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Hey! I know, let’s put the stove in the kitchen!

Rita: thank you for the flowers! They started my morning off with a huge smile. Kathy and Jen: I tried to reply to your message, but it didn’t get through. Can you write again? One of you sent a really funny reply to my wonderings about incense on the thirteenth of February and I asked permission to quote it here:

Whenever I hear disco, I think of my childhood. Haw haw haw. My parents ate greasy fast food, listened perpetually to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack (and before that, Tony Orlando and Dawn) and wouldn’t THINK of meditating. My parents, they…bowled. Golfed. That sort of thing. Really, completely not how you described. Actually you’re lucky to have had that background - I grew up really repressed and kind of square. It wasn’t until I went to college - actually it wasn’t college, it was more when I went to live on my own - that I burned my first stick of incense and had this series of epiphanies that enabled me to be, I guess, more (ewwWww) - Spiritual (shudder) - when I got older.

Sorry, just that last line, “I wonder if incense brings back the same sort of memories for people my age” just had me audibly dying of laughter here. I know from reading all of your stuff that your childhood wasn’t really a picnic or anything, and I guess in comparison, at least, to what I’ve read, my childhood was a bit more stable (my parents got along and are still together, each still on their first marriage). There was no real discontent in my house. Not until later, anyway - when I hid adolescence.

But I guess it’s a tradeoff. Were it not for my insatiable, often impetuous and unwise curiosity, I might just be a stockbroker playing techno albums by now. I do sort of wish there was more substance to my parents.

Speaking of epiphanies, Todd and I have had a few lately of the “pushing on the door marked PULL” variety. Although we’re both quite motivated to work hard during the day neither of us is exactly a dynamo when it comes to housework. It was only in the past two years that we came to the realization that it would be monumentally clever to buy a dresser, instead of leaving our clean clothes on the floor in one of the unused bedrooms, because that way they’d stay cleaner and less wrinkled. Yes, really. So on Saturday when we decided to rearrange a little we found all kinds of idiotic things we’d done and hadn’t even considered changing. The cassette tapes were all upstairs, the stereo downstairs. Ditto the videos and the VCR. The dresser was in one bedroom, Todd’s work clothes were hanging in the closet of another bedroom. As if that weren’t silly enough, the bedroom with the closet hasn’t got a lamp in it because we don’t go in there unless we need something from the closet, so Todd had to go to one room to get clothes out of the dresser, then go into the other room, pick something out, bring it into the hall to see if it was the right something, then go back in and get dressed. I swear, since we moved the dresser and the clothes into the third bedroom it takes him half the time to get dressed in the morning. See what I mean? It’s frightening, how little attention we pay to our surroundings. I can see it now, the Hypothetical Child will have a crib in one bedroom, its clothes in the living room, and the diapers and changing table in the basement…

Monogamous writers with eight cats about…who?

Barbie had better luck driving that RV than I did this weekend…