I'm fine, thank you.

When asked, "How are you?" I am the sort of person that is likely to give an honest answer, and often as not that answer will be somewhat less unflaggingly optimistic (or formality-bound, depending on your perspective) than the culturally mandatory "I'm fine, thank you."

I've tried to explain the weight of this cultural norm to a online friend who is learning English. He consistently answers "I'm okay" when I inquire about his wellbeing via instant messenger. His answer always prompts a "Why just okay?" from me, to which he then replies, "Nothing is wrong; that's just what I say."

That little exchange has become our own ritual. I suppose what I have unsuccessfully tried to convey to him is that until you really know how something will be understood culturally, in the context of the language and of the listener, the default reply is probably the best one. Still, I have this subtle expectation of honesty and accuracy where most of our culture seems to have none, and I have little respect for the prescribed reply once I have any respect for my conversation partner.

The fact is, I can nearly always find something to complain about, repeatedly and at length. I don't think this is a virtue -- it's more of a failing. But it also makes me me somehow. Still, even as curmudgeonly (realistic, pessimistic, depressive, melancholy... ?) as I am, there are moments in life when even I can't help but realize that I am, indeed, fine. One of those moments came last night.

It was about 8:00. Dinner had been consumed, work had been set aside for a few hours. I had soft yarn and slightly chilly knitting needles in my hands and comfy slippers on my feet. The lights were off, except for the hundreds of tiny white bulbs bedecking the newly-acquired Christmas tree and garlands. There was a warm orange glow and gentle crackling in the fireplace that took the bite out of the chill of the room. My husband, healthy except for the obligatory pre-concert sore throat, sat contentedly beside me on the couch, dividing his attention between the small, furry body snoring on his lap and the hockey game on the screen. My own lap was warmed by a larger purring cat who occasionally roused himself from his catnip dreams to take a swipe at my yarn.

I stilled my mind's constant scampering long enough to be in that moment, and I saw that the moment was beautiful. I stopped knitting, looked at Daniel, until he felt my gaze and turned to look back at me, and I told him that I loved being there with him in that moment.

And I did love it, because there, in that moment, it didn't matter what the bank account balance said, what we'd eat for dinner tomorrow, who would attend our concerts this weekend, what I would wear to a wedding next month, whether I would meet my deadline on Monday, what this or that person thought of me, what I said yesterday that I shouldn't have. Not my sins of omission and commission. Not our plans for life in 10 years. Not all of the things I should have done and didn't and did do and shouldn't have. None of it mattered.

In that moment was all of the contentment I long for when I am busy fretting about everything past and everything future.

I wonder how often I let these moments slip by without the slightest notice. Probably depressingly often. Still, I captured this one, and I will treasure it in my heart.

How am I?

I'm fine, thank you.

How are you?

Conversations

Daniel: One thing

I just heard a bit of wisdom

sounds like A---'s wife just hit a deer

NIKKI: oooh

oh no

Daniel: the advice B--- gave is

don't wash the blood off the car

that way you can prove to the insurance co. that it was a deer

NIKKI: lol

okay

Daniel: Apparently the deer hit the windshield, and now there's glass in the backseat

NIKKI: I would be most upset about the deer

Daniel: bizarre. She hit the deer in mid-leap

she was in an SUV, and the deer hit the windshield and roof

NIKKI: yikes

I love you.

Please don't hit any deer, dear.

Daniel: fine then.

you always take away all my fun.

NIKKI: I try.

:P

Daniel: such is your wifely duty.

------------

Daniel and I have a long tradition, stretching back to the first week of our acquaintance -- when I was in Los Angeles and he was almost two hours away -- of communicating during the days or evenings apart via instant messaging programs. I have now-vague memories of joking about tambourines with ribbons and spirited praise songs in the online time spent together between our first meeting and our first date. It's how we got to know each other when the distance and our responsibilities kept us apart. I mean, this was, after all, the relationship that commenced with "May I email you?"

Of course, we know each other pretty well by now, but it still seems perfectly normal to us to exchange laughter, information and even endearments via text on a screen. It gives us no pause. It's just something we do, like reading a book together in the evenings, watching CSI or The Simpsons from the love-seat during dinner, going to lunch together when we worked in the same office, and talking about the big and small wrinkles in our lives before we drift off to sleep.

On Sunday the two of us stood chatting with a bunch of mostly young mothers as their children threw branches at each other on the lawn. Somehow the topic of communicating with spouses during the day came up. Most of these women are stay-at-home moms who use phones to make the occasional call to their office-working husbands. One mentioned the sometimes "I can't talk now" response that greets her spoken "I love you" as one of the hazards of work-day calls. There was some debate whether a typed "I love you", greeted by the same, was inferior when there are phones that can convey the voice in all of its intimacy and reality.

I'm not sure it matters to Dan or to me what is "better." I think what we value is all of the ways we can carry on the constant, though admittedly intermittent, conversation of our lives.

I just finished Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking -- the memoir she wrote in reflection on the year of her life that followed the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. As is our custom, I would read passages from the book to Daniel that struck me as I read. In this book, there were quite a lot of things that had that effect. I read the first three chapters while soaking in the bath, and by the time Dan wandered in to check on me or tell me something, my toes were raisins, my eyes were glowing red orbs and my face was damp, ruddy and tear-streaked. He took one look at me, asked what was wrong, and plopped down on the toilet seat to listen.

Such is his husbandly duty.

Perhaps the book resonated with me because, as Dan put it, "Her magical thinking is much like yours. I can see you doing and thinking the same things."

"Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.
Information is control."

I think he's right, as much I can imagine what I might be like without him. The truth is that neither of us knows what we might be like facing an empty house, clothes without anyone to wear them, half-finished projects and reminders everywhere that we were once not so desperately empty and alone.

I think another reason for that reaction is how much of our own marriage I saw in their relationship as described by Joan. I recognized that constant conversation, which, for them, both writers working at home, happened most often in person:

"I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse didn't end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response. I read something in the paper I would normally have read to him. I notice some change in the neighborhood that would interest him [...] I recall coming in from Central Park one morning in mid-August with urgent news to report: the deep summer green is already changing. We need to make a plan for the fall, I remember thinking. We need to decide where we want to be at Thanksgiving, Christmas, the end of the year.
I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back."

By the grace of God, our conversation continues. Sometimes it is rather mundane and irrelevant.

Daniel: I see the Britney saga never ends... now a celeb-watch website has posted video of her running a red light with the kids in the car

it's like watching a train wreck, I tell ya

NIKKI: only less entertaining

Daniel: too true

Sometimes it is deep, serious and life-changing.

NIKKI: your vino arrived

all red

2005 Wine Club #4 (34% Cab Franc, 33% Malbec, 33% Pt. Verdot)

2005 Tre Vini (50% Sangiovese, 27% Cab, Sauv., 23% Malbec)

2004 "Reserve" Merlot

Daniel: awesome!

Sometimes it is humorous, and sometimes it simply displays our insanity - the special sort of insanity that we share.

NIKKI: Mr. Orange-cat just came calling at the front porch

Daniel: fun

NIKKI: except Monkey growled at orange cat

which made Moomoo mad

because Moomoo didn't see orange cat

so Moomoo got riled and took it out on Monkey

hissing and swatting at him

Daniel: she's so high strung

NIKKI: yes

well, it was upsetting

he howled

Daniel: did she eventually see Mr. Orange?

NIKKI: nope

I tried to explain, though

lol

Daniel: Now is when you need an electronically-controlled squirtgun on the porch

NIKKI: lol

Daniel: it'd be like playing Unreal Tournament against a cat

NIKKI: haha

What matters is that the conversation keeps going as long as we are given to carry it on. So, I just keep talking, chatting, calling and loving... whenever I have a moment to do so.

Such is my wifely privilege.

Nothing better to do

There I sat. The bench was hard and cold. The light, inadequate. Still, it was just enough to read by if I held my music at the proper angle. When I realized that, I suddenly deeply regretted lacking the foresight to bring along my library book. Rehearsal had been over for about 10 minutes, and Daniel had been gone for about 40. I was growing bored and needed something to do, so I picked up one of my many sheets of music and debated whether to attempt to sing some Charpentier under my breath.

The only light actually situated in the room was several feet away, at the opposite corner, above the desk where the guard, an off-duty sheriff, tan uniformed, a bit thick through the middle, distinctly bored, and rather obviously gun-carrying, also sat and waited. For him the wait was about the hands on the clock. At 10:30 he could lock up. For me, the wait was about something a bit more difficult to pin down. Sometime in the next hour Daniel would reappear, having picked up a friend who was fresh off a plane from Los Angeles.

The guard and I had already discussed his plight and mine. It was decided that since it really wasn't safe for me to walk anywhere else to wait, and since waiting outside wasn't any safer, if Daniel hadn't appeared by 10:30, the guard would drop me off at a pub nearby that might keep late enough hours that I could duck inside and out of harm's way to finish my wait. I would call Daniel and tell him where to find me, and it would all work out somehow.

In the meantime, I waited there in the foyer of the old Arts building. It was roomy and mostly made of glass. It had the look of an edifice intended to make an impression -- large, angular, strong lines that promise strength and beauty. There was plenty of glass and metal. Lately, the only impression the interior of the place gives is that it really needs some care. The hard lines have gone soft with age. The carpet is worn and ragged. The walls have taken on an institutional pallor more fitting for a hospital than a theater or gallery. A sign at the doorway leading into the rest of the building proclaims the intent to refurbish. In the meantime, though, the place is somewhat gloomy.

My bench was up against one of the glass walls to the exterior of the building, and the light that I read by was that of a street lamp filtered by the leaves of a tree. My eyes strained to distinguish the notes in the dappled light. I had decided to sing as quietly as I could, but the little bit of noise I was making soon became uncomfortable for me. Although I had needed to raise my voice to make myself heard by the guard when he had asked me some inane question moments earlier, I felt too exposed to muddle through the baroque masterpiece with an audience, even one as unlikely to listen or even hear as the present company. When I glanced up, I noticed that most of the time he was lost in his thought, staring off into the distance behind me, and his look varied between boredom and pain. He was aware of my presence, but I was clearly the least of his worries.

Determined to keep my mind and hands occupied, I settled on whispering rhythms, gently tapping my hand or my foot to keep the beat steady as I navigated the eighth and sixteenth notes with the dexterity and subtlety of an elephant climbing stairs. Thus I remained, drilling the more difficult passages in fits and starts, until the last people had trickled out of the building and the pale blue display on my cell phone indicated that 45 minutes had passed and 10:30 had come.

I lowered my music to my lap and looked expectantly up at the guard. For his part, he wandered near me and inquired as to when I had last heard from my husband and when I thought he would arrive. My wait was perhaps just 10 minutes longer, so the guard decided to wait there with me. Just the two of us, tired and bored in a big, empty building, with nothing better to do than wait.

"How long have you been married?"
I started a little, wondering at the simultaneously personal and casual tone of his question.
"Five years last month."
"My wife just left me after 23 years."*
"Oh. I'm very sorry." What does one say?
"Her name is Kelly. Look out the window behind you there."
I turned, and there on the next building over was the name of some business "Kelly ..." I didn't catch the rest. The rest hardly mattered. Speechless, I looked back at him and put my music down on the sloppy pile next to me.

"We met some new people. They have money. Lots of money. I don't. One of the women is young and worth millions. She goes both ways, if you know what I mean. Well, Kelly started hanging out with the woman more and more. Fine, I thought. She's found friends... and one of the men, I think, though I can't be sure... I think she may have left me for ..."

"I didn't see it coming. I had no idea... We were childhood sweethearts... we'd known each other since we were in third grade...

"I've never lived alone before... the house is so quiet..."

I interjected into his story now and then a quiet concerned murmur or a reflective question, as he filled in the details of the house, the kids, the bills, the history ... he talked on like nobody had listened in a long time. Perhaps nobody had. I was a captive audience, and he was in need of one.

"I think that may be your husband now." It had been eight minutes. He gestured to a car just pulling up outside. Indeed, it was him, with our friend, just as expected. I gathered up my things and left out the door that he had opened for me. "See you next Monday," he said.

"Yes, uh, I suppose you will. Take care."

I walked out to the car to join my faithful, constant husband who had, as he always does, come for me as promised. The guard went about the business of closing up for the night, before driving in silence to his empty house.

I'm not sure why. Sometimes it mystifies me. But I seem to be the hearer of stories everywhere I go. Stories like this one -- so often offered freely, unsolicited. Ordinary stories about ordinary people made extraordinary only by the details that separate each one of us. It has happened countless times. Almost without fail, whenever I sit or stand alone with nothing better to do, someone comes to me with a story to tell... usually a sad one.

Listening is powerful, too, it would seem. Once, in college, I listened to a stranger selling magazines, who then proposed marriage on the spot. He'd take me to Arkansas with him. We could leave right away.

I declined.

Sometimes listening is uncomfortable, but I don't have the heart to silence the storytellers. I feel too much for them and understand all too well the need to unburden one's soul through words. Simone Weil says, “Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.” Difficult, yes... but somehow freeing and cleansing. For both, perhaps. I'm not sure if this, listening when perhaps nobody else will, is the gift I offer other people, or if this spontaneous trust is somehow their gift to me. Perhaps it is a gift we give to each other.

I do know one thing. When the sun goes down in my life, as from time to time it does, I pray someone will be there, sitting quietly in the darkness... with nothing better to do than to listen to me.

*The details have been changed.

Inconvenient truths

I've been doing some reading lately. Well, more precisely, I have done a bit of it when I can bring myself to read more. So much of my work time is spent with words, that sometimes a book seems more like labor than like a musty paper-ensconced friend that is ready to chat whenever I sit down long enough to engage in quiet conversation.

Strangely enough, this week, even at the height of my work-induced reading, when I read a rather stale-to-me magazine cover-to-cover at least once per day as part of my routine, I've still reached for a book when the clock has wound its hands around to time to for me unwind and sever myself from my work umbilical cord (a.k.a. my Dell and the wonder of the Internet). That's been rather mysteriously true even though most days of late that bewitching hour has come just before midnight and I have, in opposition, developed a habit of turning into a pumpkin earlier and earlier. Sometimes I end up feeling a bit like Cinderella at the stroke of 11, when the shoe has dropped: torn between the urgency of the moment and the need to get home before everything, principally my sanity, unravels. The work will always be there, the thought goes, but if I plow through a bit more tonight, maybe it won't be there with such immediacy when I roll out of bed tomorrow.

I have been wending my way through a self-help book, which is enlightening if not enrapturing, but I have also made time for several "pleasure" reads. From Bradbury (October Country) to Steinbeck (The Pearl) to Maguire (Son of Witch), I have had not a shortage of vicarious lives to live and moral lessons to learn. Somehow no matter how fanciful or distant the lives -- whether they be talking Animals, witches or halflings, carnival freaks, dream creatures or impoverished Mexican oyster divers -- they expose the best and the worst of a very ordinary human nature: my own. I find it interesting how even my "pleasure" reads can induce a moral-thought-funk or plenty of mind-dizzying spin when it's time to sleep. I also find it curious that I am drawn to continue reading books I couldn't even claim to "like" in any sense.

That, it seems, is some of the magic of books. Perhaps we read because it's just easier to confront ourselves collectively or as individuals in the guise of fictional people so obviously unlike ourselves, I don't know. Then again, maybe I'm alone in my need to pull from every tale, no matter how frivolous, some lesson, some feeling, to wrap up into my life in a way more important than a foggy and inconsequential memory of a book-spun yarn. Whatever the case, I find myself thinking long and deeply about the people I have met in the books -- the people who are disturbingly like me in some ways and regrettably unlike me -- which is to say, I regret not being more like them -- in others. They carry with them inconvenient truths, sometimes explicitly stated in dialog, sometimes obscured in the folds of the fabric of their lives, but always hidden from immediate apprehension by their cloak of ink on paper.

Among those truths, is this one, tucked on page 324 of Son of a Witch, a book whose pages I kept turning to the end paper, but that I cannot really claim to like, yet. It seemed well-timed, somehow, springing into my life on the heels of 9-11 remembered: The colossal might of wickedness[...]: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.

Indeed.

How inconvenient.

However, I am pleased and heartened to think there is a flip-side. The good in the world also is a product of what we do between breakfast and bedtime, though its ultimate font is He who is Good. That, I think, is reason enough to keep rolling out of bed, whatever may await on the to-do list. Because it isn't too late to tip the balance in my own life each day toward the good, even if it is equally inconvenient to keep trying.

Sadness

I found out today that a child I read about on the news several days ago was the son of someone I know. The story had made me cry as it was, back when it was just an anonymous child that had no connection to anyone I care about. I only knew his mom by first name, and her name wasn't mentioned in the news coverage, so I didn't put the two of them together when I read what had happened. I talked to her online today and she told me about him.

Here's a picture of James that I have had on my computer for at least a year. This was in early 2006, so he had grown a bit since this picture was taken.

I can't claim to understand this sort of thing at all. It seems so very unfair.

Rest in peace, little guy.

Place

"I really enjoy forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don't notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is." Narrator, True Stories

We've been busy noticing the details of this place. There is so much to see that we haven't seen before. So much that provides "scope for the imagination." So much to file away for when it all becomes commonplace and ordinary.

There's a house on the main street through town. The lawn is high and strewn with skeletal remains of lawn furniture of all sort. There, in a plastic lawn chair, during most of the daylight hours, sits a somewhat plump older woman with skin the color of milk chocolate and hair that looks a bit like it was permanently frozen into place by a Van de Graaff generator. She sits, unmoving, clutching a well-loved baby doll, once the color of peach flesh, swathed in the tattered remnants of a dress.

There's a pond not quite in and not quite out of city limits. Most of the time it lies still and unmolested. But if you happen by at the right time in the relative cool of the evening, you may find two barefooted figures seated atop overturned plastic buckets, dangling bits of bait into the murky water from their simple fishing poles.

There's a field outside of town to the south that has transformed in a matter of weeks from rows of nondescript small, leafy plants to a jungle of large bushes of yellow-green rippled tobacco. Down the road a piece is a small swamp that clearly used to be a patch of forest. Now all that remains are small, dark stumps of trees, peering out of the water as if to mark their own graves for anyone who cares to remember.

Throughout town, and scattered along the road to and from, there are dozens of structures, most of them obscured by a profusion of trees and kudzu vines, that clearly used to be someone's home. Sometimes the windows are boarded. Sometimes a weather-beaten official notice flaps on the rakishly-hanging door. Sometimes a hand-written "For Sale" sign molders on what was the lawn. Almost always you can see traces -- from the sagging roof and tumble-down outbuildings to the vine-draped car frames and silent farm equipment -- of the lives lived there before the place was given up to the elements.

There's a plot of land downtown that at first glance is just a patchy lawn, perhaps a public space. But if you walk by and look more carefully, you can make out, through the grass, the outlines of a structure that was almost certainly a house. A rusted-through pole stands sentinel in a distant part of the yard, now bereft of backboard and hoop. A string of large brown Ts lean, as if they would prefer to just take a nap in the grass, still tenuously connected by lengths of clothesline. Nearby lies the battered wood and brick pump house, and if you look carefully at the ground beside it, you can make out ruddy chunks of masonry brick sticking up through the grass. The house and its occupants are gone, hints of their lives remain.

In the neighborhoods surrounding NC State there are more used book and record stores than anything else besides eateries. The Reader's Corner stands out from the pack. The entire storefront is lined with shelves. And every shelf is lined with books. Every book is 10 or 25 cents, and there is a "honor" slot in the door. So, if you get a hankering to find something new-to-you to read at 3 am, you can walk or drive up and grab a book, as often as not bearing the name of a previous reader in faded ink inside the front cover, leaving only pocket change behind.

There is little need here to separate the new from the old. Life goes on, and what is no longer needed is abandoned. Nobody comes through with bulldozers and restores order where it is lost until commercial interests come in with their master-planned communities and revitalized ideals. Even then, the past isn't obliterated -- it is just slowly asked to give way to the new, acre by acre, and somehow the up-to-date coexists with the irrelevant. The new is built in the shadow of the old, and much of the old remains... a tangible memory of what was. I find it all comforting, somehow. Place is more than architecture and nature. It is our collective experience in the space, and it bears the imprint of otherwise forgettable lives.

Waiting

"How much of human life is lost in waiting." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lately we've been doing a lot of waiting.

Waiting for the next payday.
Waiting for various and sundry checks to clear our new bank.
Waiting for my sister to deliver her baby.
Waiting for friends to return from travel.
Waiting for the opportunity to fix this and that around the house.
Waiting for inspiration.
Waiting for some guidance when it comes to various decisions.
Waiting for the right moment to share bad news.
Waiting for return phone calls.
Waiting for the car's computer to reset sufficiently that it will pass emissions testing.
Waiting for business hours.
Waiting for the end of business hours.
Waiting for news.
Waiting for rain.
Waiting for the temperatures outside to drop.
Waiting for the meteor shower.
Waiting for that feeling to go away.
Waiting for new opportunities.

Waiting. Always waiting.

Waiting isn't all bad. I imagine that waiting, which fixes its eyes on some nebulous future, is marginally better than guilt or nostalgia, which linger in the shadows of what was and what could have been. Waiting exists in the realm of possibility and promise, and so long as it doesn't turn to worry or dread, it's neutral if not hopeful. Still, it's so easy to get stuck in what feels like suspended animation while we wait for things small and big. It's easy to get stuck, riveted on a far-away eventuality, and miss the things that don't require waiting -- the things that are here and now.

We lay in bed reading last night until most of the neighbors had put out their lights. Then we went outside, armed with a flashlight and our eyes, to watch for the Perseid meteor shower. As usual, the mosquitoes that thrive in the dampness of the stream behind the house gathered like the outcasts of human society descending on the LA Union Rescue Mission at Thanksgiving: in droves, prepared to feast. I became occupied with craning my neck until it hurt to look toward the largest expanse of sky not obscured by the dark outlines of trees or spoiled by electric lights and wondering if that little tickle (now on my face, now on my leg, now on my arm, now on my neck...) was just one of the normal feelings of being heightened by vague expectation of a bite or an indication that the human buffet was open for business. Dan settled down on his back on the deck. I sat by him and leaned back, a bit too afraid of what was crawling on the wood of the deck to feel comfortable digging in.

We were outside for several minutes, eyes to the grey-black heavens. Our waiting was rewarded by a single streak of silvery light across the dark expanse. But in the moments of anticipation before we saw the meteor, and in the moments that followed, when we hoped to see another, I realized that there was something to be said for what was there in the under-appreciated present. Perhaps we didn't see shooting stars, but we did see hundreds and thousands of stars -- the same stars that have given navigators their bearings for centuries. The same stars that gave human imagination a bear, a warrior and countless omens for good and for ill. The same stars that provide the backdrop of predictability that showcases the brilliance of change. Perhaps we didn't see shooting stars, but we had each other there in the stillness. We had reasons to laugh. We had delight in simply being -- and in being there together.

"How much of life is wasted in waiting..." Only the waiting that is devoid of appreciation of the beauty of the present. The rest of waiting is a gift. It's a chance to slow down and see that sameness that gives change its brilliance. It's the backdrop of constancy that makes a shooting star so magnificent to behold.

Stormy Weather and Adaptability

Yesterday brought the first of what promises to be many summer thunderstorms for us. I love it! The storms seem to drop the temperatures considerably and they make an amazing display in sight and sound. So. Cal. didn't offer enough weather for me.

Monte is not similarly enamored of the storms. He's a Southern California cat to the core. He disappeared when the first storm began and only reappeared in the lulls between storms. His tail was low and he sort of slunk around as if trying to be invisible. Once, later in the evening, we found him hunkered down in one of the bathtubs with a wet underbelly. Monte hates to get wet, but apparently the damp bathtub was the best place to hide... second only to a nice cozy spot on Daddy's lap where he spent the remainder of the harrowing night.

MooMoo, on the other hand, started with the first crash of thunder, but then ran to the window to try to find the noise. She was cool as a cucumber, no matter what the weather threatened. She seemed to regard the storm as beneath her notice in the long run. She was safe, happy, and she wanted her dinner, darn it!

I suppose we can draw some sort of moral lesson from the cats. When big, noisy, flashy circumstances present themselves -- especially new and disconcerting ones -- we can either hunker down in the bathtub and try to disappear or go about life with the same vigor and resolve... and wonder what's for dinner. Me, I prefer a good soak (especially in my nice big master bath tub!), but there's something to be said for the MooMoo method. A lot, really.

So... I promise: once I have a nice soak with Mr. Bubble, I'll get back to business.