on ne bloggez pas
Wednesday 10 March 2004 | I like a cookie
Here I am in the computer science room between the library and the media center of our old alma mater, writing Mandarin. It’s all too weird already, or this would be the weirdest thing today. I’ve walked from Granby and wandered around campus, staring at all the new buildings, at all the girls who look like girls we went to school with but are in fact a decade or two younger, and thought endlessly of her. And me being me, and reality not being real until I write or talk about it, I’ve muttered my insights and observations into my little dictaphone thingy, pretending to be David Sedaris, and producing a little This South Hadley Life segment. Also captured: sounds of waterfall from Lower Lake, ringing chimes of Mary Lyon clock tower, and speakers in (the scary new glassy) Blanchard blasting Ani DiFranco. It ain’t 1992 anymore, that’s fo sho.
And G. Lee is Dean of the College, and next year the Professor will be Dean of Faculty, and both of them will be in the swish presidential part of Mary Lyon, wielding power (of the tame academic variety) with great gentle wisdom and good humor. I’ve been upstairs in Clapp and seen the giant sloth, I’ve been to the campus convenience store and eyeballed the Arizona green tea. I’ve stared at the mud tracks bisecting the green and noticed that there are more college guys wandering around campus. All that’s left to do, really, is to go across the street to Fedora’s, if it still exists (which the horrible Chinese-American place still does, by the way; the Professor, with whom I am staying, has a menu on her refrigerator, so maybe it’s better now) and have nachos and beer.
Alas Northampton has eluded me today, exhausted as I am, and the Professor’s gone all day to classes, meetings, and a dinner, taking the Subaru with her and won’t be back until nine pm. I’m hoping to go tomorrow, before the Maine crew meets me in Hartford, which I have yet to organize.
Being here is so deeply normal and freakish at the same time that it has much of the same quality as wallowing fully clothed in the back seat of the Honda with the Film Critic. I wandered around the Professor’s house this morning, touching well-known, long-beloved objects and books and furniture in a daze, feeling like I’ve been homesick for nine years without knowing it. She has a new feline (Towie went to sleep last autumn, beleaguered by much cancer) and its name is Pippa. Pippa is amazing. Pippa weighs about five pounds and is about half the size of a normal cat—a tiny and black and compressed Burmese, with enormous preternatural yellow eyes like Gollum. She sleeps all day long under the duvet, making a miniscule, barely noticeable lump—when you lift the covers to peek at her, she gazes luminescently upon you with aforementioned eyes and makes a snarly rusty sound of greeting in the back of her throat.
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