passages

Here is our new (actually used) piano that we got Aubrey for her 16th birthday. Took the piano movers 6.5 hours to drive it to my little townhouse and lug it up my little stairs. They had to take off the stairwell hand rails and call in another guy. I seriously thought someone was going to die at one point. They were scared too. It could easily have fallen back down the stairs as they were lifting it, and smashed some one's bones all to powder. All's well that ends well: no bone powder. And now everyone is gleefully banging away on the thing.

• Quotation of the day, from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, which I am reading now. Maggie, nine, in a fit of misery had just cut off her own hair.

  "...if she had only let her hair alone, she could have sat with Tom and Lucy,
  and had the apricot pudding and the custard ! What could she do but sob ? She
  sat as helpless and despairing among her black locks as Ajax among the
  slaughtered sheep. Very trivial, perhaps, this anguish seems to weather-worn
  mortals who have to think of Christmas bills, dead loves, and broken friendships ; but it was not less bitter to Maggie — perhaps it was even more bitter — than what we are fond of calling antithetically the real troubles of mature life. 'Ah ! my child, you will have real troubles to-fret about by-and-by,' is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother or nurse in some strange place ; but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered suffering of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrevocably with the firmer texture of our youth and manhood, and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain. Is there any one who can recover the experience of his childhood, not merely with a memory of what he did and what happened to him, of what he liked and disliked when he was in frock and trowsers, but with an intimate penetration, a revived consciousness of what he felt then, when it was so long from one Midsummer to another? what he felt when his schoolfellows shut him out of their game because he would pitch the ball wrong out of mere willfulness ; or on a rainy day in the holidays, when he didn't know how to amuse himself, and fell from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from defiance into sulkiness ; or when his mother absolutely refused to let him have a tailed coat although every other boy of his age had gone into tails already ? Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children. "

  
  
• Second quotation of the day: "Panties!" --a 4-year-old boy in our Sunbeam class shouted out, out of nowhere. Everyone laughed, but no one did as much as I.


• Conversation of the day: Rebekah: "I am against sheep shearing." Me: "Why?" Rebekah: "How would you like it if someone grabbed you and sheared you?"


• Observation of the day: Jerry, in a discussion about the amazing special effects churned out by Hollywood these days, said, "If they can make Barack Obama look like a qualified candidate, they can do anything."


• My favorite ways of saying "drunk": foxed, three sheets to the wind, lambasted, pickled, shellacked, soused, wasted, snookered, smashed, tipsy, plastered, pie-eyed. Next time: my favorite ways to say "vomit."