Thirty years ago today I got married. I wonder if things would have turned out differently had we picked a more auspicious date than April Fool’s Day.
Yesterday I painted a little picture for my sister. It’s of a sad guinea pig. I love guinea pig lips. So does my sister.
Why is this pig sad? I don’t know. It’s just how it fell off my brush. Maybe it wishes it were a wrinkle-lipped bat. Possibly it doesn’t like what’s happening to Tibetan protesters and is bemused at the Chinese government’s accusation that the Dalai Lama is a “terrorist,” or grieving because the US death toll in Iraq has risen above 4000 and who knows how many Iraqis are dead. Maybe it wonders why we care that Elliot Spitzer kept his socks on. It could be discouraged that it’s odd-looking, that it hasn’t met a young fella with an accent, that it can’t speak Spanish, that it isn’t svelte even though it runs on its wheel all the time, that it can no longer point its toes properly when Irish dancing… Who can know what goes on inside the mind of a guinea pig?
But let’s talk about me: here’s a picture of a recent conference call I had with Noah and Stephen. Isn’t technology amazing? (Except the system crashed shortly after I snapped this photo.)
Mamma Ginna called me from West Virginia yesterday. She’s 94 now. She sounded very weak.
I’m hangin’ on, slowly, but I don’t know for how long — none of us know for how long — but I know mine can’t be too much longer. So I wanted to call you and tell you how I appreciate you thinking about me so often and so much. So I’m not gonna say ‘goodbye.’ I’m gonna say ‘so long, we’ll talk to you later.’
Here’s a story Mamma Ginna told me last year, about Molly and the caterpillar: