Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Not what they seem Before I go all crazy trying to put a MoveOn "Nothing Accomplished" banner across the bottom of my site ( a feat that may take a while since I am an HTML/XML newbie extraordinaire) I better post some damn thing, so that my darling Mieke will not be disappointed in me. There's nothing better than a friend who calls to say "Why haven't you posted? Get blogging already!" or some variation thereof, as Mieke did today. I spent most of today at or travelling to and from my next door neighbor's funeral. Lila was 82 years old, and had been in declining health for some time, in fact the whole time we lived next door to her, so we really never got to know her. We didn't know that her daughters, one of whom lived next door to her to take care of her until the very end, were not hers by birth, but by marriage. Their father was widowed when they were all small, and she married him and became their (adored) mother within a month of meeting them. We didn't know she'd worked in radio, with a not-yet-cheesy-famous Bert Parks. And we didn't know that she made a famous apple pie that went into the oven a towering nine inches high. This seems to be my month for learning just how little you can know about someone you encounter all the time. I heard David Leavitt interviewed on NPR today about his new novel, and he said that one thing that interests him in novels is a character who is profoundly not what they first appear. (I am broadly paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it.) It is a wonderful device for a novel, and kind of melancholy in real life. 6:18:59 PM     comment []