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The Rat Race

So I was having my morning routine, cleaning litterboxes and making tea (out of coffee again — eek, just realized what that looks like, not making tea out of coffee beans, I meant to say that there’s no coffee in the house again) and listening to the pop-psych show, feeling cheerful and sat down to eat some warmed up pizza from last night — not as gross as it sounds, the local independent places are actually made out of food, not plastic and cardboard like the big chains (but I do miss Round Table pizza *nostalgic sigh* which was the only place other than The Good Earth that we ever went out to for dinner when I was a kid) and the news came on.

A couple of days ago Todd and I read this article in the online version of the New York Times which went over exactly what Americans think the world is about, after getting all of their information from tv news. Boy, was it depressing. So I’m listening to the radio version of the tv news, which is exactly the same except you can’t see the insipid anchors — who I am not completely convinced are human as opposed to computer generated heads — and all anyone wants to talk about is the presidential race.

And I’m thinking with dread about how many stupid ads are going to be on the radio and how many “vote for X” banners are going to be across people’s web pages, and how many bumper stickers I’m going to see, and so I thought I’d just put in my bid for who I’d like to be president now, before everyone is sick of the whole thing, except she’s dead.

I discovered Louise Fitzhugh when I was still in elementary school. I don’t remember what attracted me to the book Harriet The Spy, all I remember is that it was the very first time I’d read a book about a girl who didn’t give a damn about her hair, or about boys, or about if her goddamn socks matched her cutesy outfit — she cared about life, about finding things out, about being a writer. And she was my best friend, from the first page to the last, and I carried her around with me in my head when things felt horrible on the outside. I wrote Kitey about Louise Fitzhugh, and she borrowed the book from the library and wrote me saying how astonished she was that she could have missed such a wonderful writer, that she was going to write Louise Fitzhugh and let her know how much she’d enjoyed the book.

Meanwhile, we were both finding the other novels — The Long Secret and Sport, and reading them, writing to each other about what we’d thought — this was before I was allowed to see Kitey, so at this point I hadn’t seen her for years — and one day Kitey wrote and said that Louise Fitzhugh’s publishers had sent a letter saying that she’d died. It was shocking. I believe in reincarnation, though. I think she’s back, hopefully in human form, in elementary school even now, handing in her first brilliant piece of writing.

Relief!

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