Vacation. I am having a vacation. I don't think about national holidays most of the time, but I went out of town for Memorial Day Weekend and am accidentally having a vacation.
Despite the eight hours' sleep, I determined that I did not really have the stamina for further running around today if I wanted to be functional for the rest of the weekend, so I sat quietly in the sunlight in the window-walled crafting nook that used to be a balcony—it has a work table and also a quilted leather ottoman which makes a great window seat—with several mugs of hot water and a box of seaweed snacks and read some of the books lying around the Selkie-Rami apartment—Greer Gilman's Cloud & Ashes (2009), Joanne Harris' Chocolat (1999), and Ursula K. Le Guin's Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (1976). The first two were re-reads, although I don't think I had read Chocolat since it came out; I remember stocking it at Waldenbooks. I remembered strange pieces of it, mostly the cards of the Tarot and a twisting pang of sympathy for the antagonist; I am wondering whether the author felt the same thing, since I see that of the two (three?) sequels revisiting Vianne Rocher and her daughters, the second name-checks her old adversary in the title. The Le Guin might have been the last novel left of hers that I had never read. I think it is just as well that I didn't read it when I was seventeen; it would have hit far too close to home. Now it chimes for me with some of the Orsinian Tales (1976), specifically with "Brothers and Sisters." I'd love to know if they were written around the same time. They feel like they're working out some of the same questions. Then again, Le Guin's fiction was always working out the question: how to be human. I stood there and did the human act as well as possible.
In the afternoon my godchild came home and flopped down on the couch and asked me a lot of questions and didn't answer much about their day at school. I am astonished by how much they seem to like me. They said yesterday that they wanted me to be part of their family; when reminded that I am part of their family, they clarified that they meant the family that lives with them, like Mommy and Mama. They asked so many questions about my place in the guardianship hierarchy—who gets charge of them if their parents get hit by a pig truck—that the conversation began to resemble Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). They want to come stay in Boston with me and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch. They want their whole family to move to Boston. They want me and my partners to move to live with them. They like the fact that even though I have less than a foot of height on them (they are such a tall nine-year-old), I can pick them up and tote them around like a particularly lanky, ice-hockey-playing cat and they keep springing into my arms for it; they list approvingly the ways in which we are similar, starting with nocturnality. They snuggled under my corduroy coat and wanted me to share a bunk bed with them and hung on my arm and said possessively, "Mine." I almost don't know what to do with it. I happen to love them fiercely, but I didn't expect it to be reciprocated. The rest of this paragraph deleted for Tiny Wittgenstein. I cannot think it is true that if they saw me more often, I would stop being loveable to them. We made brownies from a mix in the evening.
I will be at morning services tomorrow for the first time in more than a decade. I should see about sleep.
Despite the eight hours' sleep, I determined that I did not really have the stamina for further running around today if I wanted to be functional for the rest of the weekend, so I sat quietly in the sunlight in the window-walled crafting nook that used to be a balcony—it has a work table and also a quilted leather ottoman which makes a great window seat—with several mugs of hot water and a box of seaweed snacks and read some of the books lying around the Selkie-Rami apartment—Greer Gilman's Cloud & Ashes (2009), Joanne Harris' Chocolat (1999), and Ursula K. Le Guin's Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (1976). The first two were re-reads, although I don't think I had read Chocolat since it came out; I remember stocking it at Waldenbooks. I remembered strange pieces of it, mostly the cards of the Tarot and a twisting pang of sympathy for the antagonist; I am wondering whether the author felt the same thing, since I see that of the two (three?) sequels revisiting Vianne Rocher and her daughters, the second name-checks her old adversary in the title. The Le Guin might have been the last novel left of hers that I had never read. I think it is just as well that I didn't read it when I was seventeen; it would have hit far too close to home. Now it chimes for me with some of the Orsinian Tales (1976), specifically with "Brothers and Sisters." I'd love to know if they were written around the same time. They feel like they're working out some of the same questions. Then again, Le Guin's fiction was always working out the question: how to be human. I stood there and did the human act as well as possible.
In the afternoon my godchild came home and flopped down on the couch and asked me a lot of questions and didn't answer much about their day at school. I am astonished by how much they seem to like me. They said yesterday that they wanted me to be part of their family; when reminded that I am part of their family, they clarified that they meant the family that lives with them, like Mommy and Mama. They asked so many questions about my place in the guardianship hierarchy—who gets charge of them if their parents get hit by a pig truck—that the conversation began to resemble Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). They want to come stay in Boston with me and
spatch. They want their whole family to move to Boston. They want me and my partners to move to live with them. They like the fact that even though I have less than a foot of height on them (they are such a tall nine-year-old), I can pick them up and tote them around like a particularly lanky, ice-hockey-playing cat and they keep springing into my arms for it; they list approvingly the ways in which we are similar, starting with nocturnality. They snuggled under my corduroy coat and wanted me to share a bunk bed with them and hung on my arm and said possessively, "Mine." I almost don't know what to do with it. I happen to love them fiercely, but I didn't expect it to be reciprocated. The rest of this paragraph deleted for Tiny Wittgenstein. I cannot think it is true that if they saw me more often, I would stop being loveable to them. We made brownies from a mix in the evening.I will be at morning services tomorrow for the first time in more than a decade. I should see about sleep.
