Oscar and Lucinda, how could you do this to me?

You were such a sweet love story before the resident-married-whore got it on with an effectively unconcious Ralph Fiennes and sent him to go drown in a church! (Don't ask. You don't want to see this horrid movie)

Look, film, I am not amused. This sort of thing doesn't work with me.

Unhappy endings leave me really quite wretched.

Every Friday and Saturday at 3:00 p.m., I tutor a sixty-year old woman in how to read.

I don't mean what you might think, dear readers-- Austen and Bronte never darken our conversations. Instead we begin Green Eggs and Ham tomorrow, and meander through phonics-- rat, cat, cab, mat, map become exquisitely important as her trembly, half-broken voice scratches and stumbles over words that come to me like breath over water. I wonder, sometimes, how this picture must look to someone else. . . a nervous eighteen year old, falling over her bright words that sound like copper pans in an effort to fill the silence, and a quiet, placidly determined woman, her arms streaked with leather-brown veins and pale blonde-white puffs of hair over her ears. I push my specs up my nose as we talk; she adjusts the cotton twist of her apron.

"Maaaa--pp.pp." her lips sputter and fade towards the end of the word. I feel a sudden flash of sadness. This isn't right, that she shouldn't have to explain to me that her teacher didn't feel like she had to help the slow little girl some fifty years ago.

"We'll get you reading," I promise, and I wonder if I know that I'm lying even as I say it. But I want to believe it, and it seems so perfect, the difference between 'mat' and 'map.' I bend my head over her shaken red letters, and feel so very small and humble. She wears a gold band on her ring finger.

"I don't really like jewelry," she tells me confidentally, almost proudly. "But I feel naked without my wedding ring."

I left myself a note on a scrap of blue-veined paper. Typed. On my Underwood No. 5, the bars striking and melding letters, black ink on white skins, type so kinetic that I couldn't breathe as it click-clack-clicked its way through a darkened room. Soft, swirled jazz in the background. Books, papers, old magazines (Vogue and Victoria, we believe in equal reading rights here). Spritzing golden-scented perfume on the white coverlets. Stepping over pale blue sweaters and old Levis, looking at Monet made life. Paris and London and old trophies resplendent in peeling gold. Do you think that if I splintered, all that would be left would be a thousand pearly, pretty words, clinking on the carpet, getting lost under the sharp tap-tap. . . taptap of the typewriter?

Imagine the mess. A good thing, then, that I am patched together with schoolandworkandfamilyandstories, and that a month ago, when I thought I might be falling in love that it was just a false alarm, because then I'd have to give up writing nonsense at 10:11 in the morning, and lose my addiction to bagels.

Why isn't the new template showing?

Blogger, I despise you with every fiber of my being.
Will run damage control later.