the farmer in the dell

got a head cold. congested. freezing even though its probably 70 degrees in the house.
grapefruit juice. need to go to ny this weekend but really don't want to. would rather meet up for a camping trip halfway...
have been sick 3 days now. i never get sick. i miss daddy.

grapefruit juice is the truth.

saturday i rode for several hours. 50 miles on the royce. before i turned around to come back east toward cambridge, i stopped in a large parking lot, sat on the curb. i felt like the boy in i am the cheese. i felt that i was sitting exactly inside a scene from the story. this book was a very important one to me growing up. not sure what age i was when i got it, probably between 9 and 13. i just looked it up on amazon, and sure enough, its set in massachusetts, although the starting town, monument, might be fictional as i can't find it anywhere. i still have it, duct-tape holding it together and riddled with the crucial underlining and notes of a piqued young mind.

a few underlined passages:
I love Amy Hertz. It's ridiculous that her name is Hertz- she's probably heard a thousand car-rental jokes and I have vowed never to make one. 14

My legs are weary and my back sings with pain because I am out of condition. Frankly, I have never been in condition, which is a source of delight to Amy Hertz who dislikes all kinds of physical exercise. 15

Impressions. Crowded, with luggage. Faces, my father's cigarettes, not the smell of smoke, really, but the smell of his matches, the sulphur of his matches. Strange... 19

I was always aware of two smells, my mother's perfume and the way my father always smelled of tobacco or smoke or the matches. 19

We never went back. Not back to what I thought was home. We were in a different home. A different house. A different aura to the house. 20


i wonder how i got that book. aunt b used to take me to a bookstore on perkins every once in a while, i remember the first time- she told me to pick out a book; i chose a douglas adams fiction. we discussed books often. early on she asked my opinion of teddy, the last story in salinger's 9 shorts. she asked inadvertent questions that were her way of beating around the bush, testing me to see what i got from the story without coming right out and asking me a specific- "what happened to teddy?" from then on, she spoke more candidly with me. you know that disheartened feeling you get when you answer a question knowing that you're giving the answer that someone wants to hear? i really don't know if i gave the answer i thought she wanted or if i believed whole-heartedly the answer i gave her but i remember feeling like it was just a little too easy, or that i'd been underestimated. i imagine that because of our blood she was able to sense much more. ought to rent the movie again.

np. she wakes when she dreams. daddy always had a couple lit merit 100's sitting around his spaces. need to find some of his old stories from his youth down in the wolf river bottoms.

I have seen your wandering brother,

I have heard the river's voice.

Regarding your lost brother,

The river was his choice;

And the river is his Mother,

He finds solace in her voice.
- lfshook