when it was time to make the toast yesterday, j___ cited an old food network commercial that said, "family is whoever's around the dinner table," & yes very predictably i became choked-up. but it did feel like we were a family, at the table & then afterward when we all sat around playing guess who & battleship & sorry (now touting itself on the box as "the game of sweet revenge"), passing around the weetzie-bat & making faces at her, listening to "alice's restaurant" & aretha franklin: but the kind of family that doesn't just happen, the kind of family that might result if you made families the same way major labels make boy bands: by taking ads out in the paper & holding auditions & making notes of where the chemistry really hits & of who fits into which niche.
so we had our boy-band thanksgiving & i got to sleep in a little bit & come in today to be the only person in the clinic, just here to answer phones & read david copperfield (previously put on a long hold) & listen to my own cds on the stereo instead of the commericial country stations.
i will also spend my day alone doing things like waiting for the mail, & eating leftover sweet potatoes, & thinking about things like how fascinating it was, before i started drinking wine, to read reviews of vintages: how gorgeous & foreign it all sounded, tones & hints of different woods, how i had no idea how people could make sense of the language if the words we use every day are twisted & stretched & put to new incredible taste-describing uses.
more poems to be written about the bride. songs i have stacked up to play, all songs that make me so excited that i worry my body is not enough to contain itself.
this has suddenly become very long. all i wanted to do was mention that we had thanksgiving, & that we are the queen of the sweet potatoes.
