[Amy Fusselman, whose book, The Pharmacist's Mate, is now available through our online store and should be available at your local independent bookstore, has been keeping a diary for us during her recent reading tour. Viewing each photograph or set of photographs before reading the corresponding entry is highly recommended. Amy still has a couple of upcoming reading dates in New York, so please go see her if you can.] - - - - 7/8/01 Snapshot: King, 10 days old I've been home from the hospital for over a week now. I had my kid. He was six weeks early, but he's OK. We named him King, my Dad's middle name. He is in the bassinet now, sleeping. Frank is playing guitar to him. Frank got a Hank Williams songbook for his birthday, and has been playing "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." King tried to come out on Frank's birthday, which was also the day I was supposed to read with Colleen Werthmann and the sea shanty singers at Housing Works. Instead I was in the hospital for almost a week. But the reading went great, I heard. Now King is here. Frank keeps saying, "We are a family now," like he is trying to get himself to believe it. I've been weepy. But when Frank says, "We are a family now, so can you please be happy all the time?" I laugh uncontrollably. Thank you to everyone who helped me or came to see me on this tour. I am going to write about my labor and delivery for the October issue of Jane magazine. Love, Amy - - - - 6/10/01 Snapshot: Back of Frank's head, NYC I have decided that the air is my mother. I am walking around in the air the same way my baby is squirming in my belly. The air is pregnant with me. Today Frank asked me to cut his hair. Of the many things I have done with Frank and Frank's body, I have never done that before. I was a little nervous. We dragged a plastic chair out to the porch and put an extension cord on the clippers. Frank sat and read Noam Chomsky as I ran the clippers over his head. His hair had gotten pretty long, really. He could have been a stand-in for one of those brothers in Oasis. We hovered there, 8 floors up in the late afternoon, with the wind blowing softly, and the sound of cars honking from the Puerto Rican Day Parade, and the long strands of his hair swirling around us. When I was done there were some spots in the back that looked really hacked-at, but Frank said he liked it. Then he swept up the porch. When he finished sweeping I held the trash bag open for him, and watched as he emptied the dustpan of this strange mixture of hair and leaves and tiny bits of broken glass. - - - - 6/1/01 Snapshot: Empty work station at the La Brea Tar Pits Museum, Los Angeles Frank flew back to New York, so I am alone in Austin. Well, I'm not really alone, I do have this kid inside me, but the line where he starts and I stop is still murky. When I am very hungry, he kicks me. This is not a sensation you have when you are truly alone. I am staying in a hotel that is meant for people with cars. I know this because when I came in this afternoon and was starving and being kicked repeatedly from the inside but trying not to show it on the outside, I asked the very nice guy at the front desk if there was a hotel restaurant, and he said no. And then he asked me if I had a car, and I said no. He told me I could find some places to eat if I walked to the end of the hotel driveway and turned left and went down a ways. So I started walking down the road in the Texas heat, which measured 91 degrees yesterday. And just in case you have forgotten, I am very pregnant. And there is something about a very pregnant lady, walking in the blazing sun along a road that has no sidewalk, a road that is like a mini-interstate connecting a car dealership and an office building and a hotel, that makes people look. They look from inside their cars, behind closed windows, because they have air conditioning. I was looking at the people in their cars looking at me, and then looking down at my feet because the grass was tall and prickly and forcing me to take extra-high steps, and I thought, I am a freak now. I am a complete and utter freak who is basically foraging for a nice ham sandwich with some ketchup, on the moon. The people in their cars drove by very fast and stared. And I kept walking until finally I saw something I recognized from Ohio: a parking lot connected to another parking lot, connected to another parking lot, around a mall. It was like walking towards a mirage, almost, as I shuffled across the interstate, as the weirdness of my walking along the road gradually became the normalcy of walking alongside parked cars. And by the time I got up to the door of a department store called Foleys and opened it, I was normal again, by which I mean I was hungry, I was going to the mall to find some pizza and an Orange Julius. - - - - 5/28/01 Snapshot: Harbor seals off Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco I have been afraid a lot lately. Some of the things I have been afraid of include: -food poisoning I am eating a lot of ice cream. In San Francisco I went to the Ben and Jerry's on Fisherman's Wharf and asked the kid behind the counter where I could find the harbor seals. "Those ugly, stinky things?" he asked. Then he directed me to Pier 39, and told me to follow my nose. So I walked down the pier savoring my "World's Best Chocolate" cone, as my nose suddenly filled with a pungent, sweaty sea smell, as if the water itself needed a bath. And I could hear the barking, although the word "barking" does not do the seal sound justice. It has the tempo of barking, yes, but it's louder and more mournful, like a very large man getting his toe severed by a lawn mower and yelling in such a way that you know that he knows that the doctor cannot sew his toe back. I see the harbor seals. There must be over a hundred of them, sunning in piles on floating docks. These are not aquarium creatures, all pretty with perfect skin. Most of them have dark green moss growing on them. Many of the full-grown ones are scarred. The biggest ones, the ones that seem to be the matriarchs or patriarchs, have large, protruding foreheads. I am totally charmed by them, by the way they lie on top of each other, and rub their chins along each other's backs. I want to join them. And now I am in Los Angeles, where I have finally met up with Frank. I am less afraid now that I am with him. He still has the splint on his broken finger, which I had forgotten about. And even though this is a real splint made by a real doctor, it is still pathetic. The tape is unravelling and there's always food on it. And my belly is so big now that my center of gravity is off, and I am constantly wobbling as we walk. And it is weird to feel this, on the verge of tripping and yet scared of tripping, and all the while slightly amused, as I grab Frank's hand and try to remember in the second as I grab, not to grab the broken one. Frank and I walk around like this. And yesterday we sat in Baja Fresh, which is like Taco Bell only a hundred times better, and he came up with this great idea for a restaurant called McSpillings, which would be like a theme restaurant, only you would go in and the waiters would spill Coke on you. Or they would not spill Coke. Or they would spill it in the aisles and fall down in it. Part of the allure of going there would be that you could never be sure who would get spilled on, or if. And Frank mapped out the strategy for family-style spilling success: the spillee could never be the dad or the youngest kid, because the dad would be paying and would never come back, and the youngest kid might not be able to handle it. It would have to either be the mom, he said, or the oldest kid. And then he remembered that counting baker on Sesame Street who used to walk down the stairs with the cake, singing in a weird monotone, "nine bundt cakes" or "nine chocolate eclairs," or whatever, before he would fall. The birthday cakes would be served like that, he said. We are stumbling towards my due date, when a huge, uncontrollable, life-altering something is going to rain down on me, or out of me, I don't even know. We crunch our tacos and agree: kids will love McSpillings. - - - - 5/20/01 Snapshot: Me playing guitar while Marcel Dzama dances in a bear suit, Ruminator Books, St. Paul In Seattle I am staying at a swanky hotel that provides pet goldfish. I request one, but he still hasn't arrived by the time I have to leave for the bookstore. When I come back afterwards and turn the light on, though, he is there. He is on the bedside table, in a bowl lined with multicolored pebbles and a green plastic plant. He is mostly white--silver, really--with two bright orange, crescent-shaped smudges along his gills, one on either side. And as soon as I see him I get very excited and call the front desk to ask where his food is, and how I should take care of him. But the young woman who answers the phone just laughs and says the hotel will do all that. My only job, she says, is to enjoy him. And this is disappointing, because I had wanted to be able to interact with my goldfish, and feeding him would have been an easy way to do that. So now we are here together, him in his bowl of fruity pebbles, and me in the bed with the synthetic yellow, green and pink spread. And I am delighting in him, I guess. Whenever I go to the bathroom and then come back to the bed I put my face up close to his bowl and growl, the way I do when I greet stranger's dogs on the street in New York. And I suppose he sees me, but he doesn't respond. The only thing I have noticed him responding to is when I turn the lights on. Then he swims around a lot. When the lights are off, he just hangs there. And last night when I was asking the woman at the front desk about his food, I asked her where he went when he wasn't in my room, and she explained that the hotel keeps all the goldfish--over 100 of them--in a big tank in the sub-basement, and the housekeeping ladies parcel them out in bowls depending on how many people ask for them. And so this morning when I went downstairs for some coffee, I asked the front desk woman (the same one I talked to last night? I can't tell) if she would let me see the big tank where all the goldfish are. And she giggled and said no, that that was in an area that was off-limits to guests. And I begged a little, but in what I thought was a nice way, and said, "Please, I love goldfish," and then she did not giggle, and just said: "No." And maybe this is because I am pregnant (my husband, when he read about my going to the aquarium in Chicago, said, "Of course you're going to the aquarium. You are an aquarium.") but it doesn't take much for me to see this whole goldfish situation as a metaphor for my relationship to every living thing, or more accurately, everything before it is living: there is a big tank in the sub-basement where all the fish are swimming together, but I am not allowed to see them like that. I can only see them one at a time, in their individual bowls, and then only if I am open, only if I ask. And even then, when one appears to me, it is not right for me to poke my finger in his water, even if it's just because I love him so much I want to hug his two-inch body for hours on end, and am frustrated that I cannot do that without killing him. No, my job is to take him as he is, in his decidedly uncuddly glass bowl, with his maddening silences. And not just to accept him like this, but to enjoy him. And this is how I come face to face with my selfishness, because I don't know if I can enjoy this goldfish without knowing that he loves me, or if not loves me, then at least depends on me, i.e., swims up to my fingers greedily when I fill them with salty-smelling rainbow-colored flakes, and wiggle them over his head. And this is disturbing to realize, that I have such difficulty enjoying anything that doesn't know I exist. Especially when I stop and think how big the world is, the world that is not even Japan or India, the world that is the room next door, that is three feet away and oblivious to the small collection of T-shirts and pieces of paper and a guitar that is currently calling itself Amy Fusselman. And I imagine what will happen after I leave here, and go away through the air, where my fish can't follow me. How the housekeeper will walk him over to the big tank and tip his bowl sideways. How he'll slip back into the familiar place, the spacious place, with his hundred brothers and mothers and fathers. How even if I stood there and tried, I would probably eventually lose sight of him. - - - - 5/14/01 Snapshot: Flyer on the board at Quimby's, Chicago Usually when I have free time in a new city I like to look at art, but today I decide to go to the aquarium. It surprised me to discover that there was an aquarium in Chicago. I associate aquariums with Boston and Baltimore, but Chicago has a big one, called the Shedd. I go there, and walk around the first floor. The halls are dark. The fish are swimming around in lit-up windows that are about the same size as the display windows at Macy's. When you get close to the windows, you can hear bird songs. It reminds me of how Macy's uses familiar holiday music to complement their weird Christmas dioramas. Louder than the birdsongs, though, are the children. The place is packed with them. Kids run around crazily, pointing, jumping , shouting. Parents and teachers shout, too, attempting to corral them. The fish are silent. In one window, a Nile Knife Fish, a long, thin swatch of dark blue, hangs in the water, perfectly still. Watching him, I understand why I have come to the aquarium rather than the art museum. Because there is a fact that I have stumbled on this year, a fact that I can't get over. There is another world. There is another world besides this one. This is a fact that art is always trying to remind us of, but because it's art, it says it in a way that's a little aloof. And I have no patience for this distance now, it's not romantic to me anymore. This is just the simple truth, and we should say it just the way we say things to children. We should say it the way parents here grab their toddlers by the shoulders and say, "look at the big fish!" Even the aquarium itself has another dimension. Down two flights of stairs and through a gate is the "Oceanarium." In it, the dark halls and jewel-box windows of the main floor have been replaced by a glass wall revealing a spectactular view of Lake Michigan, and rows of seats overlooking a pool. I stand at the railing and peer into the water. Two Beluga whales are circling. Repeatedly, they emerge from the water directly below me. I see their blowholes open and close simultaneously. Their blowholes! I can't believe I can see this; it seems like such a vulnerable, sexual gesture. Even the word, "blowhole" is erotic. For a minute I wonder if the holes go directly into their brains. Can I see into a whale's brain? I look. But the blowholes are deep and dark. These are animals, I marvel, with holes in the tops of their heads. And suddenly my beloved Yankees bench coach, Don Zimmer, comes to mind, and how he, too, has a huge head with holes in it, only his holes are plugged up with metal cones. And Don Zimmer's big, beaming smile and the beatific grins of the Beluga whales become one for a minute, as I remember visiting the obstetrician before I started this tour, to get her blessing to do all this travelling, and how she checked to make sure that my cervix was fully closed, and showed no sign of opening. - - - - 5/10/01 Snapshot: Wall outlet at the Wexner Center, Columbus, Ohio I am in Cincinnati, a town recently plagued by race riots. I am with my mother, who is 76 and afraid of big trucks on the highway, and loud noises, and forgetting her wallet, and having parts of the car suddenly and inexplicably fall off. I am ashamed of myself that I am letting her do any driving, but I am. She is only five feet tall, and sits on a pillow behind the wheel of the 4-wheel drive Honda, which used to be my dad's car, and which, when my dad was alive, she used to refuse to drive, because she was afraid of it. But it's her car now. And so we are here. And we sit in the hotel restaurant and eat Italian wedding soup for lunch and watch a black policeman spend 45 minutes ticketing a white woman (Jeep Cherokee) and a black family (Chevy Caprice) after they get into a fender-bender, and the white woman and black family stand about six feet apart on the sidewalk and do not talk, and the policeman struts around in his motorcycle boots, and my stomach sticks out of my sweater like a basketball, and the waitress calls us "girls," and in short, everything seems normal. My mom is not doing much besides hanging out with me. I feel badly that I am not more fun, that I do not want to spend the day going to art museums or shopping, that all I really want to do is read the paper and take naps. But she says it's OK, it's like a vacation. We are not fighting. Every time she does something mildly irritating, I think of my dad. My mother is more precious to me now, because she is a person on earth who knew my dad, and loved him. One day, I now know, there won't be any of these people left. Last night, in the hotel in Columbus, I woke up at 3 AM. And I got up to pee, and came back, and my mother asked me if I was all right. And I was a little annoyed by that, because I feel strange sleeping in the same room with her, it feels like a very weird intimacy I haven't experienced since I was small. And I wasn't sure if I wanted it. So I was trying very hard to preserve my Psychic Space, by which I mean that at night as we lie in the dark together, I try to pretend she is not there. And as I do this, I am hoping that she is doing the same thing. But then, you see, she speaks to me, and I realize that no, she is not. And so I said something gruff and annoyed in response, like, "I'm fine mom," and tried to go back to sleep. And then in a very small voice, almost a whisper, she said, "I love you." And I remembered this book I reread right before I started this tour, which is one of my favorite death books, called "Start the Conversation." And in it, the author makes this case for why, when people die, you should not think of them as dead and gone forever, you should think of them as "out of town." She goes to great lengths to illustrate how much "dead" and "out of town" have in common. It's pretty convincing. And so I reread the book before the tour, and each time I have been tempted to get all weepy about my dad, I have been trying to sort of re-train my mind to think, "out of town, he's out of town." And sometimes, this actually works. But in the middle of the night, in the Holiday Inn in Columbus, Ohio, with the medicinal smell of hotel-room cleansers still hanging in the air, and the alarming red glow from the oversized clock radio faintly illuminating the room, and my mom suddenly sitting up in bed and whispering that she loves me as I am lying there all prickly with my son silently floating in my womb, I realize: we are out of town. We are out of town now. - - - - 5/7/01 Snapshot 1: Inside one of my dad's drawers. Snapshot 2: "Dressing room" at the gift shop at the Hockey Hall of Fame, Toronto. There is no dressing room at Toronto's Hockey Hall of Fame "Spirit of Hockey" gift shop. I know because I found a T-shirt there, a really great, subtle, girly T-shirt, with a scoop neck and cap sleeves and "The Hockey Hall of Fame" in small white script on a white background, but it only came in L/Grand and right now I am afraid that I am an XL/Extra Grand. So I carried the L size over to one of the store employees and asked her where the fitting room was, and she explained that there really wasn't one, but she ushered me around the display of hockey puck magnets, behind a piece of black cloth, to what looked like a sort of storage space/broom closet, and I tried on the T-shirt there, amid stacks of old Toronto Maple Leaf posters in dusty frames. And it did not fit, so I was forced to get a men's Grand T-shirt, with a regular neck and regular sleeves and a giant red, white, and blue Hockey Hall of Fame logo on it. And the thing is still a little tight across my tummy. But I am happy I got something. And I am in Ohio now, at my mom's house. I say my mom's house now, instead of my parents' house. This is the third time I have been here since my dad's funeral last summer, and it is still hard to be here without him. I walked around today and opened his drawers. My mom has gotten rid of a lot of his stuff. I understand her need to get rid of things, to clean and start over, but a part of me is sad about it. I really wanted to wear one of my dad's ratty T-shirts, one of the really old, dumb ones with the faintly stinky smell and the peeling decals—I remember one with "Get Crabs" on it, from a crab restaurant in Texas—but my mom has thrown all those out. The T-shirts she saved are the ones he never wore, the white, v-neck Jockey undershirts that I am guessing weren't as comfortable. Finally, after much digging around, I find one of the kind I'm looking for. It's red with "Virginia Military Institute" on it, his alma mater. It's a poly/cotton blend, and it's pilling. I sleep in it. - - - - 5/2/01 Snapshot: The back room of Wordsworth Books, Cambridge, MA. Some women who have seen me pregnant say I am "carrying well." I am thinking of this as I pack for Toronto. After today I won't be home again for over a month, so I have to take everything. Everything means my laptop, camera, phone, and all the wires for connecting and recharging them, my guitar, my vitamins and shower stuff, my wallet and date book, and my clothes. The decision to take the guitar was a big one. There is some weird German thing in my family where you get extra points for going on trips with as little as possible. If I could, I would be embarking on this tour with a wallet and two T-shirts. But now I have decided to drag the guitar across the country with me, even though it is huge and ungainly and I will be worried the whole time about whether or not I have to check it, because the case is not the sturdiest and if I have to check it, I know it will get wrecked. I am carrying well. I think when women say this, they mean that the lump on my stomach is sitting in a nice place, is maybe symmetrical in size and shape with the rest of my body. So I have decided: I am taking a bike messenger bag full of clothes, a black vinyl computer bag, and the guitar case. That means I can sling the messenger bag over my shoulder and then have the guitar in one hand and the laptop in the other. I haven't yet tried to travel with all of this, and I am imagining how I will look, shuffling through Newark Airport. I have a vague image of a Buddhist statue of a many-armed god with a big belly. But that is a statue. I will be moving. I will be moving on top of the world that is also moving. I will be moving as the lump that is a boy inside me is moving, too. I am afraid this is sounding like Bob Seger's "Turn the Page." - - - - 5/1/01 Snapshot: The Clam Box, Ipswich. In Boston I stay one night with my friend Liz, whom I've known since my senior year of high school. For reasons too complicated to get into here, my senior year of high school was spent at a Catholic boarding school, even though I'm not Catholic. Liz is two years younger than me and got kicked out of my high school and then another Catholic high school and is now an attorney. She lives in a studio apartment in Somerville with a goldfish. She keeps him in a big tank that bubbles. It was pleasant to listen to as I was falling asleep. Liz gave me the bed; she slept on the floor in a sleeping bag. For some reason we both woke up at 4:30 AM. We started talking in the dark, with the water bubbling, about the pros and cons of circumcision. My obstetrician, who is Jewish, says there's no real medical reason for it, that it's all cultural. But then, she says, don't underestimate the power of the cultural. Eaten in Boston: I am worried about my boy (we know he's a boy, if I didn't already mention that) having colic, which is this mystery infant condition where the kid cries and cries and cries for hours and you can't do anything to help him and you have to do things like drive around aimlessly with him in the car. So I have been reading about colic, and one theory I read this weekend is that it's a digestive thing, and the kid cries because he is feeling the process of food going through his body, all the little squeezings and gurglings and squishings and churnings that we don't even think about, but which, for a kid who has just spent nine months getting everything, even air, through this extremely smooth sort-of underwater delivery system, is very upsetting and weird. In the morning Liz let me feed the fish so I could see how big his mouth is. - - - - 4/26/01 Snapshot: Neal and Regina in Mary's car, Philadelphia. Mary and Patrick at Big Jar Books in Philadelphia have to be the nicest bookstore owners I have ever met. Mary picked me up at the train station, and then she and Patrick took me and Neal and his wife Regina out to dinner. It was fun to see Neal. I read with him once before, at a gallery in Baltimore, and it was one of the most fantastic public events I have ever participated in. Besides me and a guy who showed cool vintage movies, Neal had booked this teenage kid who did rope tricks. He was adorable and fresh-faced and showed up in full western wear, with the leather chaps and spurs and kerchief and everything. The rope tricks he did were impressive enough, but then he brought out a bullwhip, and asked a very brave man in the audience to stand up and hold a sheet of paper in front of his chest. The kid then proceeded to tear the paper in two, from across the room, with the whip, and then he kept doing it, five or six more times, as the extremely brave man continued to hold up the progressively-smaller half-sheets of paper. It was thrilling and insane, partly because we were all sitting in a very nicely decorated arts space, and partly because the kid, who was apparently a big-time Christian, had this music playing the whole time he was bullwhipping that sounded like Johnny Cash only singing "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus." Anyway. The reading in Philly was a lot more sedate than that, but it was fun, and I got back on the train exhausted and feeling like my face hurt from smiling so much, and I cried a little as I sat down and drank a McDonald's chocolate milkshake. And that was just a preview of what was to come, because I am home now for 48 hours, and there is so much stuff to do that I am totally overwhelmed, and Frank, who is my husband, broke his finger playing basketball, and when I walked in the door at midnight he was in bed with a bag of ice and this sad homemade splint made from an ace bandage and a dessert spoon, and of course I wanted to take care of him but at the same time in my head I was thinking, I can't believe I am gone for two days and our apartment looks like "Porky's II." And then things just sort of degenerated from there, and even though I have all these things I need to do about the book, the little white book that feels like my baby right now, the baby that needs calls and emails, calls and emails, calls and trips to the post office, I have also grown out of all my bras, and am now larger than the largest size they sell in the J. Crew catalog, and without mail-order, my friends, I am lost. And so for two weeks now I have been walking around the house referring to myself as "TB," meaning "Tight Bra," telling Frank things like, "TB is going to the deli now" as I walk out the door, and this is probably part of some larger thing I need to explore about how, since I have become pregnant, I've started to speak about myself in the third person, I have been saying "Fatty needs another snack" or "The pregnant lady has to lie down now," and even though I don't know whether this is healthy or not, I think it honestly reflects how this bodily change is so enormous it's like shock, and my brain can't take it in, and it's like it's happening to someone else. And so yesterday even though I had all this other stuff to do I went to Macy's, and blindly grabbed about 20 bras in a size I previously associated only with porn stars, and then I got to the changing room line and there were 15 women waiting there, and they had the sad, beleaguered air of women who had been waiting a long time, and were going to wait longer, and I just had a meltdown. And I huffed over to the customer service counter and demanded that they open more dressing rooms or, I said, with my bed-head hair sticking straight up and my belly poking out of my orange hunting jacket, I was going to start taking off my clothes right there. And of course this is Macy's, which is like the US Postal Service of Retail, and so the customer service lady just cocked an eyebrow at me and said sorry, but those were all the rooms they had, and so I demanded to see the manager, and she hooked a thumb in the manager's direction, and I went charging towards her with twenty hangers of red and pink bras slung over my shoulder like a bleeding comrade, and when I found her, I made my speech again, and she did what the people at the Post Office do, which is also what cows do, which is stand there, and chew something, and ignore you. And by this time the third person voice kicked in again, and I had a thought flit across my mind: "Fatty is having a breakdown." And having realized that, I couldn't stay there and fight any longer, and I threw my twisted-up bras on the counter and fled the lingerie department, the sixth floor, and then the entire stupid store, with my heart pounding. - - - - 4/24/01 Snapshot: View from the podium, St. Margaret's Episcopal Church, Washington, DC. There was a huge crowd at St. Margaret's Episcopal Church, thanks to Dave. It was like starting my tour at Madison Square Garden. I remember looking at the crowd from the back and thinking, how many people is that? 100? 500? Dave said 300, I think. It reminds me of when I first came to New York City and didn't know how to estimate space in square feet. The reading was great. Arthur Bradford, who reads and plays guitar simultaneously, had this incredible Pete Townshend moment where he stopped in the middle of his story and bashed his guitar to bits. This was in a church, remember—you could actually hear people gasp. I read something a little quieter after that. I was worried about the baby kicking while I was reading, because I am at the point now where you can see it through my T-shirt—it basically looks like "Alien"— and if you've never seen it before, it can be pretty distracting. But he was quiet. Late at night I read the Washington Post. They have the most fabulous obituary page. The New York Times also has a very good obituary page, but one that always feels, like its wedding page, to be hyper-constructed according to some weird social and finanical hierarchy that I don't know much about. But the Times's feature obits are always well written and occasionally moving. It's just depressing to me that there are always so few women there. It always looks strange to me, like women don't die. I like the "In Memoriam" section the best, because it's the place where the newspaper opens itself up for a second and offers this amazingly un-newspapery service, which is to give people, regular people, a place to speak to the dead. The words people say in this place are generally not that unusual, just regular Hallmark card stuff—"Happy Birthday, from all of us who love you," something like that—but it's like people know in their bones, they can feel it, that writing a card to your dead dad and setting it on the mantle next to the box of his ashes is not the same thing as having the very same words printed in a newspaper, where they will be made into a hundred thousand more of themselves, on a hundred thousand more pieces of paper, which will then, grimly, inevitably, find their way grimy, leaden way onto kitchen tables all over the city, where they will then slowly become unhinged, where they will mummify fish or flutter away. There is some kind of instinctual understanding that this is the proper way to address the dead: not alone, not in our own, individual voices, not in any voice at all, really, but through something else, something silent: this giant, whirling, dissolving, gray paper wind.
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