my fingers are too
as though we're raising a stout hammer
to a sickle moon
So apparently it's National Daughters' Day, and my FB feed is full of lovely people posting about their lovely daughters and I'm loving it esp. as I no longer have daughters this year. (The kids have made Huckleberry an "honorary bro" so I now have four boy-kids.)
Nu has had a cold for a couple of days and spiked a fever last night, so we headed for the drive-through Covid-test this morning. They couldn't find Nu's health records and I was quietly panicking because I thought it was because I'd decided to leave the sex column blank, but it turned out that my tired brain had given them the wrong year of birth (I gave them At's!!). I can't wait to see the AMA's recommendation that sex be removed from birth certificates universally accepted.
Note 1: I like that his new roommate is a librarian; the roommate likes that I'm a gender studies prof.
Note 2: It seems like At still loves using Mark Fisher as an intellectual tagline.
So I'm experiencing stress... and rightly so.
And I got a submission declined rejected today too.
But Scout and Huck are always adorable.
I guess he heard Big A and me have a furious, whispered conversation about Scout and/or heard me sobbing in the stairwell.
Anyway, I spent hours at the veterinary E.R. with Scout today. Tons of tests later, we still have no clear answers. But they gave us a bunch of meds; I hope they help.
Pic: Sculpture outside the E.R. (I forgot to take a pic of Scoutie.)
First I had a general epiphany about how nostalgia-fueled decisions to go back to the way things were rarely go well. "Going back" to places, people, whatever... never goes as planned. Perhaps that's the true moral of Pet Sematary. It came up in some conversation with Big A. And then suddenly because we'd talked about Scout's health, he was trying to get me to promise that I would never clone Scout. An option I'd never considered before but seemed tempting. But Big A rightly made the point that Scout is his own person and cloning disrespects that etc. OK? OK.
I was telling the kids this over breakfast some day this week, and I don't know if they appreciated their parents' deep thoughts. But they immediately started a tally of who in the family would put people in the pet sematary. Apparently neither human kid would. According to them, I totally would. And their dad--well... apparently he has a strong sense of medical ethics and wouldn't. But... he'd still probably put me in the pet sematary because he's so attached. And then, they riffed, when pet-semataried mom starts stabbing people and stuff, he'd be all patient explaining things like "Puppy, remember we talked about not stabbing people?"
For a conversation that included so many deaths, including my own, that last line in its authenticity still makes me chuckle out loud.
A long walk-talk with KB yesterday; I begin to feel I can handle the world again.
Early morning chat with my sister; figuring out all the things on our list for this year--many of them impossible without a passport (which I don't yet have as everything's so backed up). But she makes plans seem possible anyway.
Midday yoga in the forest with Nu and L on either side of me; a sort of peace washes over me.
Garden party at our place this evening; the comfort of sharing food with CF, SB, SD, and AH and others.
Talking to strangers on an FB Golden Doodle page about Scout's difficulty walking; lots of new things to obsess over and bring up with doc/E.R. visit in 48 hours.
Baby cousin K and her partner J arrive tomorrow; I get to spoil them.
My teaching day started with standing in line at Groovy Donuts at 7 am and went well as days with donuts tend to.
But after dinner I found out that DP, a student dear to me--someone I had known in class and on several committees as a joyful, thoughtful, and compassionate citizen--had been hurt badly.
I am hopeful they and their family will heal, but the description on their GoFundMe site is truly horrific and I keep thinking about all the unnecessary pain and fear they've experienced.
Flashes of their smile on the Zoom of this year's Kente stole ceremony and images of them waving to me as they stood in line for their diploma keep coming back--will keep coming back--to me. 💗
1) Drama in the morning! Nu and Max discovered some grey, eyeless, blobby newborns by the picnic table on their morning walk. We googled to ...