It's another beautiful day

Someone wanted to know what I've been reading during those long and literary breakfasts on the deck, all zipped up in a fleece hoodie and black long underwear, with my feet in slippers tucked under Tater's side (he likes to lie on my feet) and the book propped up in front of me.

Lately I am kind of revisiting my old Gertrude Steinian thing. I started by wanting to look up a receipe in the cookbook Alice Toklas published in the 50s. It's a cookbook but it's also a memoir, so I got wrapped up in some of the stories she wrote about her life with Ms. Stein in France in the early 20th century. From there I re-read a kind of chatty but interesting biography of Gertrude Stein, and now I'm delving back into her actual work again.

I'm enjoying reading this stuff again from the perspective of a fully grown up woman approaching middle age (?!), rather than that of a 22-year-old English major with a fascination for the weird. Then, it all seemed so glamorous to me – living in Paris and knowing all those famous people! All the art, all the parties, all the drama appealed to me a lot. But now that I'm 20 years older than most of the people in those stories, somehow now it all seems much more normal and mundane – like stuff your little brother might tell you on a trip home from college. People going to openings, getting drunk, fighting with lovers, etc. The people she tells about are famous now, but they weren't then. They were just a bunch of kids in their early 20s hanging out in a beautiful city and doing their art. Just like people I used to know, and some that I still do, except none of us has so far become as famous as the people in Gertrude Stein's stories. Anyway, it gives a good feeling for what it feels like to be in that time of your life. Some of it is almost touching. And very funny, too, which I don't think I clued into the first time I read it.

Like I just read this paragraph from the Autobiography that I think shows Gertrude Stein to have a sense of humor I would have enjoyed. Purrmann is a guy who thinks Gertrude Stein is weird, and is always taking Alice Toklas (the narrator) aside to try to get her to admit she's only humoring Gertrude about all the strange paintings:

He never dared to criticize anything to her but to me he would say, and you, Mademoiselle, do you, pointing to the despised object, do you find that beautiful.

Once when we were in Spain, in fact the first time we went to Spain, Gertrude Stein had insisted upon buying in Cuenca a brand new enormous turtle made of Rhine stones. She had very lovely old jewellery, but with great satisfaction to herself she was wearing this turtle as a clasp. Purrmann was dumbfounded. He got me into a corner. That jewel, he said, that Miss Stein is wearing, are those stones real.

That just made me laugh out loud. "With great satisfaction to herself she was wearing this turtle as a clasp." As someone who has been known to seize upon some unseemly or embarrassing article of clothing with utterly unwarranted enthusiasm and wear it every day, day after day on end, until Mr. A pleads with me to put on something – anything – different, I appreciate that sentence. I also love her ability to zero right in on that guy's particular brand of conventionalism and snobbery – he knows she has reprehensible taste, and yet he can't quite believe anyone could be that perverse. He has to reassure himself: "Are those stones real?"

It's such a great detail. Everyone has known so many people like him.

I also have been reading her accounts of living in France during the occupations in both world wars, since the United States (in case anyone might have forgotten) is currently at war again and likely to remain so for ... well, probably forever, if GW&Co. get their way. I've been interested in all kinds of war writing lately – the unofficial stories of war, not from soldiers or journalists but from regular people on the ground. Her writing is very un-political and in fact a lot of it is almost blog-like, concerned mainly with the plain nuts and bolts of everyday life in a country in upheaval – finding food, getting from one place to another, trying to communicate with loved ones far away. I love her descriptions of the quiet in the countryside during times when no trains were going in or out, and nobody had fuel for their cars (or if they did, they couldn't drive them anyway, because then everyone would know they'd been holding out fuel they were supposed to have surrendered). Even bicycles had been given up for the war effort (I would have found that unbearable) and so everybody just walked everywhere, and I've often fantasized about how peaceful it would be to live in a town completely without cars ... although doing without things like art supplies and good, fresh food would be a real hardship for me.

For awhile their meat ration was only a quarter pound per week, and there was no fresh produce available at all. For a person like me, who can't really eat bread, rice, potatoes, pasta or any of the other good, cheap, filling and easy-to-store kinds of food, but depends mostly on fresh vegetables, protein and good fats – I wonder what a diabetic person would have done during a time like that. Probably they would have just deteriorated that much faster, and died earlier. Another unacknowledged casualty of the war.

Anyway. That's what I've been reading.

Other details of note:

1. I did in fact chip a corner off my left front tooth a few weeks ago, and suffered the discomfort and humiliation for a total of four days before the dentist could see me. Not my own dentist, who wanted me to wait FOUR WEEKS before he had an opening, but Mr. A's dentist, who kindly agreed to meet us at his office the first weekend after it happened. I had not realized until I met him in person that he's over 90 years old, and while I was grateful to have been fit in on short notice, and I know he has been a great dentist all these years – and still teaches at the dental college in the city – I was nervous when I saw how unsteady his hands were, and when I got home and really had time to check out the repair (I had been too embarrassed to look that closely at his office, not wanting to seem not to trust his work) I realized it was not what I'm sure he would have at one time considered his best work. So I spent twenty minutes working it over with an emery board until I got the shape back to how it's suppposed to be, and kept the appointment with my original dentist three weeks later, where I had the final touches done. I'm happy with it now and even, if it's possible, a little more convinced than I already was that having good, healthy teeth is something I'm very grateful for and must never take for granted. For example, by using my teeth as a bottle opener. Or to pull a needle through several layers of heavy cloth. Or even to bite off a hangnail. Not that I've ever done any of those things with my beloved teeth.

2. Tater has a weird, weepy, scabby sore on the back of his neck that is grossing me out quite a bit, though the vet didn't seem to think it was much to worry about. I do get so scared, though, every time something happens to that poor dog's body; seeing his dear little face turn white, and knowing that we're already more than halfway through the time we're going to have together, it breaks my heart a little bit every day to think of it. But as I saw in the sympathy card section the other day, "Don't think of him and think how sad he's gone, think of him and think, how wonderful, he was here." Or something like that.

I somehow think I've already written about this not so long ago.... In any case, I've often had the thought recently how beautiful and mysterious it is to share a life with a being like that, someone whose relationship with you operates under such different rules than relationships with other humans can. It's incredibly satisfying and liberating to know there's someone in the world who knows you as well as your dog knows you, and who adores you without reservation, no matter what. Someone who follows you into every room or anywhere out in the yard or field, just because he like being with you. Yeah, he's just a dog, but it's still flattering as hell and to me, extremely satisfying. Also extremely mutual, because I adore him without reservation too. I would do anything for that dog.

So I worry when I think there might be anything causing him pain, or seriously the matter with him. But we have some medicinal spray I am applying to the area three times a day, and it seems to be scabbing up and hopefully soon it will be all cleared up. The vet also said that for a dog his age (nine years) he's in outstanding physical condition – he gave him a 4.5 out of 5 points. He said most dogs he sees over five years old are morbidly obese with awful teeth and many ailments.

The other dog news is not so outstanding, although I guess on the other hand it isn't necessarily a "bad" thing either – just a part of life. The part at the end of it. There's really nothing concrete I can put my finger on, but I can just sort of feel him starting to withdraw, mentally, emotionally, spiritually .... It's gradual. Physically he's starting to have more and more troubles too, like when he falls trying to get up the step into the kitchen, or when he slips on the kitchen floor and can't get back up. A few weeks ago Mr. A went into the kitchen at 5 in the morning and found the Jeeps stuck half in and half out of the dog door. He had tripped when he wasn't able to lift his back foot high enough to clear the bottom of the dog door, and was not strong enough to get himself back up again. So there he lay, stranded, until someone came to get him out. Who knows for how long, or why he didn't bark or whine for some help. It's a small house – we would have heard him. Maybe he couldn't get his breath.

He's still shitting in the house occasionally, but luckily so far at least it's never been anything we couldn't pick up with paper towels without leaving any kind of stain or evidence it had ever been there. They're dry, which is great if they're happening in the house, but not so great when they're trying to get out of your body. So we're a little worried about that, too.

Hey, you asked for details!

Anywho. He still has a good appetite and seems to be enjoying life, and until that changes our plan is to just go on as usual. It seems a little unreal to think that by the end of the winter he will probably be gone. But there's no reason to dwell on that. I just try to acknowledge it when the thought arises, and give extra special attention to him while he's still here.

I've found out from this that I do have a fear of aging and decay. I had always thought I was pretty much okay with all that, and theoretically and in person I am – meaning I'm okay with the idea of death, and I'm sure when I have to deal with it myself I will find my way through it just fine, one way or another – so I'm okay with thinking about the idea of death, but I am not okay about thinking about Really Dying. Or watching someone else do it. That's the part I don't think I need to think about until we have to think about it.

Urrgh. Can you tell I've been reading Gertrude Stein? I feel like this whole post reeks of her.

3. As at least one of my faithful readers knows, I went mattress shopping today. I'm the most relentlessly thorough comparison shopper on the planet when it comes to important items I use every day, and I'm sure I more than exhausted the poor sales people we talked to today – and then left without buying anything. But I plan to go back and buy one from them, just as soon as I figure out exactly what I want. The one I liked the best at the shop was a mid-range memory foam mattress for about fifteen hundred bucks. It was by far the most comfortable bed in the place. But I've been reading about them online all afternoon, and so many people are reporting the most horrendous health crises resulting from the offgassing of toxic chemicals from these and even other supposedly top-of-the-line conventional mattress brands ... And now I don't know what to get. Flopping down on my own tired old oversprung used up mattress when I got home this afternoon convinced me that I have to get something though, as soon as possible. So now I'm reading all about organic latex foam, cotton, wool ... bleah.

What kind of mattress do you sleep on?

Speaking of bedroom trauma, the other night I was trying to get some of the dog hair off my comforter cover without resorting to taking the whole bed apart to launder it. I tried various methods – shaking, brushing, wiping with tape, etc. – and nothing was working. It's a brown cotton comforter cover from Ikea, pretty but made of the cheapest fabric imaginable, so the hair just seems to stick to it no matter what you do. Finally, I had the bright idea to run the vacuum over it. I've done it before, once when Tater left a pile of walnut shells littered across the bed, and it worked great. On this night though it was already long past my bedtime and I was too tired and cranky to exercise the self-control required to do a good job of it. Suddenly: TTTHHUK! The end of the comforter was sucked into the vacuum. With the vacuum still going, I grabbed the middle of the thing and gave it an angry yank. Feathers everywhere, and little white clusters of down floating through the air like those light, powdery snowflakes that are so dry they almost make you sneeze.

I don't miss living where it snows but I did used to love those snowflakes.