experience of pet ownership: companionship. Here was an animal who did things with me, rather than around me, whose experience of the world took place alongside my own, rather than in some nearby and sympathetic but ultimately unrelated plane. And another dog followed, this time a puppy that I got to pick, who alone of all his squirmy siblings crawled into my lap and fell asleep. His name was Merlin.

We got Merlin when I was 14, and as awkward and miserable as any teenage girl in suburbia. And he was a perfect companion, equally happy walking aimlessly for hours or sitting patiently while I sobbed into his fur. And when I fled periodically home from college, after hours of intermittent sleeping and crying on the train between Annapolis and Boston, Merlin was my comfort, patient and silent and perfectly, exactly what I needed.

But of course I did grow up eventually, and there was a wider world of needs than home and dog could provide. And Dog love is such a visceral, present thing, it doesn't lend itself well to long distance. It doesn't seem like its enough to stand outside on Chistmas morning with the dog you only see twice a year, to sink your fingers into the fur that gathers around his collar and hell him how much he means to you. But that's all I could do, and that's what I did.

When Merlin died this morning, he was already incredibly old for a dog his size. My mother tells me she was starting to wonder if maybe he was the only thing on earth that never would die, that would just keep going. But of course he couldn't. Nothing does.

Lists

"Facts" I dreamed were true this week:

1. George Harrison and John Lennon are still alive, but share a body and don't go out much.

2. William Hershel was one of a set of triplets, but ate the other two soon after birth (in my dream, I read it in a book, and thought, "I don't need to know that.").

3. If I were to write a novel about high school, it would take me the better part of an afternoon.


Things that have reminded me of C.W. Bayly recently

1. A pair of orange tennis shoes and a tasteful plaid scarf.

2. At Freddies by Penelope Fitzgerald.

3. Seeing St. Etienne at the Fillmore, and ordering a greyhound at the bar.


Things I like about making lists

1. No need for follow through (you list things, you stop)

2. Numbers

3. Using the "bold" tag (it makes me feel like I know html)

4. Items in a list feel kind of like a paneled comic strip, which gives the last item a certain weight, regardless of merit.

List

Things I got in the Mail Today

1. Marlboro College Alumni Revitalization Task Force flier

2. Pacifica Graduate Institute admissions packet

3. Cell Phone Bill

4. New T-Shirt! lookie!

Gloating Just a Little

More Cherry Blossoms
Originally uploaded by Nora Sawyer.

Hard to believe it's been snowing in Boston since midnight last night. While I miss *real* seasons (and my family) a lot, I'd have to be blind not to aprecciate sites like this just outside my door. And in February, no less.

For the curious

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Nora!

1. The air around Nora is superheated to about five times the temperature of the sun!
2. The number one cause of blindness in the United States is Nora.
3. Nora was invented in China in the eleventh century, but was only used for fireworks, never for weapons.
4. Originally, Nora could not fly!
5. A chimpanzee can learn to recognize itself in a mirror, but Nora can not!
6. Without its lining of Nora, your stomach would digest itself!
7. Nora is the largest of Saturn's moons.
8. Nora can pollinate up to six times more efficiently than the honeybee.
9. If you blow out all the candles on Nora with one breath, your wish will come true.
10. The only planet that rotates on its side is Nora.

I am interested in - do tell me aboutherhimitthem