Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you

Two weeks ago I did not want to watch the last quarter of the extended version of the deluxe director’s cut platinum boxed set edition of The Two Towers (there were still 1.5 hours to go).
I needed to be alone, to read an old Economist (Obama has submitted an economic recovery plan!). It was Saturday, and I weighed an old man’s questions:
“Does lightning always strike to the north?”
“How many old New England homes were once prisons?”
“What happens to the book that comes in second place for the Pulitzer Prize?”
“My friends all have foreign wives; if we ever have a reunion and the INS shows up, would they all have to run out the back door?”
"How could the Gin Blossoms have been so awesome and suck so much at the same time?"
The next day I put my feet up by our fireplace, playing the recovering emotional invalid. My Left Brain. I read E.B. White blogs of acute observations on the rural mundane, a geek’s glorification of the farmer, the Beggar’s Banquet kneeling before the Altamont.
Serena made lunch, and I ate it and cheered up.

We have survived the weekend of Our Flu. Emma’s nanny called Serena on Friday afternoon to say that Emma had vomited twice. We picked her up early, and brought her home with remedies, Fanta and Coca-cola. We kept a vigil over Bugs Bunny DVDs, and thought that Emma was recovering, until she woke me by geysering water gulped too fast from her sippy cup. She then didn’t keep any food down for two days, and she became so dehydrated that her diarrhea blew out in stale puffs. The oral rehydration salts were not working, and I became nervous. I imagined an African mother, upon being handed a packet of ORS after waiting with her lethargic baby outside a clinic, looking up at the white man doctor and saying, “You gotta be frikking kidding me, doc. This is all I get?” But we live in Switzerland, near a pediatrician, who saw Emma on Monday morning and revived her with syringe-fulls of water, 5mL by 5mL.

Emma’s belly was flat (“like a supermodel!” Serena admired), which reminded me of when I told my first love, a sophomore who soon after nearly killed herself with bulimia, that she was looking really good, really thin. I had been in love with her since the eighth grade. She was my Winnie Cooper: she broke my heart each year, seasonally, with the onset of Washington State’s April Showers. The final heartbreaking was on a Saturday morning, when I had agreed to help my mother assemble and man a parade float to advertise her community theater group. The float was really a two-wheeled donkey cart crowded with stage set materials and some actor friends, and me, acting like I was hammering a backdrop. It rained on the parade, and no one stayed to watch. I was wheeled through town, drearily condemned.
Meanwhile, my mom’s little tape recorder squawled, “There’s NO business like SHOW business like NO business I KNOW!!!!”
The banner on the float should have read, "This season: Ingmar Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL... starring ETHEL MERMEN!"A year later I moved away to Terre Haute, Indiana, and Winnie ended up going out with and losing her virginity to a friend of mine who had always wanted to be in my high school rock band. Let’s call him Paul, because he wore glasses. Paul hadn’t been able to play a note, but he was one of the gang, so we loaned him a Casio keyboard. I put some masking tape above the keys, and told him to write the names of the notes so he could poke along with us. In the middle of our first song, I kept hearing a honk da daa honk, and we had to stop. We stared at him. Paul said that he was playing the H note. So that seemed to be the end of his musical career…. until the night I returned from the Peace Corps. I was eating a jetlag snack with my parents in front of the TV, and there was a familiar face playing drums. It was Paul, on David Letterman. For a moment the reptilian part of my brain took over. Maybe he was there inside the big box? But no, he was on national television, playing his band’s hit song. It was on the soundtrack of American Pie, which I had yet to see.
That was ten years ago. Serena says I should get over it.