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So busy
2003-11-05 - 11:45 a.m. Phew! I am somehow still really busy. I hope you feel sorry for me. Halloween was really fun -- did I mention this? Maddy's friend Morgan came over to trick or treat with N and M and the neighbor girls. Then Morgan's parents came over to eat dinner. It was really nice because, although Morgan is probably Maddy's best friend at school, we really have not done very much with her or her parents outside of school. Partly, I think, because Maddy's chief outside-of-school friend is Samantha. But also because Maddy likes to have time by herself, and Morgan is very busy with ballet, etc., and also -- I don't know -- a kind of reticence, I guess. Anyway, it was nice to hang out with Morgan'z dad, since we barely know him. He's a fireman, although now in the fire education office. I like him. Nora had a good weekend running from party to party, and then on Sunday going to see that new disney bear cartoon with Maddy and Emma and Emma's little sister. And now it is cold and wintry, which is really really nice, although I am feeling a bit sick. Just sort of achey with a possibility of a runny nose. And I don't know what else. We've pretty much decided to send Nora to public high school next year. Pretty much decided on Middle school B for Maddy next year. I'm quite happy with Middle School B. Nora is so happy and secure and settled. She could work a little harder, but overall I think there's a good balance between being challenged enough and having enough time and energy left over to do things that she has picked out for herself to do. She and Emma, for instance, have a very active outside reading life. So I'm quite happy, and I only hope that high school will be as good. I'm a little worried, but not very worried. I've just read Nicholson Baker's The Everlasting Story of Nory, which was really really good. He is the master at getting down what goes on inside the head. The Mezzanine was a 20 something, and this was a nine-year-old, and it was pretty much perfect. There is a danger in taking a fictional character for a model. Nory's standing up for the picked-on girl might possibly verge on the fictional character being more perfect than life. In the way Salinger's Glass family does, and the Melendy family in the set of books that start with Four Story Mistake does. Phillip Roth was on Terry Gross the other day talking about some character -- Zuckerman, I guess -- and how Zuckerman did something in high school that Roth only did in college. Zuckerman was always more advanced, he said. But that's so unfair! It's easy to make fictional characters be more advanced, and then the poor reader -- especially the reader who's in high school, I think -- will feel so very behind. Anyway, I did. But mostly Nory is Not like that. Anyway. And the heat's on, and it's hard to tell whether the tightness in my eyes is heat- or sickness-related. But the crick in my neck and the general fuzziheadedness I am experience seem to argue for sickness. Hey -- I really am in the process of cleaning my house. In a serious way involving lots of chucking. Ha! Okay -- got to go, because I am really really busy. Bye.
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