Helpful Details About the Sewer System in War-Torn Vienna

[mallorys_camera]

Well, this is jolly!

Susie B’s gonna be in Ithaca in two weeks when I’m gonna be in Ithaca. Something to do with the last week of the Radical Women’s Fashion Show—Honey Lee took a lot of the archival photos. Plus Susie donated her papers to Cornell, so I think she has to show up there every so often to answer PhD students’ questions.

So I will have someone to play with while simultaneously undergoing Torture By Dysfunctional Family Relationship.

Yahoo!

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Yesterday was a sunny, brilliant, warm day. I haven’t worked my way back to actually running; I’m still feeling weak, whether from lack of physical activity or the lingering effects of the killer norovirus, I’m not sure.

But I did go for a really long hike.

Dirty banks of snow like the wrinkled hides of enchanted dinosaurs: They vanish when the sun hits them like the megasauruses in The Five Children and It. Nothing in bloom yet except for this bush, which isn’t forsythia, so I think it must be elder:



In the evening, we did an impromptu dinner party with Neighbor Ed, back from snowshoeing in New Hampshire, and the current Airbnb guest who lives in Oregon and looks just like Ken Kesey in his prime. A male archetype I’ve always found devastatingly attractive! Dunno whether you’d call it flirting, but we did a lot of heavy Direct Eye Contact, and he told me his entire life story.

At some point, he was describing how his mother escaped from an abusive relationship with his biological father, how she packed up the kids in Ohio one night—Defiance, Ohio!—got in a car, just kept moving till she got to a tiny little backwater town in California—

I saw luminous letters glowing over his head: S E B A S T O P O L

“Sebastopol,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “How did you know?”

How did I know?

Anyway, the four of us had a wonderful free-ranging conversation about beavers, and narcolepsy, and the fact that ultra-liberal California has the absolute worst record when it comes to cops gunning down unarmed civilians. We ended with an exegesis of The Third Man—which is absolutely the best movie ever made, and please don’t even think of bringing up The Godfather.

Ed had just seen it for the first time. I acted out the So long, Holly scene and provided helpful details about the life of Graham Greene and the sewer system in war-torn Vienna.

Quite the jolly conversation. It completely satiated my need for Meaningful Conversation—at least for the next couple of days.

Which is a good thing because I really need to hunker down and generate vast amounts of $$$$$.

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I’ve left June and Florrie tromping through eight inches of snow. June has tied flour sacks around their kid slippers since neither of them has boots. How did they get the flour sacks? Neither of them bakes. And how are they going to get from Brooklyn to the Famous Players-Lasky movie studio in Queens? The IND subway line (now C line) didn’t open till 1932, and we are in 1923.