Yesterday I ventured out for my daily half-hour outing. I try to leave every day to make sure I'm getting enough vitamin D. Weird things are happening to me; for example, my hair is falling out in clumps. (I asked my doctor if Tysabri, or staying in my apartment all the time, could cause this. Her response: "No, but being very, very sick can." Wha-bam! Monster-truck throwdown! She just has a way with words, what can I say.)
So I decided I would go to the used bookstore, which is about three blocks away, and look for this month's Book Cabal book. The Book Cabal was founded about three years ago when a bunch of people from my MFA program moved out to the Bay area, separately and coincidentally, at the same time. Every month we eat pizza at Ruth or Mike's house. One pizza has sausage and one has chicken. Yes, every month the same pizzas. For three years. I guess we just don't like vegetarians, or are trying to hold on to the meanness and pizzaness we once knew together in New York. There is a book involved each month. Some people read it and some people don't. There have been some major winners amongst these books, and some major non-winners as well. The month that we read Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, which, admittedly, had been my choice, no one finished the book except for me, who read it three times with sticky notes, then proceeded to give a nearly tearful oratory about what a spectacular work of art it was, how it was a firework in the bleak night sky of reading and so on, while the rest of The Cabal looked at their watches and moved mushrooms around their plates. If it were possible, I would like to form a union with Wells Tower. A union of any kind. But I digress.
In September, I did not attend Book Cabal because I was here in my apartment on ER watch. Only four persons, as it transpired, were able to make it to the Cabal, and it was those four persons --- trusted persons, mind you! --- who selected Deliverance as this month's book.
"Um, Deliverance?" I repeated over the phone to Ruth, who called me from Cabal to see if I needed a ride, post-Cabal, to the emergency room. (I did not.) "I'm sorry, I thought you said Deliverance. Ha-ha. Ha."
"Deliverance!" she confirmed. "It's sort of an adventure!"
Well, that's true.
The adventure continued yesterday in the bookstore, when, almost immediately upon entering, I ran into The Bay's mother. In the fourteen months or so that I have known The Bay and known his mother and known that his mother works in this bookstore, I have never seen here there. But of course it would stand to reason that the time I am there to look for Deliverance (oh, Cabal) I would run into my boyfriend's mother and have to tell her so. Hi there! Just sweet, trustworthy me, wandering around the bookstore, looking for a nice, sweet, girlfriendly afternoon read of Deliverance. Don't mind me. Oh, this? In my belt? That's a machete. Sometimes we housebound people need it for, you know, chopping down air between the bathroom and the bed. Additionally, I'm totally normal.
After first explaining what I was doing out of the house, I then of course had to explain what I was doing there, to wit, looking for Deliverance.
"It's for my book group," I explained abashedly. "I didn't pick the book, ha! Ha-ha!" I didn't dare mention that it's really a book cabal.
The Bay's mother, batting nary an eyelash, found the book in the mystery section, chatted with me a while, and was even nice enough to extend to me her employee discount. On Deliverance. Boy, is she nice.
I don't know about you, but if I were a mother of one single, solitary, precious son, I would be absolutely delighted if he embarked on a serious relationship with a decrepit older woman who first showed herself to be a workaholic; then a chronically ill person; then a person who lands herself in hospitals; then a person who becomes housebound like a modern-day Miss Havisham; then shows up at your own bookstore looking for a book on assault. I mean, it's really just a dream come true.
Lucky for me, The Bay's mom is a way cooler mom than I would be.
Cabal, if you're out there, pizza's on you.
Monday, October 05, 2009
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2 comments:
well, at least you didn't say, "you know, deliverance -- they made it into that movie where that one guy raped another guy and made him squeal like a pig and single-handedly made a lot of people terrified to go river rafting in an area where banjo music is prevalent...you know -- THAT movie."
'cause, you know, THEN that would be awkward.
this was a particularly terrific tale. perhaps it was the going-out, perhaps the book store or the precariously uncomfortable encounter. suffice to say, i now really want pizza. i don't even like pizza.
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