Quote of the day:

"If you don't want to spend a lot on loons, crash your boat where there are a lot [of] mallards, which are cheap birds and breed like flies." Claude Cote, RI DEM lawyer, quoted in the Providence Journal, regarding the plans to "replace" the 402 loons killed in the North Cape Oil Spill

Journal of a Sabbatical

November 1, 1998

purple thumb

the book pile

Copyright © 1998, Janet I. Egan

After a great time at Water Fire - and Pumpkin Fire - last night complete with freezing cold al fresco dinner, and a pleasant, leisurely morning well spent lingering in bed reading Raymond Carver poems to each other we decided to go out to breakfast at 729 Hope Street. Well, the omelet line at 729 was really long and the restaurant was too hot for me so we changed plans and decided to walk two blocks to the Hope Street Gallery Cafe for coffee and a bagel and bizarre conversation with the proprietor, Rusty.

It was a clear, cool morning. Nothing out of the ordinary. So we're walking down Hope Street and suddenly my left foot catches on something unexpected and I'm falling. Do I use any of the martial arts techniques that I've learned over the years for minimizing injury? Nope. You'd think I never had a tai chi lesson in my life. I fact you might think I am a idiot. I did exactly what we are told never to do. I landed on my hands - on the palms with wrists bent. My glasses came off but did not break.

All I can think of is Joan-east's daughter who fell on a wet marble floor at work and is in a wheelchair for the next several months after 5 hours of bone graft surgery to sort of repair her shattered kneecap. I check my knees. I still have kneecaps. A couple of bruises on each knee. My hands are dirty and full of sand and gravel and my left thumb hurts.

Once I get up and realize I can still walk and seem to be in one piece I feel this wave of - no, not relief - deep embarrassment. How could I have fallen like that? I look around to see what I tripped over. A hubcap? What is a hubcap doing on the sidewalk? How could I not have seen it? A passerby asks if I'm alright. I insist I'm fine.

I start to at least feel relieved that I actually did trip over something and didn't just suddenly go down as if struck by the almighty or something. I can see how the hubcap would trip somebody. I pick it up and lean it against a tree out of the path of foot traffic. We continue on to the gallery cafe.

A Russian woman is cleaning the cafe after last night's Halloween party. Rusty seems to understand Russian as they talk to each other. She's washing the floor. Most of the chairs are up on the tables. Rusty has about 5 bagels left of which we order two.

As we're waiting for the bagels to toast, I notice my left thumb is large and purple, becoming larger and purpler by the minute. I ask Rusty for some ice and explain what happened, opening myself up to much teasing for the rest of the morning. There I sit with my left thumb jammed into a cup full of ice, my right hand holding the bagel and the Sunday paper propped up against my knee, reading about the plans to replace the wildlife killed in the North Cape Oil Spill in 1996.

By the time I've finished my bagel and coffee the ice has melted and my thumb is closer to its normal size although still purple. I'm ready to face the world again, or at least the Brown bookstore.

Hmm, I don't seem to have a headache anymore. Maybe the fall jolted it away.

A long browse at the Brown Bookstore yields Gilbert Waldbauer's The Birder's Bug Book. and a bilingual (French/English) edition of La Fontaine's fables, which Nancy and I read to each other over lunch at Andrea's ( a Greek restaurant on Thayer Street - not the house of my niece Andrea).

We capped off the afternoon with the new Todd Solondz movie, Happiness, at the Avon. What can I say about this movie? I felt dirty afterwards. Nobody in this movie comes close to happiness. The characters are all driven by sexual urges that have nothing whatsoever to do with love. The only love in the movie is a little kid's love for his Tamagotchi. It's a frightening and intense movie and I don't mean in the horror movie kind of way. This is way too real. I'm not sorry I saw it, but I'd find it hard to recommend it to anybody I know.