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Number Nine
Sunday, March 15, 1998 Read about the Red party, and late-night hijinks with Wally, in the special Friday the Thirteenth entry!
In fannish news, I came in ninth in the FAAn awards for Best New Fan! I got eight votes, beating out the mysterious E. B. Frohvet by one. My friend Lesley Reece won, with 71 votes. Thanks to those who voted for me!
Saturday: I called my sister M--- in the morning, and asked if they were doing anything fun. She had in mind going to Greenlake, a very popular park in the north end of Seattle. There's a lake with a path that goes all around it, so she proposed that J---, my seven-year-old nephew, would take his in-line skates, and B---, my four-year-old newphew, would take his bike. The day was overcast but mild, and the park was crowded but navigable. You wouldn't want to go there on a sunny day! As Yogi Berra (apocryphally?) said, "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded." J--- set off skating. He was soon several hundred yards ahead of us, stopping every now and then so as to keep us in sight. It took B--- a while to decide to ride his bike; at first, he just pushed it along, walking beside it. The recent improvements to the path there are worthwhile. There are now two formal lanes: one for feet and strollers, and one for wheels (skaters and bikers). The processes of B----'s mind are mysterious sometimes, but he finally decided to ride his bike. Good thing, or else we'd have taken much more time at the lake then we had planned. We stopped at about the half-way point and had sliced apples, rice cakes, and water. Going all the way around hadn't been an explicit goal, but we decided to push ahead. Again, the mystery of B----'s mind: "What is ink?" he asked. Since we'd been with him, we knew the origin of this question. He saw some skaters come on to the path from some damp ground, and was interested in the damp tracks they left. So at first he tried fast braking (on that little bike!) to leave tire marks on the paving. That didn't work, and his mother wouldn't permit him to go find a puddle or mud patch to dampen his tires. A few minutes later came the ink question. He was imagining a big stamp pad, that he could ride over and use his bike tires as rubber stamps, leaving ink tracks on the path. When we got to the playground, J--- and B--- tested all the equipment while M---- and I watched from a bench. They hadn't been to this playground since it had been fixed up recently, and the setup had some good features that my sister hadn't seen elsewhere. (The renovation of her neighborhood park is a project that she is trying to get organized.) There was a large cylinder between two poles, that kids could practice log-rolling on as it spun horizontally on its long axis, and a wheel that they could hang from and swing around, then drop down to the ground. An old-fashioned piece of play equipment, present at the Greenlake playground, is the merry-go-round; I mean the manual type that you have to get spinning, then hang on to the bars and try not to get spun off. These aren't being repaired if they break, and they aren't being constructed anymore. They are just too dangerous, apparently. However did we grow up? No good car seats, no helmets, dangerous playgrounds, small toys to choke on. Probably when kids got hurt, we didn't hear about it! We stopped at McDonalds for lunch. Again, the mind of B----: examining the toy from his happy meal, he immediately thought of features that it should have, but didn't. The toy was a tie-in from the video release of Disney's Peter Pan, a small figure of Tinkerbell trapped inside a lantern. "I want this to open up!" he said, pointing to the nonfunctional hinges on one side. "I want her to come out!" He is a good one for testing the limits of any toy. He uses things in ways that were never imagined by the designer.
On Thursday I had picked up a flyer at dance class. The band that plays at the Ballroom on Wednesday nights, Monty Banks and the High Rollers, was playing Saturday night at a place in Georgetown. Special added attraction: Merle Haggis and the Drifting Highlanders. It was revealed to me that "Merle Haggis" was in reality my classmate Joe Ross of Green Pajamas fame. So I decided to check it out! Note: I don't know why, for a putative St. Patrick's Day party, there was so much Scottish content here. Haggis is Scottish. The piper from the Clan Gordon band that played between sets was playing the Scottish pipes, not the Irish pipes. I guess most folks don't distinguish between them? I thought I knew where the venue was. But instead of getting on Airport Way at a point where I could find it, I drove to the general area of Georgetown -- a funky small town south of Seattle, now surrounded by industry and the Boeing facilities -- and counted on just running across the street. I didn't! Instead, I wound up on the wrong side of Boeing, then I was up on Beacon Hill which is the wrong side of the highway, then north, then back across the highway and into Georgetown again. At last I smartened up and asked directions while filling up the car. The tavern I was heading for, Jules Mae's, is supposed to be the oldest in the Seattle area. The block it was on was very strange. It was overshadowed by the highway and by the Ranier cold storage plant, and there seemed to be no other commercial establishments anywhere around. At least parking was easy! The place looked like an explosion in a paneling factory, with odd partitions and rooms that have been added on. I paid the cover (Why on earth was I asked for my ID?) and made my way to the back room, where Monty Banks was still doing sound checks. Dan (he's Joe's brother and another dance classmate of mine), Zola (a classmate) and other folks were sitting around waiting for the music to start. The dance floor was larger than postage-stamp size, with one post in the middle. The swing music from Monty was great! The only problem was the shortage of leads! Some women I know from the Century Ballroom and I were discussing this, and we figured out it was because it was Joe and Dan who were passing out the flyers. They must have given more to women than men! Both guys did yeoman service, dancing with all of us. Joe's band was good too! This was the first time they had appeared in public. I guess I'd call it folk-rock, of a sort. Joe was on guitar and lead vocals, with one guy on fiddle, and another who switched off between drum and fiddle. I'd have preferred a traditional bodhran (an Irish frame drum) rather than the tom hit with a beater that they used. One funny thing: a new online acquaintance had said that he might come down and meet me. I didn't have any idea what he looked like, so when a guy across the room seemed to be waving, smiling, and beckoning at me, I extricated myself from behind the table and walked over. But it wasn't him! The guy was waving at the person behind me! So I slunk back to my table.
Today was a more difficult day for me. Once, when I described walking home late at night, Jason said, "You know, when you're lonely, you can call me." Ironic, since that's the very thing I can't do. Since he is the one changing our place in each other's lives, I have to let him set the level of contact. Blocks of unplanned time (like Sunday morning!) aren't a good idea. Keeping busy is much better! A friend, Joan Kelley, was having an open house to celebrate her birthday. Neither she nor Christina, another bookclub friend, had heard about Jason's decision to stop seeing me, so naturally they both asked about him. That was tough! It was a nice party, though, with various friends from her work. Paul David, also from our book club, showed up with his eight-month-old daughter. From there I went to dinner with some friends. Debbie Schwartz organized this. Darren and Cindy were there, along with two other guys, online friends of theirs. They know Jason, but didn't know that we were acquainted, so I filled them in, briefly. The food was good (we ate at Seattle's Catch, a seafood restaurant in Fremont) and I held up my end of the conversation. As we were sitting after dinner, I burst out laughing after Debbie and Darren discussed Palm Pilot holster models for fully five minutes, repeating the words "clip", "belt clip" and "belt loop" about one hundred times. Debbie said, "We can take a hint; we'll change the subject," but I said no, it was fine. I hadn't started a new topic, after all, and that's what you should do if bored by the current one.
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