Shopping

Yesterday, after unloading a few bags of things at the Goodwill, I went inside to see if I might want to bring home any previously owned stuff to fill the gap left by the removal of my own previously owned stuff. Ah, the vicious Goodwill circle . . . Though I am not in general very tempted by shopping, I do enjoy moseying through the crazy disorder of the books and housewares, and yesterday I found the complete poems of James Wright and two sturdy plain drinking glasses of the sort that Tom had recently broken. Success! So then I thought I'd take a look at the clothes--these days almost always a waste of time at the Goodwill, now that the vintage buyers skim everything off first. But magically I found a beautiful red suede jacket that fits me like a glove and will look grand with the jeans I bought a few weeks ago . . . and get this: they are jeans in a size smaller than my usual one. I mean, what's with that? I'm almost 61 and I've dropped a size? What is this miracle?

Names

As you know, Little Chuck's full name is Charles Snowball Dirtball Van Pelt. But naturally he's acquired a few more, to be deployed in special circumstances. When he sits around sweetly, Tom pats him on the head and says, Aw, Charles. When he is his everyday spunky self, he is Hey, Chuck, stop that. But during periods of hysteria, when he is pushing silverware on the floor and climbing on the counters and worming his way into the open dishwasher and galloping up and down the stairs like a lunatic, he is Hasty Stan Stanwood, star player for the Black Sox. We had some serious Hasty Stan action last night, when he dumped a water glass all over the dining room table, just as I was getting ready to serve dinner. My son refers to this as velociraptor behavior: those moments when a kitten almost seems to become airborne. Put Hasty Stan on first and he'll steal third in the blink of an eye. It makes for an exciting mealtime.

Books

I finished rereading Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, one of the great book loves of my life. And then I finished reading Sarah Ruden's I Am the Arrow, in which she uses six Plath poems as a way to talk about Plath's writing and life. I've already read a great deal about Plath, and I've already spent a lot of time with Plath's poems. Is it wrong to say that I've reached the stage when I no longer care about anyone else's close readings?